Italy, Diocese of

Alaric has spread desolation through North Italy, striking terror into the citizens of Rome.

Imperial forces under Stilicho's command engage the barbarian Danubian coalition at the bloody Battle of Pollentia (Polenza, near modern Bra).

The battle, fought on Easter Sunday, April 6, 402, is a victory for Rome tahht, though costly, effectively halts the Goths' progress.

Stilicho captures the Gothic camp, taking Alaric's wife and family hostage.

It is not unreasonable to suppose that he and his troops were hampered by the presence of large numbers of women and children, which give his invasion of Italy the character of a human migration.

Stilicho's enemies will later reproach him for having gained his victory by taking impious advantage of the great Christian festival.

Alaric, too, is a Christian, though an Arian, not Orthodox.

He had trusted to the sanctity of Easter for immunity from attack.

Alaric and his Visigoths, defeated at Verona in June 402, subsequently withdraw from Italy.

Honorius had at first based his capital in Mediolanum (Milan), but with the Visigoths under Alaric having entered Italy, he moves his capital in 402 to …

…the coastal city of Ravenna, which is protected by a ring of marshes and strong fortifications.

While the new capital is easier to defend (although in fact the city falls to opposing forces numerous times in its history), it is poorly situated to allow Roman forces to protect central Italy from the increasingly regular threat of barbarian incursions.

It is also likely that the move to Ravenna was due to the city's port and good seaborne connections to the Eastern Roman Empire.

Alaric is allowed to escape after another defeat before Verona in June, though his army is in bad condition.

He had not "penetrated to the city", but his invasion of Italy has produced important results.

It had caused the imperial residence to be transferred from Milan to Ravenna, and will soon necessitate the withdrawal of Legio XX Valeria Victrix from Britain.

Stilicho, having engaged Alaric successfully and pursued him northward, is probably capable of massacring the barbarians with his superior numbers, but instead develops a treaty with Alaric designed to aid the former's ambitions in invading and controlling the Eastern Roman empire.

Alaric withdraws to Illyricum, where the Western court again gives him office, though only as comes and only over Dalmatia and Pannonia Secunda rather than the whole of Illyricum.

Stilicho probably supposes that this pact will allow him to put Italian government into order and recruit fresh troops.

Emperor Honorius and Stilicho, in what is to be the last victory celebrated in Rome, are honored with a triumphal march for the victories against the Goths.

Emperor Theodosius had adopted Christianity as the Roman state religion and banned pagan festivals, but the ludi have continued, very gradually shorn of their stubbornly pagan munera.

Honorius had legally ended gladiator munera in 399, and again in 404 CE, at least in the Western half of the Empire.

The last known gladiator fight in Rome occurs on January 1, 404, usually given as the date of the martyrdom of Saint Telemachus, a Christian monk who was stoned by the crowd for trying to stop a gladiators' fight in a Roman amphitheater.

John Cassian was born around 360, likely in the region of Scythia Minor (now Dobruja in modern-day Romania and Bulgaria), although some scholars assume a Gallic origin.

As a young adult he and an older friend, Germanus, had traveled to Palestine, where they had entered a hermitage near Bethlehem.

After remaining in that community for about three years, they had journeyed to the desert of Scete in Egypt, which was rent by Christian struggles.

There they visited a number of monastic foundations.

Approximately fifteen years later, in about 399, Cassian and Germanus had fled the controversy provoked by Theophilus, Archbishop of Alexandria, with about 300 other Origenist monks.

John Cassian and Germanus had gone to Constantinople, where they appealed to the Patriarch of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, for protection.

John Cassian was ordained a deacon and was made a member of the clergy attached to the Patriarch while the struggles with the imperial family ensued.

When the Patriarch is forced into exile from Constantinople in 404, the Latin-speaking Cassian is sent to Rome to plead his cause before Pope Innocent I.

Stilicho continues negotiations with Alaric; Flavius Aetius, son of one of Stilicho's major supporters, is to be sent as a hostage to Alaric in 405.

However, Stilicho is distracted in late 404, by a fresh invasion of Northern Italy by another group of Goths fleeing the Huns, led by one Radagaisus.

Innocent, who had succeeded to the bishopric of Rome in 401, was, according to his biographer in the Liber Pontificalis, the son of a man called Innocens of Albano; but according to his contemporary Jerome, his father was Pope Anastasius I, whom he was called by the unanimous voice of the clergy and laity to succeed (he had been born before his father's entry to the clergy, let alone the papacy; this is before the time of a universal rule of celibacy for priests).

Innocent loses no opportunity of maintaining and extending the authority of the Roman see as the ultimate resort for the settlement of all disputes; and his still extant communications with Victricius of Rouen, Exuperius of Toulouse, Alexander of Antioch and others, as well as his actions on the appeal made to him by John Chrysostom against Theophilus of Alexandria, show that opportunities of the kind were numerous and varied.

In 405, Innocent promulgates the church’s first official listing of books forbidden to church members without specific permission from a qualified person.

Emperor Honorius closes the Flavian Amphitheatre (the Colosseum) in an austerity move that abolishes amusements.

Radagaisus, having spent the winter in the Po Valley, is observed by Stilicho, who lacks sufficient strength to prepare an offensive against the invading German tribes.

The exact numbers of the migration are unknown, probably nearly one hundred thousand, including Alans, Burgundians, Goths, Vandals, Suebi, and other smaller tribes.