Empire and Christendom

In 410, the Visigothic warlord Alaric and his barbarian army plundered the city of Rome. Associated with this particular episode, the word “barbarian” might conjure images of brutish outsiders, bent on the destruction of Roman civilization, a process famously described by the eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon as the “decline and fall of the Roman Empire.”1 The truth of the matter was somewhat more complicated. Like many of the barbarian peoples from the margins of the Roman world, the Goths hardly represented strangers, living along the imperial frontier of the Danube for years. They were also Christians, albeit Arians. Threatened by the marauding Huns, another barbarian people from the Asian steppes, the Visigoths first entered the empire in 376 as settlers and military allies. Famine and abuse by Roman officials soon led to their uprising, culminating in the battle of Adrianople in 378, when the defeated Roman ruler Valens lost his life. An uneasy peace followed between imperial authorities and Alaric, who served as a “master of soldiers” in the Roman army. Rather than a capricious act of savagery, his sack of Rome in 410 is perhaps best understood as a protest against the Roman Empire’s broken promises, taking what he felt was rightfully owed to him.