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| 2. The Visigoths |
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| After their defeat by the Huns, the Visigoths (perhaps 80,000 in number) sought refuge in the Roman Empire. | 1 |
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| 376 |
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| Emperor Valens ordered them disarmed and allowed to cross the Danube to settle in Lower Moesia. Faced with the unprecedented problem of these refugees, the Roman government bungled the administration, failed to disarm the Goths, and ultimately had to fight a two-year war with them. | 2 |
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| 378 |
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| The Visigoths, under Fritigern, defeated and killed Valens near Adrianople, thereby making the first decisive break in the Rhine-Danube frontier. | 3 |
| Fritigern, hoping to carve a Visigothic empire out of the Roman provinces, ravaged Thrace for two years but could not take Adrianople. After his death (379), Emperor Theodosius arranged a pacification of the Visigoths as part of a general policy of assimilation. He won over the chieftain Alaric, of the royal house of Balthas, who hoped for a career in the Roman service. Alaric, disappointed in his hopes at the death of Theodosius, was elected king by the Visigoths, and ravaged Thrace to the gates of Constantinople. Arcadius, emperor of the east (395–408), was helpless until the arrival of Stilicho, magister utriusque militiae (field marshal of both services) in the east. | 4 |
| Stilicho, son of a Vandal father and a Roman mother and married to Theodosius' sister, was guardian of Theodosius' sons, Arcadius and Honorius. He faced Alaric in Thessaly and the Peloponnesus, avoiding battle apparently on orders from Honorius. Alaric was made magister militum in Illyricum, and Stilicho, out of favor in Constantinople, was declared a public enemy. | 5 |
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| 401 |
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| Alaric began a thrust into Italy, probably because of the triumph of an anti-German faction in Constantinople, and ravaged Venetia. Simultaneously Radagaisus (an Ostrogoth) began an invasion of Raetia and Italy. Stilicho, firmly against any Germanic invasion of the west, repulsed Radagaisus. | 6 |
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| 402 |
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| Pollentia (in Liguria, south of present-day Turin), site of a drawn battle between Stilicho and Alaric, was a strategic defeat for Alaric. Alaric's next advance was stopped, probably through an understanding with Stilicho. Halted again (403) at Verona, the Visigoths withdrew to Epirus. | 7 |
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| 406 |
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| The Rhine frontier, denuded of troops for the defense of Italy, was crossed by a great wave of migrants, chiefly eastern Germans: Vandals, Sueves, and Alans (non-German). The usurper Constantine having crossed from Britain to Gaul, Alaric in Noricum was paid a huge sum of gold by the senate as a sort of retainer for his services against Constantine. Stilicho, his popularity undermined by these events and by the hostility of Constantinople, was beheaded (408). Stilicho was the archetypal barbarian army general exercising power in the name of a weak emperor. There is no evidence of treason by Stilicho. His execution was followed by a general massacre of the families of the barbarian auxiliaries in Italy, and some 30,000 of them went over to Alaric in Noricum. | 8 |
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| 410 |
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| Alaric took Rome after alternate sieges and negotiations. He sacked it, then moved south toward Africa, the granary of Italy. Turned back by the loss of his fleet, Alaric died and was buried in the bed of the Busento River. His brother-in-law Ataulf was elected to succeed him. Ataulf, originally bent on the destruction of the very name of Rome, now bent his energies to the fusion of Visigothic vigor and Roman tradition. | 9 |
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| 412 |
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| Ataulf led the Visigoths north, ravaged Etruria, crossed the Alps, ravaged Gaul, and married (against her brother Honorius's will) Galla Placidia (414) after the Roman ritual. He was forced into Spain (415), where he was murdered. Wallia (414–c. 418), after the brief reign of Sigeric, succeeded him. | 10 |
| Ulfilas (311–81), a Gothic bishop of Arian convictions, invented the Gothic alphabet for his translation of the Bible. This translation, the first literary monument of the German invaders, had enormous influence and recalls the wide extent of the Arian heresy, which won every important Germanic invader except the Franks, a development with the greatest political consequences, since the lands where the Germans settled were peopled by orthodox Roman Catholics. | 11 |
| Spain had already been overrun by a horde of Vandals, Sueves, and Alans (409), and the Roman blockade made food hard to get. Wallia planned to cross to the African granary but lost his ships; he was forced to make terms with Honorius and restore Galla Placidia to her brother. He agreed to clear Spain of other barbarians. Succeeding in this, he received the grant of Aquitania Secunda (i.e., the land between the Loire and the Garonne) with Toulouse as a capital. | 12 |
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| 419–507 |
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| Thus began the Kingdom of Toulouse. The Visigoths received two-thirds of the land, the remainder being left to the Roman proprietors. A Gothic kingdom was created within the Roman state. Honorius, hoping to counteract alien influences, revived a Roman custom of holding provincial councils, decreeing an annual meeting of the leading officials and the chief landowners for discussion of common problems. The most important rulers of Toulouse were Theodoric I, (419–51), who fell in the battle of Châlons, and Euric, (466–84), whose reign marked the apogee of the kingdom. He continued the pressure of the Visigoths on Gaul and Spain, and by 481 extended his domain from the Pyrenees to the Loire and eastward to the Rhône, securing Provence from Odovacar (481). Euric first codified Visigothic law, but the Breviary of Alaric (506), a codification of Roman law for Visigothic use, had tremendous influence among the Visigoths and among many other barbarian peoples. Under Visigothic rule the administration in general remained Roman, and the language of government continued to be a Latin vernacular. The Gallo-Roman population and clergy were hostile to the Visigoths as Arians, and this hostility opened the way for the Frankish conquest (507), which reduced the Visigothic power to its Spanish domains. | 13 |
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| 507–711 |
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| The Visigothic Kingdom of Spain dragged out a miserable existence until the arrival of the Muslims (See The Visigothic Kingdom). | 14 |
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| 554 |
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| Belisarius's invasion of Spain, part of Justinian's reconstruction of the Roman Empire (See 527–65), was a brilliant campaign, but it reduced only the southeast corner of Spain, later regained by the Visigoths, who also reduced the Sueves in the north. | 15 |
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