0:00 You hear the creek down there?0:02 It's running a little high today.0:05 Had some rain up in the holler last night.0:08 The water level changes, but the creek itself...0:12 it's always there.0:14 For eight hundred years, the city of Rome was like that for the folks living in that part of the world.0:22 A constant.0:23 The city that couldn't fall.0:25 And then, one August morning in the year 410, it did.0:30 Now, we’ve talked before about that terrible mess in the Third Century, how the whole Roman world nearly came apart at the seams like a cheap suit.0:42 They patched it up, but some patches...0:45 well, they don't hold forever.0:47 This is the story of one of those patches giving way.0:52 And it's a story that shows that sometimes the biggest, most dramatic collapse doesn't start with a bang.1:00 It starts with a key turning in a lock.1:03 I know how that sounds.1:05 But hang on.1:06 To understand what happened, you gotta understand the men at the heart of it.1:13 On one side, you got the Roman Emperor, a fella named Honorius.1:18 He wasn't what you'd call a commanding figure.1:22 He was a young man who'd been made emperor when he was just a boy.1:27 He didn't even live in Rome.1:29 He'd moved the whole government to a city called Ravenna, which was basically a swamp with big walls.1:38 Easy to defend.1:39 He spent most of his time, the stories say, raising chickens.1:44 On the other side, you got a man named Alaric.1:48 Alaric was a Goth.1:49 Now, when we hear 'Goth' or 'Visigoth', we tend to picture some wild-eyed fella in a bearskin, waving a club.1:58 But that ain't who Alaric was.2:01 Not at all.2:01 The Goths had been living alongside the Empire, and often inside it, for generations.2:08 They were farmers and soldiers.2:11 Alaric himself had served in the Roman army.2:15 He'd fought for the emperor.2:17 He knew how Rome worked.2:19 And that was the whole problem, you see.2:22 Alaric and his people, the Visigoths, they didn't want to destroy the Roman Empire.2:29 They wanted to be part of it.2:31 They wanted what other folks who served the empire got: land to settle, food for their families, and a title for their leader.2:42 A place at the table.2:43 Alaric thought he'd earned it.2:46 He wanted to be a proper Roman general, a Magister Militum.2:51 But Honorius, and the politicians around him in that swampy fortress of Ravenna, they kept saying no.2:59 They looked down on Alaric.3:01 To them, he was a barbarian, no matter how many Roman battles he'd won.3:07 They'd make a deal, then break it.3:10 They'd promise him land in Gaul, then change their minds.3:15 They treated him like a dog you could kick whenever you felt like it.3:20 Whoo, boy.3:21 That was a mistake.3:23 Kicking a dog is one thing.3:25 Kicking a dog that leads forty thousand armed and hungry men...3:30 that's another thing entirely.3:33 So Alaric did what any man with a big army and no other options would do.3:38 He marched on the source of the money.3:42 He marched on Italy.3:43 He wasn't even trying to sack the city of Rome at first.3:48 He was just trying to get their attention.3:51 It was like a union negotiation, but with swords.3:55 He blockaded the roads, cut off the grain shipments coming up from the port at Ostia.4:02 He put a stranglehold on the city.4:05 This was the first siege, back in 408.4:08 And inside Rome?4:10 It was bad.4:10 The city was a world unto itself, maybe eight hundred thousand people packed inside those famous Aurelian Walls.4:20 All of 'em dependent on food that came from somewhere else.4:24 When Alaric cut the supply lines, the city started to starve.4:30 The senators, the rich folks, they sent messengers out to talk.4:35 Alaric told them his price.4:37 He wanted all their gold, all their silver, all their fine silk clothes, and all their barbarian slaves.4:45 One of the Roman envoys, he got real indignant.4:49 He asked Alaric, "If you take all that, what will be left for us?" And Alaric...4:56 he just looked at him and said, "Your lives." So they paid.5:01 They stripped the gold from the pagan temples, melted down statues.5:06 They paid a ransom so big it nearly broke the city.5:10 And Alaric, true to his word, he took the money and pulled his army back.5:16 For a little while.5:18 See, the money wasn't the point.5:21 The money was just leverage.5:23 Alaric STILL wanted a permanent deal.5:26 He wanted land for his people.5:28 A home.5:29 And the government in Ravenna STILL wouldn't give it to him.5:34 The main fella advising the emperor, a man named Olympius, he was dead set against making any kind of treaty with a Goth.5:44 They just kept stalling, insulting him, underestimating him.5:49 So in 409, Alaric came back.5:51 A second siege.5:52 This time, he was smarter.5:54 He didn't just blockade the city.5:57 He captured the port of Ostia, where all the grain was stored.6:02 Now he had all the food, and Rome had none.6:06 He even propped up his own emperor, a puppet senator named Priscus Attalus, just to try and force Honorius's hand.6:15 It didn't work.6:16 Honorius, safe in his swamp, just wouldn't budge.6:20 His puppet emperor turned out to be useless.6:24 So Alaric gave up on that, deposed his own puppet, and tried one last time to make a deal with the real emperor.6:33 They were supposed to meet, just outside Ravenna.6:37 Alaric rode out with a small guard.6:40 And what happened?6:42 He was ambushed by a Roman general—a rival Goth, no less—who hated him.6:47 That was the last straw.6:49 The betrayal was too much.6:52 Alaric had tried to play by the rules.6:55 He'd tried to negotiate.6:57 He'd tried politics.6:58 He'd been a soldier, a diplomat, a kingmaker.7:02 And at every turn, the Romans had cheated him, insulted him, and tried to kill him.7:09 He was done asking.7:10 He turned his army around and marched on Rome for the third, and final, time.7:17 This is the part that always gets me.7:20 For eight hundred years, no foreign army had breached the walls of Rome.7:26 Not since some other Gauls did it way back in 390 B.C.7:30 Those walls were more than just stone and mortar.7:34 They were a symbol.7:36 They were the line between civilization and everything else.7:41 They meant safety.7:42 Permanence.7:43 And in August of 410, Alaric's army was camped outside those walls.7:48 The city was starving again.7:51 Desperate.7:52 People were dying in the streets.7:54 There was no hope of an army coming to save them.7:58 The emperor was safe in Ravenna, with his chickens.8:03 The city was on its own.8:04 Now you stay with me here.8:07 The greatest siege in a thousand years, you'd think it would end with some heroic battle, right?8:14 Catapults, siege towers, fighting on the walls, the whole business.8:20 It didn't happen that way.8:22 On the night of August 24th, the Salarian Gate on the northeast side of the city swung open.8:30 Just...8:30 opened.8:31 There was no great battle.8:33 No final assault.8:34 Someone on the inside unlocked the gate and let the Visigoths in.8:40 The old records are a little fuzzy on who, or why.8:44 Some say it was servants, slaves, who were starving and figured they had nothing to lose.8:51 Maybe they were Gothic slaves who felt more loyalty to Alaric's men than to the masters who were letting them starve.9:01 Some say a wealthy lady named Proba, seeing the suffering of the people, ordered her servants to open the gates just to end the agony of the siege.9:13 We'll never know for sure.9:15 But that's the thing, isn't it?9:18 The walls didn't fail.9:19 The society inside them did.9:22 The great bastion of Western Civilization wasn't conquered from the outside.9:28 It was unlocked from within.9:30 It's like a track washout.9:32 The rails are still there, looking solid, but the ground underneath 'em has been washed away by slow, steady erosion.9:42 The first heavy train that comes along...9:45 well.9:46 That train ain't making it to the depot.9:49 The city of Rome was a heavy train, and the ground underneath it had been washing out for a hundred years.9:58 What Alaric's men did next...10:00 it's called the Sack of Rome, and it was brutal.10:04 For three days, they looted the city.10:07 They took gold and valuables.10:09 They burned some buildings, including the homes of the rich senators who had snubbed their leader.10:17 There was violence, for sure.10:20 This was an army that hadn't been paid, that had been hungry and angry for years.10:27 But it wasn't the mindless destruction you might imagine.10:31 Alaric gave specific orders.10:33 He was a Christian—a different kind of Christian than the Romans, but a Christian nonetheless.10:41 He ordered that the great churches, like the basilicas of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, were to be untouched.10:50 They were declared places of sanctuary.10:53 And anyone, Roman or Goth, who made it there would be safe.10:58 And by and large, his men obeyed.11:01 They weren't trying to wipe the city off the map.11:05 They were...11:06 collecting a debt.11:07 With interest.11:08 A right smart amount of interest.11:11 After three days, they left.11:13 They marched south, taking with them everything they could carry, including the emperor's own half-sister, Galla Placidia, as a high-value hostage.11:25 Alaric's plan was to cross over to Africa, the breadbasket of the empire.11:31 A new home for his people.11:34 He never made it.11:35 A storm wrecked his fleet, and a few months later, in southern Italy, Alaric—the man who humbled Rome—died of a fever.11:45 He was just forty years old.11:47 His followers buried him, the story goes, by diverting a river, burying him and his treasure in the riverbed, and then letting the river flow back over.11:59 His grave has never been found.12:02 The physical damage to Rome was repaired pretty quick.12:06 The real damage was to the idea of Rome.12:10 The city had been the heart of the world for so long, people thought it was eternal.12:17 Invincible.12:18 The sack proved it wasn't.12:20 It sent a shockwave across the empire.12:23 A holy man, Saint Jerome, heard the news way off in Bethlehem.12:28 He wrote, "The city which had taken the whole world was itself taken." A fella named Augustine, over in North Africa, he spent the next thirteen years writing a book, a massive book called The City of God, trying to make sense of it all.12:47 His point was that the city of man can fall, but the City of God is eternal.12:54 He had to remind people that their real faith shouldn't be in walls of stone, but in something else.13:02 That's how big a deal this was.13:04 They needed a whole new way of looking at the world because the old one had just been shattered.13:12 And that, friend, is why you check the record.13:16 The fall of Rome wasn't one single event.13:19 It was a long, slow crumbling.13:22 But the sack in 410 was the moment everyone heard the cracking sound.13:28 It was the moment the idea of "forever" died.13:31 It makes you think, don't it?13:34 About the things we count on to be permanent.13:37 The institutions, the ideas, the ways of life we think will always be there, solid as the bedrock in these hills.13:47 History shows us that nothing built by human hands is truly permanent.13:52 And when the walls we trust in finally do get breached, it's almost never because of the enemy hammering on the outside.14:02 It's usually because something on the inside has already given way.14:08 Well.14:08 That is about the size of it.
