When I began writing my latest novel, The Barbarian, the second book in the Marcus Flavius Victor series, the barbarian I had in mind was Flavius Stilicho, the Roman general who grasped the Empire’s reins in the wake of the death of the Emperor Theodosius in 395. Theodosius’s death left his two sons, Arcadius, seventeen, and Honorius, nine, in the care of his old friend Stilicho. Arcadius took the throne of the Eastern Empire, with his capital in Constantinople, and Honorius, the Western, based originally in Milan, but Stilicho held supreme military power, and, in the first instance, the two Emperors submitted to his advice. In essence, Stilicho was the entire Empire’s de facto ruler, and, if he’d chosen, could have seized total power with little opposition.
For the next decade Stilicho guided the growing youths through times made more turbulent by barbarian migrations from the east and growing turbulence at the heart of the empire. But Stilicho, for all his astute grasp of strategy and politics, made enemies among the ambitious and the jealous courtiers who surrounded his wards and he had one great weakness, his father was a Vandal. This, and the fact he was forced through Rome’s military weakness to enlist the aid of Franks, Vandals, Goths and even Huns, left him susceptible to the charge of opening the gates to the very forces he was supposed to be opposing, and being a barbarian himself.
Bust of Theodosius
As the book progressed, and Marcus made his perilous journey through the heart of darkness between the Elbe and the Danube, I began to realise that the young Honorius, who was in essence a Roman snob, would have regarded him as even more of a barbarian than Stilicho. For all that Britannia had been a Roman province for almost four hundred years, from the perspective of Milan, its citizens were little more than rustic tribesfolk who still required the expensive protection of Rome’s soldiers. Marcus may have been keeping the Picts at bay for decades, but that wouldn’t have made him a Roman in the eyes of the Imperial court.
As fortune would have it, along the way, Marcus encounters two more eastern barbarians who would soon threaten the very foundations of Honorius’s teetering authority. Both were Goths and one, Alaric, has gone down in history as the man who sacked Rome in 410 AD, while the other, Radagaisus, has been largely forgotten, despite arguably being the greater danger.
The growing pressures on the Roman Empire at the end of the fourth century are well known, but the subtleties of the various incursions and invasions of the Barbarian Migrations are less so. We have an image of bearded, fur-clad savages pouring over the Rhine drawn by the wealth of the ‘civilized’ Roman world, and bent on plunder, rapine and murder, but that wasn’t always true, and certainly not in the case of the Goths.
Alaric had been tried and tested as an ally of Rome at the battle of Frigidus in 394 AD, when the Roman Emperor Theodosius sacrificed the Goths to save Roman blood and then reneged on his promise to give them citizenship. Yet, for all he’d learned never to trust Rome, Alaric knew that the future prosperity of his people depended on citizenship and the sanctuary and stability of becoming an integral part of the Empire. When his demands for citizenship and fertile lands were refused, he invaded Italy in 402AD, only to suffer defeat at the hands of Stilicho at Pollentia and Verona. Yet Alaric’s army must have remained intact, because instead of executing his foe, Stilicho came to an agreement that he retire to Pannonia, there to act as a bulwark against further barbarian incursions from the east – and bide his time before a new invasion.
Meanwhile around 405, Radagaisus and the Ostrogothic people, had been driven from their heartland near the Black Sea by pressure from the Huns, savage and merciless horse warriors. As they sought out new lands, they were joined by other fugitive tribes, Alans, Vandals and Suevi, until Radagaisus’ horde reached anything from one hundred thousand to four hundred thousand souls. After he crossed the Danube, Radagaisus turned south towards Italy, where, like Alaric, he hoped to force Honorius to provide him with a new, fertile homeland where his people could settle. Less than a year later he would die, disappointed, at the hands of Stilicho after defeat at the battle of Fiesole, near Florence.
So that’s how the single barbarian of my book’s title transformed into four, and my image of those who were known to the Romans as barbarians became much more nuanced than it had been before I started the novel.
Douglas Jackson is the author of The Barbarian, published by Bantam and out now.
