The Fall of the Roman Empire Read Free

of Valentinian i (364-75), when this downward process was about to start: though in his day Rome still seemed to be at the height of its power.

    VALENTINIAN I
    In 364 the army acclaimed Valentinian 1 as Emperor, and he was the last really impressive Emperor Rome ever had. He came from Cibalae (Vinkovci) in Pannonia (Yugoslavia). He was tall and vigorous - a champion wrestler - with fair hair and bluish-grey eyes, regular features, a long face and a large straight nose. Although his enemies sneered at his barbarous origins, he was quite thoroughly educated, and a clever painter and sculptor.
    His character was disconcerting: cruel, jealous, evil-tempered and panicky. Nor was he a reliable judge of the civilians he chose to govern the Empire on his behalf. Yet Valentinian was a superb soldier and a conscientious worker, endowed with ferocious energy. He felt a strong duty to the state, and, much more unusual, a strong duty to the poor, an emotion which he combined with a considerable distaste for the Roman upper class. More unusual still, in the age in which he lived, he believed in tolerating differences of religious opinion. For all his faults he would have been an outstanding man in any epoch, and it is only because of the misleading tradition which dismisses the personalities of the later Empire that most people have never heard of him.
    Valentinian decided that the needs of national defence required there should not be one single Emperor only, but two. In consequence, he gave his brother Valens the East, and took the West for himself. The Western Empire that he inherited was immense, with a large army to defend it, and after his eleven-year reign he left it stronger than ever.
    But this great strength had only been maintained by his own unremitting vigilance and energy. For as soon as he came to the throne, he was plunged immediately into a variety of emergencies. In the words of Ammianus, who wrote a magnificent Latin history of the later Roman Empire, 'at this time, as if trumpets were sounding the war-note throughout the whole Roman world, the most savage peoples raised themselves and poured across the nearest frontiers'. Yet Valentinian and his able generals were a match for them.
    The first thing that had happened was that Germans broke across the Rhine, capturing the fortress of Mainz. But they were defeated by the Romans three times, and then the Emperor himself, moving his headquarters from Lutetia (Paris) to the frontier city of Treveri (Trier), marched up the valley of the River Neckar and won a ferocious victory in the Black Forest. He remained in Germany for seven years, constructing an elaborate system of fortifications on the Rhine, building a strongpoint at Basilia (Basel), and moving to Ambiani (formerly Samarobriva, now Amiens) in order to direct operations in Britain, which was overrun by Saxons from across the sea and Picts and Scots from the north.
    Valentinian also deliberately stirred up dissension among the Germans themselves by calling to his aid the Burgundians, hereditary foes of their compatriots the Alamanni who were the enemies of Rome. Meanwhile, many Germans continued to be admitted as settlers within the boundaries of the Empire.
    In 374 a more easterly section of the northern border was breached when other Germans, as well as members of the great group of Sarmatian peoples of mainly Iranian stock, erupted across the middle and upper Danube into what are now Hungary and Austria. In the following year Valentinian established his residence at Sirmium, and restored the fortresses on the Danube, which he crossed to ravage the German territory on the other side. Later in the same year the insolent attitude of German envoys who came to see him in Hungary so infuriated him that he broke a blood-vessel and died.
    His son Gratian, a somewhat insignificant sixteen-year-old, became his successor, but in his absence on a different part of the frontier the powerful Roman army of the Danube attempted to