Alaric I

Lore & Background

Alaric began his career under the Gothic soldier Gainas and later joined the Roman army. Once an ally of Rome under the Roman emperor Theodosius, Alaric helped defeat the Franks and other allies of a would-be Roman usurper. Despite losing many thousands of his men, he received little recognition from Rome and left the Roman army disappointed. After the death of Theodosius and the disintegration of the Roman armies in 395, he is described as king of the Visigoths. As the leader of the only effective field force remaining in the Balkans, he sought Roman legitimacy, never quite achieving a position acceptable to himself or to the Roman authorities. He operated mainly against the successive Western Roman regimes, and marched into Italy, where he died. He is responsible for the sack of Rome in 410, one of several notable events in the Western Roman Empire's eventual decline.

Reader's Guide

According to Jordanes, a 6th-century Roman writer of Gothic origin, Alaric was born on Peuce Island in the Danube Delta in present-day Romania and belonged to the noble Balti dynasty of the Thervingian Goths. There is no way to verify this claim. Historian Douglas Boin does not make such an unequivocal assessment about Alaric's Gothic heritage and instead claims he came from either the Thervingi or the Greuthung tribes. When the Goths suffered setbacks against the Huns, they made a mass migration across the Danube, and fought a war with Rome. Alaric was probably a child during this period who grew up along Rome's periphery. Alaric's upbringing was shaped by living along the border of Roman territory in a region that the Romans viewed as a veritable 'backwater'; some four centuries before, the Roman poet Ovid regarded the area along the Danube and Black Sea where Alaric was reared as a land of 'barbarians', among 'the most remote in the vast world.' Alaric's childhood in the Balkans, where the Goths had settled by way of an agreement with Emperor Theodosius, was spent in the company of veterans who had fought at the Battle of Adrianople in 378, during which they had annihilated much of the Eastern army and killed Emperor Valens. Imperial campaigns against the Visigoths were conducted until a treaty was reached in 382. This treaty was the first foedus on imperial Roman soil and required these semi-autonomous Germanic tribes—among whom Alaric was raised—to supply troops for the Roman army in exchange for peace, control of cultivatable land, and freedom from Roman direct administrative control. Correspondingly, there was hardly a region along the Roman frontier during Alaric's day without Gothic slaves and servants of one form or another. For several subsequent decades, many Goths like Alaric were 'called up into regular units of the eastern field army' while others served as auxiliaries in campaigns led by Theodosius against the western usurpers Magnus Maximus and Eugenius. A new phase in the relationship between the Goths and the empire resulted from the treaty signed in 382, as more and more Goths attained aristocratic rank from their service in the imperial army. Alaric began his military career under the Gothic soldier Gainas, and later joined the Roman army. He first appeared as leader of a mixed band of Goths and allied peoples, who invaded Thrace in 391

Did You Know?

• Alaric died in 411 AD, not 410 as sometimes claimed.
• Alaric sacked Athens in 396, with archaeological evidence of widespread damage.
• Alaric helped Emperor Theodosius defeat the Frankish usurper Arbogast at the Battle of Frigidus; Arbogast fought at the behest of Eugenius.
• Alaric was the first king of the Visigoths, reigning from 395 to 410.