Magister Militum Flavius Stilicho was the last great hero of the
Western Roman Empire. At a time when all of the noble Patrician fat cat
losers around him were busy being a bunch of obnoxious, lazy,
back-stabbing sycophants more obsessed with slaves, jewelry, and
top-shelf hair products, this old-school stoic honor-bound
barbarian-smiting warhammer of Imperial justice was out there proving
that even though she was dying and decaying from the inside, the blood
of Caesar, Scipio, Marius, and Agrippa still coursed through the veins
of Roman Empire. He rose from the rank-and-file of the Roman Legions to
serve on the Emperor’s bodyguard, marry the Emperor’s daughter, take
command of all Roman armed forces, and then defended the Eternal City
from barbarian invaders at the gates not once but twice despite being
underfunded, outnumbered, and having every single logistical problem in
the Ancient World kicking him in the balls every time he tried to take a
leak. In twenty years of military service to the Empire this dude
fought off unstoppable hordes of rampaging enemy soldiers with a handful
of legionnaires cobbled together at the last minute, and he defended
the realm without ever sacrificing his personal honor or his duty to the
Emperor. Nowadays he goes down in history as the last great warrior of
Rome, and his tragic death marks the end of the Western Empire as we
know it.
Flavius Stilicho was born in Germany around 365 AD. We don’t know a
whole lot about his early days because the Romans didn’t really bother
writing down information about kids who didn’t come from well-known
wealthy Roman families, but we do know that his mother was a Roman
provincial and his father was a Vandal, which was a tribe of Germanic
barbarian dudes who were super in to smashing mailboxes with baseball
bats and tagging graffiti on highway underpasses. Stilicho’s dad was a
cavalry officer serving the Roman army as an auxiliary, and as soon as
Stilicho was old enough to heft a gladius over his head he enlisted in
the military to get busy with the head-cracking. He was a badass
archer, horseman, and hand-to-hand fighter, a charismatic leader, and a
steel-plated tactical genius, and at a time when it was pretty common
for soldiers from good families to just pay for military promotions like
a dude trying to unlock a Counterstrike skin, Stilicho never once
accepted a promotion that wasn’t based purely on merit.
Stilicho first shows up in history in 383 AD, when he was selected to
command an honor guard sent by Emperor Theodosius to negotiate and
ratify a peace treaty with the King of Persia. Stilicho negotiated that
shit like a boss, returned to Constantinople in triumph, flexed his
pecs, and married the Emperor’s daughter Serena, who basically fell in
love with him as soon as she saw his six-pack. Marrying the Princess of
Rome is pretty badass by itself, but Serena was a shrewd diplomat
herself, and she was deftly able to defend him from the machinations of
his enemies. Her behind-the-scenes political skills are what kept this
guy alive and in power at a time in history where most powerful men
ended up futilely trying to remove six-inch blades that had just been
embedded in their spines by their best friend.
The Emperor’s son-in-law continued rising through the ranks of the
military. He commanded the Emperor’s personal bodyguard, and then was
trusted with a sizeable portion of the Imperial army at the Battle of
Frigidus in 394 AD. Stilicho opened the attack by sending forward his
expendable barbarian infantry head-on into the enemy, which resulted in a
lot of dead barbarians, which is fine by him, and then while the enemy
was busy chopping up the Germans Stilicho flanked around with the
cavalry and broke the enemy forces with a pincer move. The enemy
commander – Emperor Theodosius’ brother – was captured executed on the
battlefield.
Well Emperor Theodosius died in 395, and he left his empire to his
two young sons, setting up a divide between East and West that would
never really be reunified again. Because the emperors weren’t old
enough to rule, Stilicho was put in charge of governing the West, and a
total asshole named Rufinius was sent to help manage the East. Rufinius
was a scheming, self-serving jerk who had willingly ordered one of
Stilicho’s best friends to his death, so clearly the next logical step
was for the brothers to start killing each other. And that’s
totally what
was about to happen, but then all of a sudden there was a rebellion by a
tribe of long-haired Germanic barbarian warriors called the Goths.
Oh hey, remember a minute ago when I was talking about all those
barbarians who got mulched into sawdust during the Battle of Frigidus?
Well, their commander was a guy named Alaric the Bold – a man you should
be familiar with if you’ve read the first Badass book – and Alaric the
Bold didn’t get a nickname like that by sitting around and letting a
bunch of sandal-wearing Roman d-bags use him as cannon fodder. Alaric
the Bold declared himself King of the Goths, kind of like a 5
th-century
Morrisey, and went to work devastating the Greek countryside at the
head of a screaming horde of axe-swinging German marauders.
Stilicho immediately raised the armies of Western Rome, sailed across
into Thrace, and crashed his armies head-long into the Goth menace.
Bloodied and defeated, Alaric retreated further into Greece to escape
the wrath of Rome. Stilicho chased him, forced him up a mountain, and
then surrounded the mountain with heavy siege engines.
Over in Constantinople, Stilicho’s old pal Rufinius decided that the
only thing that made him more upset than a rampaging band of plundering
Germans was a full-scale Roman army led by Stilicho walking all over his
territory, so even though Stilicho had Alaric’s nuts in a vice he was
ordered to back down and get the hell out of the East. Stilicho was
pissed but agreed, and as a parting gift he sent a couple of his troops
over to Constantinople to murder Rufinius. Which they did.
Stilicho returned to Italy to find that one of the provinces in North
Africa had rebelled against the Romans, which honestly was just totally
not acceptable behavior for those dudes. Their governor, a guy named
Gildo, was refusing to send food to Rome and declared himself King of an
independent North Africa. Well that wasn’t going to fly. Stilicho
first provided for the Roman people by importing food from Gaul, and
then he went across the Mediterranean and beat some Imperial sense into
the rebel king with a couple javelins to the face, smashing Gildo’s
armies so bad that Gildo killed himself. After dealing with that
nonsense, Stilicho returned to Rome and cemented his claim to power by
marrying his daughter Maria off to the 14 year-old Emperor Honorius,
which is kind of gross, because Maria and Honorius were first cousins,
but Gibbon says that Honorius died a virgin so I guess that’s some small
consolation in that.
It’s worth mentioning that Honorius is pretty much a worthless ruler
with all the charisma of a week-old pre-chewed chunk of bubble gum. He
spent all day in his decadent palace feeding his pet chickens and
pigeons, he never showed any inclination to rule whatsoever, and pretty
much anybody that met this dude in person immediately lost all respect
for Roman rule and attempted a rebellion. Gibbon himself states in his
own inimitable fashion that “In the eventful history of a reign of
twenty-eight years, it will seldom be necessary to mention the name of
the emperor Honorius.”
Ok, so around this time Alaric the Bold was getting pretty bored of
reducing the cities and townships of Greece to blood-stained burning
rubble, so the King of the Goths set his sights on Italy and went
full-throttle across the Alps with the intention of beating the Emperor
to death with his own dismembered leg. Honorious, hearing reports of
the rampaging onslaught of Visigoths beatboxing their way towards his
castle, immediately prepared to flee for his life like a coward.
Stilicho told him hang on. I got this.
Now, the Western Roman Empire at this point in time is completely
falling apart. The vaunted Legions of old are gone. There is a minimal
standing army. There’s not much money to raise one. The citizenry are
either lazy or rebellious depending on where they live. But Stilicho
had a city to defend, and the only thing standing between the Emperor’s
skull and a barbarian axe was the Last Great Roman Warrior, and this guy
was going to be damned if the empire fell apart on
his watch.
Stlicho rode his horse hard across the Alps in the dead of winter,
braved the ice and snow into Gaul, and started cobbling together every
single fighting man in the Western Roman Empire. He recalled garrisons
as far north as Hadrian’s Wall in Scotland. He left entire regions
undefended on critical borders. He pulled recruits from German tribes
that were among Rome’s biggest enemies and stripped garrisons from
cities. Basically if you could hold a spear parallel to the ground and
thrust it in a vaguely-menacing way, you were going to get called up to
face-shank some Visigoths in a fight for your life.
Alaric the Bold burned, plundered, and pillaged his way through
Northern Italy, finally arriving outside the Emperor’s palace in Milan
in the Spring of 402 AD. Honorius freaked out and ran for it, fleeing
with an entourage of toga-wearing dignitaries who wore sandals to work
and smelled like flowers all the time, but the battle-scarred,
warmongering Visigoths caught up to him and the Emperor had to take
emergency refuge in a small walled fort just south of the Alps. The
Goths surrounded the fortress, set up siege equipment, and prepared to
ransom themselves an Emperor.
But then, just when all appeared lost, on the horizon a lookout
spotted something amazing. General Stilicho, protector of Rome, was
swimming across the fucking Addua River with a vanguard of thousands of
Roman soldiers. When they reached the far side, they pulled themselves
out of the water and began lining up in battle formation.
It was around this time that Alaric started receiving reports of
Roman Legionnaires marching through basically every single mountain pass
in the Alps, all streaming towards the Goths’ position in sweeping
arcs.
In the moment of his greatest victory, Alaric the Bold was about to
be completely surrounded by Roman soldiers ready to fight and die to
protect the Empire.
The battle that followed was a crushing Roman victory. Stilicho
captured Alaric’s camp, took his wife prisoner, freed all the slaves
Alaric had taken during his march, and recovered priceless treasures
that had been looted from towns ranging from Constantinople to Rome.
Alaric escaped with about half of his force intact, and tried to attack
the Italian city of Verona on his way out of town, but once again
Stilicho beat him to the punch – Stilicho had bribed some of Alaric’s
disgruntled chieftains to spy on him for Rome, and when Alaric emerged
from the mountain pass outside Verona he was attacked on three sides by
Roman forces and smashed to bits.
For being the Defender of Rome, Stilicho was given a Triumph through
the streets of the city. Sitting in the spot of honor next to the
Emperor, Stilicho led a parade of his victorious soldiers, prisoners,
and treasure while all the citizens of the city came out and cheered
their hero. In the last 100 years of the Western Roman Empire, only
three men received this honor, and Stilicho was the only one who had
accomplished the feat without having to kill other Roman citizens in the
process.
(It’s not really related, but it’s worth noting that this event also
marked the last time gladiator battles ever took place in Rome. During
the games at the Coliseum that followed the triumph, one particularly
violent gladiator battle was interrupted when a badass, fearless Asiatic
monk named Telemachus came running out onto the battlefield and tried
to separate the two fighters. Telemachus was killed when angry fans
threw rocks at him, but Emperor Honorius was in attendance when this
went down and he was so horrified by the whole thing that he banned
gladiator games forever.)
But, as I’ve said, these are dark times for Rome, and it wouldn’t be
long before Stilicho was going to need to save his people once again.
This time it was in 405, when a humongous horde of Ostrogoths crossed
the Danube under the command of a warrior named Radagaisus and began
immediately creating chaos, mayhem, and destruction. Stilicho once
again cobbled together an army out of nowhere – he promised freedom to
slaves who would fight for him, abandoned the defenses anywhere he could
spare it, and somehow put together 30 Legions of Roman Infantry to
stare down a Gothic horde that was easily three or four times his size.
Time was short, and Radagaisus’ Goths were moving much too quickly.
By the time Stilicho had finally built a half-decent army, he was
receiving word that the Gothic army had surrounded Florence and was
attempting to starve the population into submission. He was going to
have to work quick if he wanted to save the people of that city – and
the people of Rome, who were only about 180 miles away from Florence.
Stilicho marched his army as hard as they would go. The people of
Florence held out bravely, thanks in no small part to the inspiring
speeches of St. Ambrose, and then, just when it was starting to look
like the Ostrogoths were going to break through the city defenses, “All
of a sudden, they beheld from their walls the banners of Stilicho, who
advanced with his united force to the relief of the fateful city; and
who soon marked that fatal spot as the grave of the barbarian army.”
Stilicho couldn’t afford to lose his valuable troops on a battle in
the open, so he took a page out of the Julius Caesar playbook – he
surrounded the besiegers and set up a humongous series of defensive
works that bottled the Goths up in a ring around the city. Radagaisus
tried multiple times to break out of the trap, but Stilicho’s Romans
held the line against wave after wave of barbarian attacks. Disease,
hunger, and attrition ravaged the Goths. When Radagaisus met with
Stilicho to make peace, Stilicho arrested him and sent his head back to
the Goths in a catapult. When the rest of the Goths surrendered, he had
them all sold into slavery.
Because that’s what happens when you fuck with the Roman Empire when it’s led by a badass Roman commander.
Stilicho continued to kick asses for Rome, putting down a Vandal
invasion and containing a rebellion in Gaul, but despite all the heroics
he’d accomplished for the Empire Stilicho wasn’t completely immune to
subterfuge and political backstabbing. First, the Senate thought
Stilicho had gone soft when he agreed to pay Alaric the Bold not to
attack Italy again… which is dumb as hell because negotiating peace to
avoid an unwinnable battle is a hell of a lot smarter than having your
homeland burned to ash. Then some of Emperor Honorius’ advisors,
jealous of Stilicho’s power and influence, started convincing the
Emperor that Stilicho was going to overthrow him and seize power. Or
that Stilicho couldn’t be trusted because he was half-German and
therefore had divided loyalties. Or something.
A large number of Stilicho’s friends and top generals were ambushed
and murdered by their own men in 408 AD. A barbarian warrior broke into
Stlicho’s tent and tried to murder him as well, but Stilicho defeated
that guy, escaped, got to a church and asked for sanctuary so he could
write a letter telling the people of Rome never to open their gates to
the barbarians and to defend their Empire and their cities to the last
man. When Imperial soldiers finally came to arrest him, the great Roman
hero went outside with them willingly and was executed by beheading in
the Church courtyard. He was 49 years old.
Less than two years after Stilicho’s death, Gothic armies under
Alaric the Bold invaded Rome once again. With no one left to defend the
empire, Alaric encircled Rome in 410 AD, stormed the walls, and his
barbarian warriors sacked the city with sword and fire.
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