You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [7]
After the initial sacking, attacks on Rome became more commonplace. Constantine fought a number of battles against the Vandals, Suebi and Alans using Frank and Alamanni troops. He won some, lost some and was eventually destroyed by Emperor Honorius’s barbarian mercenaries…including Alaric’s brother, Athaulf, who was given the province of Aquitaine (central France) and most of Gaul as payment for his assistance. Innumerable battles were fought between local barbarians over land, payments and assassinations. In the middle of the fifth century, Attila the Hun appeared on the scene. He and his brother Bleda ravaged Asia and the Middle East. They were paid off by Constantinople, and after a brief fallout (in which Attila murdered Bleda) entered Europe, where the Huns were defeated in France by Aetius and his Gaul and Visigoth army. Attila retreated to Hungary and then moved south into Italy. In A.D. 452 the Huns were at the gates of Rome but stopped short of sacking the city. There is mention of a payoff as well as a malaria epidemic, which caused Attila (the unlucky) to withdraw to Hungary, where he died in A.D. 453. The Huns separated into small groups and hired out their services to the highest bidder. Barbarian “protectors” and their allies sacked Rome twice in later years.
The following year Eastern emperor Valentinian had Aetius killed but was not wealthy enough to afford the barbarian armies that would ensure control of his empire. Europe was carved up by the barbarians, and by A.D. 510 the last puppet Roman emperor (West), Romulus Augustulus, died peacefully in retirement while his “hired” Skirian barbarians ruled Rome.
During the first through fifth centuries, barbarians attacked and defended territory that included Italy. The Romans hired barbarians to keep them safe. It was these same barbarians who became the “new” Romans and then, in turn, were destroyed and replaced by other barbarians. Money and luck ruled the day for a while. Then the Italian Romans learned that lesson about a free lunch. As these Roman emperors too often found out, sometimes you don’t always get what you pay for.
Your Son Did What?
You can pick your friends and avoid your enemies, but family you are stuck with. Then comes the problem of when your family is your enemy, or maybe your friend. Worse yet, sometimes when you get to pick your family, it does not work out so well.
HENRY, ELEANOR, AND THEIR ROYAL BROOD
ENGLAND, TWELFTH CENTURY
Brian M. Thomsen
King Henry II (1133–1189) was the first of the Plantagenets (the son of Geoffrey Plantagenet and Matilda, the daughter of Henry I). He ascended to the throne of England (more precisely, wrested it away from the control of King Stephen) in 1154 amid an era of chaos, anarchy and petty squabbling that had weakened Britain in terms of empire and infrastructure. Within a few short (albeit bloody) years he had established a competent and self-sufficient bureaucracy of state as well as an enforced hold/rule of the lesser barons and rulers, who had always been involved in various landgrabs and feuds under the administration (or more precisely, lack thereof) of his predecessor.
Indeed, with the inclusion of the holdings that he inherited upon his father’s death in 1151 (Normandy and Anjou, the province of his birth) and his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine (ex-wife of King Louis VII of France) in 1152, and the other lands he acquired through conquest of disputed territories in the British Isles, Henry II was well on his way to establishing England as a world power.
(Even though technically his French holdings were as a vassal subservient to the king of France, their breadth in conjunction with the holdings on the British Isles