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CHAPTER 1
THE WESTERN EMPIRE, 425–76
peter heather
On 23 October 425 the emperor Valentinian III was installed as ruler of the
western half of the Roman empire. The act was a triumph for the
Theodosian dynasty, which had lost its grip on the west following the death
of Valentinian’s uncle, the emperor Honorius, on 15 August 423, and, at
first sight, a remarkable demonstration of imperial unity. The young
Valentinian (born on 2 July 419) had been taken to Constantinople by his
mother Galla Placidia even before Honorius died. Valentinian’s father,
Flavius (Fl.) Constantius, had done much to reconstitute the western
empire in the 410s. He then married Galla Placidia (Honorius’ sister) on 1
January 417 at the start of his second consulship, and had himself declared
co-emperor of the west in February 421. He died the following September,
before he could extract recognition of his self-promotion from
Constantinople. His death let loose an extended power struggle in the west,
which at first centred on controlling the inactive Honorius.
Placidia and Valentinian had fled east in the course of these disputes in
422. When, after Honorius’ death, power was seized by a high-ranking
member of the western bureaucracy, the notarius John, the eastern emperor,
Theodosius II, eventually decided to back Valentinian and the cause of
dynastic unity. Hence, in spring 425, a large eastern force – combining fleet
and field army – moved west, and despite the capture of its commander,
Ardaburius, quickly put an end to the usurper. Imperial unity was sealed by
the betrothal of Valentinian to the three-year-old Licinia Eudoxia, daughter
of Theodosius II. The whole sequence of events was recorded in considerable
detail by the historian Olympiodorus, who brought his story of a
twenty-year period of crisis and reconstruction in the western empire to a
happy conclusion with Valentinian’s installation.
Thus Olympiodorus, writing from an eastern standpoint (he was, in
fact, an eastern diplomat), might well have entitled his work ‘How the
West was Won’. 1 For the landowning Roman élites of the west, however,
Valentinian’s installation did little to address a series of problems, whose
1 Although we know he liked to refer to the work as ‘raw materials for a history’ (�λη συγγρα��ς):
Photius, Bibl. lxxx, trans. Blockley, p. 153.
1
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