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Rome August 24, 410AD...Why Is That Gate Open?


Valin

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Sack Of Rome

 

(Snip)

 

So now we have a greatly expanded (and very angry) Visigoth army on the loose in Italy, and the only Roman general capable of opposing them is headless in Ravenna. The predictable result was that a few months later Alaric's long siege of Rome began. The Senate now offered to buy off the Visigoths with gold, silver, and food, the last of which, of course, would have to be provided from outside Rome, probably by Honorius. Alaric withdrew for a while after receiving the Senate promises (and some gold and silver), but Honorius, well fed in Ravenna, was not susceptible to the pleas of the starving (some accounts say eventually cannibalistic) Romans. All deals fell through, and Alaric renewed the siege. Finally, on August 24, 410, someone opened the Salaria Gate (now the Pincian Gate at the end of Via Venetto), and Alaric's Visigoths poured through.

 

The Sack -- the shortest part of the story:

 

The Visigoths were also pretty famished after camping for more than eighteen months in what later became the Villa Borghese Park, so they only pillaged for three days before they left in search of food. During the sack, most unresisting persons were spared from the sword. Many were nominally enslaved, but the selling price of slaves plunged so low that most quickly bought themselves and friends out of servitude: the Visigoths wanted whatever cash they could realize and certainly had no desire to own a multitude of pretty useless city people as slaves. A few important persons, notably the beautiful young Galla Placida, a daughter of Theodosius who had been raised in Stilicho's household, were kept as hostages. All accounts agree that rape was not on the menu -- they were all Christians, after all. Public buildings were burned, but, by and large, houses and churches were spared. Secular artwork was damaged or hauled off, but early sacred art survived -- it was mostly in the catacombs and churches. No matter: it was almost all destroyed later or painted over in new styles.

 

The sack, although short-lived, had a profound effect on Rome. There was no food in the city, and a chaotic situation prevailed. The Roman slave economy had also finally collapsed, because almost any slave could afford freedom in the glutted and depressed slave market. Roman population numbers, already reduced since the departure of the government apparatus with Constantine ninety years earlier, again fell precipitously as droves of Romans quickly dispersed into the hills and countryside. Additional waves of barbarians, interspersed with outbreaks of plague and wars, ensured that Rome's population would not again meet its highest imperial peak until the 20th century.

 

Aftermath:

 

From the Visigoth viewpoint the most important thing about Rome, when they finally took it in 410 AD, was also that it was a city without food. The "sacking" was exceedingly brief, and then, led by Alaric, the invaders very quickly headed off southward to forage. They happily devoured whatever was available on the southward march through the fertile Campania and Cosenza. According to legend, they planned to take Sicily as a stepping-stone to North Africa -- where there was more food -- but the plan aborted when Alaric died after a short illness. Another legend, repeated by Gibbon in his "History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire" (Volume 3 Ch. XXXI), recounts the burial of Alaric in the bed of the Busentinus (now Busento) River at the southern edge of Cosenza city, the river having been diverted for the purpose and then allowed to return to its course covering the still undiscovered tomb.

 

(Snip)

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Alaric's Sack of Rome, 410 CE

Procopius of Caesarea

 

History of the Wars [written c. 550 CE], III.ii.7-39

 

But the Visigoths, separating from the others, removed from there and at first entered into an alliance with the Emperor Arcadius, but at a later time (for faith with the Romans cannot dwell in barbarians), under the leadership of Alaric, they became hostile to both emperors, and, beginning with Thrace, treated all Europe as an enemy's land. Now the emperor Honorius had before this time been sitting in Rome, with never a thought of war in his mind, but glad, I think, if men allowed him to remain quiet in his palace. But when word was brought that the barbarians with a great army were not far off, but somewhere among the Taulantii (in Illyricum), he abandoned the palace and fled in disorderly fashion to Ravenna, a strong city lying just about at the end of the Ionian Gulf, while some say that he brought in the barbarians himself, because an uprising had been started against him among his subjects; but this does not seem to me trustworthy, as far, at least, as one can judge of the character of the man. And the barbarians, finding that they had no hostile force to encounter them, became the most cruel of all men. For they destroyed all the cities which they captured, especially those south of the Ionian Gulf, so completely that nothing has been left to my time to know them by, unless, indeed, it might be one tower or one gate or some such thing which chanced to remain. And they killed all the people, as many as came in their way, both old and young alike, sparing neither women nor children. Wherefore, even up to the present time Italy is sparsely populated. They also gathered as plunder all the money out of all Europe, and, most important of all, they left in Rome nothing whatever of public or private wealth when they moved on to Gaul. But I shall now tell how Alaric captured Rome.

 

(Snip)

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