Theodoric

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AD 468, when this story begins, was a critical year for the Western half of the Roman Empire; nothing less than its survival or extinction hung in the balance. How had this ‘moment of truth’ come about?

The beginning of the fifth century had witnessed successive waves of barbarians — Visigoths, Vandals, Suevi et al. — break through the West’s frontiers and rampage through Gaul and Spain, with Britain being abandoned in the chaos. But cometh the hour, cometh the man. Just when it seemed that nothing could halt the West’s slide towards disintegration, a remarkable Roman general, Constantius, took on the German invaders and forced them to settle peacefully on Roman soil as federate ‘guests’. After his premature death, Constantius’ work was continued and consolidated by an even greater Roman commander, Flavius Aetius. For thirty years, Aetius was able, most of the time, with the help of his allies the Huns, to maintain stability and some form of imperial control. Ironically, it was the Huns, a formidable horde of nomadic horse-archers from Central Asia who, by pressing the German tribes from the rear, had set off a chain reaction of migration resulting in the barbarian invasions. These were largely confined to the West, whose long Rhine-Danube frontier was especially vulnerable to attack by the confederations of German tribes beyond the northern banks. In contrast, the Eastern Empire — wealthy, stable, the home of ancient civilizations — had only the Lower Danube frontier to defend; also it became adept at passing on barbarian invaders, such as Alaric’s Visigoths, to the West. (Persia, to the east, potentially a far greater threat than any barbarian confederation, was a civilized power which on the whole kept its peace treaties with Rome.)

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