The chroniclers were shaken by that vision. “The whole world was liquidated in one city,” wrote a contemporary philosopher. Many wondered why providence had allowed that barbarity; the answer was that it was a just punishment for lack of morality. The colossal looting that Rome suffered by Alaric’s troops during the year 410 AD has been recorded as one of the most shocking in history. And not only because it was barbaric, but because it allowed the Visigoths to get hold of one of the greatest treasures of antiquity. However, it is often overlooked that, before the raiders passed through the gates of the Eternal City, a siege took place, forcing the legions and citizens to eat human flesh.
To the doors
Alaric I was barely 25 years old when he made the most important promise of his short life to the river god; the one who, according to the Visigoths, was hiding in the Danube. In 395 AD, when he was elected king of his people, he vowed not to remove his armor until he conquered the Eternal City. Or what was left of it, for that same year the monolithic Roman Empire had split in two and was gasping for air to survive. The one who was a general of the Gothic auxiliaries was close to achieving his objective on three occasions. Although in all of them he was stopped by the legions; what had been the best infantry of his time.
In his case, the fourth was the charm. After the death of the last great general of Rome, Stilicho, Alaric marched on Italy again and appeared on the outskirts of Rome in 410 AD This time, no one could stand up to him. The old empire offered him power and even chose a puppet emperor. He was not worth it. Neither did he the five thousand pounds of gold, the thirty thousand of silver, the three thousand of pepper and the four thousand silk robes that they gave him with a bow. The Goth requested some command –Gaul, Britain or Hispania– to start thinking about the deal, but the Emperor Honorius did not accept and the ‘rex’ continued with a siege that, according to Saint Jerome, wreaked havoc in the ‘urbs’:
«Already looted once, its citizens were looted again with the danger of losing not only their subsistence, but also their lives. My voice is choked with sobs as I am dictating this letter. The Capital that conquered the entire world was conquered, rather, it fell by hunger before falling by the sword, and the victors found only a few to take them prisoner. Extreme need pushed the hungry to search for ineffable food: men devoured their own flesh, and mothers did not spare the infants in their breasts, and received in their bodies what their bodies had given birth before.
Looting: myths and fallacies
The sources agree that the Goths entered the heart of Rome on the night of August 23, 410 AD at the hands of a traitor; sad deja vu of what had happened centuries before in Thermopylae with Ephialtes of Thessaly. The character opened wide the ‘Porta Salaria‘, one of many in the capital. The identity of the culprit, a millennium and a half later, is still a mystery. «Later, the fanciful rumors found guilty subjects. According to one version, they were Gothic slaves, introduced into the place; according to others, the instigator of the plot was a Roman noblewoman, Anicia Proba Faltonia», explained Saint Jerome in several letters written in the fifth century.
Then Alaric’s troops unleashed madness on the Eternal City. The symphony of robberies, destruction, fires and barbarism lasted for three whole days. Although some experts such as the historian Florencio F. Hubenak –author of the dossier ‘The sack of Rome in 410 and its political-religious implications’– emphasize that, almost certainly, the looting continued in the following days by the slaves who they had fled from Rome and joined the ranks of the raiders. The versions of what happened are counted by dozens. Although, among the most outstanding, are those of the aforementioned St Geronimo o San Agustin.
The gate that raiders passed through to sack Rome
The historian and philosopher Paulo Orosior, contemporary with the events, he wrote that the fire spread throughout the city and devoured the most prominent buildings. In his words, the disaster was shocking, but no greater than the one Nero had caused. “Oh, what a great evil! The world is about to perish, but sins do not end in us! The illustrious City and the head of the Roman empire It has been consumed in a fire. There is no country where some Romans do not live in exile. Holy churches once have fallen, burned and turned to cinders and cinders: and with all that we are still greedy and greedy! We live, as if there were no tomorrow, as if we were to live in this world forever”, added Saint Jerome.
The historian Socrates of Constantinople (5th century) left blank that the Visigoths seized all the wealth that was in the temples; both artistic and in cash. Although they showed no mercy for so many priceless pieces and left them to burn inside the buildings. The writer Augustine of Hippo, also a contemporary, insisted on the extensive list of women who were raped by the Visigoths and stressed that Alaric’s troops perpetrated a thousand different torments against the citizenry. However, it is difficult to discern what was a fable caused by the ‘shock’ of seeing the capital fall, and what was tangible reality.
Alaric I, rey godo
This is what we have been told for millennia, but it seems that the lion is never so fierce; Or, at least, not so barbaric. The historian Jose Soto Chica he believes that looting cannot be denied, but insists that Alaric set limits on his men. “Although there were murders, rapes and captives, in general, a certain order was maintained and there were no mass killings,” he explains in ‘Visigoths, sons of a furious god’ (Desperta Ferro). Furthermore, before passing the ‘Porta Salaria’ he ordered his troops not to cause any damage to the basilicas of the Apostles Peter and Paul. These were turned into an inviolable siege place.
for the historian Sozomeno, “the only cause that prevented the entire demolition of Rome” was Alaric’s respect for Christian places of worship. Salvation, he affirms, came hand in hand with the religion of the Visigoths, who had embraced Christianity en masse. But even this maxim has its light and its dark. Soto Chica, once again, sticks his finger in the bubo and destroys the myths with data: “In reality, many, perhaps most of the followers of Alarico, must have been pagans.” They were Radagaiso’s followers—who made up half the king’s people—and many of the Huns, Alans, and other barbarians who had joined him during his advance on the Eternal City.
gigantic booty
The booty looted was immense. The carts and the saddlebags of the mounts were full of riches. “A good part of what had been guarded for centuries in Vespasian’s ‘forum pacis’ and in the Capitol sanctuaries ended up in the hands of the monarch and became part of the Visigothic royal treasury,” reveals Soto Chica. And, as a supreme prize, Alaric was made with ancient relics. The historian confirmed it. Procopius of Caesara in his ‘Book of Wars V’: «Alaric the Elder, in former times, took as booty […] the treasures of the king of the Hebrews. Most were adorned with emeralds.” The most striking was the Table of King Solomon, which, in turn, had been stolen by the Roman legions of Jerusalem.
What is unknown is why Alaric did not take the menorah: the seven-branched candelabrum weighing one talent – about 34 kilograms – that, according to tradition, Yahweh ordered Moses to make in “fine and solid gold”. It was one of the few objects of worship that he respected. The relic, in fact, was kept in Rome until, in 455, the vandals of Genserico they took him to Carthage. Procopius himself recalled in his texts that all the cities that had sheltered him had fallen into disgrace: Jerusalem, Babylon, Rome and Carthage.
The jewels and artistic pieces brought from Jerusalem to Rome by Titus in 70 AD, added to many others that were already hidden in the capital of the Empire, had made his treasure one of the largest in antiquity. And thus made Alaric one of the richest monarchs of his era. The historian Daniel Gómez Aragonés He explains, in statements to ABC, that the Visigoth became the most important treasure of all the monarchies that arose in Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Neither Swabians, nor Vandals, nor Franks, nor Angles, nor Saxons, nor Longobards equaled him.
«No one had a treasure of those dimensions. It had begun to form from the periods of the first migrations of this people. It had been magnified by the sack of Rome by Alaric, who had stolen what the Romans had stolen in Jerusalem. There was also a relic of the True Cross that Pope Gregory the Great had given to Recaredo after his conversion, and even King Solomon’s table. And, in addition to its economic value, it also had an ancestral value”, explained the author of ‘Toledo. Biography of the sacred city’ (La Esfera) for the ABC report ‘The five reasons why the Muslims devastated Spain after the mysterious death of Don Rodrigo’..