Valentinian III
Valentinian III reigned in the west for thirty years, lost Africa, and stabbed his own best general to death with his own hand. He was six when eastern troops installed him in Ravenna, and his mother Galla Placidia governed for him - a woman who had been captured by the Visigoths in the sack of Rome, married their king, and been ransomed back. Real power passed to Aetius, the commander who had spent years as a hostage among the Huns and who used Hunnic troops to destroy his rivals. In 429 the Vandals crossed from Spain into Africa, some eighty thousand people, and moved east along the coast. Africa was the west's grain supply and its richest tax base. A treaty in 435 conceded them Numidia and the provinces they already held; four years later they took Carthage anyway, and with it the fleet that let them raid the whole western Mediterranean at will. The west never recovered the revenue. In 451 Attila invaded Gaul, having been offered the emperor's sister and half the empire with her by the sister herself. Aetius assembled Romans, Visigoths, Franks and Burgundians and stopped him at the Catalaunian Plains, then watched him invade Italy the following year instead. In September 454 Valentinian summoned Aetius to hear the accounts, accused him of aiming at the throne, and killed him personally with a sword. A courtier is said to have told him he had cut off his right hand with his left. Six months later two of Aetius's retainers murdered the emperor on the parade ground in Rome. The Vandals sacked the city within three months, and the western empire had eight more emperors in twenty-one years.
- Lived: 419 CE – 455 CE
- Nationality: Roman
- Roles: head_of_state, royalty
