Original subtitles

Previously on "Rome: Rise and fall of an empire"

Inheriting an empire ravaged by barbarians and torn apart by rival emperors, one man rises victorious.

His name is Constantine.

Fighting under the banner of a new god, he brings unity to a divided Roman empire.

Now:

As its armies are defeated and emperors slain by barbarians, Rome is on the brink of disaster.

In this chaos, two mighty leaders emerge-- one from within the empire, the other, from the ranks of its enemy.

Their struggle will reveal an empire at war with itself.

THE BARBARIAN GENERAL

On the edges of the empire, Roman soldiers march off to defend the frontier villages from attack.

A young boy named Stilicho proudly watches his father among them.

Stilicho was the child of a mixed marriage, as it were.

He had a vandal father but a Roman mother and this meant that he grew up in a sort of context

that was half barbarian and half Roman.

This was not atypical of people in this period and above all, the people who were associated with the army.

Stilicho dreams of becoming a soldier like his barbarian father,

fighting to protect the great empire.

By this time, a sizeable percentage of the officer corps was of what you might call barbarian ancestry.

These are men who were recruited, worked their way up the ranks.

The next generation they become the generals.

As ever-fiercer tribes invade the empire, Rome's dependence on barbarian mercenaries grows by the day.

Under pressure to protect its expansive frontiers, the empire divides in two.

The west is defended by emperor Valentinian in Rome, while emperor Valens defends the east, in Constantinople.

But Valens is challenged in 378 a.D., when a savage enemy attacks the city of Adrianople.

They are the goths, and what they want is Roman land.

They intend to destroy the Roman forces with muscle, steel, and fire

knowing the heavily armored romans will quickly feel the heat as the battlefield burns.

The goths were far more numerous and they had a lot to fight for.

They'd been badly treated by the romans. They'd been sold into slavery.

They really had nothing to lose.

During the battle of Adrianople, emperor Valens' soldiers are no match for the savage and relentless barbarian warriors.

They attack and everybody is pushed to the right.

The romans always edge to the right anyway

because you want to keep that right shoulder under the shield of the guy next to you.

Now, this has accelerated.

Everybody compacts around the emperor

because he's on the far right, the point of honor, and his men won't move.

So we have this acceleration, this compactor process.

The goths come out of this circular deployment and surround the romans and cut them down.

The emperor Valens himself falls on the battlefield, forced to fight for his life.

It is a fight he quickly loses, sending his shocked soldiers into panicked retreat.

When an ancient army breaks, mass slaughter always ensues.

What made Adrianople even worse was that the Roman army was partly surrounded

and not everybody could run so that in their haste to get away,

the Roman soldiers ended up killing one another,

trampling on one another and suffocating to death simply in the vast confusion.

Two-thirds of the Roman army is lost.

The late Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus describes the carnage:

Arrows, whirling death from every side, always found their mark with fatal effect

since they could not be seen beforehand or guarded against."

The battle of Adrianople is a turning point in Roman history.

It's a turning point from which the empire cannot return.

The army is largely gone and there's no way of getting it back

except to use the barbarians themselves.

The new eastern emperor, Theodosius, does just that.

He invites the goths to a banquet, offering them land in exchange for military service.

At his side is Stilicho, now a Roman general in his early 20s.

Stilicho was half a barbarian, as it were.

He's half vandal, half Roman, and as is typical for so many of these kinds of guys, he worked his way up through the army.

Emperor Theodosius relies on Stilicho to handle negotiations with the goths, whom he plans to use as mercenaries.

The conditions that the goths achieve, from Theodosius,

are highly unusual because it puts them in a stronger position than they might have expected.

The most important thing is that they're not broken up.

The goths who have been fighting Theodosius are all settled in one place

and they're settled in one place without being put under Roman control.

Stilicho brokers the deal.

In exchange for this land, the entire gothic force agrees to fight as solders in Theodosius' army.

Though Stilicho is himself a half-barbarian, Theodosius trusts him like a son and has no doubts.

Stilicho was very good at what he did. He distinguished himself.

He came to the attention of the emperor, and so as he worked his way through, he got higher and higher

and was in command of a large contingent of Theodosius' army.

But Stilicho's position does not make him next in line to rule.

The honor falls on the emperor's biological sons, Arcadius and Honorius, who is born in Constantinople in 384 a.D.

Yet Stilicho enjoys a royal connection as well.

Stilicho was actually closely related to the emperor Theodosius.

He had clearly been selected from among the many barbarian or semi-barbarian generals as a future leader,

so much so that the emperor Theodosius had married Stilicho to his own niece,

and this marriage was a strong point in cementing Stilicho's relationship

with the imperial house throughout the course of his life.

Though chosen by the emperor to lead, Stilicho's power will always be limited.

As a barbarian or half-barbarian, there was no way he was going to be emperor.

That was it.

Nonetheless, emperor Theodosius knows he can rely on his most trusted general

to help manage the eastern empire's biggest problem:

The goths.

To solidify emperor Theodosius' new treaty,

gothic boys are sent to training camps, to be instructed in Roman military ways.

What is clear is that they weren't fully Roman subjects,

but that they were obliged to serve the Roman army when the Roman emperor called them to do so.

As Theodosius' right hand man, Stilicho ensures the young goths are well trained and loyal.

There is one whose natural talent catches Stilicho's atention:the boy Alaric.

Alaric had probably been born inside the empire

and he probably had been raised inside the empire with full awareness of what a Roman military career was like.

Taking Alaric under his wing, Stilicho cannot begin to imagine how their fates will be intertwined.

Over the next decade, the eastern empire grows stronger

under the combined rule of Stilicho and emperor Theodosius,

but their authority is jeopardized when a betrayal in Vienne, Gaul, rocks the western empire in 392 A.D.

While sleeping in his palace, the western emperor, Valentinian II,

is murdered by his barbarian guardian, Arbogast, who then disguises the death as a suicide.

The emperor was the symbol of Rome's empire itself.

And so the death of somebody around whom the state was structured,

symbolically structured, is a tremendous psychological blow.

Worse still, the western empire and its army fall

under the control of the ambitious barbarian Arbogast.

The usurper is now a threat to the Eastern empire as well.

Without delay, the eastern emperor, Theodosius, leads his army westward to confront the usurper.

He calls upon his trusted general Stilicho to prepare the troops for battle.

Stilicho was master of the soldiers in Thrace

and was in command of a large contingent of Theodosius' army at the time.

Stilicho recruits the young Alaric, now a full-grown gothic chieftain,

and his tribesmen to fight alongside the romans.

By now, about a quarter of the Roman army is made up of barbarian mercenaries.

The romans had become extremely reliant on non-Roman manpower with non-Roman leadership

in a way that could potentially become very dangerous for the empire.

Emperor Theodosius recognizes this danger,

but he has devised a plan to destroy the usurper Arbogast and weaken the goths in one powerful blow.

In 394 A.D., Theodosius leads his eastern army, including Alaric's gothic troops,

against the forces of the western Roman empire, now led by the power-hungry traitor, Arbogast.

The battle takes place in 394 A.D. at the river Frigidus, in modern-day Slovenia.

There, confronted with Arbogast's army,

emperor Theodosius orders Alaric and his goths into battle first, preserving his Roman troops.

He almost certainly deliberately put them on the front lines for the very first engagement,

knowing that was the most dangerous position for them.

He probably hoped that as many of them would die as possible and yet still achieve victory.

The goths fight for their lives.

But Arbogast's forces, hungry for blood and booty, cut them down.

Just as defeat seems imminent, a fluke of the weather changes everything.

It just so happened that the way that the troops were lined up,

the winds were blowing very much against the forces of Arbogast and for the forces of Theodosius

so that the projectiles that were shot and thrown on the part of Arbogast's army

failed to reach or have any effect on Theodosius' army.

With this advantage, emperor Theodosius defeats Arbogast soundly.

But in the process, he has made a dangerous new enemy.

As Alaric searches the bodies of the fallen goths for survivors, Theodosius' betrayal cuts deep.

When the goths were put on the front lines

and used as cannon fodder or missile fodder for the troops of Arbogast, Alaric must have been furious.

Never again will Alaric allow his people to be mere casualties of Roman glory.

While Theodosius celebrates his victory at the Frigidus and becomes the sole emperor of Rome,

Alaric and the goths take their vengeance, ravaging the Balkans for food and booty.

There, Roman farmers, unarmed and vulnerable, are completely unprepared for the wrath of the goths.

Their harvest is exactly what Alaric needs.

Alaric has nothing now to draw upon to support his people.

He does not have access to local taxes. He does not have access to granaries.

That means he can't feed his people.

Alaric is now determined to feed his people with Roman grain...

And the local roman garrison can do little to stop him.

Emboldened by their success, the goths now declare Alaric their king.

With Alaric they become the first barbarian people to create a kingdom inside the empire.

Alaric is very important because what he does is really forge the goths

as a single political unit and really create from a band of soldiers a people.

Alaric's gothic kingdom is unchallenged for now, as the empire faces other, more critical upheavals.

In 395 A.D., when emperor Theodosius falls ill and dies, the empire is divided once again.

His teenage son Arcadius is made emperor of the east, in Constantinople,

and his 10-year-old son Honorius becomes emperor of the west in Rome.

Theodosius' loyal general Stilicho is not forgotten.

He becomes the boy-emperor Honorius' protector and teacher.

After Theodosius fell ill, it was Stilicho that he turned to for whatever reason.

He says to Stilicho, according to one version or the other, that he wants him to be the regent of Honorius.

Inexperienced in the tools of war, young Honorius relies on Stilicho for his expertise and guidance.

Stilicho had a sort of patronizing relationship, a sort of godfather relationship with this child.

I think Stilicho always saw Honorius as his little kid.

But Honorius is an indifferent student.

Stilicho keeps a keen eye on him.

He knows that the future of the empire depends on his control of the boy.

In 397 A.D., Stilicho secures his hold on Honorius by marrying the young emperor to his daughter.

What he was really interested in is having his grandson be emperor because he married his first daughter, Maria to Honorius,

so clearly he wanted Honorius' son and his grandson to be emperor

so that would be the only possible way that he could have direct familial influence over the next emperor.

The wedding guests are scandalized at the joining of the royal bloodlines with a barbarian.

But Stilicho is oblivious to their anger, seeing himself as Roman to the core.

But Stilicho's power in Rome does not extend to the other young emperor, Arcadius, in Constantinople.

There, the 19-year-old Arcadius enjoys the amusements of the imperial bed-chamber,

leaving important matters of state to his advisors.

Well, the fact that Theodosius, had he been alive to see his sons try to operate without his presence,

would have been greatly disappointed.

Of that there can be no doubt.

Shockingly, Arcadius grants the honor of consulship to his chief of staff, the eunuch Eutropius.

A eunuch as a consul is like having a porn star elected as president of the United States.

This is just so far beyond the pale that people just can't believe it.

A eunuch as consul is monstrous.

But what makes him truly hated in Constantinople are Eutropius' plans to negotiate with the barbarian goths.

For three long years, Alaric and the goths have raided the Balkans,

pressuring emperor Arcadius in Constantinople to give him the land that his people so badly need.

Finally, in 397 A.D., emperor Arcadius invites Alaric to Constantinople at the urging of Eutropius.

Indifferent to politics, the emperor leaves the negotiations to the eunuch.

Eutropius executed an agreement between the eastern court and Alaric,

and Alaric, this gothic leader, certainly saw in that a tremendous advantage,

particularly the advantage of being able to gain supplies and potentially land from the eastern court.

In return, Alaric promises the goths will once again fight for the eastern empire.

But this deal leaves the people outraged.

The goths had regularly confronted the romans in battle and actually defeated the romans in battle.

The romans therefore had a huge amount of not so carefully disguised distaste for the goths.

Poisoned with hatred for their one-time enemies,

the angry people will not be satisfied until the streets of Constantinople flow with gothic blood.

In 397 A.D., the eastern emperor, Arcadius,

at the urging of his closest advisor, the eunuch Eutropius, makes a treaty with Alaric the goth.

But anti-barbarian prejudice spreads like poison throughout the city.

After two years of public outcry, Eutropius is finally arrested,

swept away in the growing race-hatred.

His rivals claim his disgrace will quickly appease the angry mob.

The problem that arose, of course, was that his power made him unpopular

and he had a great many rivals for control of the imperial court.

And one of the things they exploited was his willingness

to negotiate with barbarians and with the goths.

Eutropius is sent into exile and later executed.

But his sacrifice does not quell the anti-barbarian fervor of the people,

who rise up and massacre every last goth in the city.

It's very difficult in any period to put your finger on the roots of ethnic tension.

It's clear enough that the romans resented barbarians who were invading their territory.

But Roman feelings against barbarians went much deeper than that.

There was a sort of visceral dislike of anything that smacked of barbarism.

Such violence against his people sends an undeniable message to Alaric that a treaty with the east is impossible.

The hatred is too deep.

A desperate Alaric takes his people west, to Italy,

hoping to gain a favorable treaty from general Stilicho instead.

But soon a terrible new force threatens both the goths and Rome:

the huns.

Sweeping into the tribal villages at the margins of the empire,

the huns attack and destroy everything before them.

Well, the huns were moving west.

They were looking for greener pastures as it were.

And they're forcing the various germanic tribes, the nomadic tribes, the settled tribes to move out of their way.

The huns are nasty. They're ruthless and no one wants to be near them.

But to all intents and purposes, they're forcing the others ahead of them

like a bow wave in front of a boat and people are trying to get out of the way.

Those who do not flee the savage horsemen are cut down with brutal precision.

For the huns leave no survivors.

The hunnic invasion forces other barbarian tribes deeper into Roman territory.

And while emperor Honorius moves the seat of the western empire to the better-protected city of Ravenna,

the defenseless villages of northern Italy fall prey to the barbarians' devastation.

The dwindling Roman forces are overwhelmed.

In the italian field hospitals, general Stilicho watches the numbers of fallen soldiers grow daily,

depleting an already sparse army.

I think that's one of the main problems that Stilicho faces.

He just doesn't have a proper standing army,

and it then becomes the major problem of the west throughout the fifth century.

There isn't a standing army.

Something happens, you've got to run around, pay guys, gather sort of whatever mercenaries and whatnot you can

and get off to the battlefield as quickly as you can.

With each soldier he loses, Stilicho grows more desperate.

In order to defend Italy, he needed more troops.

And in order to take back the rest of the empire, he needed more troops.

And he needed them because much of the western empire wasn't under his control.

Being half barbarian himself, Stilicho feels his support in the army is waning.

Now he has no choice but to turn to the one person who can help him secure more troopes:

the gothic king, Alaric.

In 406 A.D., Stilicho travels to Alaric's camp in Illyricum, modern-day Serbia, offering a deal.

Alaric, eager for a treaty with Rome, welcomes Stilicho to his camp.

Stilicho brings his old friend Alaric a gift to warm the goth to his request.

Stilicho desperately needed troops.

There simply weren't enough Roman troops in Italy to go around,

and the only reservoir of manpower was Alaric and his goths.

Stilicho also offers Alaric the position he's always wanted.

In 404 he wants Alaric to be given a Roman command,

and he's given a Roman command so that Stilicho can then use him as an army to capture Illyricum

so that he can use that as a launching pad.

Stilicho desperately needs Illyricum, a recruiting ground for soldiers that now belongs to the Eastern empire.

Alaric agrees to help him take it for the west, offering Stilicho a gothic sword as a symbol of their treaty.

From Alaric's point of view, this was a very good thing.

He needed some way to keep his followers occupied so that they didn't simply drift away.

He needed some way to keep them fed so that they didn't mutiny or depose him.

Stilicho promises Alaric that his goths will be well-paid by the grateful western emperor, Honorius.

The two men embrace as allies once more.

But years go by, and Honorius' court is unwilling to make good on Stilicho's promise to Alaric.

Stilicho finds he has lost influence over the young emperor.

By now, Honorius is a full adult and doesn't need a guardian anymore.

Stilicho's position versus Honorius' court, the inner circle, that is a very difficult one

because as Honorius grew into adulthood, his court distances him, Honorius, from Stilicho's influence.

Feeding the emperor anti-barbarian propaganda,

these advisors have delayed Stilicho's plan to work with the goths for years.

The goths now demand to be paid for their service as promised.

Stilicho needs to come to the Roman senate

and he needs to ask that the senators themselves produce 4,000 pounds of gold in order to pay off the goths for this.

He has to do so, in many ways, over the protests of Honorius.

So it's very clear that the two of them are beginning to part ways at this point.

But Stilicho warns Honorius that if Alaric is not paid,

the goths will revolt, an event the emperor may not survive.

Honorius at first agrees to this, but then his personnel official, who's named Olympius,

believes that Stilicho is trying to do this so that Stilicho himself can set up his son Eucherius on the eastern throne.

Scared and confused, Honorius believes Olympius' claims,

making a decision that will spell disaster for both Stilicho and the western empire.

Facing barbarian invasions on the frontier,

the Roman general Stilicho appeals to Alaric, king of the goths, for troops.

But emperor Honorius' advisor, the anti-barbarian Olympius,

turns the emperor against Stilicho.

Olympius and his like-minded officers, incite the army to revolt against the half- barbarian general Stilicho.

And so Olympius then starts sowing all sorts of rumors amongst the troops as well.

The troops riot in August and they call for the death of Stilicho.

Swayed by Olympius' slander, emperor Honorius responds by issuing a decree against Stilicho.

Honorius had many courtiers willing to play upon his fears,

to suggest to him that Stilicho was seeking the throne for himself or for his son,

and the emperor's mind was really poisoned against Stilicho.

Stilicho is himself declared a public enemy,

and many of his supporters are massacred in cities throughout Italy.

Ethnic hatred explodes among the populace.

Fifth-century chronicler Orosius:

"Stilicho was sprung from the barbarian vandals, that cowardly, greedy, treacherous, and crafty race."

The racially motivated violence is brutal, and the victims are quickly overwhelmed.

Determined to cleanse the empire of all barbarians, the romans now hunt for the general himself.

The angry mob of Roman soldiers, eager for blood, find Stilicho in a church in Ravenna, where he has taken refuge.

Stilicho flees to a church and tries to escape the decree knowing full well it will mean his death,

but he's given strong assurances that he's only to be arrested and not to be executed.

Despite his misgivings, Stilicho decides to give himself up willingly.

He was in a position to seize the state for himself, had he wanted to.

But he remained a loyal servant of the ruling family his whole life.

Even at the end, when he was betrayed by the master he had served his whole life,

he refused to rise up and resist, and it certainly spared Italy a civil war.

Outside the church, among the angry mob, Stilicho finds Olympius waiting for him.

Instantly a second decree arrives ordering Stilicho's death.

His attendants and bodyguards threaten that they will attack those who have been sent to arrest Stilicho,

but Stilicho, in very noble fashion agrees to allow himself to be killed so as not to stir up further trouble.

Stilicho is stripped of the symbols that mark him as a Roman general.

Stilicho himself is something of a tragic figure.

He could quite easily have rebelled when he faced this hostility from his emperor,

but instead he surrendered, left the church where he had taken sanctuary and went quietly to execution.

The great barbarian general is felled as those he sought to protect cheer on.

His death excites the crowd, who are no longer satisfied by symbolic gestures.

Their hatred of the goths soon spreads beyond Ravenna to cities throughout Italy.

Roman troops attacked any gothic families immediately,

killing as many of 10,000 of them as a response to this anti-barbarian sentiment

that had arisen at the end of Stilicho's administration.

Sixth-century historian Zosimus describes the massacre that occurs in the Italian cities in 408 A.D.:

"The soldiers fell upon the barbarian women and children in each city

and, as if at a predetermined signal, destroyed them and plundered their property."

Naturally, those goths who remained alive and who escaped this massacre

were no longer willing to associate themselves with the romans and they had an easy and quick place to turn-- Alaric's army.

30,000 goths instantly switched allegiance and joined Alaric.

But with Stilicho's death, their treaty with Rome --and the money and land it promised them--vanish.

Alaric and his now-powerful army move towards Rome to pressure emperor Honorius to give them what they want.

Alaric and his tribesmen invade Italy and lay siege to Rome in 410 a.D.

But emperor Honorius, safe in Ravenna, refuses to negotiate with the goths.

Honorius and his advisor Olympius care little for the people of Rome.

So what little by little happens is Alaric's trying to do anything

to get Honorius' government to sit across the table from him and talk shop.

I mean, "what's going on here?"

"I would destroying Italy. All I want is a command, someplace to take that command."

And the court won't talk to him.

But the Roman senators insist that Alaric's demands must be met or the city will fall.

They're negotiating a ransom, in essence, for their city.

And what they agree to pay seems like a lot --it's many thousands of pounds of gold.

Humoring the senators, Honorius agrees, sending Alaric word of a possible treaty,

"Come to Ravenna, and we'll come to terms".

But the anti-barbarian emperor has his own plans for the goths.

In the chaos following general Stilicho's death, the goths lay siege to Rome.

To save the city, emperor Honorius agrees to make a deal with the barbarians' king, Alaric.

Alaric and his troops begin their journey from Rome to Ravenna to meet Honorius for negotiations, in good faith.

But along the way, Alaric is ambushed by a group of mercenaries working for the emperor.

The fact is that over and over again the romans display that they're only barely going to tolerate these barbarians

and that whenever possible they're going to massacre them or put them in harm's way so that they'll be killed.

As his men are cut down around him, Alaric knows he has been deceived by the Roman empire once again.

That's a good story of betrayal, of a lack of honor on the part of the court of Honorius.

Alaric is a very honorable man who's dishonored by both courts.

And one could go on.

Alaric is done with peaceful negotiations.

He orders his men back to Rome, bent on destruction.

The goths break through the gates of Rome in 410 A.D., and at long last, enter the ancient Roman capital.

For the first time in 800 years, the great city is sacked.

It's important to realize that Alaric didn't want to sack Rome.

He did not want his army to sack the city.

It was a decision made out of frustration

at the fact that really two years' worth of negotiation had failed to get him anything that he wanted

and in the end, he saw no other way forward but to allow his army to sack Rome.

Unlike the romans, who so recently slaughtered thousands of goth women and children,

Alaric orders his soldiers to show restraint.

Alaric clearly did his best to stop his troops from indiscriminately killing people or seizing captives.

Nonetheless, for three days, the goths plunder the riches of Rome, taking all they can carry.

The sack of Rome would have been devastating

in terms of the amount of treasure and money that was taken away from the city,

and we can be sure that however mild it was,

there were still a great many atrocities perpetrated. There's no question of that.

But the deepest effect of the sack of Rome is psychological.

A former citizen of Rome, Saint Jerome, writes mournfully about the devastated city:

"My voice sticks in my throat;

And as I dictate, sobs choke my speech.

The city which had conquered the whole world was itself conquered."

In response to this attack on the very heart of the empire, emperor Honorius does nothing.

It becomes clear that Stilicho's death has robbed the empire of its last great leader.

Honorius is, in a sense, a captive court figurehead, alone in his palace

surrounded by courtiers with no real sense of what's going on in the world or anything else for that matter.

When confronted by refugees from Rome who came to beg for aid,

the emperor shows only annoyance, ordering this reminder of his failure to be removed.

So, not only is he distancing himself from the realities of government, he's progressively losing the credibility of the office.

Many romans lose faith in the emperor's ability to defend its people from their barbarian enemies.

Their fears will be justified.

As the goths continue to savage the dwindling Roman army, the emperor is powerless to stop them.

The goths are here to stay.

The gothic kingdom that grows out of Alaric's following is the first real successor to Rome in the west.

It's the first part of Roman territory to fall away.

And it's the first of many.

Over the next 40 years,

barbarian tribes will continue to pour across the vulnerable borders of the empire,

taking large regions of Roman land.

These losses, and the fading of the empire, were foreseen by general Stilicho,

who tried desperately to stop them, only to earn his own execution.

Stilicho's tragic downfall foreshadows the terrible and irreversible fate of the empire itself.

Next on "Rome, Rise and fall of an empire"...

Ethnic tensions continue to divide the already ravaged empire,

as the barbarian-born general Ricimer claws his way to the throne.

Hungry for power, he kills anyone who stands in his way.