Birthday Greetings #65

OK, hands up anyone who expected this blog entry to be entitled "Shooting Kittens for Food".

Nope, I just loved the title but I've played with it enough so that a blog entry could only be an anti climax.  So instead; happy birthday to Flavius Gratianus, Roman emperor known to us (or at least to me) as Gratian.  Gratian was the son of Valentinian who came to power when his predecessor made the mistake of eating mushrooms without asking who prepared the food.

Valentinian divided the empire in half (as was now more or less traditional) and settled down to rule the western half while tapping his brother Valens to take over in the east.  Gratian was made co-emperor by Daddy at the age of eight and took over the top job when Valentinian burst a blood vessel while yelling at some barbarian envoys (this is why you employ a foreign minister) at the ripe old age of fifteen.  A few days later he appointed his infant younger brother, Valentinian II, as co-emperor.  The last sentence is a diplomatic fiction (see, this is why you employ a foreign minister).  In actual fact Gratian was with his armies in Gaul and the armies on the Danube, irritated at the idea of an emperor with no connection to themselves simply appointed Valentinian II without any reference to the man who was supposed to be their boss.  Wisely Gratian accepted the situation, it was unlikely that Valentinian was going to have much input on policy for a number of years.

The first couple of years of Gratian's reign were occupied by the sort of murderous court struggles that take place when a young inexperienced monarch is learning his job.  Gratian learned fast though, the court struggles ended when he executed the leaders of both rival factions.  After which he turned over running of the empire to a convenient poet.  Gratian was definitely the man in charge though and he announced his new found maturity by slaughtering a bunch of handy barbarians (well his army and his generals did the slaughtering but Gratian was aware of the events in general terms).  He followed this up by personally leading his army across the Rhine (the last emperor to do so) and stomping the barbarians in their homeland.

All of this was well and good but there were grim tidings from the east.  Uncle Valens had got himself into a horrible mess.  Briefly speaking his empire had come down with a severe attack of Goths.  A combination of corrupt officials, self serving officials, incompetent officials and just officials generally had managed to convert a group of asylum seeking Goths into a massive, predatory army marauding through the Balkans and stealing all of the bits not nailed down.  Valens was nobodies idea of a genius but one sight of the Goths made him realise this was a threat that needed a full scale imperial response from both halves of the empire.  Dialing in his army he marched for the Balkans and sent a message asking Gratian if he wouldn't mind turning up with as many soldiers as he could spare.

Unfortunately Gratian, busy beating up the barbarians on the Rhine, was going to be somewhat late for the meeting.  On hearing this such good sense as he possessed deserted Valens and he took on the Goths single handed.  One brief afternoon later and the eastern empire had neither an army or an emperor.  Gratian was appalled.  His own army was more or less sufficient to handle the threats faced by the western Empire, now somehow he had to scrape together a force to defend the eastern one as well and, oh yes, appoint a replacement emperor.  The second part was significantly easier than the first.  A bloke named Theodosius was currently living in discreet retirement in Spain after falling foul of court intrigue.  He was a capable general and a distant relative so Gratian sent him an "all is forgiven" telegram and appointed him Emperor of the East.  When Theodosius saw the condition of the east he must have doubted whether anything had been forgiven at all.

Still between them Gratian and Theodosius managed to present a handful of successful skirmishes and some desperate negotiations as a major triumph.  To replace the eastern field army, most of whom were dead, they hired the nearest available source of manpower; the Goths.  So basically the Goths were rewarded for rampaging through the empire by being given government jobs and (most significantly) allowed to maintain their own rulership structure within the empire.  This meant that the empire suddenly had a powerful and largely independent ethnic minority living inside the borders.  Multiculturalism being in its infancy at the time this was not considered a good thing but its difficult to see what else Gratian and Theodosius could have done.

With something vaguely resembling peace established Gratian returned home to the west and things started going downhill.  Gratian was a Christian which was fine in the east but a lot of the west was still Pagan.  His father (despite being an ill tempered bastard) had treated the Pagans gently and generally given them little cause for concern.  Gratian, under the influence of a meddling priest (his name was St Ambrose of Milan if you're interested), took a distinctly harder, pro Christian line.  This delighted St Ambrose of Milan and pissed off a lot of other people.  Quite a lot of those other people had swords.

But Gratian wasn't finished.  All of his earlier decisiveness and battle skill seemed to desert him and he spent his time favouring Alan mercenaries over his other troops and lounging around dressed up as a barbarian warrior.  This would have been socially dubious at the best of times but when half the empire's army has just been slaughtered by a group of barbarian warriors dressing up like one was not exactly clever behaviour on the part of the emperor.  People started to mutter.  Specifically the soldiers started to mutter.  And what they muttered was "Wouldn't Magnus Maximus make a much better emperor?"

Magnus Maximus duly raised the standard of revolt and Gratian roused himself from hunting and playing dress ups to lead his army against him.  He met Magnus but no battle happened due to the fact that virtually his entire army deserted to the enemy, he really was unpopular by this time.  Following the example of his army Gratian deserted himself and fled to Lyon where one of his few remaining supporters turned out not to be and stabbed him to death.  He manged to achieve all of this before his twenty fifth birthday.