On this day in AD 455: the beginning of the end for Rome

On June 2, 455, King Gaiseric and the Vandals sack Rome. Rome looted for 14 days. From the article:

"On this day in AD 455: the beginning of the end for Rome
On 2 June AD 455, Gaiseric and his Vandals arrived at Rome’s gates. What followed was two weeks that shook the world.

At least that’s how it’s often told. In fact, it was a lot less dramatic.

The Vandals were the second group of “barbarians” to sack Rome. The first attack had come on 24 August 410, when Alaric the Visigoth had looted the city for three days. Even though Alaric was a Christian, and the capital of the Western Roman Empire had moved to Ravenna, his assault had genuinely sent shock waves around the Mediterranean and throughout the Western and Eastern Roman Empires. So by the time of Gaiseric and his Vandals in 455, people had seen it all before.

On 17 March that year, the Roman senator Petronius Maximus became Western Emperor, the day after assassinating Emperor Valentinian III. Eager to consolidate his power, he forced the murdered emperor’s widow, Licinia Eudoxia, into marrying him.

Hundreds of miles away, the Vandals were a Germanic people that had fled the Huns and settled in southern Spain in AD 409.

From there, under a leader named Gaiseric, in 429 they migrated into north Africa, where they defeated the local rulers and forces sent by the Eastern and Western Roman Empires.

In 435, they became foederati, or treaty allies, of Rome, but four years later Gaiseric rebelled and captured Carthage. By the time he had finished his expansion drive, he was in control of large swathes of Tunisia and Algeria, along with the Balearics, Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia.

Back in Rome, one of Emperor Valentinian III and Licinia Eudoxia’s daughters, Eudocia, had been betrothed to Gaiseric’s son. This arrangement had been agreed by Valentinian and Gaiseric in a move to cement peace between Rome and north Africa. However, now Valentinian was dead and Petronius Maximus was at the helm, the new emperor had other ideas. He broke off the existing arrangement and instead married Eudocia to his own son. Unsurprisingly, Gaiseric took it as just the excuse he needed to march on Rome.

Petronius Maximus soon heard of the massing Vandal army, and decided his best option was to flee. Unfortunately, on 31 May 455, the citizens of Rome caught him in the act, and stoned him to death, pulled him apart, then threw his remains into the Tiber. He had ruled for a mere two and a half months.

Although the Vandals are usually described as barbarians, they were Christians. According to Saint Prosper of Aquitaine, who was writing at the time, Pope Saint Leo I — who had memorably met with Attila the Hun and persuaded him not to invade Italy — now intervened, and specifically requested Gaiseric not to slaughter the people of Rome or raze its buildings to the ground.

Obligingly, the Vandals largely fell in with the Pope’s request. They spared the majority of the city’s people and buildings, but systematically ransacked and plundered the former capital for anything not nailed down. Although they refrained from mass slaughter, they seized thousands of the city’s inhabitants and sold into the slave markets of North Africa.

When the raiding was done, among the many trophies Gaiseric carried off were the newly re-widowed Licinia Eudoxia and her two daughters, Eudocia and Placidia. Eudocia — who had been at the centre of the original marriage insult — was promptly married off to Gaiseric’s son, as originally planned.

The rampages of Alaric and Gaiseric through the Eternal City were two of the final nails in its coffin
The date of Alaric’s earlier sack of 410 is sometimes given as the date of the fall of Rome. Gaiseric’s sack of 455 is also often cited. Perhaps, most accurately, the true date is 476, when Romulus Augustulus, last Roman Emperor of the West, was overthrown by the Germanic barbarian Odoacer. Whichever date is chosen, there is no doubt that the rampages of Alaric and Gaiseric through the Eternal City were two of the final nails in its coffin.

It was, however, a time when peoples came and went. In 533, the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian sent his leading general, Belisarius, into north Africa to seek revenge on the Vandals. In an unexpected turn around, he comprehensively wiped the Vandals out of history in a single campaigning season."