Valentinian III (425 - 455)

After the death of Honorius in 423, one of his senior court officials, a man named Ioannes, took the throne. He was not recognized by Theodosius II, the emperor in the east, who orchestrated a campaign and invaded Italy to destroy the usurper. This campaign was successful and Ioannes was killed in the summer of 425. Theodosius installed the rightful emperor on the throne of the west. He was the grandson of the original Theodosius, a six-year-old boy named Valentinian. This is not a video about Valentinian III. The late history of the Roman West was dominated not by mighty emperors, but by military generals who monopolized power without seeking the throne. A number of these generals sought to gain power in the aftermath of the death of Honorius, but one man rose head and shoulders above the rest. His name was Flavius Aetius. The circumstances of Aetius' early life are unclear, but we know that he was born around the year 391 into the Roman political elite in the Balkans, the son of a general. He was frequently present in Honorius' court in Ravenna, and as a teenager, he was sent to be a hostage in the court of Alaric in 405. After his stay among the Goths, he was sent in 408 to the court of the Huns. He would spend a decade there, learning about Hunnic life, culture, customs, political structures, and military organization. This knowledge would prove useful to him. Aetius first entered the stage of grand Roman politics in the midst of the war between Ioannis and Theodosius. He arrived on the scene with an army of Huns, ready to fight for the usurper. But he was a couple months late, and Valentinian III had already been installed as emperor. Instead of fighting a war for no reason, Aetius negotiated a deal with the court of Valentinian. He sent his Huns back home, and secured for himself an appointment as the Magister Militum of Gaul. Aetius immediately began distinguishing himself in Gaul. He first launched a campaign against the Goths, who were trying to seize territory outside of Aquitaine, and successfully contained them to the south of the province. He then fought against the Franks, who were trying to assert direct control of cities across the Rhine river, pushing them back. The first years of his career in command were spent bouncing around trouble spots in Gaul and around the Empire. He also secured the Alps and the Danube during this period, in addition to more campaigns against the Franks and Goths. It's worth taking a little bit of time to assess Rome's relationship with peoples like the Goths and the Franks. Things were not as simple as Romans versus Barbarians all the time. When the Romans weren't fighting the Franks, they were making agreements with them. These agreements allowed the Franks to benefit from economic connections with Rome, in exchange for defending the Rhine frontier. Roman armies of this time also contained large contingents of Franks, Goths, Vandals, and other foreign peoples. Aetius almost certainly had some Franks on his side when he went to fight the Franks, and some Goths on his side when he went to fight the Goths. It's best to see the Roman-Barbarian relationship during this period as an unstable fluctuation of alliance and antagonism, combined with a good deal of cultural mixing and economic exchange. The Barbarians, while they did burn and loot and steal, were not tearing the Roman world up from the roots. They were latching on to the Roman world, benefiting from it, and playing a role in the imperial system that continued to sustain it. Aetius was not the only political force in the West at this time. There were three other major political powers. Flavius Felix, who was technically the empire's most senior general, Bonifacius, who was the governor of Africa, and Galla Placidia, who was the mother of Valentinian III and the daughter of Theodosius I. Placidia, who was essentially the emperor in place of the child Valentinian, was one of the most influential women in Roman history, and she played a major part in the civil wars of this period as an early enemy of Aetius. She sent an order to Bonifacius, recalling him to Ravenna, but Bonifacius refused and went into rebellion. Meanwhile, Aetius successfully outmaneuvered Felix, who was allied with Placidia, and orchestrated his execution in 430. Bonifacius, in order to augment his strength, made an alliance with the Vandals, who were still occupying territory in Spain. Under the protection of Roman naval forces from Carthage, the Vandals crossed the Straits of Gibraltar into Africa. Bad idea. Bad, bad, bad, bad idea. After the Vandals arrived, relations quickly broke down and battles were fought with the Vandals victorious. Bonifacius and the rest of the Roman forces were pushed back to Carthage by 432, when Bonifacius was again recalled to Ravenna. This time he accepted and was given high authority over Placidia's military forces. However, when Aetius came down from Gaul, Bonifacius was defeated and killed in a decisive battle. In 433, Placidia finally acquiesced to Aetius, making him the military authority in the West, and giving him the title of Magister Militum. The following decades of Aetius' hegemony were marked by perpetual activity. Aetius never stopped moving around the empire, checking and balancing Rome's various threats. The historical record is very spotty, and it is difficult to pin down where he was in any particular year. We know he fought several wars with the Goths, the Franks, and peasant insurgents who were unsatisfied with being neglected by imperial authority. No progress was really made in the course of these campaigns. All Aetius was managing to do was barely preserve the status quo. He was like a sailor on a damaged ship, running back and forth patching leaks just to keep the ship afloat. In 437, Aetius invaded the kingdom of the Burgundians, which was occupying Roman cities on the Rhine, and crushed them in a battle at the city of Worms. In a rare instance, the battle devolved into a mass slaughter. Over 20,000 Burgundians died. However, Aetius was not without mercy, or pragmatism. He allowed the remaining Burgundians to settle in the south of France, in 443, where they formed a semi-autonomous state. Also in 437, Valentinian III finally turned 18, marking the beginning of his independent reign. Aetius attended the ceremony that formally invested Valentinian with the full powers of the imperial office. Yeah, Aetius continued to be the one who actually did stuff, while Valentinian continued to be the guy who sat around in Ravenna. Throughout the 430s, Aetius was constantly busy in Gaul, leaving him with no time and few resources to spare for the rest of the empire. Because of this, despite reinforcements arriving in Africa from the Eastern Empire, the great city of Carthage fell to the Vandals in 439. Africa, which had once been a hub of trade and a vital breadbasket for the province of Italy, was lost. In Roman Hispania, the situation was deteriorating. The Vandals had left for Africa, but the Suebi and other affiliated tribes were still occupying territory, and in many places they were joining forces with more peasant rebels to present Aetius with a massive challenge. As far as we know, Aetius spent little time commanding forces in Hispania personally, but his generals had limited success, largely failing to make progress against the newly independent armies in the province. Meanwhile, Aetius and his lieutenant, a man named Majorian, successfully fought off another invasion of Gaul by the Franks. After almost two decades of command over Gaul and the rest of the West, Aetius had done his best. Despite losing Africa, he had prevented major losses in Gaul and Hispania while keeping Italy safe. However, for a reason entirely out of his control, everything was about to fall apart. Because in 451, the Huns finally came calling. The king of the Huns, Attila, had had his eyes on Gaul for a while. Negotiations with Aetius finally failed in 450, and Attila led his fearsome army across the Rhine the following year. His rampage took him all across the northern part of what is now France, all the way to the gates of Lutetia, the Roman city that is today Paris. Finally, in June of 451, Aetius succeeded in bringing Attila to battle on the Catalanian plains. Late Roman history is really fun. Why? Because we have literally no reliable information on what happened at this battle. Roman victory? Indecisive? Roman defeat? Who knows? The Roman army was mostly composed of Goths from Aquitaine, and Gothic historians from centuries later who provide us the details of the battle paint a glorious picture of a Gothic victory. I'm not going to go into the details of this battle because it's not clear whether any of those details are actually true. But personally, I doubt that the result of the battle was decisive. In any case, Attila withdrew from Gaul with his army almost entirely intact, leaving dozens of sacked cities and towns in his wake. With his entirely intact army, Attila launched another invasion the following year, this time of Italy. Aetius was unable to oppose him, his army the previous year had been mostly Gothic, and without them he had pretty much nothing. He placed a sizable garrison in the city of Aquileia which guarded the passage into Italy and had held off invaders of Italy for centuries. It did not stop Attila. He captured the city and burned it to the ground, leaving no trace. With Attila fast approaching, Valentinian III fled Ravenna for the relative safety of Rome. Meanwhile, Aetius successfully slowed Attila's advance with a much smaller army, eventually bringing him to the negotiating table. Without exacting any concessions, Attila withdrew his army. Attila had other reasons to leave, but nevertheless the whole sequence of events against Attila indicates Aetius' immense skill in both war and politics. Aetius would get no thanks for this. Valentinian III, who was beginning to feel threatened by Aetius' unchallenged glory and authority, feared that Aetius wanted to place his son on the Roman throne. He was dragged into a plot to assassinate Aetius. One day in 454, when Aetius was presenting a document to Valentinian, he burst out in rage, accusing Aetius of treachery. Before Aetius had a chance to speak in his own defense, Valentinian himself drew a sword and stabbed him to death, in front of the assembled imperial court. Very smooth. Reportedly, after the assassination, Valentinian was told by one of his court officials, you have cut off your right hand with your left. He was right. The following year, Valentinian was himself assassinated in Rome. Reportedly, none of the soldiers who witnessed the attack lifted a finger to defend the emperor, as they were all still loyal to the memory of Aetius. His reign, which had technically lasted 30 years, had seen him do literally nothing aside from killing Rome's last great general. In the aftermath of his death, a usurper named Petronius Maximus took power in Rome, forcing Valentinian's widow Eudoxia into a marriage to legitimize his rule. However, this move opened hostilities with the Vandals in Africa, as Eudoxia sent pleas to the Vandal king Gaiseric to save her from this weird creepy dude. The Vandals, who had been sending grain under the terms of an alliance made with Aetius, cut the supply to Rome, and soon began preparing for an attack on Italy. Faced with angry mobs in Rome, Petronius was stoned to death on the streets in late May of 455. Three days later, the Vandals sailed into the undefended harbor of Rome and sacked the city. They ravaged the Eternal City for two whole weeks. Rome would never recover.