The Fall before the Fall

One of the most fascinating parts of Roman history is the little known "Fall before the Fall". This was the period from around AD 250 to 275 when the Roman Empire broke up into three separate parts. It was a close-run thing if the empire would survive. Find out more here!

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Hello and welcome back to the fall of the Roman Empire. My name is Nick Holmes, and this is episode 13 called The Fall Before the Fall. Why am I calling it that? Because in the 260s and 70s the Roman Empire effectively collapsed. As you've heard in previous episodes, the pressure from the Goths, Persians, and Germans increased exponentially from the 240s onwards, leading to the disastrous Roman defeats at the hands of the Goths at the Battle of Apritus in 251, when the Roman Emperor Decius was killed, and that was followed by the Persian victory at Edessa in 260 when the Emperor Valerian was captured. I find this period particularly fascinating because relatively little has been written about it, while much more has been written about the earlier Roman period, I'm thinking of Julius Caesar and Augustus, etc., as well as the later Roman period when the Western Roman Empire really was destroyed in the 5th century. But it was from, let's say, 251 to the 270s that Rome was on the edge and could easily have crumbled completely. But it didn't. The Romans just managed to survive. And the next few episodes will be about that extraordinary fight for survival which culminated in the reigns of the greatest emperors since Augustus, who were Diocletian and Constantine. But before we get to that remarkable Roman recovery and revolution that occurred at the end of the third century, let's look at what happened in the 260s and 70s, and how close the Roman Empire came to falling before it really did fall. And I'll narrate from my own writing and research, which will be part of the first volume of my forthcoming series of books on the fall of the Roman Empire. Hope you enjoy it. The Roman army must have suffered huge casualties. Although the source material is unreliable, we know for certain that at least three large Roman armies were destroyed within the space of ten years. The first by the Goths at the Battle of Abritus in 251, the second by the Sasanian Persians at Barbilissus in 253, where the Persian sources claimed an army of 60,000 Roman soldiers was destroyed, and the third was the destruction of Valerian's army at Edessa in 260, where the Persians claimed to have destroyed an army of 70,000 Romans. Then there were countless other battles and smaller engagements on all three of Rome's major frontiers, the East, the Danube, and the Rhine, and we can only guess at casualty rates, but if the Roman army had, for example, around 300,000 men in 250, that would be 30 legions with about 5,000 men each, which would equal about 150,000 legionaries in total, plus a similar number of auxiliary troops, then maybe during the 250s most of that army was lost, representing perhaps up to a quarter of a million Roman casualties. And the result was the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 260s. But that collapse occurred in a rather surprising way. Instead of the entire empire being overrun by barbarians, it broke up into three separate areas. First, after the catastrophe of Valerian's defeat and capture in 260, it looked as if the Roman Empire would be replaced by a new Sasanian Persian superpower in the east. But instead something completely unexpected happened. A new regional power rocketed to prominence, and its name was Palmyra. Palmyra was located in an oasis in the Syrian desert, separating Rome and Persia. It had started life as an important trading city at the junction of caravan routes between Persian Mesopotamia and Roman Syria, and had grown rich as one of the main points on the developing Silk Road between Europe and Asia. It had prospered as a Roman client state, and the Romans had allowed it considerable autonomy. Its army was highly effective and similar to the Persian army, consisting of heavy cavalry and most famously large numbers of cavalry archers. Palmyra was also ruled at this time by a particularly capable king called Odinathus. He was deeply worried by the Persian victory over the Romans at the Battle of Edessa in 260, since he feared it would lead to Persian domination of the East and the end of Palmyra's prosperous independence. So he mobilized the Palmyran army and waited to see how things panned out between Rome and Persia. And after their catastrophic defeat at Edessa in 260, the surviving Roman forces conducted what can best be called a strategic retreat. They abandoned Antioch, which was the third largest city in the Roman Empire and the Roman headquarters in the Middle East, and regrouped in the Taurus Mountains in Cappadocia. There they hoped to establish a defensive line, using the mountains as natural protection, for the Taurus Mountains were notoriously difficult for an army to cross, with only one safe route through a defile called the Cilician gates. So the Romans concentrated their forces to block this and waited for the Persians to attack. But the Persian attack never came. After occupying Antioch as well as Tarsus, which was the Roman capital of Cilicia, in southern modern day Turkey, they became a victim of their own success. Drunk on their victories, probably quite literally, and with huge quantities of booty, the Persian offensive ground to a halt. There was a loss of discipline which allowed the Romans to make a surprisingly daring counterattack with a group of legionaries even capturing Shapur's Harim. Shapur decided to break off the offensive and to at least get the bulk of his army safely back to Mesopotamia with its loot. It was then that the Palmerines struck. King Odonatha saw his chance with the Persian withdrawal and launched an all-out attack on the Persian columns marching east. His offensive succeeded beyond all expectations, and the Persian army was sent fleeing back to its capital at Catesiphon, with the Palmeres in hot pursuit. This victory over the Persians was, of course, met with intense rejoicing by the new Roman emperor Gallianus, for it not only kept the Persians at bay, but it also went some way to avenging the capture and death of his father Valerian. He quickly showered honours on Odinathus, making him Dux Orientis, or King of the East, provided, of course, that he continued to be a Roman vassal. Palmyra's sudden rise to Stardom looked too good to be true for the Romans, and so it was, for while Odinathus was happy to be a nominal vassal to Rome for the time being, it was clear that the servant could only too easily turn against his master. This began when there was no sign of a Roman relief force arriving to reclaim Syria. Odinathus sent Palmerine troops to recover Antioch from the Persians. Then he garrisoned it with Palmerine troops. Palmyra was replacing Rome. Roman fears were fully confirmed when in 267 AD Odinathus was assassinated and control of Palmeria passed to his beautiful and gifted widow, Zenobia, who was acting as regent for their young son. There were few women who seized power in the ancient world, but when they did, the results could be dramatic. Like Boudica in first century Britain, Zenobia was more than a match for the Romans. She was a woman of extraordinary energy, courage, and political ambition. She decided that now was the time for Palmyra to break with Rome and to establish its own empire in the East. In AD 271, Palmyre troops ousted the Roman legionaries from Egypt and Western Asia Minor. Rome had lost control of the East, not to Persia but to Palmyra. And it wasn't just in the East that Rome was collapsing. Indeed, well before Rome lost its eastern empire to Palmyra, its western territories had already broken away into a separate Gallic empire led by a Roman general called Postumus. As Gaul was being overrun by the Franks and Alemanni, in desperation, Postumus, who commanded the troops on the Upper Rhine, gave up hope of ever receiving reinforcements from Rome and declared his own independent state with its capital at Trier in Germany. He was cut off from the rest of the Empire by the Alemanni, but successfully defended the Upper Rhine against the Franks. The governors of Britain and Spain, seeing themselves similarly isolated from Rome, threw in their lot with Posthumus. By 260 AD this meant that what was left of the official Roman Empire was only Italy, North Africa, and the Balkans. The legitimate Roman Emperor was Valerian's son Gallienus, who ruled this greatly reduced state. Gallienus's reign is filled with controversy. He is enigmatic because he was derided by most contemporary records as being lazy, licentious, and tyrannical, but nevertheless he did manage to prevent the complete collapse of the Roman Empire by hanging on to Italy in particular and trying to salvage the situation in the Balkans by containing the Goths. Undoubtedly his most important achievement was to drive the German tribe, the Alemanni, out of Italy. In AD 259, they launched a major assault into Italy, even reaching the outskirts of Rome itself, where they skirmished with an army hastily thrown together by the Senate, including the Praetorian Guard and a citizen militia. Then, rather surprisingly, they retreated rather than attack Rome. This was almost certainly because they were suffering from a severe outbreak of plague. As we've heard in a previous episode, the plague of Cyprian was raging in the Roman Empire at this time, and it was a good example of what a double-edged weapon plague was, capable of harming Rome's enemies as much as the Romans themselves. Meanwhile, Gallianus, who was in Gaul fighting the Franks at the time, rushed his army to northern Italy, and in AD two sixty he found the Alemanni besieging Medialanum or Milan, as we call it today. He engaged and decisively defeated them at the Battle of Medialanum. His victory was so conclusive that they left Italy and did not reappear for the next ten years, even if his victory was achieved as much due to the plague as force of arms. Nevertheless, it kept Italy safe. Without that, and if the Alemanni had, for example, been able to sack Rome, it's possible that the Roman Empire would have collapsed completely in the third century. And Gallianus might have achieved more, but throughout his reasonably long reign, he ruled as sole emperor from two hundred nine to two six eight, and as co-ruler he had ruled with his father Valerian from two five three to two five nine. He was critically undermined by the chronic Roman infighting that had so gravely weakened the Empire since two hundred three five. Indeed, there were so many pretenders to the Roman throne that the humorous Augustan history, as it's called, which is one of the main Roman sources for this period, but which is viewed somewhat suspiciously by historians because its author, who remains unknown, delighted in expressing extreme views, one of which was a strong dislike of Gallienus. And he described his reign as the period of the Thirty Tyrants. This needs a little bit of explanation because it's a reference to the Thirty Tyrants who were very famous in antiquity, but not today, who were installed by Sparta to rule Athens in the 5th century BC. And in fact, in Gallienus's reign there were only nine attempted uprisings, not thirty, but even that was damaging enough. And by far the most important of them was Posthumus's breakaway Gallic Empire. Now Gallienus devoted considerable resources to fighting Postumus, and they were all unsuccessful. Apparently he even challenged Postumus to single combat, who declined. There was an added personal animosity between the two, since Postumus had murdered his son, Salaninus, in 259 when he seized power. Salaninus had been the official governor of Gaul. And in 263 Gallienus launched a major offensive against Postumus. This civil war of Roman against Roman further weakened both sides. For example, it enabled some Franks to march across the entire length of Gaul and invade Spain, where they even managed to acquire boats and sail to North Africa in what was an early example of the sort of epic travels the barbarians liked making that would later lead to the creation of the huge Vandal kingdom in Tunisia in the 5th century. But back to Gallianus, his attempts to dislodge Posthumus in the west were a failure. However, in the east he did better by accepting the status quo and pretending that Odenathus was his subject. In fact, for a short amount of time this worked well since Odenathus continued to stave off the Sasanian Persians while Gallianus was able to defeat yet another Roman pretender, this time Macrianus in 261. But the biggest challenge of his reign was a massive new invasion of the Balkans by the Goths, together with new Germanic allies in the form of the Heruli and the Gepids. Contemporary sources are woefully vague about the details and timing of this invasion, but in AD 267 there does seem to have been just as serious an invasion as that led by Kineva nearly twenty years previously in two hundred forty nine, which resulted in the catastrophic defeat and death of the Roman Emperor Decius at the Battle of Abritus. The Roman sources this time talk of both Gothic warriors crossing the Danube together with a fleet manned by the seafaring Heruli tribe sailing through the Bosphorus and into the Aegean, where it started to attack the coastal cities. This culminated in an event that shocked the whole Roman world. For in AD 267 the ancient city of Athens was sacked by the Heruli. Athens was regarded by emperors from Hadrian to even Gallianus himself, who was a dedicated Philhellen, as the centre of the civilized world. There's a story recorded by one Roman source which is implausible but quite amusing, that the Heruli were persuaded to spare the great library at Athens from destruction on the grounds that the Greeks were more inclined to scholarship than to warfare, and that therefore it would be sensible to leave them their books to study. Whatever the truth about that, the sack of Athens sent shockwaves throughout the ancient world. Fighting this huge Gothic invasion would now take centre stage in Roman history. Gallienus turned all his available resources to meet the invasion. He massed an army and navy against the Goths and started to deploy them with some success. However, we will return to the story of the Gothic invasion later, since not only would it become a critical turning point for the Romans in the third century, but also because Gallienus was not the man who would finish it, for although he initially achieved some successes against the Goths, he was called away to deal with yet another Roman rebellion. This time the traitor was his general Auriolus, whom he had left in charge in Italy to guard against Posthumus' breakaway empire in Gaul. Gallienus had to march back to Italy with most of his troops. He defeated Auriolus outside Milan, who fled into the city. Gallienus settled down to besiege it, but one night, while he was at supper, he was told that Auriolus had launched a sortie from the city walls. Leaving his bodyguards, he rushed to put on his armour and mount his horse, but little did he know that his generals were plotting to assassinate him, and as he was about to mount his horse, a man called Cacropius, the commander of the elite Dalmatian cavalry, hacked him down and killed him. With Gallianus' death in AD 268, a whole new chapter opened in Roman history, and it was a chapter that would bring with it a transformation of the Roman Empire. And that ends this episode. Thanks so much for listening, and I hope you enjoyed it. And as usual, if you did, I'd be really grateful if you wanted to subscribe, tell a friend, or best of all, to leave a review or a rating. That would be fantastic. Thank you. And in the next episode, we'll continue with the story of the Roman crisis of the third century. Thanks for listening and see you next time.