Galla Placidia - First Marriage

First Marriage

In the disturbances that followed the fall of Stilicho, throughout the Italian Peninsula the wives and children of the foederati were slain. The foederati were considered loyalists of Stilicho and treated accordingly. The natural consequence of all this was that these men, to the number of 30,000, flocked to the camp of Alaric I, King of the Visigoths, clamouring to be led against their cowardly enemies. Alaric accordingly led them across the Julian Alps and, in September 408, stood before the Aurelian Walls and began a strict blockade. Rome was under siege, with minor interruptions, from 408 to August 24, 410. Zosimus records that Placidia was within the city during the siege. When Serena was accused of conspiring with Alaric, "the whole senate therefore, with Placidia, uterine sister to the emperor, thought it proper that she should suffer death". Her reasons for concurring to the execution of her cousin are not stated in the account.

Prior to the fall of Rome, Placidia was captured by Alaric. Her captivity was recorded by both Jordanes and Marcellinus Comes, though the exact circumstances are not mentioned. She followed the Visigoths in their move from the Italian Peninsula to Gaul in 412. Their ruler Ataulf, having succeeded Alaric, entered an alliance with Honorius against Jovinus and Sebastianus, rival Western Roman emperors located in Gaul. He managed to defeat and execute both Gallo-Roman emperors in 413.

After the heads of Sebastianus and Jovinus arrived at Honorius' court in Ravenna in late August, to be forwarded for display among other usurpers on the walls of Carthage, relations between Ataulf and Honorius improved sufficiently for Ataulf to cement them by marrying Galla Placidia at Narbonne on January 1, 414. The nuptials were celebrated with high Roman festivities and magnificent gifts from the Gothic booty. Priscus Attalus gave the wedding speech, a classical epithalamium. The marriage was recorded by Hydatius. The historian Jordanes states that they married earlier, in 411 at Forum Livii (Forlì). Jordanes's date may actually be when she and the Gothic king first became more than captor and captive.

Placidia and Ataulf had a single known son, Theodosius. He was born in Barcelona by the end of 414. Theodosius died early in the following year, thus eliminating an opportunity for a Romano-Visigothic line. Years later the corpse was exhumed and reburied in the imperial mausoleum in St. Peter's Basilica, Rome. In Hispania, Ataulf imprudently accepted into his service a man identified as "Dubius" or "Eberwolf", a former follower of Sarus. Sarus was a Germanic chieftain who was killed while fighting under Jovinus and Sebastianus. His follower harbored a secret desire to avenge the death of his beloved patron. And so, in the palace at Barcelona, the man brought Ataulf's reign to a sudden end by killing him while he bathed in August/September, 415.

The Amali faction proceeded to proclaim Sigeric, a brother of Sarus, as the next king of the Visigoths. According to The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, the first act of Sigeric's reign "was the inhuman murder" of Ataulf's six children from a former marriage "whom he tore, without pity, from the feeble arms of a venerable bishop." (the latter being Sigesar, Bishop of the Goths). As for Galla Placidia, as Ataulf's widow, she was "treated with cruel and wanton insult" by being forced to walk more than twelve miles on foot among the crowd of captives driven ahead of the mounted Sigeric. Seeing the noble widow's sufferings, however, became one of the factors that roused indignant opponents of the usurper, who quickly assassinated Sigeric and replaced him with Wallia, Ataulf's relative.