Sack of Rome (455)

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The Vandals under Geiseric conquer and plunder Rome. (19th century fantasy)

The sack of Rome in the year 455 was after the Visigoth invasion of Rome by Alaric I , the second sacking of the capital of the Roman Empire during the Great Migration . It took place from June 2 to 16, 455 by the Vandals under Geiseric , who had declared war on the Western Roman usurper Petronius Maximus .

prehistory

In 442, the Western Roman Emperor Valentinian III. and Geiseric concluded a peace treaty ( foedus ), with which the Vandal Empire in Africa was recognized as factually (but not de iure ) independent of the Roman Empire . The Vandal Warrior Association thus entered the imperial service nominally as a foederati and received permission for it to be supplied from the rich North African provinces for an unlimited period of time. To strengthen their alliance, the two rulers betrothed their children Eudocia and Hunerich ; like many other late Roman " warlords ", Geiseric strove to marry with the imperial family. As soon as Eudocia was old enough, they would get married.

In 454 tensions arose when the mighty army master Flavius ​​Aëtius managed to get his own son betrothed to Eudocia. Before they got married, Aëtius was slain by the emperor himself. On March 16, 455, however, Valentinian III. murdered in Rome by followers of Aëtius.

The usurpation of Petronius Maximus and the vandal attack 455

Valentinian's successor on the throne, the Senator Petronius Maximus , forced the imperial widow Licinia Eudoxia into marriage and married Eudocia to his own son Palladius . The new emperor made friends with the murderers of Valentinian, and was said to have instigated them to act.

Geiseric took the usurpation of Maximus and the open breach of the treaty of 442 as an opportunity to attack Rome with a vandal fleet . Tradition reports that Licinia Eudoxia called in the Vandals to avenge the murder of Valentinian and to defend herself against Maximus ( John Malalas 14:26). Whether this is the case is debatable in research. After the Vandals landed in Portus , Maximus, who obviously had no popular support, tried to flee Rome and was killed on May 31, 455. The sources name either Roman civilians or a legionnaire named Ursus as the perpetrator; Sidonius Apollinaris also suggests that the betrayal of a Burgundy played a role in Maximus' death.

Three days later Rome opened the gates to the Vandals. Geiserich released the city for sacking for 14 days. What is certain is that the Vandals carried immense wealth from Rome to Carthage , including (allegedly) the temple treasures of Jerusalem , the gilded roof of the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol and numerous statues; also evidently the insignia of the Western Roman Empire, the ornamenta palatii . However, in contrast to the sacking of Rome in 546 by the Ostrogoth Totila , there was apparently no major devastation. Pope Leo I had assured the vandals that there would be no resistance, so that fighting, conflagrations and rape would be avoided. The derivation of the proverbial vandalism from blind destructiveness is therefore probably incorrect historically. According to the report by the Eastern Roman historian Prokop , written about 90 years later, at least one church in Rome is said to have burned down.

consequences

According to Victor von Vita and Johannes Malalas , the Vandals took a large number of respected Romans with them to Africa . It is conceivable that, in view of the internal Roman civil war, many of them voluntarily joined Geiseric; the sources are silent about this. The Dowager Empress Eudoxia was also brought to Africa with her two daughters Eudocia and Placidia , where they were received with all honors. A little later Eudocia was married to Hunerich; her son Hilderich later became rex of the vandals.

There was no longer an emperor in Italy because Geiserich had not raised his own candidate. However, when a little later Avitus , a friend and follower of Aëtius and Petronius Maximus, who had just concluded an alliance with the Visigoths on behalf of the latter, was proclaimed emperor in Gaul and then moved to Rome, Geiseric began to raise in return to demand of Olybrius as the new Western Emperor - this was the husband of Placidia. Relations between the Vandals and Italy henceforth remained hostile; only a few years after the failure of the great vandal campaign of 468 there was another foedus between Geiseric and the emperor.

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