Battle of Faesulae (406)

Battle of Faesulae
Part of the Roman-Germanic wars
Date 406 CE Location Fiesole, modern  Italy Result Roman victory
Belligerents
Western Roman Empire Goths Huns	Goths Vandals
Commanders and leaders
Flavius Stilicho Sarus the Goth Uldin the Hun	Radagaisus†
Strength
30,000-40,000	200,000
Casualties and losses
Negligible	Massive

The Battle of Faesulae was fought in 406 CE as part of the Gothic invasion of the Western Roman Empire. After General Flavius Stilicho repelled the Visigoths at Pollentia and Verona, he encountered a new incursion of Vandals and Goths led by Radagaisus whose forces attacked Florence. Stilicho ultimately defeated the invaders at Faesulae (modern Fiesole) with support from Uldin the Hun and Sarus the Goth. Radagaisus was executed after the battle and survivors of his armies fled to Alaric.^[1][2]

Background

A vast army of assorted barbarians from central Europe had crossed the Danube in late 405 or early 406 led by Radagaisus.^[3] After overrunning the undefended Rhaetia and northern Italy, heavily devastating the fertile countryside, they halted to besiege Florence, only 180 miles north of Rome.^[4] Stilicho, Master-General of the west, hastily gathered forces for the defense of Italy, enrolling in his service a tribe of the Alani, and numbers of the Goths under Sarus and the Huns under Uldin, his army amounting, according to ancient sources, to some 40,000 Romans and auxiliaries.^[5] Radagaisus, by comparison, who likewise had in his army miscellaneous detachments of Goths and Alani, had as many as 200,000 barbarian warriors at his back, amounting, together with wives, slaves, and children, to nearly half a million souls.^[6]

The battle

While Stilicho had been collecting his army, the minute garrison of Florence had held out with praiseworthy fortitude against the innumerable barbarians encamped outside their walls.^[7] As soon as Stilicho arrived with his army of relief, he contrived to smuggle desperately needed supplies and reinforcements into the beleaguered city.^[8] But instead of attempting to crush Radagaisus' army in an open battle, Stilicho adopted a more lengthy, though prudent, course of action. After surrounding the barbarians with rudimentary entrenchments, he brought in thousands of the native people, to aid in the construction of a systematic entrenchment of the lines enclosing Radagisus' camp.^[9] Although the barbarians made repeated efforts to break out while the work was still in progress, the Romans were able to repulse every attempt due to a lack of proper concert amongst Radagaisus' forces, whose assaults were individual to each band and made in small numbers. After the lines of circumvallation were completed Radagaisus admitted the hopelessness of his situation, trapped as he was in the midst of enemy territory with no provisions and a vast number of non-combatants in need of subsistence. On August 23rd^[10] he left his camp to capitulate in the tent of Stilicho. Though he had been promised equitable terms, or even an equal alliance, by Stilicho, the German chieftain was immediately beheaded by the ruthless Vandalic general, who by thus emerging victorious received a second time the applause of a grateful people as the “savior of Italy”.^[11]

Aftermath

Although Stilicho had halted the invasion by the execution of its leader and momentarily averted the collapse of the empire, the issue was, in fact, less decisive than apparent since he was incapable of utterly destroying the enormous army of Radagaisus, and the barbarian survivors were not likely to return north to again confront their more savage Asian enemies, the Huns.^[12] Instead, a large detachment of the remnants of Radagaisus' army, comprising Suevi, Vandals, Alans and Burgundians, to a number of over 100,000 escaped north over the Alps, only to reappear on the frontiers of Gaul, which had been stripped of its defenders by Stilicho in 401 to meet Alaric's inroad into Italy at that time. Although initially resisted by the Franks and other Roman auxiliaries, the barbarians were soon enabled to devastate or conquer Gaul,^[13] which was lost at this point never to be recovered by the western empire. In the words of Gibbon, “This memorable passage of the Suevi, etc. may be considered as the fall of the western empire beyond the Alps, and the barriers, which had so long separated the savage and the civilized nations of the earth, were from that fatal moment leveled with the ground”.^[14]

References