The Sack of Rome, 410 AD

Lore & Background

A power struggle between Stilicho and Rufinus allowed Alaric to pillage Greece, including Piraeus, Corinth, Argos, and Sparta.

Reader's Guide

The shock was profound: St. Jerome, writing from Bethlehem, noted that 'the city which had taken the whole world was itself taken.' The sack marked a turning point in the relationship between the Roman world and the Germanic peoples, highlighting the empire's inability to control or integrate the Visigoths, who had been allies and enemies in turn. The event also underscored the political fragmentation of the empire after Theodosius's death, with power struggles between East and West enabling Alaric's campaigns. While Rome was no longer the administrative capital, its spiritual and symbolic importance made its fall a lasting symbol of the empire's transformation and eventual collapse in the West.

Did You Know?

• St. Jerome, living in Bethlehem, wrote about the sack: 'the city which had taken the whole world was itself taken'.

The Shock of an Eternal City Falling

The shock rippled outward in every direction, striking allies and adversaries of the empire with equal force. In Bethlehem, the scholar St. Jerome captured the magnitude of the moment with a single devastating observation: the city that had once taken in the whole world had itself been taken.

The Gothic-Roman Entanglement

The relationship between the Visigoths and Rome was neither simple conquest nor clean subjugation but a tangled web of treaty, obligation, and resentment stretching back to the late fourth century. Alaric was granted the title comes for his bravery, yet he seethed at what he perceived as a deliberate Roman strategy to weaken the Goths by making them absorb the heaviest fighting, and at his exclusion from higher imperial office.

Alaric's War and the Empire's Fractured Response

His two young successors, Honorius and Arcadius, required guardians, and a bitter struggle erupted between the Western general Stilicho and the Eastern praetorian prefect Rufinus, each claiming authority over both empires. Rufinus reportedly negotiated Alaric's withdrawal from Constantinople, perhaps by offering him lands in Thessaly. Stilicho then marched east with a combined army and besieged Alaric behind a wagon fortification on the plain of Larissa for several months, yet never committed to a decisive battle. Arcadius, under pressure from Stilicho's enemies, ordered him to withdraw. Freed from Stilicho's pressure, Alaric pillaged much of Greece—Piraeus, Corinth, Argos, and Sparta fell to the sword, while Athens escaped by paying a ransom.

Four Centuries of Collision

Over four centuries of contact with the Roman Empire, the Germanic tribes had undergone profound transformation in technology, social organization, and economic production. From the first through the fourth centuries, their populations grew, their tribal confederations consolidated, and their capacity for organized warfare expanded to the point where they could genuinely challenge Roman armies. What began as a request for refuge curdled into open revolt when starvation, crushing taxes, Roman hostility, and governmental corruption turned the Goths against their hosts.

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