Emperor Honorius

Honorius ruled the Western Roman Empire for twenty-eight years and Rome was sacked during them. Born in Constantinople in AD 384, the younger son of Theodosius I, he became emperor of the west at ten in AD 395 when the empire was divided between him and his brother Arcadius. He was governed by the general Stilicho, whose daughter he married, and Stilicho held the frontiers and defeated Alaric twice and Radagaisus once. Honorius moved the imperial residence from Milan to Ravenna around AD 402, protected by marshes, which made him safe and made him irrelevant. In AD 408 he was persuaded to have Stilicho arrested and executed, and permitted the massacre of the families of Gothic soldiers serving Rome. Some thirty thousand men defected to Alaric, who had no serious opponent left. Alaric besieged Rome three times. Honorius, in Ravenna, refused terms repeatedly over three years — Alaric had asked for land, grain and a command — and on 24 August 410 the Goths entered the city and sacked it for three days. It was the first time Rome had fallen to a foreign enemy in eight hundred years, and the shock across the Mediterranean produced Augustine's City of God. Procopius records that when a servant told Honorius that Rome had perished, he thought his pet chicken of that name had died, and was relieved to learn otherwise. The story is probably invented and captures how he was regarded. Britain was abandoned in AD 410, and Gaul and Spain were largely lost. He died in AD 423.

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