Terp Tritzum

[Robert Vermaat]

Valentinianus who was coronated in 425.

I have him coronated in 424

Please... crowned! ;-)

Actually I've written it down in my [strike]chronicle [/strike]timeline as " Flavius Placidius Valentinianus (Valentinian III), son of Galla Placidia and Constantius III, is elevated to Augustus in Thessalonica, only 5 years old. "
http://www.fectio.org.uk/articles/timeline5th.htm

[Flavivs Aetivs]

I said probably with the Frisiavones, a lot of tribes were determined by whether they had or hadn't signed a treaty with Rome and whom the treaty was signed with, but again I said this doesn't have to be true to distinguish them. They could have simply been another tribe or another name.

You cannot truly call the Chauchi "Proto-Saxons" because you have to remember that these were confederations - tribes joined and left them all the time.

The Placidi could have been raised in 414, hadn't thought of that. I still think 419 is more likely as Galla Placidia did not have Valentinianus in her name. I also said 425 because he was crowned in Ravenna in 425, and the Placidi are a Western set of units.

The Salian franks may have still remained in the area, but they couldn't claim the area as theirs as the Romans had control of it. They wouldn't overrun it again until after Aetius' death - Sidonius and Hydatius record that the Suebes capture Spain, the Visigoths expand through the rest of Aquitaine, and the Franks and Alemanni come back accross the Rhine in 455 because there was no capable general to oppose them. Also Merovaeus (Merovech) is still a conjectured name - we know the younger son of Chlodio became the King right after Chalons, but he was the adopted son of Aetius and did not oppose Roman dominion under Aetius' reign. After his reign he probably thought he had a right to that land to avenge the death of his father in law. Furthermore, he was not the Magister Militum per Gallias after Aetius was bumped up to MUM Junior in 429, because either Avitus or Litorius (more likely Avitus) became MUM per Gallias in 429 or 430. After Litorius whom was MUM per Gallias in 435-439, its likely Aegidius became MUM per Gallias and Majoran a comes of Gaul.

As to Alan settlement in Gaul, the Chronica Gallia 452, and other sources, record Goar (who had turned to the Roman side in 406) settling in the area between the Loire and the Seine based out of Aurelianum in 442.

Augustodunum is Clermont (Sidonius Apollinaris' city) where Alans under Sambida were settled in 440 and remained there until the 470's (Sidonius states that cataphracts under command of an Alan whose name I can't remember fought off the Visigoths from Clermont).

The Notitia Digntiatum lists Sarmatians in Paris (possibly Goar) and Au... (trails off, incomplete) which might be Aurelianum.

[ValentinianVictrix]

I understood that the Sarmatians were conquered by Constantius II who placed his own candidate for king to rule over them? This then led the Limogantes to rebel as Constantius was about to give a speech in front of them, causing the Roman troops present to butcher them.

I think the first time we hear of Alans in Roman service were those Alans who appear to have formed Gratian's personal guard and may have been the cause of his death.

Not much to do with the original topic though I fear...

[Michael Kerr]

Magister Militum Flavius Aetius wrote:

As to Alan settlement in Gaul, the Chronica Gallia 452, and other sources, record Goar (who had turned to the Roman side in 406) settling in the area between the Loire and the Seine based out of Aurelianum in 442.

There is some dispute on whether Goar & Eochar are the same man. Goar & his followers defected to Romans from Alan king Respendial like you said in 406AD. Later on in 411AD he & Gunthiarius who was chief of the Burgundians supported the proclamation of Jovinus as emperor in Mundiacum. The 36 years difference between the dates you mentioned would indicate that Eochar was a different king, maybe his successor but if he was the same man he must have been a tough old rooster & it is not impossible that they were the same man if you look at the example of Scythian King Ateas who died on the battlefield leading his army against Philip II in the summer of 339 BC aged 90.
Regards
Michael Kerr

[Flavivs Aetivs]

Even if Goar and Eochar were seperate, they were both dead by the time of the battle of Chalons.

I got rid of the article about the Notitia, its something for another paper.

[Robert Vermaat]

I said probably with the Frisiavones, a lot of tribes were determined by whether they had or hadn't signed a treaty with Rome and whom the treaty was signed with, but again I said this doesn't have to be true to distinguish them. They could have simply been another tribe or another name.

Indeed. It’s even possible they are same tribe.

You cannot truly call the Chauchi "Proto-Saxons" because you have to remember that these were confederations - tribes joined and left them all the time.

I did not come up with the concept. Anyway, you’re thinking of tribal identity, but the reason to call them ‘proto-Saxons’ is functional - because they raided the Roman coast as the Saxons did later.

I'm going to reply about Merovech in another thread, that one sounds like a new discussion about the Franks in Gaul.

[Robert Vermaat]

As to Alan settlement in Gaul, the Chronica Gallia 452, and other sources, record Goar (who had turned to the Roman side in 406) settling in the area between the Loire and the Seine based out of Aurelianum in 442.
Augustodunum is Clermont (Sidonius Apollinaris' city) where Alans under Sambida were settled in 440 and remained there until the 470's (Sidonius states that cataphracts under command of an Alan whose name I can't remember fought off the Visigoths from Clermont).
The Notitia Digntiatum lists Sarmatians in Paris (possibly Goar) and Au... (trails off, incomplete) which might be Aurelianum.

It might and it might not. And the fact that there were Sarmatians in paris by 294 does not mean that this is similar to Alans in either Aurelianum or Augustodunum. I see no base for a hypothesis that either presence (NOT: settlement) should mean that that particular part of the ND was supposedly updated. Especially the fluid nature of Goar’s Alans (who were also used in Brittany) means that they were presumably not settled anywhere. Unlike the sarmatians, who were settled as farmers, securing their inability to be used as cavalry, sadly.

I recall Sidonius writing about Ecdicius fighting off the Goths, but he neither mentioned cataphracts nor Alans. Ecdicius was a well-known Gallic nobleman.

[Flavivs Aetivs]

I remember reading Ecdicius was of Alan descent. I'll go back, I have a copy of his letters to Ecdicius.

Well all theories can be discounted. We know some Alans of Goar (Eochar) were actually settled in the area between Armorica and Aureliani, as there is a record of conflict between Roman and the incoming Alanic aristocracy, who eventually drove the roman possesores out.

[Michael Kerr]

Only have Wikipedia as a source but it says Ecdicius was the son of deposed emperor Avitus & brother-in-law of Sidonius.
Regards
Michael Kerr

[Flavivs Aetivs]

That is correct according to Sidonius letters.

" To [his brother-in-law] Ecdicius*
c. A.D. 470

[1] YOUR countrymen of Auvergne suffer equally from two evils. 'What are those?' you ask. Seronatus' presence, and your own absence. Seronatus----his very name first calls for notice; 1 I think that when he was so named, a prescient fortune must have played with contradictions, as our predecessors did, who by antiphrasis used the root of 'beautiful' in their word for war, the most hideous thing on earth; and, with no less perversity, the root of mercy in their name for Fate, because Fate never spares. This Catiline of our day is just returned from the region of the Adour to blend in whole confusion the fortune and the blood of unhappy victims which down there he had only pledged himself in part to shed. [2] You must know that his long-dissembled savagery comes daily further into the light. His spite affronts the day; his dissimulation was abject as his arrogance is servile. He commands like a despot; no tyrant more exacting than he, no judge more peremptory in sentence, no barbarian falser in false witness. The livelong day he goes armed from cowardice, and starving from pure meanness. Greed makes him |35 formidable, and vanity cruel; he continually commits himself the very thefts he punishes in others. To the universal amusement he will rant of war in a civilian company, and of literature among Goths. Though he barely knows the alphabet, he has the conceit to dictate letters in public and the impudence to revise them under the same conditions.

[3] All property he covets he makes a show of buying; but he never thinks of paying, nor does he trouble to furnish himself with deeds, knowing it hopeless to prove a title.1 In the council-chamber he commands, but in counsel he is mute. He jests in church and preaches at table; snores on the bench, and breathes condemnation in his bedroom. His actions are filling the woods with dangerous fugitives from the estates, the churches with scoundrels, the prisons with holy men. He cries the Goths up and the Romans down; he prepares illusions for prefects and collusions with public accountants. He tramples under foot the Theodosian Code to set in its place the laws of a Theodoric,2 raking up old charges to justify new imposts. [4] Be quick, then, to unravel the tangle of affairs that makes you linger; cut short whatever causes your delay. Our people are at the last gasp; freedom is almost dead. Whether there is any hope, or whether all is to be despair, they want you in their midst to lead them. If the State is powerless to succour, if, as rumour says, the Emperor Anthemius is without resource, our nobility is determined to follow your lead, and give up their country or the hair of their heads.3 Farewell. |36

* Partly translated by Fertig, Part i, p. 20."

[Flavivs Aetivs]

"III.

To his brother-in-law Ecdicius
A. D. 474

[1] THERE never was a time when my people of Clermont needed you so much as now; their affection for you is |67 a ruling passion for more than one reason. First, because a man's native soil may rightly claim the chief place in his affection; secondly, because you were not only your countrymen's joy at birth, but the desire of their hearts while yet unborn. Perhaps of no other man in this age can the same be said; but the proof of the statement is that as your mother's time advanced, the citizens with one accord fell to checking every day as it went by. [2] I will not dwell on those common things which yet so deeply stir a man's heart, as that here was the grass on which as an infant you crawled, or that here were the first fields you trod, the first rivers you swam, the first woods through which you broke your way in the chase. I will not remind you that here you first played ball and cast the dice, here you first knew sport with hawk and hound, with horse and bow. I will forget that your schooldays brought us a veritable confluence of learners and the learned from all quarters, and that if our nobles were imbued with the love of eloquence and poetry, if they resolved to forsake the barbarous Celtic dialect, it was to your personality that they owed all. [3] Nothing so kindled their universal regard for you as this, that you first made Romans of them and never allowed them to relapse again.1 And how should the vision of you ever fade from any patriot's memory as we saw you in your glory upon that famous day, when a crowd of both sexes and every rank and age lined our half-ruined walls to watch you cross the space between us and the enemy? At midday, and right across the middle of the plain, you brought your little company of eighteen 2 safe through some thousands of the Goths, a feat which |68 posterity will surely deem incredible. [4] At the sight of you, nay, at the very rumour of your name, those seasoned troops were smitten with stupefaction; their captains were so amazed that they never stopped to note how great their own numbers were and yours how small. They drew off their whole force to the brow of a steep hill; they had been besiegers before, but when you appeared they dared not even deploy for action. You cut down some of their bravest, whom gallantry alone had led to defend the rear. You never lost a man in that sharp engagement, and found yourself sole master of an absolutely exposed plain with no more soldiers to back you than you often have guests at your own table. [5] Imagination may better conceive than words describe the procession that streamed out to you as you made your leisurely way towards the city, the greetings, the shouts of applause, the tears of heartfelt joy. One saw you receiving in the press a veritable ovation on this glad return; the courts of your spacious house were crammed with people. Some kissed away the dust of battle from your person, some took from the horses the bridles slimed with foam and blood, some inverted and ranged the sweat-drenched saddles; others undid the flexible cheek-pieces of the helmet you longed to remove, others set about unlacing your greaves. One saw folk counting the notches in swords blunted by much slaughter, or measuring with trembling fingers the holes made in cuirasses by cut or thrust. [6] Crowds danced with joy and hung upon your comrades; but naturally the full brunt of popular delight was borne by you. You were among unarmed men at last; but not all your arms would have availed to extricate |69 you from them. There you stood, with a fine grace suffering the silliest congratulations; half torn to pieces by people madly rushing to salute you, but so loyally responsive to this popular devotion that those who took the greatest liberties seemed surest of your most generous acknowledgements. [7] And finally I shall say nothing of the service you performed in raising what was practically a public force from your private resources, and with little help from our magnates. I shall not tell of the chastisement you inflicted on the barbaric raiders, and the curb imposed upon an audacity which had begun to exceed all bounds; or of those surprise attacks which annihilated whole squadrons with the loss of only two or three men on your side. Such disasters did you inflict upon the enemy by these unexpected onsets, that they resorted to a most unworthy device to conceal their heavy losses. They decapitated all whom they could not bury in the short night-hours, and let the headless lie, forgetting in their desire to avoid the identification of their dead, that a trunk would betray their ruin just as well as a whole body. [8] When, with morning light, they saw their miserable artifice revealed in all its savagery, they turned at last to open obsequies; but their precipitation disguised the ruse no better than the ruse itself had concealed the slaughter. They did not even raise a temporary mound of earth over the remains; the dead were neither washed, shrouded, nor interred; but the imperfect rites they received befitted the manner of their death. Bodies were brought in from everywhere, piled on dripping wains; and since you never paused a moment in following up the rout, they had to be taken into houses which were then hurriedly set |70 alight, till the fragments of blazing roofs, falling in upon them, formed their funeral pyres. [9] But I run on beyond my proper limits; my aim in writing was not to reconstruct the whole story of your achievements, but to remind you of a few among them, to convince you how eagerly your friends here long to see you again; there is only one remedy, at once quick and efficacious, for such fevered expectancy as theirs, and that is your prompt return. If, then, the entreaties of our people can persuade you, sound the retreat and start homeward at once. The intimacy of kings is dangerous; 1 court it no more; the most distinguished of mankind have well compared it to a flame, which illuminates things at a short distance but consumes them if they come within its range. Farewell."

[Michael Kerr]

Sorry to butt in on this discussion but I get interested when Alans are mentioned. In regard to the settlement/deployment of Alans in Gaul. Could there have been a few groups of Alans roaming around Gaul during the time of Aetius? For example I think the group led by Sambida was settled on deserted lands around the town of Valentina (Valence) in 440AD. As the area was deserted maybe Sambida's group were auxiliary veterans being given unused land as a reward for service to Rome & being available for local military service in emergency situation. (surmising here). However 2 years later a group of Alans with an unnamed leader was given land in Transalpine Gaul by Aetius to be shared out with local inhabitants, who opposed this so the Alans subjected them by way of arms and appropriated the land by force after driving them out. This second group could have been led by Eochar & it sounds like they were possibly used to put down or punish a local revolt and enforce Aetius's will in Transalpine Gaul with typical Alan strong-arm tactics. So if Aetius wanted to quell the revolt of the Bacaudae in Amorica in 447/8 AD these men would be the obvious choice to get the job done. Heiric's description although poetic sums up the plight of the Amoricans when he said Aetius,

tired of the customs & crimes of that arrogant people, allowed the rough Alans to ravage them; their king was Eochar, wilder than any beast.

As to whether Alan groups settled in their new lands or just maintained a presence I think Aetius with the loss of African & Spanish revenues would look for ways to rebuild his tax base so with the settled tribes I suppose that if they didn't pay taxes at first they would still be obliged to supply & equip their own forces when needed to offset his military budget. So I think they would have settled down & like a lot of barbarians wanted to live the Roman experience. If Sangipan succeeded Eochar it would be a good bet that despite the bias of Jordanes in their role at battle of Chalons, I don't think Aetius shared that opinion of the Alans resolve as he placed them in the centre of his line & once the battle started his other forces would have been too busy fighting their respective opponents to worry about Alans reliability & to be realistic there would be nothing they could do to prevent it anyway once battle began & that could have been disastrous for allies as their remaining forces would be divided and destroyed piecemeal. Of course these are just my thoughts & hope they help contribute to the discussion.
Regards
Michael Kerr

[Flavivs Aetivs]

Those are the two groups I am referring too, except they were not settled in transalpine gaul (which didn't exist anymore) but in the area between the seine and the loire in Armorica. Both were settled there as reward for their service to Aetius.