Anthemius
Flavius Procopius Anthemius ( ancient Greek Προκόπιος Ανθέμιος ; * around 420 in Constantinople ; † July 11, 472 in Rome ) was Western Roman emperor from 467 to 472. He was the son of the master Procopius and son-in-law of the Eastern Roman emperor Markian (450-457).
Life
Rise to the emperor
Anthemius was the grandson of the Praetorian prefect of the same name , who in fact led the affairs of state for the young emperor Theodosius II around 410 . His father Isidorus also held the highest offices. In addition, he was descended from Procopius in an unknown manner , who in turn was a distant relative of the Constantinian dynasty . Anthemius therefore came from a family of the high aristocracy. An army master himself , he fought against the Goths and Huns on the Danube and, due to his successes, held the consulate in 455 . As Markian's son-in-law and reigning magister militum praesentalis , after his death in 457 he actually had the best prospects for the Eastern Roman imperial dignity, but with the help of the second army master Aspar , Leo instead prevailed as the new ruler. Nonetheless, Anthemius continued to be an important and prominent figure in Constantinople.
The military leader Ricimer , the most powerful military in Italy at the time and de facto regent of the western empire, asked Leo I in 466 to appoint a separate emperor for the west. Leo, who in 465 had formally taken over the government himself in the Western Roman Empire, since the Western Empire had been vacant since that year, arranged for Anthemius to be sent to Italy and made emperor of the west there. Ricimer hoped for military support from Ostrom; Leo, for his part, was able to elegantly get rid of a powerful rival in this way. Anthemius was elevated to Caesar by Leo in Constantinople in the first half of January 467 and reached Italy in the spring of 467; he was accompanied by a strong army that Leo had financed. On April 12, 467, he was proclaimed Augustus before Rome . He established marriage connections with his Eastern Roman colleague and tried to promote the idea of a constitutional unity of both halves of the Roman Empire .
The new West Emperor immediately tried to solve the two first-rate military challenges that affected the rest of the Roman Empire in the west and were increasingly destabilizing. On the one hand, there were the restless Visigoth foederati under Eurich (II.), Who had settled in Aquitaine in particular . On the other hand (and above all) the Vandals in Africa posed a deadly threat to Western Rome : their rex Geiseric had resided in Carthage since 439 and had been at war with the Western Roman government in Ravenna, controlled by his rival Ricimer, since 455; he repeatedly cut Italy off from the vital North African grain and disturbed the peace with his fleet. If Anthemius failed to eliminate this threat, his rule would be doomed.
Domination
As ruler, the new emperor called himself Emperor Caesar Flavius Procopius Anthemius Augustus . His government started out hopefully. He had the backing of Leo I and initially also the Ricimers, who married Anthemius' daughter Alypia and was a mortal enemy of the vandal ruler Geiseric . An important commander in Illyria , the army master Marcellinus , gave up his previous opposition to the government in Italy and swore the oath of allegiance to the new emperor. Meanwhile, Leo officially recognized Anthemius as iunior Augustus and gave orders that the portrait of his colleague be erected together with his own everywhere in the eastern half of the empire in order to document the combined rule of the two rulers over the undivided Roman Empire .
The great vandal campaign , which both emperors carried out jointly and with enormous effort (65,000 pounds of gold and 700,000 pounds of silver brought up East power alone to equip the fleet and army ), initially made good progress; the Roman army is said to have numbered 100,000 men ( Prokopios , Bella 3,6,1). However, after initial significant progress - for example the destruction of a vandalized fleet - it was neglected to build on these successes. The general Basiliscus made it possible for Geiseric to destroy the anchored Roman fleet by incendiary ships (468), so that one was forced to retreat to Sicily, where Marcellinus, who was fighting the Vandals there, was murdered shortly afterwards. An Eastern Roman land army that had marched from Egypt towards Carthage broke off the campaign in the face of these catastrophes and turned back. Whether Basiliscus was just unlucky or whether he was incompetent or even corrupt, as later sources claim, can hardly be clarified (since he appeared as a usurper in 475, his picture may have been distorted in retrospect). In any case, Anthemius was also blamed for the failure of the campaign, although he was not directly involved in the operations. According to researchers such as Peter Heather , Mischa Meier or Henning Börm , the failure of the campaign sealed the downfall of West Rome , which would have had a realistic chance of survival if North Africa had been regained; but this way Geiseric could further destabilize Italy from his power base.
The emperor's position was shaken after this defeat, and many turned away from Anthemius, apparently disappointed. Now and then he was denigrated as the “Greek Emperor” ( Graecus imperator ) and thus denied him Romanism, but this view was not generally shared by the Western Roman upper class. More problematic was the fact that the emperor showed unusual tolerance towards pagans and "heretics", so that Messius Phoebus Severus , a (alleged?) Pagan, originally from Rome, became consul in 470 and then city prefect . Nothing like it had happened in Rome for six decades. Through this policy Anthemius came into an increasingly strong opposition to the Roman Church and its powerful bishops Hilarius (461–468) and Simplicius (468–483). This conflict was perhaps exacerbated by the fact that the emperor was unusually resident in Rome, thereby restricting the freedom that the local bishops claimed. One reason for the ruler's behavior may be to be seen in his Eastern Roman origins - the patriarch of Constantinople was traditionally controlled by the emperors much more closely than the self-confident bishops of Rome; Augustus ' claim to stand above the church was hardly called into question in Ostrom and almost inevitably led to conflicts with the Roman clergy.
After 468 the emperor was plagued by empty coffers, and since the pay failed to materialize, his army slowly began to disintegrate. Anthemius did not give up at first and now tried to achieve military success against the Visigoths , who controlled large parts of southern Gaul. He allegedly received support from (the) Riothamus , who ruled in Britain (or rather in Aremorica ), and thus quite far from the circle of possible partisans, but reinforced him with his army to attack the Visigoth king Euric . However, Euric was able to defeat both the army of Riothamus and the Roman troops, which were commanded by Anthemiolus , a son of the emperor, (470/71), only to then occupy several Gallic cities, which had previously been in Roman hands. In addition, Eurich maintained excellent contacts with Ricimer, who was perhaps not innocent in the failure of the imperial campaign.
Sickness and death
After all of these failures, Anthemius 470 apparently fell seriously ill. Allegedly believing that he was subjected to sorcery, he took revenge on various prominent men, above all the high-ranking official ( magister officiorum ) Romanus , whom he possibly rightly accused of seeking empire: Anthemius probably had an alleged or actual plot uncovered. With 6,000 elite soldiers armed for the vandal war, Ricimer then moved from his base in Milan against the emperor, but a preliminary reconciliation was initially negotiated. Behind all these events was probably the conflict between the powerful emperor Ricimer and Augustus , who tried to escape the influence of the army master and therefore probably did not reside in Milan or Ravenna, but, as I said, in Rome . The Eastern Emperor Leo, who had his mighty army master Aspar murdered in 471 , is said to have advised Anthemius to do the same with Ricimer ( Johannes Malalas 14:45). The dispute escalated again at the beginning of 472, whereupon Ricimer finally gave up his allegiance to Anthemius and proclaimed the counter-emperor Olybrius . Anthemius was apparently initially supported by many senators and Italians, Ricimer by the mostly "barbaric" troops and the church, who feared for their power. Over time, however, it seems that many senators have switched sides. Leo also evidently withdrew his support from Anthemius and let Ricimer persuade him to recognize Olybrius. The conflict ended five months later with Ricimer's conquest of Rome and the capture and subsequent execution of Anthemius, who is said to have tried to escape disguised as a beggar, in July 472. Remarkably, Ricimer gave him a state funeral. His son Marcianus , consul of the year 469, rose unsuccessfully against Zeno in 479 .
literature
- Henning Börm : Westrom. From Honorius to Justinian (= Urban pocket books. Vol. 735). Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-17-023276-1 , pp. 107-111.
- Gottfried Härtel : The historical relevance of the novellas of the Emperor Anthemius. In: Klio . Vol. 64, 1982, pp. 151-159, doi : 10.1524 / klio.1982.64.12.151 (currently not available) .
- Peter Heather : The fall of the Roman Empire. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-608-94082-4 , pp. 459-467.
- Dirk Henning: Periclitans res Publica. Empire and elites in the crisis of the Western Roman Empire 454 / 5–493 AD (= Historia . Individual writings. Vol. 133). Steiner, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-515-07485-6 (also: Marburg, University, dissertation, 1997/1998).
- Dirk Henning: The first "Greek Emperor". Reflections on the failure of Procopius Anthemius in the Western Roman Empire. In: Hans-Ulrich Wiemer (Ed.): Statehood and political action in the Roman Empire (= Millennium Studies. Vol. 10). de Gruyter, Berlin et al. 2006, ISBN 3-11-019101-6 , pp. 175-186.
- Ralph W. Mathisen: Leo, Anthemius, Zeno and extraordinary senatorial status in the late fifth century. In: Byzantine Research. Vol. 17, 1991, ISSN 0525-3306 , pp. 191-222.
- John M. O'Flynn: A Greek on the Roman throne: the fate of Anthemius. In: Historia. Vol. 40, No. 1, 1991, pp. 122-128, JSTOR 4436183 .
- Alexios G. Savvides, Benjamin Hendrickx (Eds.): Encyclopaedic Prosopographical Lexicon of Byzantine History and Civilization . Vol. 1: Aaron - Azarethes . Brepols Publishers, Turnhout 2007, ISBN 978-2-503-52303-3 , pp. 290-291.
Web links
- Ralph W. Mathisen: Short biography (English) at De Imperatoribus Romanis (with references).
| predecessor | Office | successor |
|---|---|---|
| Libius Severus |
Western Roman Emperor 467–472 |
Olybrius |
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Anthemius |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Procopius Anthemius |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Western Roman emperor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | at 420 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Constantinople |
| DATE OF DEATH | 472 |
| Place of death | Rome |