When Alaric took Rome in 410, it was no longer even the capital
On 24 August 410 the Visigoths under Alaric entered Rome, the first foreign capture of the city in almost 800 years. Oddly, the emperor was not there: the court had long since moved to Milan and then Ravenna. The shock was symbolic, and Jerome wrote from Bethlehem that the conqueror of the world had been conquered.
The road to 410 began with refugees. In 376 Huns pushed Therving Goths into the Eastern empire, where hunger, heavy taxes, local hostility and corrupt officials turned them against Rome. Their revolt climaxed at Adrianople in 378, where the emperor Valens died in battle. A treaty in 382 settled them as autonomous federates in the Balkans, obliged to fight for Rome, and they became known as the Visigoths.
Alaric emerged as their king sometime in the 390s, though historians dispute the year. At the Battle of the Frigidus in 394 about half the Visigoths fighting for Theodosius were killed, and many Goths suspected Roman generals had deliberately spent their lives; Alaric also resented being denied high office. When Theodosius died in January 395, leaving the empire to two young sons, the Goths considered their treaty void. Alaric rebelled, marched on Constantinople and then looted much of Greece, while rival courtiers in East and West undermined each other.
The Western general Stilicho repeatedly cornered Alaric and repeatedly let him slip away, for reasons still argued over. Alaric invaded Italy in 401 and besieged Milan; beaten at Pollentia and Verona in 402, he withdrew, and the frightened emperor Honorius relocated his court to marshy, sea-linked Ravenna. That move may have cut the Western government off from events north of the Alps.
Alliances then shifted constantly. Stilicho made Alaric a Roman commander in 405, but a separate Gothic invasion and a collapse of the Rhine frontier in Gaul derailed their plans. In 408 Alaric demanded 288,000 gold solidi, roughly a single senatorial family's annual property income, to avoid invading Italy, and the bitter argument over paying damaged Stilicho's standing with Honorius. The sack that followed is remembered as a landmark in the Western empire's decline.
Source: Sack of Rome (410)
