Sack of Rome by the Visigoths
Alaric's Visigoths entered Rome on 24 August 410 and sacked it for three days — the first time the city had fallen to a foreign enemy in exactly eight hundred years. Alaric had been a Roman commander as much as an enemy. He led a federate people settled inside the empire, had fought for Theodosius at the Frigidus, and spent fifteen years alternately raiding and negotiating for what he actually wanted: land for his people in a defensible province, a fixed grain supply, and a senior Roman command for himself. He besieged Rome three times. The first, in 408, was lifted for an enormous ransom; the second installed a puppet emperor; the third followed the collapse of talks with the emperor Honorius at Ravenna, who was safe behind marshes and had no reason to concede. Stilicho, the one man who might have managed him, had been executed in 408, and his federate troops massacred, driving thirty thousand of them to Alaric. The sack itself was restrained by the standards of the age. The Visigoths were Arian Christians and spared the churches of St Peter and St Paul as sanctuary; the city was not burned; and much of the damage was to property and to a great many people who were carried off, including the emperor's sister Galla Placidia. The shock was psychological and enormous. Jerome wrote that the city which had taken the whole world was itself taken. Augustine began the City of God to answer the charge that abandoning the old gods had caused it. Alaric died within months.
- Category: Military
