117 - Aurelian's Walls

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, Episode 117 Aurelian's Walls. During the big time question blowout that was the hundredth episode of the History of Rome, I listed my top five emperors as being Augustus, Diocletian, Trajan, Constantine, and Hadrian. This is a pretty conventional list, and apart from ordering and maybe subbing in Marcus Aurelius for someone, it's not going to cause much controversy. But one assumption that I made when putting the list together was that we were talking about career value, rather than peak value. An obvious similarity between all the guys in my top five is that they each ruled for a long, long time. Trajan put in the shortest service time of the five, and he still ruled for more than 19 years. You can make a big impact when you have 20 or more years to work with, and so it should come as no surprise that my greatest emperors are also some of the longest serving emperors. But that's true as long as we're talking about greatest in terms of career value.

See, when we sit around and debate who was the greatest pitcher of all time, or who was the greatest goalie of all time, or who was the greatest golfer of all time, we always need to make sure that everyone is on the same page. Are we talking about career value, or are we talking about peak value? That is, are we talking about the guy who did the most, scored the most, blocked the most, won the most of all time, or the guy who, at his peak, in his prime, was simply the best of the best? Maybe his career was cut short by injury, or he hit a wall when he turned 30 or whatever, but for a while, he was unhittable, undefendable, and unstoppable. Being the baseball fan that I am, I know the patron saint of peak value as Dodger pitcher Sandy Koufax. You will not see his name on the list of most strikeouts all time, or most wins all time, or most innings all time, but he put together five of the most dominant seasons that anyone has ever seen in the history of baseball. From 1962 to 1966, Sandy Koufax was the left hand of God, and his single season statistics during this period are absolutely mind boggling.

I'm going to stop now so I don't spend the rest of the episode gushing about Sandy Koufax, and really, this is just a very roundabout way of saying that Lucius Domitius Aurelianus may not have been around long enough to accumulate the kind of all-time stats you need to crack into the top of the emperor's career value list, but from 270 to 275, oh man, he was peak value defined. If you sometimes have trouble remembering which emperor was which during the 3rd century and what happened during whose reign, just remember that Aurelian is the Sandy Koufax of Roman emperors. The rest, hopefully, should fall into place.

Aurelian was in Thrace, serving as the captain of the mobile cavalry, and doing advanced work for the coming campaign against the Vandals, when Claudius died of the Cyprian plague in 270 AD. It did not take long for the officers of the imperial army to track down the dead emperor's and offer him supreme authority over the legions and, by extension, the empire. Back in Italy, though, a word of Claudius' death immediately fired up the ambitions of a man by the name of Marcus Aurelius Claudius Quintillus, the younger brother of the dead emperor. Despite their frequent protests to the contrary, the Romans were as much enamored with blood ties as anyone else, and as he took over the role of pater familius from his brother, Quintillus had an eye on taking over the role of emperor as well.

Now everyone and their mother knew that the Danube legions were going to turn to Aurelian, and there were many in the aristocracy who feared the ascension of old Sordenhand, the no-nonsense soldier, who would likely have little room at his table for the Senate, who, let's face it, were chock-full of nonsense. So they decided to back Quintillus' bid for the throne. And though the Danube legions were far and away the best of the legions, Quintillus, by virtue of his relation to Claudius, had been put in charge of the significant Italian garrisons, which included the Praetorian Guard, so it's not like his bid was backed by nothing but the Senate's hot air. Unfortunately for Quintillus, though, the Danube legions really were the best of the best, and they made his Italian army look like it was, well, made of little more than hot air.

Aurelian accepted the acclamation of the legions, and upon becoming emperor, well, one claimant anyway, his first move was to turn the armies around and march them back to Italy, to establish his authority over the home province. It was not an auspicious beginning to his reign, as he fell into the same trap that so many other 3rd century emperors had fallen into, leading the legions away from the frontier to consolidate power right at the moment when they were needed on the borders to consolidate victory. Claudius had put his foot into the backsides of both the Alamanni and the Goths, and a concentrated push against the remaining northern tribes might re-establish Roman power for a generation or more. With Claudius dead, though, that all now appeared to be in jeopardy. But Aurelian managed to smash his way out of the trap, rather than falling by the wayside like Decius and Aemilianus and Gallus before him. The northern tribes would take advantage of his withdrawal back to Italy, but they would come to regret it.

Quintillus gathered his troops at Aquileia in preparation for the assumed invasion of Aurelian, but as they met and readied themselves, it became obvious quickly that this was starting to look an awful lot like a suicide mission. Eventually, the Danube legions, under the command of Aurelian, are going to come pouring down out of the Alpine passes, and then what are we going to do? Defeat them in battle? I don't think so. Accounts differ as to the fate of Quintillus, that is, whether he was killed by his own troops or committed suicide, but they don't differ in having him dead as a doornail when Aurelian arrived in Italy. The troops Quintillus had gathered, needless to say, swore allegiance to Aurelian the first chance they got.

As with everything else to do with the third century, the chronology of Aurelian's reign is very confused, and though we know the things that he did, we cannot hope to know exactly the order in which he did them. Right off the bat though, it seems that he headed back to the Balkans, because the Vandals had taken his withdrawal of the legions as an open invitation to attack. The Vandals already posed enough of a threat that they were next up on Claudius' hit list when he died, and the disappearance of the imperial army only inflamed their passions, and before you could say the emperor is dead, long live the emperor, the Vandals were running amok in Pannonia. So after making sure Quintillus was dead and the troops in Italy were with him, Aurelian immediately charged back to the Balkans to push back the invading tribes.

Aurelian's strategy for dealing with the Vandals was to order that anything that could be consumed by men and horse be drawn inside the towns and cities of the provinces, to leave the invading Vandals without anything to eat. Once the lack of provisions began to drag the Vandals down, Aurelian swept in and crushed them in a quick battle. When the fighting was done, Aurelian allowed the remaining Vandals to return home, but with the stipulation that they hand over 2,000 cavalrymen to serve in the Roman army. With internal recruitment often coming up dry as a result of 20 years of famine, plague, and warfare, Aurelian knew that fresh recruits for his army were going to have to come from somewhere, if he planned to reunify the empire, and the German tribes began to look like an excellent source of soldiers. The Vandal horsemen would not be the last or even the largest levy Aurelian would lay on defeated northern tribes, and it was during his reign that the so-called Germanization of the legions, already underway in the form of temporary auxiliaries and sometime mercenaries, would really begin in earnest. On an ad hoc basis, the empire had always been able to get tribes from beyond the frontiers to fight for them, going back as far as Julius Caesar, but the process was about to become far more systematized and far more permanent.

While he was overseeing the Vandal retreat though, word came that the Alamanni, or likely just the Jethungi, one of their component tribes, was headed into Italy, the third time now in just over ten years that barbarians had set foot on the once perfectly safe peninsula of Italy. Leaving behind enough troops to remind the Vandals of their oath, Aurelian headed back to Italy, a trip that was becoming a nearly annual pilgrimage for the men of the Danube legions. When they reached the peninsula, Aurelian found that the Jethungi had overrun the Po Valley, sacked a number of towns, and were presently occupying the key city of Placentia.

Aurelian made straight for the city, but in his haste to meet the enemy, he never gave his men time to rest, and when they finally arrived at Placentia, the legionaries were exhausted. Well, actually, that's not true, they never even reached the city. The Jethungi had set an ambush for the Romans, and right at sunset, the weary legions were ready to make camp and go to bed, but the Germans sprang out of the woods and put Aurelian and his army to a humiliating flight. Scattered and disoriented, it took some time to piece the legions back together, and in the meantime, the Jethungi pointed themselves south, aiming directly for Rome, which understandably put the Roman Romans into a panic. The ambush at Placentia, though, was by no means a decisive victory for the Jethungi, and the embarrassment it caused Aurelian only ratcheted up his motivation to stop them.

He regrouped his forces and gave chase, this time keeping a close eye on the Jethungi's movements and waiting for the right moment to strike. He found his moment on the banks of the Mataurus River, where he broadsided the Germans and ran them into the water, which swept a good number of them down to a watery grave. The battered Jethungi sent word to the Emperor that they would like to parley for peace and safe passage home, but their attitude was not sufficiently deferential for Aurelian, and he rejected their entreaties. Without a guarantee of safe passage, the Germans were forced to head north, with Aurelian's army shadowing their movements and waiting again for the perfect opportunity to smash them up for good. This time, the opportunity came at Pava, where Aurelian forced the fleeing Jethungi into a pitch battle that they had no hope of winning.

Completely defeated, the remaining Germans surrendered their captured booty and begged for mercy, which this time Aurelian allowed, if they gave their fighting men over to the legions. If they wanted to live, they'd have to fight for the empire, not against it. Some reports have this new influx of soldiers coming in at anywhere between 20,000 and 40,000 men. This was not small potatoes to an imperial army badly weakened by the previous generation's strife.

With the frontiers finally quieted down a bit and Italy free of invaders, Aurelian was finally able to make his triumphal entry into Rome in early 271, almost a year into his reign. Sporting the new title Germanicus Maximus for his recent victories, it is likely that Aurelian was expecting, if not enthusiastic greetings from the citizens of Rome, then at least a warm embrace. But Aurelian's entry into the city seems to have actually sparked riots and street fighting not seen since the days of the Flavian capture of Rome, some 200 years before.

The causes for this mass uprising were threefold. First, there was the lingering effects of the panic caused by Aurelian's defeat at Placentia, which had everyone's nerves good and frayed. Second, was the disruption of the grain supply, which likely had been caused by Zenobia's of Egypt. And third, we have the massive fraud being undertaken daily at the main imperial mint in Rome, which is the reason the riots got started in the first place.

As I mentioned a few episodes back, debasement of the coinage was a major problem for the Roman economy, and the damage done by official imperial policy was being hugely exacerbated by the conduct of the workers at the mint when it came time to actually produce the debased coins. Even the nominal amount of silver that was supposed to be going into the coins was having a hard time finding its way into circulation, and instead kept getting routed into the pockets of the workers and administrators of the mint, and, of course, the pockets of any official tasked with overseeing the process. Aurelian had already signaled that he planned to revalue the coins back up to a respectable level, respectable for the times being 5% silver in the denarius, and the mint workers were justifiably worried that when Aurelian found out that their additional graft was making things even worse than he thought, that he would be, well, displeased. And given Aurelian's fearsome reputation, displeased meant that heads were likely to roll, literally.

So when Aurelian arrived in Rome, the mint workers took to the streets and began demonstrating against the new regime. Soon enough, they had ginned up their narrowly selfish cause into a general strike and full-blown street riots broke out, egged on by senators and equites who had backed Quintilis and who hoped to drive Aurelian out of power before he had a chance to do any damage to their interests. Angry at the sedition and unwavering in his commitment to putting down the mob, Aurelian called in regular troops to back up the urban cohorts who were clashing daily with the enraged citizenry. Thousands were dying on both sides, but pretty soon, order was restored as the overmatched civilians were driven back into their homes.

When the full story of how the mint riots got started came out, the citizens of Rome found Aurelian had passed well beyond displeased. A quick and ruthless purge followed that took the lives not just of the mint administrators, but also the senators and equites who had supported first their fraud and then their riots. When Aurelian's harsh justice was done being metered out, the emperor then took the unprecedented step of simply closing the Rome mint down for good. Though this extraordinary measure was undertaken specifically because Aurelian did not feel that he could now trust Rome to implement his reformist monetary policies, it had the effect of being one of the final nails in the coffin of Rome's political and economic relevance. A decade later, Diocletian would be able to come to power and avoid visiting the Eternal City for 19 years without any serious repercussions.

But though Rome's practical power was waning, its power as a symbolic force was still immense – even Diocletian could not deny that – and the recent string of Italian invasions had gotten Aurelian and his fellow officers thinking about how best to protect the living embodiment of the empire. For more than 200 years, the defensive strategy that had been invented by Augustus and brought to full realization by Hadrian had worked just fine – post-legionary garrisons on the frontiers, build walls to control cross-border movement, and focus militarily and politically on keeping the Rhine and Danube tribes divided from one another. For generation after generation, the strategy had worked out as well as anyone could have hoped, and with the frontier garrisons easily absorbing whatever foreign encroachments came along, there was little reason to worry about maintaining the local defenses of the towns and cities in the interior.

But times had changed. Squeezed between Rome on one side and rising eastern powers like the Huns on the other – and we'll get to them soon enough – the German tribes were now well down the road towards regional unification, which rendered the old divide-and-conquer technique obsolete. It also meant that the various legionary garrisons now faced enemy numbers far in excess of anything that they had had to face before or were equipped to handle. It used to be that a legion or three could stop up any leak with ease, but now torrents of Germans in the hundreds of thousands were blowing past the completely outnumbered garrisons with impunity. Compounding this problem was the fact that, for domestic political reasons, emperors could no longer afford to place the kind of troop numbers necessary to combat these supersized invasion forces under the command of some random general. If a general had enough troops to face down the Alamanni or the Goths, then he had enough troops to steal the throne.

And Gallienus had recognized this problem and made sure that he was always at the head of the most massive army the empire could put together, complete with its totally dominant mobile cavalry. But that meant that wherever this great imperial army wasn't, well, that is where the Germans would be. For Gallienus, and then Claudius, and now Aurelian, this meant an awful lot of rushing around trying to expel invaders after they had already invaded. In terms of grand strategy, it meant that the Romans had completely lost the initiative, which, yeah, was bad, but on a purely practical level, it really meant that the great cities of the empire, including Rome, were now completely vulnerable to attack. That the imperial army would maybe be able to arrive next month and try to reclaim the captured goods from some raid, and punish the raiders, usually came as cold comfort to the citizens of the raided city.

If the outer walls of the empire, those built by Domitian and Hadrian, were no longer enough to keep foreign invasion at bay, then the empire needed new walls. Walls that would allow communities to stave off defeat until the imperial army could arrive and drive the invaders off. What the empire needed was city walls. On their own initiative, many cities near the frontiers had already upgraded their defensive walls. But Aurelian now put the imperial stamp of approval on the idea of permanently fortified cities by ordering a massive wall circuit built around Rome itself.

As Rome's power had grown, so too had the city grown, and the old Servian walls, built in the aftermath of the Gallic sack way back in the 4th century BC, had ceased to function as any sort of real defensive barrier. The majority of the city now lay beyond its scope. And for essentially the entire imperial period, Rome was an unwalled city, and one so far from the front lines that no one gave it another thought. Now they were thinking about it all the time.

During his brief stay in Rome in 271, Aurelian wasted no time sketching out plans for a new fortification circuit that would include areas like, say, the Campus Martius, which once upon a time had been an empty field, but was now a bustling urban area that housed some of Rome's most important civic buildings, including the Pantheon and Pompey's Theatre. The new wall circuit, eventually dubbed the Aurelian Walls for obvious reasons, would grow to be 19 kilometers long, and eventually enclose an area of 13.7 square kilometers. As originally built, the walls were 3.5 meters thick and 8 meters high, though in the 400s AD, when the going really got rough, the height was doubled to 16 meters. Every hundred Roman feet there was a 26 meter tall guard tower, so that eventually there were over 350 of these fortified towers looming over the city. In the end, there were 18 heavily defended main gates that limited access to the city, and 5 posturned gates, which were essentially secret doors that allowed defenders to sneak in and out of the city without the enemy noticing.

Because Aurelian's overriding concern was that the walls be completed as fast as possible, his engineers were ordered to incorporate as many existing buildings as possible into the design, so as little new construction as possible would be needed. Normally, a project so overtly military as the Aurelian Walls would have been built by soldiers, but given the circumstances, Aurelian could not spare a single legionary, and he had to rely on civilian conscripts to do almost all the work, leading to irregularities in both the quality of the work and the aesthetic design of the different sections, as different crews worked double time to complete their designated zones. The whole circuit took just 5 years to complete, but even the record time Rome went from being naive and open to jaded and shut tight was too long for Aurelian, who died just before the last gaps were bridged. It was left to his successor Probus to formally dedicate the completed fortifications.

I have posted some pictures at thehistoryofrome.typepad.com to give you an idea of the size and scope of these impressive new defense systems. The Aurelian Walls were solid proof that Rome was undergoing a permanent transformation. For centuries the empire had been a bubble, with everyone living inside the bubble nonchalantly coming and going without a care in the world. Now that bubble was burst, and at any moment a barbarian horde could come pouring in over the horizon. The ever resilient Romans though had no intention of ceding their lives and territory simply because the old defensive lines were broken, and in place of the one huge bubble that they had lived in for so long, they built hundreds of tiny bubbles that dotted the provinces.

When Aurelian built his walls around Rome, it was a signal to every other urban center to do the same. So now, though the barbarians were still able to cross the borders of the empire with ease, they would no longer find easy pickings on the other side when they did so. As the frontiers of the empire were reduced to mere theory, the Romans drew back the practical lines of defense right to their city limits. It was a strategic retreat that allowed Rome to regain the initiative. It said to the barbarians, okay, you're here, but now what are you going to do? We've hidden everything of value behind these walls, and you completely stink at siege warfare.

Next week, Aurelian will make his next move. Confident that he had set the center of the empire on a path to true security, he cast his sights on the great prize that had been dancing just out of Rome's reach for the last decade, the reunification of her empire. Zenobia's capture of Egypt was absolutely unacceptable, and despite the official partnership that existed between Rome and Palmyra, there was no doubt that the two powers were now headed towards war. Aurelian planned to not just initiate the final conflict, but to win it outright. Palmyra would be laid low, and the east would be brought back into the empire. Of this, Aurelian had absolutely no doubt.