Rome Sacked Aug. 24 410 CE

[Valin]

The Sack of Rome

"My voice sticks in my throat; and, as I dictate, sobs choke my utterance. The City which had taken the whole world was itself taken."

Jerome, Letter CXXVII (To Principia)

 

Just before his death in AD 395, Theodosius I divided the empire into East and West, to be ruled by his two sons. Honorius was only ten years old at the time, and the West was governed in his stead by Flavius Stilicho, his guardian and commander of the army. The two halves of the empire were in contention, however, a situation exploited by Alaric, whose Visigoths had been used as allies but now, with the death of Theodosius, renounced their allegiance and rose in revolt. Alaric was able to negotiate the command of the army in Illyricum but later there was resistance to this concession and he was obliged to leave the area. Alaric then invaded Italy itself and in AD 402 besieged Honorius in Milan (to where the capital of the western Roman empire had been removed more than a century before). Twice defeated by Stilicho but spared each time, Alaric were forced to retreat and persuaded instead to join in a campaign to wrest Illyricum away from the East. But the scheme was abandoned when the usurper Constantine III revolted in Britain in AD 407 and Arcadius unexpectedly died the next year.

 

Alaric demanded compensation, which Honorius, who now was in the new capital at Ravenna, refused to pay. Stilicho had been executed and in AD 410 Alaric marched on Rome itself, the first time in almost eight hundred years that the "Eternal City" in Tibullus' phrase (Elegies, II.5) had been attacked. Zosimus, who provides the only account of these events, records what happened (5.40).

 

 

"When Alaric heard that the people were trained and ready to fight, he said that thicker grass was easier to mow than thinner and laughed broadly at the ambassadors, but when they turned to discuss peace he used expressions excessive even for an arrogant barbarian: he declared that he would not give up the siege unless he got all the gold and silver in the city, as well as all movable property and the barbarian slaves. When one of the ambassadors asked what he would leave for the citizens if he took these, he replied: 'Their lives.'"

 

 

The seige of Rome was lifted only after five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand pounds of silver, four thousand silken tunics, three thousand scarlet-dyed hides, and three thousand pounds of pepper had been paid. Statues were stripped of their decorations and, when that was not enough, those of gold and silver melted down. When further negotiations regarding a homeland for the Goths broke down, Rome again was besieged and, this time, sacked, the fathers of the church seeking to explain such a catastrophe. The date was August 24, AD 410.

 

[Valin]

[Valin]

Highly Recommended Barbarians and Romans: The Birth Struggle of Europe A.D. 400–700.

Justine Davis Randers-Pehrson.

[Draggingtree]

Inflation and the Fall of the Roman Empire

10/19/2017 / Joseph R. Peden

[This is a transcript of Professor Joseph Peden's 50-minute lecture "Inflation and the Fall of the Roman Empire," given at the Seminar on Money and Government in Houston, Texas, on October 27, 1984. The original audio recording is available as a free MP3 download.]

 Two centuries ago, in 1776, there were two books published in England, both of which are read avidly today. One of them was Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and the other was Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon's multivolume work is the tale of a state that survived for twelve centuries in the West and for another thousand years in the East, at Constantinople.

Gibbon, in looking at this phenomenon, commented that the wonder was not that the Roman Empire had fallen, but rather that it had lasted so long. And scholars since Gibbon have devoted a great deal of energy to examining that problem: How was it that the Roman Empire lasted so long? And did it decline, or was it simply transformed into something else (that something else being the European civilization of which we are the heirs)?        https://mises.org/library/inflation-and-fall-roman-empire