And then on the twenty-sixth day of August 423, a messenger came with shocking news from Rome. Emperor Honorius had died of dropsy, and a usurper, Johannes, had raised legions in Illyria and declared himself the new Emperor of the West.
Aetius seemed relieved to be getting away at last. ‘The enemies of Rome are not growing any fewer,’ he observed dryly. ‘There is fighting to be done.’
11
The shops of Constantinople were shut for seven days, in a demonstration of public grief for Honorius. The new emperor, Theodosius, even ordered the horse-races to be cancelled, which nearly caused a riot.
Thus at last Galla returned to Rome, together with Aetius, and her son was made emperor at the age of four.
From an early age, Valentinian displayed every sign of taking after his uncle rather than his father: a lamentable inheritance. He was slothful, greedy, childish, petulant and cruel. Galla herself, it was poisonously gossiped, had deliberately made her son stupid with feeble education and enervating superstition. Though Christian in name, Valentinian was obsessed with the darkest arts of magic and divination.
To blame these failings on the teachings of his mother was sheer ill-informed malice: Galla’s faith in the Christian God was real, and sober. Not for her the hoarse gabblings of haruspices amid the splashes and flecks of a dying pigeon’s blood, and all the other tawdry trappings of a moribund paganism. In an age when loud professions of religious zeal were everywhere, and true, divinely inspired loving-kindness almost nowhere – that is to say, an age much like any other – Galla, for all her ruthlessness and pride, devoted herself all her life to the officially sanctioned religion of the empire.
Besides, those sly gossips were ignoring one salient fact: Valentinian was quite stupid and corrupt enough to discover the joys of witchcraft for himself.
Nevertheless, as the only obvious heir to the western throne, the crafty-eyed little boy was solemnly crowned with the diadem and the imperial purple; and his mother became effectively ruler in the West.
For some years after that, the Empire knew an uneasy, unaccustomed peace, except for one stunning loss, which seemed to happen overnight, and to resist every attempt at recapture: the grainfields of North Africa were taken by the Vandals.
Suddenly, in the blazing June of 429, the Barbary Coast was in flames. The Vandal raiders were a Germanic horse-people of the steppes, lately settled in southern Spain but with an appetite for conquest and destruction unabated. In a single generation, so it seemed, they had mastered the arts of both shipbuilding and sailing from their native Spanish subjects. From their kingdom of Vandalusia, or ‘Andalusia’, as the Berbers called it, they had crossed the narrow straits, overrun the province of Mauretania, and fallen upon the precious grainfields of Numidia and Libya with fire and sword.
Rome was taken utterly by surprise. None but Aetius seemed aware of how disastrous this was. It is said that when he heard the news he sat down, ashen-faced, gripping his left wrist in his right hand, and did not speak for half a day.
The imperial court, the wealthy senatorial classes and the chattering crowds of Rome carried blithely on, as if unaware of the vast, blood-dark cloud slowly seeping across their sky from the far horizon.
The following year the Vandal armies set out eastwards across the Mahgreb, bent on ‘conquest to the gates of the rising sun’. City after city fell to their fury. On clear nights, it was said, you could see the African shore lit up as if with mighty beacon fires all along the coast from Tingis to Leptis Magna.
The summer of 432 saw them besieging the city of Hippo Regius. In the third month of that terrible siege, when starving people killed each other over a rat, one of the great voices of the Church, St Augustine of Hippo, closed his eyes upon the ruins of a world which he had so desired and feared. He died on the twenty-eighth day of August, aged seventy-five. A few weeks later Hippo was taken and burned almost to a shell. But Augustine’s writings and his personal library were by some miracle saved: two hundred and thirty-two books, plus treatises and commentaries, epistles and homilies, and those immortal works the Confessions and The City of God.
The years passed, the Vandal conquerors made North Africa their own, and the young and hesitant Emperor Valentinian hesitated. Aetius argued for reconquest by land and sea, vigorously at first, and then furiously. When Galla Placidia concurred with the general and urged her son in the same direction, the weak and paranoid adolescent rebelled against them, called them ‘bossy’, refused point blank to do anything about Africa, and sent Aetius into exile.
Not for the last time, Aetius took refuge at the court of the Visigoths in Tolosa. Valentinian, meanwhile, sued for dishonourable peace with Genseric, the wrathful, debauched king of the Vandals, who had once been a hostage prince in the court of Rome, with his younger brother Beric; the latter had long since died in an ‘accident’.
Genseric was fierce and blood-thirsty, delighting always in spectacles of the utmost cruelty and depravity. He especially liked to see women forced to couple with animals, in supposed tableaux of ancient myths: a wild bull, representing Zeus, mated with a naked slave-girl, representing Europa, tied down over a cartwheel. Perhaps Genseric believed that, by showing his appreciation for such entertainments, he was demonstrating his affinity with the elevated culture of the classical world. He spoke little, was short in stature, and he struggled to sleep with women in the normal way. When he did so, it was with hatred.
To the dismay of many, the Vandal kingdom of North Africa under the rule of the monstrous Genseric became an established fact. Rome’s resources shrank still further.
Indeed, the streets of Rome were filled with more and more threadbare and starving refugees from the Vandal fury in North Africa, and tiny wooden boats bobbed across the Mediterranean from the Numidian or Mauretanian shore to make landfall in Italy. More and more desperate, hungry mouths, and less and less grain to go round. But still the people lived blithely, and did not want to see that the blood-dark cloud now nearly filled the sky.
12
The years passed, and Valentinian’s sister, Honoria, grew into young womanhood. No sooner had she reached that turbulent age, not sixteen summers old, than she betrayed her true character, and the name ‘Honoria’ showed itself absurdly unsuitable for this inveterate lover of pleasure. ‘Oh, incongruous name!’ one monkish chronicler has written. ‘For never was there a female so shameless in her carnal appetites as the Princess Honoria!’
It is not for a humble scribe like myself to have opinions one way or another about the girl’s behaviour, but many other chroniclers have felt differently, describing her as ‘a she-daemon of sensuality’, ‘a succubus who inflamed men’s flesh and scoured their souls’, and even ‘the Great Scarlet Whore whose appearance marked the End of the World’. The more censorious have written that they could not possibly commit to writing the horrifying stories they heard about her lusts and depravities, before going on to do so in extensive and unblushing detail. Whatever the truth about the princess, as a responsible historian I must record what I have heard about her without demur.