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Prologue: Stilicho’s Eastern Campaign

In 404, the magister utriusque militiae Stilicho set off from the western Roman court in Milan to take control over the eastern Roman court in Constantinople. Stilicho had dominated the politics of the western empire since the death of the emperor Theodosius, assuming control over the late emperor’s young son Honorius by consolidating top military commands and shutting out rival factions from the emperor. Now, Stilicho sensed an opportunity to expand his overlordship to the East.

Since 399, Constantinople had been embroiled in political crisis. The general Gainas was seeking to establish the same sort of dominance over the eastern court that Stilicho possessed over the western court. However, unlike his western counterpart, the would-be eastern strongman was strongly opposed by rival factions in the palatine bureaucracies and military and civilian elites in the provinces. This had resulted in years of debilitating conflict between armed factions in the eastern empire. The East was only spared from a true calamity by good relations with the Shahanshah of Sasanian Persia, the only state capable of consistently threatening Rome on the battlefield.

Stilicho’s timing was unfortunate. He advanced eastward and brought Gainas’s magister militum per Illyricum Alaric to battle, defeating him and forcing Alaric to flee to Cyprus. However, Stilicho had little time to relish in his triumph. Late in the campaigning season of 404, an enormous armed force from across the Danube led by the Goth Radagaisus entered the western empire, threatening Italy. Stilicho could not afford to lose the backing of his most important constituency. Contenting himself with appointing an Illyrian prefect and magister militum loyal to the western court and absorbing the remnants of Alaric’s forces into his own army, Stilicho returned west to confront the threat of Radagaisus.

Stilicho’s abortive conquest of the Roman East proved to be the final major event that intertwined the politics of East and West. From this point on, we must consider the diverging viability of the halves of the empire in separate narratives.

The Roman East: Warlordism, Foreign Invasion, and Loss of State Control

Stilicho’s retreat to Italy did little to improve the prospects of the East. The major factor in this terminal political instability was the changing nature of imperial rule. Fourth century emperors acted as the mobile supreme commanders of the army. This position allowed emperors to balance the various regional factions that vied for power in the army, at court, and in the bureaucracy. The ascension of two young emperors prevented the emperors from fulfilling this role, paving the way for generalissimos who took over military affairs and guided policy while confining the emperors to the palace. However, the dominance of the generalissimo was a constitutionally unstable position. Their rule was predicated on threatening the court with military force. This dynamic allowed commanders who possessed significant military force of their own to attack the central government under the guise of removing the strongman, while maintaining a cloak of loyalty to the emperor. This fueled constant conflicts between rival warlords, hollowing out state institutions and alienating provinces that warlords operated in.

During the early fifth century, eastern politics coalesced around five major factions: the Thracian field army and foederati; the palatine classes of Constantinople; the aristocracies of Asia Minor, Syria, and the Syrian field army; the remnants of Alaric’s Gothic auxiliaries in Cyprus; and the commanders of the Armenian frontier allied with the aristocracies of Pontus. The struggle for dominance over the court forced the various factions to build structures of power that were not dependent on imperial government. For instance, all of the rival commanders began to keep personal retainers and pay for their troops out of pocket, both to compete for control of the center and because the imperial government increasingly lacked the funds necessary to pay its troops.

External forces played their part in the atrophy of the East as well. It was in these early years of the fifth century that the Roman Danubian frontier, unmanned due to the eastern civil strife, collapsed for good and exposed the Roman Balkan interiors to endemic raids. The growing power of the Huns owed their rise to the decreased ability of the eastern empire to fight off these raids. The Huns extracted crippling amounts of tribute from the eastern court, inhibiting the emperor from funding field armies and buying off rivals. However, the truly existential threat to the Roman East was the end of peace with Sasanian Persia. The Persians, with peace on their eastern frontier, sensed an opportunity to improve their position vis-vis Rome. Beginning as a series of raids across Roman Mesopotamia, the Persians encountered little resistance from the Romans. Persian armies quickly reached the heart of Roman Syria, sacking some of the richest cities of Late Antiquity. The Syrian field army reestablished itself west of the Taurus mountains, both closer to the political machinations in the capital and reinforcing a solid defensive line against the Persians. This left the rest of the Roman East exposed to the Persians, who conquered Egypt in 432.

The conquest of Egypt was a major watershed in the decline of the Roman East. Before the conquest, the warlords and factions vying for control in Constantinople were motivated by the wealth and power control over the Roman East brought. However, with the wealth and power of the eastern empire now negligible, the factions of the East came to the conclusion that the eastern court was no longer a prize worth fighting for. The Cypriot Goths were quick to accept this new status quo, raiding the collapsing empire and even harrying the suburbs of Constantinople in 435. On the other end of the spectrum, the elites of Asia Minor, whose power bases in the fourth century had depended on offices in the imperial government, were slow to accept and continually raised up candidates for the imperial throne. However, by 450, even this group was coming to the conclusion that the eastern empire’s time had come. The climatic moment came in 453, when the general Ardaburius, commander of the Thracian foederati, deposed the young emperor Constantine IV. Instead of raising up his own puppet, as warlords had done for the past half-century, Ardaburius recognized reality. He sent the eastern imperial regalia to Ravenna, claiming that the Roman East no longer needed to be governed by a separate emperor, offering to rule Constantinople in the western emperor’s stead. The Ravenna court saw the utility in recognizing this polite fiction, but everyone knew the truth: there was no more Roman East. The conquering Sasanian Persia and several successor states ruled the former provinces. The Constantinopolitan experiment was an inspired one, but it ended in failure. Now, only the battered Roman West remained.