Sack of Rome (410)

In August 410 a Visigothic army led by its king, Alaric, broke into Rome and plundered the city for three days. Rome was no longer the seat of government of the Western Roman Empire, whose emperor lived at Ravenna, but it was the most famous city in the world, and no foreign enemy had captured it for roughly eight centuries. The shock was felt across the Roman world, and the sack is remembered as a landmark in the empire's decline in the west.

The Goths had crossed the Danube in 376, fleeing the Huns, and two years later destroyed a Roman army and killed the emperor Valens at the Battle of Adrianople. A treaty of 382 settled them inside the empire as allies who served in Roman campaigns but kept their own leaders. Alaric emerged as their commander in the 390s. He wanted land for his people, regular payment and a senior Roman military office, and he moved between service and open conflict as successive governments in Constantinople and the west failed to give him what he asked.

Alaric first invaded Italy in 401–402 and was checked by Stilicho, the general who dominated the western court of the young emperor Honorius. In response to the danger, Honorius moved his residence to Ravenna, protected by marshes. In 408 Stilicho fell from favour and was executed, and in a wave of hostility Roman troops massacred the families of barbarian soldiers in Italy; many of the survivors joined Alaric. He marched on Rome the same year and blockaded it, lifting the siege only after the Senate paid a large ransom in gold, silver and goods.

When Honorius still refused his terms, Alaric besieged Rome again in 409 and persuaded the Senate to proclaim a rival emperor, the senator Priscus Attalus. Negotiations with Ravenna continued, but Attalus proved unreliable and Alaric deposed him in 410. After Sarus, a Gothic commander in Roman service, attacked his men during fresh talks, Alaric turned on the city a third time.

On 24 August 410 the Goths entered Rome through the Salarian Gate, possibly with help from inside. For three days they looted houses and public buildings, took captives and burned parts of the city, including the Gardens of Sallust. Contemporary writers, nearly all Christian, stressed that Alaric, himself an Arian Christian, ordered churches to be respected and allowed those who sheltered in the basilicas of Saint Peter and Saint Paul to go unharmed. By the standards of the age the sack was limited, and most of the city's monuments survived. Among the captives was Galla Placidia, the emperor's half-sister.

Alaric led his army south, planning to cross to Sicily and Africa, but a storm wrecked his ships and he died soon afterwards near Consentia, today's Cosenza, late in 410. His brother-in-law Athaulf led the Goths into Gaul, and in 418 they were settled in Aquitaine, where they founded the Visigothic kingdom that later spread into Spain.

The material losses mattered less than the symbolism. Jerome, writing in Bethlehem, lamented that the city which had conquered the world had itself been taken. Pagans blamed the abandonment of the old gods, and in reply Augustine of Hippo began The City of God, arguing that Christians should place their hope in a heavenly city rather than an earthly one. Rome was sacked again by the Vandals in 455, and the last western emperor was deposed in 476, events traced in the fall of Rome.

Our 400 map shows the Western Roman Empire shortly before the sack, with Italy still under imperial rule, and the 500 map shows the Germanic kingdoms that had replaced it a century later.