Before he sacked Rome, Alaric spent years trying to become a Roman general
Alaric the Goth is remembered for the sack of Rome in 410. Yet for most of his career he wanted in, not out: a proper Roman command, pay and grain for his people. After losing thousands of men fighting for Emperor Theodosius, he received so little thanks that he turned on the empire.
Alaric was born around 370, by one account on an island in the Danube Delta, into a Gothic world pushed across the river by the Huns. He grew up in the Balkans among veterans of Adrianople, the 378 battle where Goths destroyed much of the eastern Roman army and killed Emperor Valens. A treaty in 382 let the Goths farm Roman land under their own leaders in return for soldiers, the first such arrangement inside the empire.
He first appears in 391 leading a mixed band into Thrace, where the general Stilicho stopped him. By 392 he was in Roman service, and in 394 his Goths fought for Theodosius against a usurper's army at the River Frigidus. Theodosius used them to smash the enemy front, costing Alaric around 10,000 men, and many Romans counted the Gothic losses as a bonus. Denied the senior command he expected, Alaric rebelled and marched on Constantinople.
Theodosius died on 17 January 395, splitting the empire between two young sons and leaving Alaric as king of the Visigoths, at the head of the only effective army left in the Balkans. He played the eastern and western courts against each other: he sacked Athens in 396, clashed indecisively with Stilicho, and in 397 was named the East's top general in Illyricum, winning gold and grain for his followers. In 399 a new government in Constantinople dropped him, and his men lost their official supplies.
Probably desperate for food, he crossed the Alps near Aquileia around 401 or 402 and first met Stilicho in Italy on the Via Postumia. His campaigns against successive western regimes culminated in the sack of Rome in 410, a milestone in the western empire's decline. Alaric died in Italy the following year. His Gothic name is thought to mean ruler of all.
Source: Alaric I
