Birthday Greetings #39

Well from east to west.  The last birthday greeting was to an ruler in the dying days of the Byzantine  empire.  Now we hop west several hundred miles and back a thousand years to give a single digit salute to a ruler in the dying days of the Roman empire (or Western Roman Empire if you want to get all accurate about it).  Unlike Manuel who was a conscientious, hard working and capable man today our greetings go out to a talentless, uninspiring nobody who shepherded the western empire towards its final collapse.

With that as an introduction Happy birthday to Valentinian III, Roman emperor and worthless waste of space.  Valentinian was the nephew of the equally deadbeat emperor Honorius.  He spent the first few years of his life in Constantinople whence his mother had fled to avoid the attentions of Honorius, her half-brother.  When Honorius died a jumped up civil servant seized the throne.  This galvanised Theodosius II, the eastern emperor into declaring Valentinian (then six years old) emperor and sent him with his mother and an army to the west.  A couple of years later with the usurper safely dead Valentinian settled down in Ravenna.  His mother ran the empire while he grew up.

There were problems with Huns, there were problems with Visigoths, there were problems with Vandals but the major problem was that the three top military commanders in the west would have much preferred killing each other to fighting any of them.  The Vandals left Spain and conquered Rome's North African provinces which was an utter disaster as they were the richest lands left to the western empire and provided the bulk of the tax revenue to say nothing of the grain that kept Rome fed.  From this point on Rome never had enough money to fund the army it needed to regain the provinces that would provide the money to fund the army.

By the time Valentinian had come of age (one hesitates to use the term "grown up") the problem of three military commanders vying for power had been resolved when one of them managed to kill the other two.  The survivor was Flavius Aetius who (perhaps not surprisingly) got on rather better with Huns and Visigoths than he did with other Romans.  Despite a chronic lack of troops and funds Aetius somehow managed to hold the line in Gaul defeating (in no particular order) Franks, Visigoths, Suebi and Burgundians.  Meanwhile Valentinian occupied himself having parties, practicing archery and seducing the wives of his senators.

Then Attila the Hun turned up.  That was a bit of a reality check.  Valentinian reacted to the danger by waving a hand at Aetius and murmuring "deal with that would you, there's a good chap."  Aetius did his best.  Scraping together what was left of the Roman military machine he cut deals with the Visigoths (now cheerfully ensconsed in Gaul since the Romans hadn't been able to chuck them out) and the Burgundians using the very obvious truth that Attila planned to murder everybody and thus wasn't just a Roman problem.  Commanding this somewhat heterogeneous army he met Attila at the Battle of Chalons.  Aetius didn't win the battle but he didn't exactly lose it either.  Both sides took heavy casualties but eventually the Huns muttered "sod this for a game of soldiers" and left so Aetius claimed it as a win. 

Valentinian was terribly pleased but somewhat less so when Attila attacked Italy the next year.  Fortunately Attila came down with an acute case of death and the empire was saved (for about another fourteen years or so).  After about twenty nine years on the throne without having injected himself once into the management of his disintegrating empire Valentinian suddenly decided to make a policy decision himself.  He murdered Aetius.  Granted Aetius was ambitious, ruthless and none too trustworthy but he was also the only halfway competent commander the western empire had.  Under him an outnumbered, underpaid pack of grumbling conscripts and unreliable barbarians had somehow managed to managed to keep the Roman eagle over much of Gaul, a little of Spain and had even gone toe to toe with Attila.

Valentinian didn't get much of a chance to decide whether his newfound decisiveness was going to be a habit or not.  A few months after his terminal demotion of Aetius a senator whose wife he raped persuaded a couple of Huns in Valentinian's bodyguard to avenge the murder of Aetius (did I mention he got on well with Huns when he wasn't killing them?).  This they did by beating Valentinian to death while he was training in the Campus Martius.  The empire would last another fourteen years, astonishingly they would manage to have another nine emperors during that period.  Apparently it was a temp job.