Visigoths under Alaric sack Rome
- Date
- 24 August 410 CE
- Category
- Military & conflict
- Region
- Italy (Rome)
- Era
- Classical Antiquity
- Significance
On 24 August 410 CE the Visigoths under their king Alaric entered Rome and plundered the city for three days, the first time Rome had fallen to a foreign enemy in nearly 800 years.
The sack followed years of failed negotiations with the western court at Ravenna, where the emperor Honorius repeatedly refused Alaric's demands for land and subsidies for his people. Though the looting was relatively restrained by ancient standards and Christian basilicas were largely spared, the symbolic shock reverberated across the Mediterranean. Alaric carried off treasure and the imperial hostage Galla Placidia, sister of Honorius, before dying in southern Italy within months. The fall of the 'Eternal City' stunned contemporaries and prompted Augustine of Hippo to write 'The City of God', defending Christianity against pagans who blamed the disaster on the abandonment of the old gods. While Rome had ceased to be the administrative capital, its sack laid bare the weakness of the Western Roman Empire and accelerated the loss of its provinces, becoming a defining marker of the transition from classical antiquity toward the early medieval world.
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Empires active in 24 August 410 CE
- Sassanid Empire224 CE – 651 CE
- Kingdom of Funan50 CE – 550 CE
- Roman Empire27 BCE – 476 CE
- Byzantine Empire330 CE – 1453 CE
- Pyu City-States200 BCE – 1050 CE
- Gupta Empire320 CE – 550 CE
Related military & conflict events
- Battle of Adrianople: Goths annihilate the Eastern Roman army9 August 378 CE
- Battle of the Catalaunian Plains20 June 451 CE
- Shapur I captures Emperor Valerian at the Battle of Edessa260 CE
- Yellow Turban Rebellion weakens the Han184 CE
- Bar Kokhba revolt and the renaming of Judaea to Syria Palaestina132–135 CE
- Roman Empire reaches its greatest territorial extent under Trajan117 CE
Further reading
The wider story
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
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