Plague decimates the population, the frontiers are breached, and barbarians ravage Dacia as emperor Marcus Aurelius fights to overcome the empire’s direst crisis in living memory.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to A history of Romania.

Season 1, Episode 12: To bear this worthily is good fortune

In the last two episodes, we explored what life was like in the Dacian provinces under the reigns of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius. We looked at people’s jobs, religions, cultures, habits – it was a lot of ground to cover, and there’s still so much more we could explore. But I couldn’t include everything that surfaced during my research, either because it was too detailed or because it didn’t fit into the narrative flow. But, to be honest, it hurts to pass over some information, especially when I think that some of you would find it just as interesting as I do.

So, I decided to make a Facebook page for the podcast, and, as I write these episodes, I’ll use it to share bits of research that don’t make it into the scripts. For instance, in the last two episodes, I didn’t talk about what life looked like for Roman soldiers on the frontier; or the private letters between Greek speakers; or the artistic style that had developed in the Dacian provinces. It’s those sorts of tidbits that you can expect to find on your feed.

I won’t post information about periods beyond where we are in our story – only what relates to our present narrative. So, if you want to get some extra content, you can find the link to the page in this episode’s description. Now, let’s get back to the narrative.

On March 7, 161 CE, emperor Antoninus Pius died in one of his Italian villas, with his succession long since secured. When Hadrian had selected him as his heir twenty-three years earlier, he had done so on the condition that he adopt two boys as his successors: Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. There’s still some debate as to why Hadrian forced Antoninus to have two heirs, but what’s clear is that his decision secured a smooth transition of power for decades to come.

When Antoninus died, the Senate wanted to make Marcus sole emperor since he had more experience in the administration. But he refused and insisted that he take the office alongside Lucius as had been agreed. It was the first time that the Roman empire had two emperors ruling at the same time with equal powers.

The first challenge of their joint reign appeared within a few months. The king of Parthia, the traditional nemesis of Rome, saw an opportunity to expand his influence while the empire was welcoming two inexperienced emperors. In the autumn of 161 CE, he invaded the Kingdom of Armenia, which was a Roman client state, removed its king, and installed his own man in power. The Roman governor of nearby Cappadocia marched his soldiers into the area to reassert control, but they were trapped and surrounded by Parthian forces; realizing his mistake, the governor committed suicide, and his men were massacred.

This was a grave setback, and the two emperors decided that one of them needed to take personal command of the war. They resolved that Marcus should remain in Rome to manage the administration, while Lucius should march East.

Early the next year, he started towards Parthia at the head of a large army which included three full legions taken from the borders of the empire. Among these was the legion V Macedonica, which defended the Danubian frontier of Moesia Inferior. The emperors realized that taking troops away from their forts posed a risk, so they told the governors of the Dacian provinces and of Moesia Inferior to avoid conflict with the peoples beyond the border.

This wasn’t a simple task, since there was quite a tapestry of them. There were the Sarmatian nomads that lived west of the Dacian provinces, called the Iazyges, and those living to the east of them, called the Roxolani. To the north were the Costoboci, a tribe of Dacians that had coalesced around a king, and besides them lived a Germanic people called the Hasdingi Vandals.

There had been some conflict between the Romans and these peoples in the last fifty years, namely two attacks by the Costoboci and one by the Roxolani in the 140s and 150s CE. But these conflicts had been more akin to raids; they’d been quickly repulsed and didn’t disturb the general peace pervading the Dacian provinces.

By continuing to pay their leaders and trade with them, the governors were able to keep the peace with the Iazyges, Roxolani, Costoboci, and Hasdingi. And their efforts were worth it, as good news streamed in from the war against the Parthians. In 163, the Romans recaptured the Armenian capital; in 165, they pushed into Parthia; and by 166, the war was over, the empire had gained territory, and Roman forces were heading back West.

But as the legions returned to their bases, they brought back more than just plunder. Without knowing it, they also brought a plague.

As soldiers marched home, they dealt with traders, who got their goods from farmers and sailors; and these men walked back to their local villages or crossed the Mediterranean, docked in faraway ports, spent their earnings in taverns, and sat next to artisans and servants, who then returned to their shops, their employers, their families. Soon, people from the most remote farms to the floor of the Senate unwittingly became hosts to a deadly disease.

Around two weeks after being exposed to it, individuals began experiencing fever and chills; then came diarrhea that turned from red to black, and pustules on the skin that scabbed and left scars. Though we don’t know the exact nature of this disease, historians generally agree that the population of the empire had just come into contact with smallpox.

This was the first time that its communities had encountered it, and they had no immunity. From farmers planting crops to soldiers garrisoning the frontier to magistrates debating legislation, the disease hit all sectors of the population. The suffering was gruesome and widespread, and people didn’t know how to protect themselves or help their loved ones. Many carved amulets to ward off the plague, while others went to temples dedicated to gods of health. Unfortunately, their efforts proved fruitless, and many didn’t recover. Historians estimate that around 7.5 million people in the empire died, which was about 10% of its population. Farms were abandoned, workshops vacated, garrisons decimated, and a silent dread hung over villages, towns, and cities.

The plague didn’t stop at the borders of the empire, either, but infected the peoples beyond the frontier as well. The close trading contacts between the Romans and the Costoboci, Roxolani, and Iazyges proved an ideal vector for the disease. While we have no descriptions of the effects of the plague on them, smallpox doesn’t discriminate, and it undoubtedly caused immense harm among their communities as well.

At the same time, the tribes on the frontiers were experiencing pressure from a people unknown to the Romans: the Goths. This Germanic people lived on the coast of the Baltic Sea and, starting in the middle of the 2^nd century, they had begun migrating southwards in massive numbers. Their neighbours had two choices: fight to stay where they were or take their belongings and find new lands elsewhere. Since the Goths vastly outnumbered them, most of their neighbours decided to move south to avoid conflict. In doing so, they displaced the people next to them, who displaced the people next to them, and so on and so forth, until this wave of migration became unstoppable. From Gaul to Illyria, communities were pushed from the back towards the frontiers of the empire. By the 160s CE, they had nowhere else to go, and the only option they had was to try to cross its borders.

The Romans of course stopped them from entering. The empire was happy to trade with these people, but it wouldn’t let them in; the Romans saw themselves as the embodiment of the civilized world, and if they wanted to keep it that way, these wild barbarians had to be kept on that side of the line; these tribes didn’t adhere to Roman laws and customs, and, if allowed to settle inside the empire, they would disrupt its order and prosperity.

As these communities reached the border, fleeing a fearsome new people and suffering from plague, they had a choice to make: go back, fight their neighbours to stake out a piece of land for themselves, and then live in fear at the arrival of the Goths, or push forwards and hope to get a plot of land in the safe and affluent Roman empire. Many chose hope and tried to cross the line, but the Romans put up their shields. Between 162 and 166 CE, clashes occurred all along the border from the Rhine River to the Pannonian Plain as professional soldiers halted migrating families and the warriors who protected them. In 167, the governor of Pannonia negotiated with 11 tribes, forcing them to stop fighting and stay where they were; the tribes had little choice but to accept, but the deal did nothing to address their underlying issues.

In the Dacian provinces, the situation was deteriorating quickly. In 167, the Vandal Hasdingi, the Sarmatian Iazyges and Roxolani, and the Dacian Costoboci tried to enter the Dacian provinces and were rebuffed. The only way they were going to be allowed into the empire was if they defeated the Romans and forced them to accept their settlement; and so, their migration soon turned into a war. As one group attacked one part of the border, the others saw an opportunity to strike at another part; their actions weren’t coordinated, but the individual efforts of the Hasdingi, Iazyges, Roxolani, and Costoboci combined to form a massive barbarian invasion from the Roman point of view.

On the border near the fortress of Porolissum, two castra were destroyed, and the frontier was punctured. As the attackers moved south and reached the goldmines of the region, work stopped and valuables were hidden. The invading forces then reached Apulum, the headquarters of the only legion in the Dacian provinces. The unit was besieged inside the walls of its castrum, and the civilian settlement that had developed around it was plundered. The attackers made it all the way to the southern Carpathians where the most important city in the Dacian provinces was located, Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa. Its walls held firm against the invaders, but its suburbs were devastated.

With the barbarians ravaging the countryside, the civilian population fled to more isolated regions or behind the walls of cities and castra to wait out the fighting. As people left their homes, they buried their valuables, intending to come back to them later. Archeologists have found dozens of stashes with coins and jewelry; obviously, their owners didn’t survive, and their treasures remained hidden for centuries.

The fighting was so intense that the governor of Dacia Superior, the one who led the only legion in the area, was killed in the fighting in 167, and his colleagues were left to deal with a chaotic situation. The two emperors realized that drastic measures had to be taken to protect the Dacian provinces. In 168, they transferred the legion V Macedonica from Moesia Inferior to Dacia Porolissensis to reinforce its defenses. But to expulse the invaders for good, the Romans had to combine their forces and resources. So, the emperors put the three Dacian provinces under the administrative and military control of a single governor. Accordingly, the divisions between the three Dacian provinces were dissolved and they became a single province called Tres Daciae, meaning “Three Dacias.”

The emperors needed a trusted man to lead this large political unit within the empire, and they chose Marcus Claudius Fronto, a general who had fought alongside Lucius Verus during the Parthian war. He came into his role in 168 and took command of two legions – XIII Gemina and V Macedonica – as well as various auxiliary troops, and faced the difficult task of stabilizing the region.

At the same time, the pressure was mounting on Pannonia and its neighbouring provinces. Kept out of the empire, the king of the Marcomanni created a coalition of Germanic tribes to force their way in. We’ve met the Marcomanni before in episode six. At that point in the 80s CE, they had refused to join emperor Domitian’s war against Decebal’s kingdom. Since then, the empire had established friendly relations with them, as it had with many peoples on its frontiers. At this point in our story, the Marcomanni were one of the tribes that had signed a truce with the Romans forcing them to stay in place.

But the pressure from the Goths had not relented, so they now led a second, more organized effort to enter the empire in 167 CE. The German coalition was so powerful that it managed to defeat Roman forces in the Alps and advance into northern Italy, where it put the city of Aquileia under siege. This was the first time that enemies had set foot on the Italian Peninsula since the Cimbri did so in 101 BCE, more than 260 years ago. The city of Rome panicked, and the emperors raised new legions to stop the German advance. The two men succeeded in pushing them out of Italy, but in the midst of their campaign in 169, Verus died of the plague, and Marcus Aurelius was left as sole emperor. Saddened and disheartened, he returned to Rome to oversee his adoptive brother’s funeral. The man who had never wanted to go to war was now forced to face this massive crisis alone.

Meanwhile, the situation in Dacia remained dire. To staunch the invaders, Fronto was given command of Moesia Superior in addition to his role as governor of the united province of Dacia. By 170, he managed to expulse the Iazyges, Roxolani, Costoboci, and Hasdingi from that part of the empire, but the fighting was brutal and he died in battle. He was replaced by Sextus Cornelius Clemens, who inherited a province under threat, but not under siege.

With their incursion into Dacia having failed, the Costoboci turned their attention to Moesia Inferior. When the legion V Macedonica was relocated from the Danube, its positions were taken up by less experienced auxiliary troops. Realizing that the border was weaker here, the Costoboci attacked the forts along the Danube in 170, overwhelmed them, and marched south along the coast of the Black Sea. They didn’t have the equipment or expertise to take cities, so they instead ransacked settlements in the countryside. And they didn’t stop with Moesia Inferior; they continued southwards into Thrace, then Macedonia, and made it all the way to Greece, where they burned the sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone in Attica. Roman forces were finally able to bring them to battle deep inside the empire, and won. Defeated yet flush with loot, the Costoboci retraced their steps and made it back to their homeland the following year.

As the barbarians left the empire, Marcus Aurelius understood that the shore of Black Sea needed to be better defended, so he decreed that the coast of Moesia Inferior should be considered part of the frontier. In practice, this meant that garrisons of Roman soldiers were stationed in the Greek cities, their walls were reinforced and extended, and the cities themselves were stripped of their autonomy and put under the direct control of the governor. The period of Greek autonomy had come to an end; these were times of crisis.

When the Costoboci returned to their homelands north of the Carpathians after a yearlong absence, the situation had changed.

The Hasdingi chieftains had been in talks with Clemens, the governor of Dacia, to settle inside the province in exchange for military service and subsidies. In effect, they wanted to be foedorati – meaning subsidized allies of the Romans – as many other tribes had been before, including the Dacians; but they wanted to be foedorati that lived inside the empire, which was unprecedented. The governor of course refused; the empire was indivisible, and he couldn’t envision letting barbarians settle inside of it and rule themselves independently.

But Clemens made a deal with the Hasdingi. If they attacked the Costoboci, they could take their territories and become foedorati right on the borders of the empire where the Romans could better support them. It was the best deal the Hasdingi were going to get, so they agreed, and when the Costoboci returned north of the Carpathians in 171, they attacked them and won a resounding victory. The Costoboci warriors were vanquished, their king was killed, and his entourage captured. The Hasdingi offered the royal family to the Romans, who kept them as prisoners in Rome to ensure they would never again pose a threat. There the queen and her children lived as captives. An inscription found in the city reads: “To the spirits of the dead. Dedicated to Zia the Dacian, daughter of Tiatus, wife of Pieporus, Costoboci king. Natoporus and Dirgisa made this memorial for their most dear, well-deserving grandmother.”

With their leadership eliminated, the clans that had formed the Costoboci tribe were left adrift. Some fell under the rule of the Hasdingi, others remained defiant in smaller groups, and others still fled to their Dacian kin to the east of the Carpathian Mountains. After this devastating defeat in 171 CE, we hear no more of the Costoboci; they disappeared as a political community.

This attack had been a fantastic success for both the Romans and the Hasdingi. The German tribe was now settled next to the empire and received subsidies from it, while the governor of Dacia had managed to destroy one tribe and gain an ally all while losing no soldiers of his own; diplomacy had secured the borders of Dacia.

Meanwhile, emperor Marcus Aurelius had pushed the Marcomanni and their allies beyond the Alps. Besides the Marcomanni, the main enemies he now faced were the Quadi, another German tribe that was closely related to them, and the Iazyges that had turned their attention from Dacia to Pannonia. The focus of the war now turned beyond the Danube to the Pannonian Plain where these tribes lived; as the emperor saw it, the only way to end this crisis was to go to the homelands of these barbarians, defeat them, and impose a peace.

So, in 172, Marcus Aurelius launched a massive counterattack across the Danube. Three years of gruelling campaigns followed with brutal reprisals by the Romans, at the end of which they had vanquished the Quadi, Marcomanni, and Iazyges. These defeated peoples were forced to return Roman prisoners, surrender hostages, provide warriors to fight alongside the imperial army, and accept Roman garrisons in their homelands.

A permanent victory was within reach, but before the emperor could fully secure the region, news came that a general in Syria had declared himself emperor, since a rumour had spread that Marcus Aurelius had died. So, in 175, the true emperor was forced to pause his campaign, make peace with the tribes based on the status quo, and march East. The rebellion ended before he even got there, but Marcus Aurelius still toured the eastern provinces to consolidate his position. Once he finished his tour in 176, he returned to Rome for the first time in seven years and celebrated a triumph for his victories over the Germans and Sarmatians.

At that point, the Senate voted that a monument should be erected to honour the emperor. No one alive could remember a war on this scale; the frontiers had been attacked from the Rhine River to the Black Sea, barbarians had invaded Italy, and plague had decimated the population; yet the emperor had prevailed in safeguarding the empire and vanquishing its enemies. Such an achievement deserved a fitting trophy, and it was to be a column modelled on Trajan’s own monument erected 70 years before.

In fact, the architectural design was almost an exact copy. Marcus Aurelius’ Column is the same height as Trajan’s, has an internal staircase that ascends to the top, and a spiral frieze that depicts the emperor’s wars against barbarian foes. The column tells us a lot about this chaotic and little-documented period, and this is one of those instances where there’s so much to say about the subject, but we don’t have the time to get to it in the episode. So, on the Facebook page, I’ve included more details about Marcus Aurelius’ Column, focusing especially on what it tells us about the Roman perspective on the massive crisis they had just experienced.

But Marcus Aurelius was not to be blessed with peace. In 177, a year after his triumph, the Marcomanni, Quadi, and Iazyges broke their treaties and attacked the empire. The emperor was forced to campaign anew, and three more years of brutal fighting followed. By 180, Marcus Aurelius’ legions were once again occupying the Pannonian Plain, and this time, he had a plan to ensure a permanent peace.

His solution was to create two new provinces on the territories of the defeated peoples; they were to be called Marcomannia and Sarmatia, after the Marcomanni and the Sarmatian Iazyges. This wasn’t an unprecedented plan; we’ve seen how Trajan had done the same when he had defeated the Dacians. And it was a plan that could be realistically implemented; with Roman troops already building castra to secure land north of the Danube, Marcus Aurelius’ next step was to set up the administration of these two new provinces.

But before he could get to work, the emperor died in his military quarters on March 17, 180. He was only 58 years-old and may have succumbed to the plague. Power passed to his sole surviving son, Commodus, who was with him in the camp.

This succession had long been planned. The emperor had taken his son with him on campaign in 172 and kept him by his side ever since, undoubtedly to teach him how to govern the administration and command the army. In 176, Marcus Aurelius gave Commodus the title of imperator, making them equal emperors.

Now, at only 18 years-old, Commodus received full command of the Roman empire and its armies. Occupying the lands of the Marcomanni and Iazyges, he could continue his father’s efforts and impose Roman rule on the region. But Commodus hated army life and wanted to be done with military camps and harsh campaigns as soon as he could. So, instead of maintaining his forces in the field and establishing two new provinces, he sent ambassadors to the various enemy tribes and began negotiations for a quick peace.

We only have a few details about these treaties. Some of the barbarian tribes were prohibited from living or grazing their animals within 5 Roman miles of the border, which amounts to 7.4 kilometres. This buffer zone was meant to prevent surprise attacks and allow the Romans to better supervise the frontier.

At the same time, entire communities were transplanted into the empire to work farms that had been abandoned during the war. For instance, 12,000 free Dacians were forcefully moved inside the province of Dacia. We don’t have details about how they were settled, but they were probably dispersed throughout the province to reduce to risk of them coming together into larger groups and threatening the established order.

The treaties could’ve also stipulated the return of Roman prisoners, a pledge of mutual help, and even for the tribes to provide the empire with warriors. Whatever the details, the conditions were much better than what the Marcomanni and Iazyges could’ve expected after their near total defeat, since they were allowed to maintain their independence. The legions retreated from their lands and left them to live as they wished. The various peace treaties were signed a few months after the death of Marcus Aurelius, and before the end of the year, Commodus was in Rome celebrating a triumph.

His generals were left to supervise the frontiers. Several clashes occurred over the next two years as some tribal remnants were forced to adhere to the deals, but there were no incursions into the empire.

As the year 182 dawned, the migrations that had begun twenty years earlier were over. The peoples that had been pushed to the borders of the empire and tried to enter it had been repeatedly defeated, and they were now frozen in place, exhausted by continuous losses.

In the case of Dacia, fighting had been most intense from 167 to 171 CE, after which its frontiers had been secured and the peoples on its borders subdued. The Costoboci had been disbanded, the Hasdingi had become Roman allies, and the Iazyges and Roxolani had been forced to accept peace. Rome had once again used its immense resources to overcome a crisis.

But the repercussions of this chaotic period can’t be summarized by neat treaties and nice borders. The people of the Roman world had been transformed by this traumatic experience, and next time, we’ll look at how the people of Dacia had changed and how they began to rebuild their lives after a generation of war and plague.