The Fall of the Roman Empire Read Online Free PDF Page A

bracketed him with Aetius, and it was right to consider the two men together, since their rivalry proved momentous. In 427 Placidia was persuaded to recall Boniface from Africa. But he refused to obey her summons and, in 429, after defeating her troops, called in the aid of one of the German nations which had invaded Gaul and then Spain two decades earlier, the Vandals, led by Gaiseric. But Boniface soon found it impossible to keep his new allies within bounds, and returned to Italy.
    There he became reconciled with Placidia, and their friendship inspired in her the hope that he would suppress Aetius, whom she was beginning to find excessively powerful. And so the two Roman commanders clashed in civil war. In 432, Boniface was wounded, and later died. According to a legend giving a foretaste of medieval chivalry, the rivals had decided to struggle by single combat, and Boniface, with his dying breath, commended his wife to his victorious enemy as the only man worthy of her love.
    His death meant that Aetius, with the help of his Hunnish soldiers, was at last in a position to exercise decisive influence on Placidia and the court. Before long, he was appointed commander-in-chief. It was said that envoys from the provinces no longer reported to the Emperor, a youth in his early teens, but were granted their Imperial audiences by Aetius himself.
    It was a task of the most urgent priority to limit the Vandal Gaiseric's power. However, a joint army of the Western and Eastern Empires which was sent against him failed dismally, and serious alarm was felt at Rome.
    Gaiseric was a leader of single-minded, ruthless will, whose enormous ability presented the Romans with a more intractable problem than any previous German had posed. We have a description of this man, whose mother had been a slave, from Jordanes, the sixth-century historian of the Goths.
. . . Of medium height, lame from a fall off his horse, he had a deep mind and was sparing of speech. Luxury he despised, but his anger was uncontrollable and he was covetous.
He was far-sighted in inducing foreign peoples to act in his interests, and resourceful in sowing seeds of discord and stirring up hatred.
    Since peasant revolts inside Gaul were leaving its frontiers perilously vulnerable to the Germans, the Western government felt obliged to come to terms with Gaiseric. A treaty was therefore concluded by which the Vandals were granted federate status in large areas of what are now Morocco and western Algeria. But, this time, it was a federate status which was not far removed from complete independence.
    Moreover, four years later, Gaiseric struck a new and devastating blow by invading Tunisia and north-eastern Algeria, the very centres of Rome's essential grain supply. Gaiseric also captured the African capital Carthage itself. It was the second city of the Western Roman world: and its loss made the dissolution of the Empire lamentably apparent. Three years later, the Western government signed a fresh treaty with Gaiseric. Under its terms, he kept the regions he had lately seized, while ostensibly (though not permanently) returning to Rome the more westerly regions of Morocco and Algeria that he had occupied earlier.
    Gaiseric now ruled openly over his own sovereign state, which was torn away from the Empire altogether. He was unique among the 'barbarian' rulers in two other respects as well. He had established an authentic, unquestioning kingship; and he possessed the only German fleet - which terrorized the central Mediterranean and threatened Italy. Gaiseric contributed more to the downfall of the Western Empire than any other single man.
    Aetius was powerless to stop him. Elsewhere, however, he scored certain successes. The Germans were temporarily forced back beyond the westernmost upper Danube. The peasant resistance movements in Gaul were suppressed. And when, in about 437, the Burgundians tried to penetrate Gaul from the Rhineland, Aetius defeated them utterly (an event