4 - The dynasty of Theodosius

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The years from 395 to 425, during which the Roman world was ruled by Arcadius and Honorius, the sons of Theodosius I, and by Theodosius II, his namesake's grandson, stand at the fulcrum of the series of events that transformed the Roman empire of antiquity into the European kingdoms, the Byzantine empire and the Islamic states of the Middle Ages. At the beginning of this period the two parts of the Roman empire, still constitutionally undivided, came close to hostilities as the result of the ambitions of those who controlled the governments. In the east, political dissensions and an inability even to put an army in the field against foreign enemies placed the state in grave danger, while in the west the firm and able guidance of the magister utriusque militiae Stilicho appeared to offer a respite from the turmoil of the fourth century. At the end of the period, harmony between the two parts of the empire had been restored. But by now it was the west that was headlong into its final process of political disintegration, while in the east the twenty-four-year-old emperor Theodosius II, almost half-way into a long reign, was presiding over a recovery of stability and strength that both laid the foundations of the Byzantine state and gave it the resiliency necessary to weather the storms of the fifth-century invasions, the grandiose schemes of Justinian, and the onslaught of the armies of Islam.

In both parts of the empire the developments during this crucial thirty years both crystallized what had gone before and shaped what followed. In the west the barbarization – mostly Germanization – of the Roman army accelerated, and with the emergence of one magister utriusque militiae superior to the other military magistri, the emperor was to become little more than a puppet in the control of an often German ‘generalissimo’. Honorius appears for most of his reign to have been complaisant, and those of his successors who attempted to assert their independence failed, so that little really changed when in 476 (or, better, 480 when Nepos was killed) the western emperor was eliminated and the patricius Odovacer began to rule Italy as the representative of the eastern court.