W081 The wars and settlements of Gaul and Spain

Groups entering Iberia in AD 409 and competing Roman administrations transformed the western situation. The campaigns of the imperial commander Constantius and the Visigothic forces associated with Wallia restored some Roman leverage. The Gothic settlement in Aquitaine in AD 418 created an enduring military and political relationship without ending subsequent war.

Imperial, Gothic, Burgundian, Suevic and other powers continued to compete, negotiate and form alliances. Later fighting in Gaul, including resistance around Clermont and the settlement of AD 475, shows that the loss of Roman control was regional, contested and prolonged.

Command, forces and military problem

Extended campaign study

The account below develops the operations and their interpretation. Reported numbers and reconstructed tactical details retain the uncertainties described in the dossier.

Aetius and the Hun Bargain (425–450)

The West's soldier of the age governed it for thirty years without ever wearing the purple, and his career is the era's system in one biography. Flavius Aetius — a Danubian officer's son, hostage in youth to Alaric and then to the Huns, whose friendship became his instrument — climbed through the usurpation-crisis of 423–425 (arriving three days late for the battle with a Hun army hired for the usurper, and pardoned because sixty thousand Huns required pardoning), destroyed his rivals Felix (executed 430) and Boniface (defeated at Ariminum 432, dead of the wound) in the West's private civil wars, and from 433 ruled as patrician and generalissimo for the empress-mother Galla Placidia's son. His achievement was Gaul, and its method was the bargain the chapter's title names: with Hunnic auxiliaries hired from his friends beyond the Danube, Aetius broke the Visigoths' sieges of Narbonne (436) and fought them to treaty at Toulouse; suppressed the Bagaudae of Armorica; settled the Alans on the Loire and the remnant Burgundians — after his Hun allies had annihilated their Rhine kingdom in 436/7, twenty thousand dead with King Gundahar, the catastrophe that seeded the Nibelung legend, graded here as the one certain historical event beneath that poetry — in Sapaudia (443); and held the Rhineland's Franks as federate satellites.

476: The Notice (468–476)

The last eight years the account presents as the chronicle-tempo demands. Anthemius and Ricimer came to open war in 472 — the generalissimo besieging his emperor in Rome, taking it by storm in July (the city's third capture in the account), Anthemius beheaded by Ricimer's Burgundian nephew Gundobad; Ricimer dead of hemorrhage forty days later, his puppet Olybrius following within months. Gaul meanwhile ended: the Visigoth Euric, having killed his brother for the throne in 466, read the 468 fire-light correctly, renounced the federate fiction, and took the diocese by open conquest — Arvernum (Clermont) holding four years under Sidonius's leadership and his brother-in-law Ecdicius's eighteen-horseman sorties, only to be traded to Euric in the treaty of 475 for a Provence the empire could no longer use: Sidonius's letters, the account's last Roman voice in Gaul, curse the bargain from the bishop's house of a Gothic city. In Italy the Pannonian officer Orestes — once Attila's Latin secretary, the age's résumés being what they were — was made master of soldiers by the emperor Julius Nepos (the East's last nominee, 474), rose against him within the year, watched Nepos sail for Dalmatia, and crowned his own young son: Romulus, called Augustulus, the little Augustus, a boy whose name yoked the founder of the city to the founder of the empire and whose reign of ten months existed for one transaction. Orestes was taken at Placentia and executed on 28 August; Ravenna fell within the week; and on 4 September 476 the boy-emperor abdicated before Odoacer, who — the sources agree on the mercy and the pension — spared him for his youth and beauty and retired him to the Lucullan villa on the bay of Naples with six thousand solidi a year: the last emperor of the West pensioned into the pleasure-palace of the Republic's most famous gourmet, a coincidence no dramatist would risk.

Outcome and critical assessment

Result and caution: successor kingdoms consolidated while areas of Roman government contracted or changed allegiance. Precise settlement terms and distributions of land and revenue are debated. A colored patch labeled "Visigothic kingdom, 418" can exaggerate the uniformity of early control. Hydatius supplies a regional witness, not an all-seeing western intelligence report.

Historical record: IR-VIII, chapters 4–6; Hydatius; Orosius, concluding narrative; Sidonius, letters and panegyrics for later Gaul.