Further west, the Gothic war ground on, as increasingly outnumbered Visigothic armies were penned up in Aquitania by the Western Roman coalition. Anthemiolus and Phylarchus joined their armies to launch a spring 475 descent on the Gothic capital of Tolosa, which Evareiks narrowly warded off. Riothamus’ army, in the meantime, was secure enough to move south again. Busily marching to and fro to keep the two armies from uniting, Evareiks was eventually defeated by Riothamus in a major battle near Vesunna. The defeated Visigoths sued for peace in early 476, as Anthemiolus renewed the siege of Tolosa, whereby their territories were reduced to parts of Aquitania, though not so much that they were forced back to their original territories of 418 along the Garumna River.
Anthemius’ victory in the Gothic war did not immediately free him to intervene in the East. Western military power under the more or less direct control of the Emperor was essentially incipient. Before the African expedition, the West had disposed of basically a field army and a half; its troop strength was rising, based in large part on the incorporation of defeated enemy troops, although Italian recruitment was up. Anthemius’ regime still had no control over the field army on the Liger, which still took orders and pay from Childeric, who had to be conciliated; it likewise could not control the Burgundiones. (The Burgundiones also could not control themselves. Ricimerus’ death had thrown them into civil war.) And there were ever so many alternate pressures on the Western Roman army. Roman Noricum, loosely controlled at best, was under serious raiding from Rugi, Heruli, and Torcilingi groups, and had to be rescued by Anthemiolus’ army. Phylarchus was forced to respond to Suebi aggrandizement, since the Visigoths that had held them in check were no longer an effective force south of the Pyrenæi; the Roman army in Hispania was drawn into campaigns around Ulixippida and Scallabis, unable to restore order in the majority of the peninsula.
In sum, the West was fully too busy with its own troubles to bother about the goings-on on the other side of the Adriatic. Another neighbor of the Eastern Roman Empire was not so occupied. Pērōz I, Šāh-an-šāh of Iran and Aniran, had recently been humbled by the power of the Hayāṭila on his northeastern border. Where better to take out his frustration than against the Romans? Already during the reign of Leōn I, Sāsānian arms had conquered Lazikē, a Roman satellite state. Beginning in 475, as Roman troops left the frontier denuded to fight in the civil war, Pērōz began to raid Roman Mesopotamia and Osroene. The following year, Sāsānian troops besieged and captured Martyropolis, aided by treachery from inside the powerful fortress’s walls. A second expedition, later that year, entered Roman territory from the Araxes valley and plundered Theodosioupolis.
While the frontier was eroding to the east, Strabo incessantly kept up the fight against the Isaurian faction in Anatolia. But even he was aware that his ally Basiliskos was slipping. The inability to crush the Isaurian uprising and the military failures against the Gepids were leading to widespread discontent, even in the capital. Egypt was still in
stasis, and Timotheos Ailouros remained unpopular outside of Alexandria. His opportunity came in early 477, as Zēnōn and Herakleios were briefly immobilized by internecine disputes and the need to juggle the civil war and the incipient Sāsānian war. After repeated Gepid defeats in the Balkans, Anagastes was replaced as
magister militum per Thracias by the Sciri Odovacar, a shockingly poor choice by Basilikos. This was not due to Odovacar’s competence or lack thereof, but his rivalry with the Ostrogoths that were ascendant in the Eastern court. Odovacar quickly came to a deal with the Gepid raiders, rebelled, and sent part of his army to plunder Thrace.
Basiliskos’ government was paralyzed. Seizing the opportunity, Strabo countermarched to Bithynia and blackmailed the Emperor, threatening to abandon Constantinople if he were not elevated to
patricius, as Aspar had been, and awarded land in which to settle in the prosperous territories of Asia. Basiliskos initially agreed, throwing in the consulship for good measure. The Emperor also attempted to murder a possible rival of Strabo’s for control of the Ostrogoths, Thiudareiks Amal, who had been a hostage in the capital for some years, but Amal escaped and fled to Odovacar’s army. Strabo departed to organize his Goths to head across the Hellespont, but during his absence Basiliskos had second thoughts. Trusting in the Constantinopolitan fortifications to protect the capital from the Sciri, he rescinded Strabo’s titles and land grants. When word got back to the Ostrogoths, Strabo predictably flew into a rage and openly rebelled with the backing of the (formerly Thracian) field army. By the summer of 477, Basiliskos had been lynched by the citizens of the capital, who raised the civil servant Sebastianos to the purple in his stead. Basiliskos’ nephew Armatos, who had been serving with a small detachment in Syria, immediately opened channels to Pērōz I, asking for military support for his own claim to the throne.
Sebastianos, who made a big show about reluctantly assuming the purple, clearly wanted to employ his very imperium as a bargaining chip with Zēnōn, whom he contacted directly. The Isaurian faction was offered the capital on a silver platter, with Sebastianos himself demanding only an extraordinary military command in Roman Armenia to fight the Sāsānians, and his son to be named Cæsar and heir to Zēnōn. The Isaurian promptly agreed, took ship to Constantinople, and occupied the city. After awarding Sebastianos his command and making his son heir, Zēnōn had the son tonsured and the father murdered, and consigned Leōn I’s widow Verina to a monastery. He himself then organized the defense of the capital from Odovacar, who besieged Constantinople from August to October 477 without success. Finally, Zēnōn opened channels to the Sāsānians to try to negotiate an end to the war.
Pērōz I knew a winning hand when he had one. His most recent war with the Hayāṭila, though it had been unsuccessful, had more or less closed that frontier of military action for the time being. He was under no serious time constraints, and the war with Rome was making him more money than he was losing by mobilizing his army. The Sāsānian despot believed that with such an opportunity as the civil war, at the very
least the Romans ought to have to give up several major frontier fortresses and a belt of intermediary Sāsānian puppets. But Zēnōn was unwilling to concede any more than recognition of Sāsānian control over Lazikē and a cash indemnity. The gains to be made were negligible, and the potential benefits of staying in the war far outweighed any immediate ones to be gained by leaving the field. The šāh-an-šāh instead cultivated his connections with Armatos in Syria and continued his raids on the eastern prefectures.
In 478, Marcellinus,
patricius of the Western Roman Empire, died after coughing up blood. Foul play was not suspected, although some Christian chroniclers attributed the messy death to the
patricius’ paganism. Strikingly, Anthemius did not nominate a new
patricius to replace him, although court opinion had held that Phylarchus or Iulius Nepos would be next in line. Instead, Anthemiolus was given the title of
magister utriusque militiæ and ordered to campaign in Hispania, and Flavius Marcianus was given some leftovers and ordered to campaign against the relatively harmless Heruli. As the fighting in Africa was finally beginning to wind down, Nepos was sent to Gaul to campaign against the Burgundiones, in an effort to keep him from establishing a semi-independent fiefdom as his uncle had. This was given new urgency by Phylarchus, who had come to an agreement with the Suebi in 477 and promptly revolted, attempting to parlay his outsize Iberian field army into a personal kingdom. Upon revolting, Phylarchus managed to gain the support of Evareiks and the Visigoths as well, reopening the Gothic war.
Even without the civil war in Hispania, though, the Western Empire could hardly have effectively intervened in the east. Zēnōn’s loyalists were fighting a two-front war in Anatolia and slowly losing both fights, while the Emperor himself had no resources in Thrace with which to ward off Odovacar. In some desperation Zēnōn offered Odovacar command of one of the præsental field armies (which, to all intents and purposes, did not really exist) and land for the Sciri north of the Haimos Mountains, which was rejected. He attempted to resettle Strabo’s Ostrogoths in Armenia to help block the Sāsānians, but Strabo demanded better lands which wouldn’t have put the Ostrogoths in a position to be militarily effective at all. So the Eastern Empire continued to be slowly ground down. Antiocheia nearly fell by treachery to Armatos in 478, but declared for Zēnōn after serious riots. Thessalonike
did fall to Odovacar’s army, which sacked the city, causing riots in Constantinople. And the Sāsānians captured Edessa in Osroene, which as far as the frontier was concerned turned the clock back a century.
By 479, Zēnōn was on the ropes. While the capital was more or less impregnable to attack by Odovacar and the Gepids, both of whom had essentially overrun the peninsula, the rest of the war was going very poorly. The Emperor was considering fleeing the city for Isauria again, lest he have been lynched like Basiliskos. During that spring, though, events moved against him. Herakleios, who needed to salvage what he could of the eastern field army, staged a fighting retreat through central Anatolia to Nikaia, whereupon he and a picked body of men crossed the Straits and staged a coup in Constantinople. Zēnōn was murdered and Herakleios ascended to the purple in his place, bringing Verina out of her monastery to lend some legitimacy to his new regime as a “trusted” advisor.
Initially, Herakleios believed he could make a fight of it. Save Syria, which was occupied by Armatos’ armies, most of the wealthiest taxpaying regions of the Empire were still under his control: western Anatolia, coastal Greece, and Egypt. He still had a field army (and a half) near the capital, control of much of the navy, and was working to open channels to some of the combatants to try to achieve terms. The appearance of power was illusory at best, though. Egypt could not be counted upon at all; after Timotheos Ailouros kicked the bucket in late 478, his popularly acclaimed replacement, Petros Mongos, turned out to be even more vociferously anti-Chalkedōnian than his predecessor had been. Part of the fleet mutinied at Ephesos over pay arrears in April 479 and went cruising around the Aegean, raiding and plundering under the leadership of one Martinianos. And to demonstrate how insecure western Anatolia actually was, Thiudareiks Strabo, who had set up shop in Galatia with most of his Ostrogoths, went on an extended raid along the Aegean coast in the early summer of 479, which Herakleios’ general Moschianos was unable to prevent. The Ostrogoths nearly captured Tralles and
did capture Aphrodisias, capital of Karia province, before being forced to pull back to Kappadokia to fight Sāsānian raiders.
Petros Mongos clearly had to go, but Herakleios’ choice of replacement was uninspiring at best. Timotheos Salophakiolos had already served in Alexandria before riots brought Ailouros into the driver’s seat; his pro-Chalkedōn stand would not play well in Pieria. Predictably, his return inflamed Alexandria again. A local Miaphysite garrison commander, one Stephanos, elected to support the anti-Chalkedōn rioters. He kicked out Salophakiolos and claimed the title of
comes et magister militum per Ægyptias, demanding imperial recognition of his new position as he busily recruited regular troops and attempted to construct something of a navy.
The loss of Egypt crippled Herakleios’ regime and forced him to come to terms with some of his opponents. Odovacar was offered Thrace and Makedonia on which to settle his Sciri, the post of
patricius, and the consulship for 480, which the Sciri warlord snapped up more or less instantly. His troops pulled back from their siege of Athens and moved north, fighting Gepids as they went. Herakleios then sacked Moschianos and replaced him with one Kottomenēs, who had successfully waged naval war against Martinianos’ raiders. Kottomenēs managed a narrow victory over part of Strabo’s Ostrogoths near Thyateira during the winter of 479-80. Combined with an autumn 479 defeat at the hands of the Sāsānians west of Sebasteia, the Ostrogoths were ready to come to terms. In 480, Strabo accepted terms that permitted the Ostrogoths to settle in Galatia, Kappadokia, and western Armenia, and which gave him the command of
magister militum per Orientem. While less ideal than those he originally coveted – lands near the Aegean – these were prosperous enough, and the stick was big enough to make him think twice about continuing the fight.
Herakleios never stopped trying to split his various enemies and right the ship of state. In order to fight against the Sāsānians and Armatos, whom he considered the chief dangers, the Emperor confirmed Stephanos in his extraordinary command. This had the salutary effect of simplifying the situation in the Levant. From 477, the Roman
foederati phylarchy of the Banū Salīh had basically split, with various constituent tribes supporting one claimant to the throne or another. The situation was complicated by the intervention of the Sāsānian-allied Banū Lakhm, which raided heavily amongst the Salīhid-protected Levant. With Herakleios’ pronouncement, many of the remaining Salīhids affixed themselves to Stephanos’ armies, while the others cast their lot in with Armatos and the Sāsānian-allied Romans. Heavy fighting broke out in Phoinike, with Stephanos’ garrison troops and ill-trained “regulars” generally coming off worse against Sāsānian and Syrian soldiers. Stephanos was thus unable to relieve Antiocheia before it fell to Armatos in the fall of 480.
Odovacar successfully limited the Gepid raids south of the Haimos during the course of 480 and 481, aided by a surprising development: a small detachment of troops from the West under the command of one Ecdicius. In 480, Phylarchus and his Suebic allies had finally been crushed in a climactic set-piece battle outside of Ocelodurum by Anthemiolus. Gothic pretensions were limited by the actions of Riothamus in conjunction with the Liger field army of Childeric. Evareiks had attempted to employ the Burgundiones, led by the victor in their civil war, Godegisel, but Ecdicius and the general Thorisarius successfully warded off that threat in a series of complicated campaigns in southern Gaul, ultimately kick-starting a second Burgundian civil war. In sum, the Western Empire was somewhat able to dispatch a small force of some 7,000 troops, mostly Herulian and Hunnic mercenaries, to aid the Eastern Emperor. Ecdicius’ army played a large part in destroying a sizable raiding force of Sabartoi that had allied with the Gepid ruler Draserich in Dacia Ripensis.
Ecdicius was uninterested in meddling in Eastern Imperial politics. After he died in the relief of a Gepid siege of Ratiaria in the winter of 482, his second in command, one Orestes, replaced him. Orestes, an interesting figure in his own right, had been the scion of a Pannonian family and spent time as a hostage at the Hunnic court of Attila during the 440s. He proved more willing to work with Herakleios’ schemes, and was duly appointed
magister militum per Thracias in the Eastern army. The Emperor planned to have him act as a counterweight to Odovacar and his ambitions, and as such installed Orestes’ Western troops as guards in the capital, replacing Odovacar’s men. Orestes was also given control of the
Vigla, the city watch. Herakleios erred in trusting the slippery Pannonian. Within two months, the Emperor himself was forced to flee the city after Orestes unsuccessfully attempted to murder him. Herakleios fled to the western coast of Anatolia, his old stomping grounds, where he rallied what troops he could.
Orestes, casting about for a suitable puppet emperor to replace Herakleios, picked the pirate leader Martinianos, who had conquered Crete and could lend his sizable fleet to preventing Herakleios from recrossing the Straits. This move may have made sense from a purely short-term perspective, kind of, but it proved to be suicidal. The obvious loser was Odovacar, who immediately marched on Constantinople. Martinianos’ fleet proved useless against Odovacar’s Sciri, Gepid, and Roman troops, who invested the capital within a few weeks. Orestes and Martinianos were lynched on 17 July 482, and the citizens of Constantinople opened the gates of the Theodosian Walls to Odovacar’s army.
It was not immediately clear what Odovacar’s recourse might be. He was not a plausible candidate for the imperium himself, and considered it a dubious honor at best that at worst might bring the other players in the East down on his head. At the same time, he distrusted Herakleios too much to readmit him to the capital; the entire reason the Eastern Emperor had been displaced was because of a plot gone awry. Instead, he offered the imperial regalia to Anthemius at Ravenna. The Western Emperor always had been a plausible candidate for the Eastern throne, with his familial connections and history. Anthemius knew that he himself couldn’t really do much to justify claiming the eastern imperium; sending Ecdicius’ expedition had been something of a strain in itself, and
that had been a disaster. Instead, he sent the regalia back, with an attached letter chastising the Eastern Senate for not returning the trappings of power to their rightful holder, Herakleios. As far as Anthemius was concerned, there still was an Eastern Emperor, albeit holed up far outside the capital.
It has been argued that the Eastern Roman Empire did not, in fact, cease to be on 17 July 482. After all, there was still an Eastern Emperor, and by that point in time the Emperors in Constantinople had ceased to exercise any “real” power. This argument is unsustainable. The Eastern Emperor’s writ ceased to run in Constantinople, and as it turned out, no Emperor would ever rule from the city again. As for lacking any “real” power, even up to 479 and 480, the Eastern Emperors were able to mount serious military expeditions to attempt to restore their authority, and the very plot that ejected Herakleios from the capital was designed to wipe out his political rivals and restore a semblance of control. The Eastern Roman Empire, contrary to belief, went down kicking and screaming all the way. In fact, the fact that, after 482, it ceased to do so was something that contemporaries noticed. The Gallic aristocrat and
præfectus urbi Sidonius Apollinaris marked the date of 17 July in his famous correspondence, and it was similarly recorded by even ecclesiastical chroniclers in Iberia.
Even so, there is much to be said for the view that, for most of the inhabitants of what used to be the Eastern Roman Empire, little changed. It is not as though, before 482, all Easterners spoke Latin, and after that date, they began to use Coptic, Syriac, and Greek; it was not a matter, in Egypt, of putting away the togas and getting out the pharaonic hats. The average person’s life continued much as it had beforehand; taxes paid to the same taxmen, soldiers recruited and armed and organized much the same way, trade links running more or less the same way, similar coins used in the marketplace. The religious questions remained much the same as they had been before Martinianos was executed. Thus one can argue not merely for catastrophe in the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire, but also for continuation; they are not polar opposites of the debate, but sides of the same coin.
It has been remarked that throughout the collapse of the Eastern Roman state, none of the major actors were actually trying to destroy it. Nobody really believed it was
possible to destroy it, up to the very end. Everybody was trying to make a better place for himself in the hierarchy of the state, with the symbols of the state, employing the framework of the state. Thus it can be said that the Eastern Roman Empire did not die a natural death, yet also it was not assassinated. The Eastern Roman Empire committed suicide by accident.
OOC: I couldn’t resist stealing and altering a few good lines from various modern historians of the period. It’s a work in progress.
Also, I'll be making semi-regular maps of the situation. This is not a finished TL by any stretch of the imagination.
Comments/constructive criticism?
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