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Imaginative portrait of Alaric in C. Strahlheim, Das Welttheater, 4.Band, Frankfurt a.M., 1836. According to Jordanes, a 6th-century Roman bureaucrat of Gothic origin—who later turned his hand to history—Alaric was born on Peuce Island at the mouth of the Danube Delta in present-day Romania and belonged to the noble Balti dynasty of the Thervingian Goths.
Alaric and the Visigoths in Athens. Illustration from the 1920s. In January 409, [69] the Senate sent an embassy to the imperial court at Ravenna to encourage the Emperor to come to terms with the Goths, and to give Roman aristocratic children as hostages to the Goths as insurance. Alaric would then resume his alliance with the Roman Empire.
The Battle of Vouillé (from Latin Campus Vogladensis) was fought in the northern marches of Visigothic territory, at Vouillé, near Poitiers , around Spring 507 between the Franks, commanded by Clovis, and the Visigoths, commanded by Alaric II. The Franks' victory resulted in their conquest of Gallia Aquitania and the death of Alaric II.
The revolt of Alaric I was a military conflict between the Roman Empire and a rebel army, probably composed mainly of Goths. This war consisted a number of armed conflicts in the period between 395 and 398, interspersed with periods of negotiations and sometimes even cooperation.
When Alaric II was killed while fighting Clovis I, king of the Franks, in the Battle of Vouillé (507), his kingdom fell into disarray. "More serious than the destruction of the Gothic army," writes Herwig Wolfram, "than the loss of both Aquitanian provinces and the capital of Toulose, was the death of the king."
A problem arose when in 395 Alaric, a former general in the Roman army and king of the Visigoths, revolted and invaded Greece (Revolt of Alaric I). Stilicho, the commander-in-chief of the western armies, and shortly before his superior, wanted to drive him back, but was repulsed by the Eastern Authority, because he moved outside his territory.
The Visigoths were never called Visigoths, only Goths, until Cassiodorus used the term, when referring to their loss against Clovis I in 507. Cassiodorus apparently invented the term based on the model of the "Ostrogoths", but using the older name of the Vesi, one of the tribal names which the fifth-century poet Sidonius Apollinaris, had already used when referring to the Visigoths.
The Montagne d'Alaric (Alaric's Mountain), near Carcassonne, is named after the Visigoth king. [16] Local rumour has it that he left a vast treasure buried in the caves beneath the mountain. [17] The Canal d'Alaric (Alaric's Canal) in the Hautes-Pyrénées department is named after him. [18]