Sack of Rome (410): Alaric and the Visigoths Take the City

The sack of Rome in AD 410 was the capture and three-day plunder of the city by a Gothic army under Alaric I, beginning on the night of 24 August 410. It was the first time in about 800 years that a foreign enemy had taken Rome, and the news stunned Christians and pagans from Britain to Palestine. Although the Western Roman Empire survived for another 66 years, the sack became a lasting symbol of the fall of Rome and inspired Augustine’s The City of God.

Background: the Goths inside the empire

In 376 large groups of Goths, fleeing the Huns, were allowed to cross the Danube into Roman territory. Mistreatment by Roman officials led to revolt, and in 378 the Goths destroyed the army of the emperor Valens at the Battle of Adrianople.

In 382 Theodosius I made peace with them. They were settled in the Balkans as allies who served under their own leaders. This arrangement left a large, armed and partly autonomous people inside the empire, dependent on Roman supplies and goodwill.

Alaric, born around 370, emerged as their leader. He commanded Gothic troops for Theodosius at the Battle of the Frigidus in 394, where the Goths suffered heavy losses. After the emperor’s death and the division of the empire in 395, Alaric rebelled, seeking a senior Roman command and secure terms for his followers.

Alaric, Stilicho and Honorius

For the next fifteen years Alaric moved between rebellion and alliance. He ravaged Greece in 395–397 and was then appointed a Roman general in Illyricum by the Eastern court. In 401 he invaded Italy but was checked by the Western commander Stilicho at Pollentia in 402 and near Verona soon afterwards.

The young Western emperor Honorius moved his court from Milan to Ravenna, protected by marshes and the sea. Stilicho later planned to use Alaric against the East and agreed in 408 to pay him 4,000 pounds of gold.

The court turned against Stilicho, whom his enemies accused of treason. He was executed at Ravenna on 22 August 408. Roman troops then massacred the families of barbarian soldiers in Italian cities, and according to the historian Zosimus about 30,000 of those soldiers went over to Alaric.

Three sieges of Rome

The first siege (408). In autumn 408 Alaric marched on Rome and blockaded it, cutting the grain supply from the port. Famine and disease followed. The Senate bought him off with a huge ransom that Zosimus lists as 5,000 pounds of gold, 30,000 pounds of silver, 4,000 silk tunics, 3,000 scarlet-dyed hides and 3,000 pounds of pepper.

The second siege (409). Honorius refused Alaric’s demands for land and a command. Alaric returned to Rome and persuaded the Senate to proclaim a rival emperor, the senator Priscus Attalus, who gave Alaric the title of commander. But Attalus failed to secure grain-rich Africa, and in summer 410 Alaric publicly deposed him near Ariminum (Rimini) to reopen talks with Honorius.

The third siege (410). When negotiations near Ravenna were close to agreement, the Gothic general Sarus, an enemy of Alaric serving Honorius, attacked his camp. Alaric took this as proof of bad faith and returned to Rome for the last time.

What happened in August 410

On the night of 24 August 410 the Goths entered Rome through the Salarian Gate in the northern walls. How they got in is unknown. The later historian Procopius tells two stories, one of young slaves opening the gate and one of a noblewoman named Proba ordering it opened to end the people’s suffering, but neither can be confirmed.

For three days the Goths plundered the city. They took gold, silver and valuables, seized captives for ransom, and burned some buildings. The area around the Salarian Gate, including the Gardens of Sallust, was set on fire, and archaeologists have found traces of burning in the Forum, notably in the Basilica Aemilia, where coins fused by heat were found in the floor.

Alaric and many of his men were Christians, though of the Arian form condemned by the imperial church. He ordered that the great basilicas of St Peter and St Paul be treated as places of sanctuary. Orosius, writing a few years later, tells how Goths escorted the sacred vessels of St Peter’s through the streets to the basilica, with Romans joining the procession.

There was violence nonetheless. Jerome records that his elderly friend Marcella, a noted Christian ascetic, was beaten by soldiers searching for treasure and died soon afterwards. Many Romans were killed, raped or enslaved, and thousands of refugees fled to Sicily, Africa and the East.

On 27 August the Goths left, taking enormous booty and important hostages, among them Galla Placidia, the half-sister of Honorius.

Death of Alaric

Alaric led his army south through Campania towards Rhegium (Reggio Calabria), hoping to cross to Sicily and then Africa, the granary of Italy. A storm wrecked his ships in the Strait of Messina.

Turning back north, Alaric fell ill and died at Consentia (Cosenza) late in 410. According to the 6th-century historian Jordanes, his followers diverted the river Busento, buried him with treasure in its bed and then let the water flow back, killing the workers so the spot would stay secret. The tomb has never been found and the story may be legend.

Consequences

Alaric’s brother-in-law Ataulf led the Goths into southern Gaul in 412. In 414 at Narbonne he married Galla Placidia in a Roman ceremony. After years of conflict, the Goths were settled in Aquitaine in 418 as federates of the empire, the beginning of the Visigothic Kingdom of Toulouse.

Militarily the sack changed little. Honorius stayed safe in Ravenna, and Rome was soon repopulated and partly rebuilt; the government even granted tax relief to help the city recover. But the event revealed that the Western government could no longer protect its most famous city.

At the same time the West was losing control elsewhere. Vandals, Alans and Suebi had crossed the Rhine in 406 and were moving into Spain, and Roman rule in Britain came to an end around 410 (see End of Roman Britain).

Reactions across the Roman world

The news travelled fast and caused a shock out of proportion to the damage. In Bethlehem, Jerome wrote that his voice failed him and that the city which had taken the whole world had itself been taken.

Pagans argued that Rome had fallen because it had abandoned its ancient gods. In answer, Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa, began his great work The City of God in 413 and finished it in 426. He argued that no earthly city is eternal and that Christians belong to a heavenly city that cannot be sacked.

Augustine also encouraged the Spanish priest Orosius to write his Seven Books of History against the Pagans (completed around 417), which tried to show that disasters had been worse in pagan times. Both works shaped how medieval Europe understood history.

Myths and facts

Myth: the sack of 410 marked the fall of the Roman Empire. The Western Empire continued until 476, and the Eastern Empire until 1453. The sack was a symbolic blow, not the end.

Myth: the Goths destroyed Rome. Damage was real but limited. Most of the city’s monuments survived, and life resumed quickly. The Vandal sack of 455 was longer and more thorough (see Vandal Sack of Rome).

Myth: the Visigoths were a primitive horde from outside. Alaric’s army had lived inside the empire for over thirty years, many of its soldiers had served Rome, and Alaric himself wanted a Roman generalship. The name “Visigoths” was applied to them mainly later.

Myth: Honorius cared more about his chicken. This famous anecdote comes from Procopius more than a century later and is best read as satire on a weak emperor.

Key people

• Alaric I (c. 370–410): Gothic leader and sometime Roman general who took Rome.
• Honorius (384–423): Western emperor, who governed from Ravenna.
• Stilicho (c. 359–408): Western commander who held Alaric in check until his execution.
• Priscus Attalus: senator proclaimed emperor by Alaric in 409 and deposed in 410.
• Galla Placidia (c. 390–450): Honorius’s half-sister, taken hostage in 410 and later regent of the West.
• Ataulf (died 415): Alaric’s successor, who led the Goths to Gaul.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 376: Goths cross the Danube into the empire.
• 378, 9 August: Battle of Adrianople.
• 395: Alaric rebels after the death of Theodosius I.
• 402: Stilicho checks Alaric at Pollentia; Honorius moves to Ravenna.
• 408, 22 August: Stilicho is executed; Alaric besieges Rome that autumn.
• 409: Second siege; Priscus Attalus proclaimed emperor.
• 410, summer: Alaric deposes Attalus.
• 410, 24 August: The Goths enter Rome by the Salarian Gate.
• 410, 27 August: The Goths leave the city.
• 410, late: Alaric dies at Cosenza.

Why it matters

The sack of 410 was the moment the Roman world realised its capital was no longer untouchable. It exposed the weakness of the Western government, set the Goths on the road to their own kingdom in Gaul and Spain, and provoked Augustine’s City of God, one of the most influential books in Western thought. For later generations it became the defining image of the fall of Rome.