General Notes

[blended.FTW]
[mergebase.FTW]
Galla Placida married the Master of the Soldiers Constantius (who ruled briefly as co-Emperor with Honorius, Galla's brother) when he was at the height of his career, and their son Valentinian III reigned in the West. When the Visigoths under King Alaric I sacked Rome in 410, they carried off Galla with them as hostage. She was of course returned, and later went on to rule the empire when her son was very young with the formal title of "piissima et perpetua Augusta mater" which translates to "most pius and eternal Empress."
---------------------------
A visit to the mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna is quite enough in itself to inspire one with a desire to know more of this remarkable woman. Daughter to Theodosius the Great, and half-sister to Honorius, the Emperor under whom Britain was finally lost to Rome, she lived to see the great empire of the known world become the battleground of marauding barbarians, and the court that had ruled that empire sheltering disconsolently in the last territory it could call its own---Ravenna, an island of security surrounded by a waste of marshland and the sea.
She first storms onto the stage of history in 408 when Alaric the Goth was laying siege to Rome. The Senate consulted her as to the reliability of her cousin Serena, widow of Stilicho, the Vandal general who had served her father, and she advised that the woman be strangled for conniving with the enemy. Though a very devout Catholic, she lived in a world of treachery and sudden death, and witnessed many such scenes---and worse, for the most usual form of execution then was clubbing to death.
When Alaric sacked Rome, he carried off Placidia as a part of his booty but afforded her imperial honours. He died soon afterwards, and his brother-in-law Ataulf became king. Ataulf carried on for a short time Alaric's policy of attempting to convert the Roman Empire into a Gothic one, but rapidly became convinced of the superiority of a Roman structure. In 412 he offered to join with Honorius and to give up Placidia in return for supplies, but neither cooperation nor supplies came, and in 414 he married Placidia. This was be no means a forced marriage, and the description we have of the ceremony shows an interesting union of Roman and barbaric ideas: they dressed in the Roman manner, and the proper wedding hymns were sung, but the bridegroom's gift to the bride was fifty handsome youths dressed in silk, each carrying two platters, the one piled high with gold, the other with precious stones---the booty from the sack of Rome. Ataulf declared 'I hope to be handed down to posterity as the initiator of a Roman restoration.' (Olympiodorus fragment 24, and Orosius, vii, 42.)
We cannot tell what might have resulted from such a cooperation, but it was foiled by Honorius, who was deeply shocked by his sister's marriage with a barbarian and also was strongly influenced by the advice of his leading general, Constantius, who longed to marry Placidia himself.
In 415 Placidia bore Ataulf a son, and called him Theodosius, after her father. But the child died, and almost as soon as they had buried their hope for the future in his silver coffin in Barcelona, Ataulf was murdered. His immediate successor treated her as a common prisioner, driving her before his horse on foot for twelve miles. Luckily for her this man only lasted a week, and his successor handed her over to Constantius in return for 600,000 measures of corn, as her husband had instructed on his death-bed.
In 417 she was married, much against her will, to Constantius. She soon settled down, bearing him a son and a daughter, and exercising her powerful influence on Honorius to raise her husband's status. Honorius was not keen on human beings---he loved poultry best of all but his sister he adored, and scandal ensued from their constant kissing. In 421 Placidia was elevated to the rank of Augusta, and her husband as Agusutus became joint ruler of the Wester