Rise and Fall of Rome: A Weekly Journey Through Empire

You hear the creek down there? It's running a little high today. Had some rain up in the holler last night. The water level changes, but the creek itself... it's always there. For eight hundred years, the city of Rome was like that for the folks living in that part of the world. A constant. The city that couldn't fall. And then, one August morning in the year 410, it did. Now, we’ve talked before about that terrible mess in the Third Century, how the whole Roman world nearly came apart at the seams like a cheap suit. They patched it up, but some patches...

well, they don't hold forever. This is the story of one of those patches giving way. And it's a story that shows that sometimes the biggest, most dramatic collapse doesn't start with a bang. It starts with a key turning in a lock. I know how that sounds. But hang on. To understand what happened, you gotta understand the men at the heart of it. On one side, you got the Roman Emperor, a fella named Honorius. He wasn't what you'd call a commanding figure. He was a young man who'd been made emperor when he was just a boy. He didn't even live in Rome. He'd moved the whole government to a city called Ravenna, which was basically a swamp with big walls.

Easy to defend. He spent most of his time, the stories say, raising chickens. On the other side, you got a man named Alaric. Alaric was a Goth. Now, when we hear 'Goth' or 'Visigoth', we tend to picture some wild-eyed fella in a bearskin, waving a club. But that ain't who Alaric was. Not at all. The Goths had been living alongside the Empire, and often inside it, for generations. They were farmers and soldiers. Alaric himself had served in the Roman army. He'd fought for the emperor. He knew how Rome worked. And that was the whole problem, you see. Alaric and his people, the Visigoths, they didn't want to destroy the Roman Empire.

They wanted to be part of it. They wanted what other folks who served the empire got: land to settle, food for their families, and a title for their leader. A place at the table. Alaric thought he'd earned it. He wanted to be a proper Roman general, a Magister Militum. But Honorius, and the politicians around him in that swampy fortress of Ravenna, they kept saying no. They looked down on Alaric. To them, he was a barbarian, no matter how many Roman battles he'd won. They'd make a deal, then break it. They'd promise him land in Gaul, then change their minds.

They treated him like a dog you could kick whenever you felt like it. Whoo, boy. That was a mistake. Kicking a dog is one thing. Kicking a dog that leads forty thousand armed and hungry men... that's another thing entirely. So Alaric did what any man with a big army and no other options would do. He marched on the source of the money. He marched on Italy. He wasn't even trying to sack the city of Rome at first. He was just trying to get their attention. It was like a union negotiation, but with swords. He blockaded the roads, cut off the grain shipments coming up from the port at Ostia.

He put a stranglehold on the city. This was the first siege, back in 408. And inside Rome? It was bad. The city was a world unto itself, maybe eight hundred thousand people packed inside those famous Aurelian Walls. All of 'em dependent on food that came from somewhere else. When Alaric cut the supply lines, the city started to starve. The senators, the rich folks, they sent messengers out to talk. Alaric told them his price. He wanted all their gold, all their silver, all their fine silk clothes, and all their barbarian slaves. One of the Roman envoys, he got real indignant.

He asked Alaric, "If you take all that, what will be left for us?" And Alaric... he just looked at him and said, "Your lives." So they paid. They stripped the gold from the pagan temples, melted down statues. They paid a ransom so big it nearly broke the city. And Alaric, true to his word, he took the money and pulled his army back. For a little while. See, the money wasn't the point. The money was just leverage. Alaric STILL wanted a permanent deal. He wanted land for his people. A home. And the government in Ravenna STILL wouldn't give it to him. The main fella advising the emperor, a man named Olympius, he was dead set against making any kind of treaty with a Goth.

They just kept stalling, insulting him, underestimating him. So in 409, Alaric came back. A second siege. This time, he was smarter. He didn't just blockade the city. He captured the port of Ostia, where all the grain was stored. Now he had all the food, and Rome had none. He even propped up his own emperor, a puppet senator named Priscus Attalus, just to try and force Honorius's hand. It didn't work. Honorius, safe in his swamp, just wouldn't budge. His puppet emperor turned out to be useless. So Alaric gave up on that, deposed his own puppet, and tried one last time to make a deal with the real emperor.

They were supposed to meet, just outside Ravenna. Alaric rode out with a small guard. And what happened? He was ambushed by a Roman general—a rival Goth, no less—who hated him. That was the last straw. The betrayal was too much. Alaric had tried to play by the rules. He'd tried to negotiate. He'd tried politics. He'd been a soldier, a diplomat, a kingmaker. And at every turn, the Romans had cheated him, insulted him, and tried to kill him. He was done asking. He turned his army around and marched on Rome for the third, and final, time. This is the part that always gets me.

For eight hundred years, no foreign army had breached the walls of Rome. Not since some other Gauls did it way back in 390 B.C. Those walls were more than just stone and mortar. They were a symbol. They were the line between civilization and everything else. They meant safety. Permanence. And in August of 410, Alaric's army was camped outside those walls. The city was starving again. Desperate. People were dying in the streets. There was no hope of an army coming to save them. The emperor was safe in Ravenna, with his chickens. The city was on its own. Now you stay with me here.

The greatest siege in a thousand years, you'd think it would end with some heroic battle, right? Catapults, siege towers, fighting on the walls, the whole business. It didn't happen that way. On the night of August 24th, the Salarian Gate on the northeast side of the city swung open. Just... opened. There was no great battle. No final assault. Someone on the inside unlocked the gate and let the Visigoths in. The old records are a little fuzzy on who, or why. Some say it was servants, slaves, who were starving and figured they had nothing to lose. Maybe they were Gothic slaves who felt more loyalty to Alaric's men than to the masters who were letting them starve.

Some say a wealthy lady named Proba, seeing the suffering of the people, ordered her servants to open the gates just to end the agony of the siege. We'll never know for sure. But that's the thing, isn't it? The walls didn't fail. The society inside them did. The great bastion of Western Civilization wasn't conquered from the outside. It was unlocked from within. It's like a track washout. The rails are still there, looking solid, but the ground underneath 'em has been washed away by slow, steady erosion. The first heavy train that comes along... well. That train ain't making it to the depot.

The city of Rome was a heavy train, and the ground underneath it had been washing out for a hundred years. What Alaric's men did next... it's called the Sack of Rome, and it was brutal. For three days, they looted the city. They took gold and valuables. They burned some buildings, including the homes of the rich senators who had snubbed their leader. There was violence, for sure. This was an army that hadn't been paid, that had been hungry and angry for years. But it wasn't the mindless destruction you might imagine. Alaric gave specific orders. He was a Christian—a different kind of Christian than the Romans, but a Christian nonetheless.

He ordered that the great churches, like the basilicas of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, were to be untouched. They were declared places of sanctuary. And anyone, Roman or Goth, who made it there would be safe. And by and large, his men obeyed. They weren't trying to wipe the city off the map. They were... collecting a debt. With interest. A right smart amount of interest. After three days, they left. They marched south, taking with them everything they could carry, including the emperor's own half-sister, Galla Placidia, as a high-value hostage. Alaric's plan was to cross over to Africa, the breadbasket of the empire.

A new home for his people. He never made it. A storm wrecked his fleet, and a few months later, in southern Italy, Alaric—the man who humbled Rome—died of a fever. He was just forty years old. His followers buried him, the story goes, by diverting a river, burying him and his treasure in the riverbed, and then letting the river flow back over. His grave has never been found. The physical damage to Rome was repaired pretty quick. The real damage was to the idea of Rome. The city had been the heart of the world for so long, people thought it was eternal.

Invincible. The sack proved it wasn't. It sent a shockwave across the empire. A holy man, Saint Jerome, heard the news way off in Bethlehem. He wrote, "The city which had taken the whole world was itself taken." A fella named Augustine, over in North Africa, he spent the next thirteen years writing a book, a massive book called The City of God, trying to make sense of it all. His point was that the city of man can fall, but the City of God is eternal. He had to remind people that their real faith shouldn't be in walls of stone, but in something else.

That's how big a deal this was. They needed a whole new way of looking at the world because the old one had just been shattered. And that, friend, is why you check the record. The fall of Rome wasn't one single event. It was a long, slow crumbling. But the sack in 410 was the moment everyone heard the cracking sound. It was the moment the idea of "forever" died. It makes you think, don't it? About the things we count on to be permanent. The institutions, the ideas, the ways of life we think will always be there, solid as the bedrock in these hills. History shows us that nothing built by human hands is truly permanent.

And when the walls we trust in finally do get breached, it's almost never because of the enemy hammering on the outside. It's usually because something on the inside has already given way. Well. That is about the size of it.