The theory of the commanders of Honorius was that the Apennines were by nature impregnable save at one place, the narrow pass between them and the Adriatic, which they had long designed Ravenna to hold. Their intention to hold this line was determined not only by this theory, but by this, too, that they were something more than uncertain of the attitude of the Eastern Empire. Their strategy meant the abandonment of the richest province south of the Alps, the richest and the most ancient; but if the military theory which regarded the Apennines as impassable were right it meant the certain and immediate salvation of the soul of the West and the eventual salvation of the whole.
Honorius and his ministers had not long to wait. Having looted the provinces of Europe within the dominion of the Eastern Emperor, Alaric “tempted by the power, the beauty and the wealth of Italy ... secretly aspired to plant the Gothic standard on the walls of Rome, and to enrich his army with the accumulated spoils of an hundred triumphs.”
In November, 401, Alaric entered Venetia by the Julian Alps and passed by Aquileia without taking it, intent on the spoil of the South. As he came on Honorius retired from Milan to Ravenna; the gates of Italy were barred. Then came Stilicho over the Cisalpine Plain, met Alaric, who had crossed the Po, at Pollentia, and defeated him and, following his retreat, broke him at Asta so that he compelled him to recross the Alps. In 403 Alaric again entered Venetia. Stilicho met him at Verona and once more hurled him back. The barred gates of Italy had scarce been questioned.
It was not Alaric, after all, but another Barbarian, Radagaisus, who was first to demand an entrance. In 405 he traversed the same Alpine passes as Alaric had used, passed Aquileia, crossed the Po and shunning the Via Emilia, which led through the pass Ravenna barred, adventured over the Apennines which the Roman generals had conceived as impassable by a Barbarian army. They were right. When Radagaisus saw the South he was starving. Stilicho found him at Fiesole and cut him to pieces. But the remnant of his army escaped as Alaric had done, it was not annihilated; it returned through Cisalpine Gaul and fell upon Gaul proper. Then in 408 Stilicho was murdered in Ravenna by order of the Emperor.
This last disaster was the cause of what immediately followed. When in 408 Alaric invaded Venetia he looted and destroyed as he wished, for there was no one to meet him. He took the great road southward and found the gate open; passed Ravenna without opposition, marched to Rome and after three sieges entered and pillaged it and was on his way southward to enjoy and to loot the South and Sicily, Placidia, the Emperor’s sister, a captive in his train, when he died at Cosenza in 410. His brother-in-law Adolphus, erected as king upon the shields of the Goths—there by the monstrous grave of his predecessor—concluded a peace with Honorius similar to that which years before Alaric had made with Constantinople. He was received into the Imperial service, consented to cross the Alps, and, what was to become a precedent for a yet more outrageous demand, received the hand of Placidia, the Emperor’s sister, in marriage. Thus the retreat of the Barbarian was secured, the peace of Italy restored and a repose obtained which endured for some forty-two years.
It is interesting to observe the extraordinary likeness between Alaric’s attack upon the East and his invasion of the West. Indeed, the only difference between them is the fact that Constantinople was never really in danger, whereas Rome was entered and looted. The intention of both invasions was the same—loot; the result of both was the same—tribute and service in return for the evacuation of the immediate provinces by the Barbarian.
The Imperial failure East and West was a failure in morale and in politics; it was not rightly understood a military failure: Alaric had always been defeated when he was attacked. It was the failure of the West to attack him that gave him Rome at last. The Imperial advisers perhaps thought they had solved the question he had propounded to them, when, after Alaric’s death, they had obtained the retreat of the Barbarian across the Alps—a retreat he was as glad to carry out as they to order, for he was in a sort of trap—and had secured at least his neutrality by admitting him into the service of the Empire. But the peace of more than a generation which followed their act was as illusory as it was contemptible.
The whole Empire had received from Alaric a moral blow from which it was never really to recover. It is true that much which happened in the years that immediately followed the retreat of Adolphus was fortunate. Placidia the spoil and the bride and later the fugitive widow of Alaric’s successor returned in triumph to Ravenna to be the unwilling bride of her deliverer Constantius. Largely through her influence, after the death of Honorius, when she ruled in Ravenna with the title of Augusta as the guardian of her son, the young Cæsar Valentinian, between East and West, a new, if unsubstantial, cordiality appeared. Italy at least was restored to prosperity, while in Aetius she possessed a general as great as the great Stilicho. But if Italy was safe the provinces were in peril and she herself saw Africa betrayed by Boniface and ravaged by and lost to the Vandals under Genseric. Nor was the domestic state of her household and court such as to inspire her with confidence in the future. If her son Valentinian was a foolish and sensual boy, her daughter Honoria was discovered in a low intrigue with a chamberlain of the palace, and when in exile at Constantinople sent, perhaps longing for the romantic fate of her mother, her ring to the new and youthful King of the Huns, soon to be famous as Attila, inviting him to carry her off as Adolphus, the Goth, had carried off Placidia.
Such was the condition of things in the royal household of the West. In Constantinople things were not more promising. Theodosius, the young Emperor, called the Calligrapher, was a dilettante of the fine arts, not a statesman. Those who surrounded him were mediocrities intent rather on theological controversies than on the safety of the State, or sunk in a cynical corruption in which everything noble was lost. No one East or West seemed able to grasp or to realise that there was any danger. Had the Imperial Governments failed altogether to understand the fundamental cause of the Gothic advance, the Vandal attack, indeed of all their embarrassments? Had they failed to remember what was there beyond the Rhine and the Danube? Had they forgotten the Huns?