MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · August 24 · 410
ON THIS DAY · 24 AUGUST 410
The sack of Rome
24 Aug 410 — Alaric’s Goths, refused land and pay for a decade, enter by the Salarian Gate. Three days of looting; the world’s psychological capital falls. Jerome: “the city which had taken the whole world was itself taken.”
THE MOMENT IN CONTEXT
Follow the arrows from the right edge of the map, because that is where this chapter begins — out on the steppe, beyond every Roman category. Around 370 the Huns, mounted archers of unknown origin and unprecedented effectiveness, shatter the Alan and Gothic worlds north of the Black Sea. The point is not that they attack Rome — for decades they mostly don’t — it is that they make the whole barbarian world move: in 376 the entire Tervingian Gothic people, perhaps 100,000 souls, appears on the Danube begging admission to the empire. Note the shape of the event — refugees, not invaders. The eastern emperor Valens, seeing recruits and taxpayers, lets them cross; then Roman officials embezzle the food money and sell the starving Goths dog meat at a slave per dog. The revolt that follows should have been a police action; but at Adrianople, on 9 August 378, Valens attacks without waiting for the western army, and the Goths destroy two-thirds of the eastern field force and kill the emperor — the worst Roman defeat since Cannae, says the contemporary Ammianus, and this time there is no socii network to refill the ranks. Theodosius makes the deal that changes everything (382): the Goths settle inside the empire, on the Danube, as foederati — allied soldiers under their own chiefs. Rome has armed peoples inside the walls whose loyalty is to a treaty, and treaties, unlike provinces, must be perpetually renegotiated — usually by threat. Watch also the ◆ at Thessalonica (390): Theodosius massacres thousands of citizens in reprisal for a riot, and bishop Ambrose forces the emperor of Rome to public penance — church over state, for the first time, a hinge inside the hinge.
From Chapter 10 — The Storm from the North of The Rise and Fall of Rome, 264 BC – AD 476 (AD 396).
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TEACH THIS IN 5 MINUTES
- Why it happened — An exogenous shock: the Huns. Nothing in Roman policy caused the Huns, and the strongest modern account (Heather’s) rests on that: the fourth-century empire was strained but…
- The turn — Adrianople, 9 August 378. The military facts are grim but recoverable — Rome had lost whole armies before. What proved irreversible was the settlement: for the first time, a…
- What it changed — The West inherits the exposed half. The 395 division gave the East the short, fortress-anchored frontier (Constantinople, the straits) and two-thirds of the revenue; the West got the…
Then ask the room: In 376 the Goths asked to join the empire; in 410 they sacked its capital. Locate the decisions in between that made the second event grow out of the first — and say which was the last real exit. The argued answer is on the chapter page →
THE ATLAS THAT SHOWS IT
THE DISPATCH
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