Birthday Greetings #75

Happy birthday to Valentinian I, Roman Emperor.  Also known as Valentinian the Great to certain arse kissing historians whose names will be mercifully excluded from this blog.  Valentinian was well, ok there's no getting around it, basically he was a foul tempered, bullying thug.  But one man's personality deficiencies are another man's imperial qualifications.  Valentinian took over the empire at a time when, shall we say, more enlightened personality traits might have been a hindrance.

He followed the usual career path for a Roman emperor, he served in the army and made quite a name for himself.  Just when he could have been looking forward to the rewards of higher office however his career hit a bit of a snag.  He was Christian.  This shouldn't have been too much of a problem, the empire had been at least notionally Christian for several decades by this time but unfortunately just when Valentinian's name started to get mentioned in the right places the then emperor (one Constantius by name) inconveniently died and his nephew, Julian, took over.  Julian had a bunch of interesting personality traits of his own one of which was Paganism.  Valentinian wasn't exactly put on the shelf but its fair to say that his career trajectory suddenly looked a lot lower than it had been.

Fortunately (for Valentinian and the history of Christianity in general) Julian got himself killed a couple of years later in an idiotic war with Persia.  Jovian, his replacement, was an easygoing Christian (easygoing being a relative term in those days) who seems to have got the job simply because he was standing nearby at the time.  Valentinian was back in the good books.  Then Jovian died.  Apparently he ate mushrooms that disagreed with him.  The propensity of Roman emperors to eat something that disagreed with them was quite remarkable.  With Jovian filling a pit the army (with, no doubt, a weary sense of deja vu) gathered to decide who was going to run the place now.  A number of names were put forward but Valentinian was handy and he got the nod.

There were a couple of conditions attached however.  Since Julian had marched a lot of the western army eastward for his Persian campaign things had got a little tense over in the west.  Various barbarian tribes (you know they're barbarians because the Romans tell us they were) had wandered across the borders and started sacking and looting stuff.  It was obvious that the first job of any freshly minted emperor would be to head west and persuade them to stop but the easterners didn't want to be without an emperor themselves so the army insisted that Valentinian appoint a colleague to look after the east while he was away.  Valentinian appointed his brother Valens whose principal qualification for the job was his tendency to do what he was told.

With a compliant colleague keeping his seat warm in Constantinople Valentinian headed west to deal with the barbarians, principally the Alemanni.  The Alemanni proved tough to beat as the generals Valentinian sent against them kept getting killed.  Eventually however the Romans beat the Alemanni up enough to persuade them to go home.  Valentinian then followed them into their own territory and won a rather pyrrhic victory over them.  It was certainly enough to make the Alemmani sue for peace (assassinating one of their leaders helped as well) which was handy as while all of this was going on Roman rule in Britain had disintegrated and the Saxons started raiding the bits of northern Gaul that the Alemanni had left standing.  The defeat (more or less) of the Alemanni allowed Valentinian to send troops (mainly recently recruited Alemanni) to Britain to restore Roman rule.  Against the Saxons he came up with the charming idea of suing for peace, persuading the Saxons to leave and then butchering them all on their way home. 

Then there was the whole revolt in Africa thing and the war with the Quadi tribe along the Danube.  In each case the war was caused by corrupt Roman officials abusing the locals and lining their pockets.  Polite protests were made, Valentinian responded to these in a mature and sensible way, he screamed at the envoys and sent in the army.  It is only fair to record that the general he sent to Africa while beating up the rebels also discovered the corruption that had caused the revolt and had the perpetrator arrested.  The Quadi had been driven to war by a local Roman official illegally building forts on their territory which didn't stop Valentinian from flogging them from one end of the Danube to the other.  Eventually the Quadi sued for peace and promised to provide recruits for the Roman army.  Unfortunately (for Valentinian) in an audience the envoys were granted they insisted on pointing out the original cause of the war.  Valentinian lost his temper, screamed threats and imprecations at them, burst a blood vessel and dropped dead on the spot.  This, incidentally is what a successful Roman emperor from the fourth century looks like.  Most of the others were worse.

In fairness Valentinian seems to have been a conscientious administrator whose principal fault was a habit of choosing lousy subordinates and then sticking to them even when everybody could see they were a bunch of grasping deadbeats.  He was noted for his religious tolerance although this is likely to be as much a factor of general disinterest as it was to any more positive attitude.  Certainly of all the emperors named Valentinian (there would eventually be three) he was definitely the best.