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But very soon, Stilicho claimed that Alaric had violated the terms of the truce and brought him to battle again, this time at Verona, in July or August of 402.[230] This fight was no more conclusive than Pollentia had been and even Claudian admits that Alaric was able to consider attacking Gaul or Raetia in its immediate aftermath. If some of Alaric’s support melted away in the absence of a decisive success, he was nonetheless able to avoid further confrontations and retreated into the Balkans again.[231] From 402 to late 404 or early 405, Alaric occupied the northwestern Balkans, perhaps the province of Pannonia Ⅱ, shunted by Stilicho into the de facto no-man’s land between East and West. In this corner of Illyricum, Alaric could not aggravate the state of almost continuous cold war between the eastern and western courts, or at least not until one side or the other decided to deploy him in its own interest. This time it was Stilicho who took the initiative. He decided to grant Alaric the same sort of office that Eutropius had granted him half a decade earlier. Probably in 405, Alaric’s followers again returned to Epirus, their leader once again bearing the codicils of office appointing him magister militum, but now supplied by the western rather than the eastern empire.[232] Eastern propaganda chose to see this move as Stilicho’s preparation for a full-scale invasion of Illyricum, an interpretation modern scholars have been too willing to accept. In fact, Stilicho’s move represented nothing new. Granting Alaric his new title was no more than the reassertion of a hegemony that Stilicho had always claimed to possess, and it involved taking no action whatsoever – Alaric was already in Illyricum, and he might just as well be put to some use as an irritant to the eastern court. Even had Stilicho actually planned to take action himself in Illyricum, and there is not the slightest evidence that he did, events in Italy and Gaul rapidly made such plans unfeasible.

Crisis in the Western Empire

Late in 405, a Gothic king named Radagaisus, hitherto completely unknown to history, crossed the Alps from central Europe, marched through the province of Raetia, and invaded Italy. More than a year passed before he was finally subdued. To make matters worse, on the last day of either 405 or 406 a large band of Vandals, Alans and Suevi crossed the Rhine near Mainz and spread devastation in the northern provinces of Gaul.[233] That invasion provoked a string of usurpations in Britain, the third of which, led by a common soldier named Constantine (r. 407–411), spread across the Channel and soon removed Gaul, Britain and Spain from the control of Honorius’ government in Italy. For obvious reasons, Stilicho had to deal with the threat to Italy before he could attend to a Gallic usurpation. In August 406, he chased Radagaisus down near Florence and won a crushing victory that left thousands of the Gothic king’s followers enslaved – so many that the bottom fell out of the market for able-bodied slaves.[234] With Radagaisus dead, Stilicho could turn to other matters, particularly suppressing the Gallic usurpation of Constantine, for which purpose Alaric might prove very useful. Unfortunately for Stilicho, Alaric had now lost patience.

There is no question that Alaric had recouped whatever losses of manpower he had suffered at Pollentia and Verona, and, after three years as a legitimate commander in Illyricum, he may well have begun to rebuild his financial position as well. But Illyricum and Greece had been plundered repeatedly since the early 390s and it is hard to see how they could have yielded revenues on a large enough scale to replace the spoils that Stilicho captured at Pollentia. Having already been resident in the eastern empire for so long, Alaric seems to have decided its potential as a target was limited. The West offered richer pickings. Thus in 407, he marched on Italy again, taking up position in Noricum – modern Austria – and demanding 4,000 pounds of gold if he was to spare