The Visigoths Sacked Rome

On 24 August 410, Visigothic forces led by their king Alaric poured through Rome’s Salarian Gate and began a three-day sack of the city. It was the first time in roughly 800 years that a foreign enemy had taken Rome, and the shock rippled across the Roman world.

The plunder was, by the brutal standards of the age, restrained. Alaric’s Goths, who were Christians, largely spared the great churches and refrained from mass slaughter, concentrating instead on the treasury, imperial palaces, and a handful of public buildings. They carried off enormous wealth and a prize hostage: Galla Placidia, sister of the western emperor Honorius.

“In one city, the whole world perished,” wrote St Jerome, capturing the era’s despair.

Rome was no longer even the empire’s working capital, having ceded that role to Ravenna in 402. Yet the symbolism was devastating. The fall fed a sense that the classical order was unravelling, and within decades the Western Roman Empire itself would dissolve, marking a slow passage from antiquity into the medieval world.