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Updated: May 25, 2025
The Barbarians acquired, from the junction of some Pannonian deserters, the knowledge of the country, and of the roads; and the invasion of Gaul, which Alaric had designed, was executed by the remains of the great army of Radagaisus. Yet if they expected to derive any assistance from the tribes of Germany, who inhabited the banks of the Rhine, their hopes were disappointed.
On a sudden, they beheld, from their walls, the banners of Stilicho, who advanced, with his united force, to the relief of the faithful city; and who soon marked that fatal spot for the grave of the Barbarian host. The apparent contradictions of those writers who variously relate the defeat of Radagaisus, may be reconciled without offering much violence to their respective testimonies.
As the flood of barbarians rushed southward through Italy, many cities were pillaged or destroyed, and the city of Florence sustained its first recorded siege. Alaric and his Goths were Christians. Radagaisus and his Germans were half-savage pagans. Florence, which had dared oppose them, was threatened with utter ruin.
Alaric was a Christian and a soldier, the leader of a disciplined army; who understood the laws of war, who respected the sanctity of treaties, and who had familiarly conversed with the subjects of the empire in the same camps, and the same churches. The savage Radagaisus was a stranger to the manners, the religion, and even the language, of the civilized nations of the South.
We may take it that Alaric entered Venetia in November 401, and that at the same time Radagaisus invaded Rhaetia. Stilicho, Honorius' great general and the hero of the whole defence, advanced against Radagaisus.
About four years after the victorious Toulun had assumed the title of Khan of the Geougen, another Barbarian, the haughty Rhodogast, or Radagaisus, marched from the northern extremities of Germany almost to the gates of Rome, and left the remains of his army to achieve the destruction of the West.
Many cities of Italy were pillaged, or destroyed; and the siege of Florence, by Radagaisus, is one of the earliest events in the history of that celebrated republic; whose firmness checked and delayed the unskillful fury of the Barbarians.
After the defeat of Radagaisus, two parts of the German host, which must have exceeded the number of one hundred thousand men, still remained in arms, between the Apennine and the Alps, or between the Alps and the Danube.
Rome, in the course of a half-century, was the object of four terrible attacks, that of Alaric and the Visigoths; of Radagaisus with the Suevi, Vandals, and Alans; of Genseric with the Vandals; of Attila with the Huns. ALARIC IN ITALY. The Visigoths made Alaric the head of their most illustrious family, the Balti their leader.
Leaving the bulk of their companions on the borders of the Rhine, two hundred thousand of them crossed the Alps, and made their way as far as Florence. Stilicho once more saved Rome and the empire by forcing them back into the Apennines, where most of them perished from famine. Radagaisus surrendered, and was beheaded.
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