THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYof the east at this period that it was able to absorb such a loss virtually within
a generation. It was perhaps characteristic that the eastern government chose
to concentrate its military effort on the dramatic target presented by Vandal
Africa, just as Justinian was to do, but the failure of the expedition ruled out
any thought of similar intervention in Italy itself. The Vandals remained in
control of North Africa until defeated by Belisarius in 533–4, and when the
line of Roman emperors in the west came to an end in AD 476, the east was
already resigned to the situation and proceeded to deal by a kind of de facto
recognition with the barbarian leaders who succeeded them. It was easier to
close one’s eyes, and it was some time before Constantinople fully realized
that the west was in practice divided into several barbarian kingdoms, particu-
larly as the kings for their part tended to adopt a deferential tone towards the
eastern emperor.^44
A means of maintaining relations with the west was through dynastic mar-
riage, though this too could mean military action. On the death of Honorius in
423, Theodosius II intervened to support the claims of the young Valentinian,
grandson of Theodosius I, against the usurpation of a certain John; in order
to do this he had to recognize the position of Valentinian’s mother Galla
Placidia, widow of Honorius’ short-lived colleague Constantius III, whom he
had refused to recognize as empress only two years before, and who had now
fl ed to Constantinople.^45 A force was dispatched under the Alan Ardaburius
and his son Aspar to install Galla Placidia and her son, and Valentinian was
duly made Augustus, and married in Constantinople in 437 to Theodosius’
daughter Licinia Eudoxia, to whom he had been betrothed as a child. For
the fi rst part of his reign Placidia acted as regent, and relations between east
and west were good. But Valentinian proved a fragile reed, and the infl uence
of the general Aetius accordingly grew. However, the western court was also
making marriage alliances with the barbarians, and Valentinian himself agreed
to betroth his tiny daughter Eudocia to the Vandal Huneric. Older imperial
women sometimes took matters into their own hands: after Galla Placidia’s
death in 450, Valentinian’s sister Justa Grata Honoria chose to get herself
out of an awkward situation by offering herself to the Hun king Attila, a fool-
hardy action with dire consequences (Chapter 2), but one to which Theodo-
sius II gave his support.^46 Luckily for Honoria, and certainly for the empire,
Attila died fi rst, having just taken a new wife, one Ildico, and his empire broke
up:
on the morrow, when most of the day had passed, the king’s attendants,
suspecting something was amiss, fi rst shouted loudly and then broke open
the doors. They found Attila unwounded but dead from a haemorrhage
and the girl weeping with downcast face beneath her veil. Then, after the
custom of their race, they cut off part of their hair and disfi gured their
already hideous faces with deep wounds to mourn the famous warrior not
with womanly tears and wailings but with the blood of men.
(Priscus, fr. 24, trans. R.C. Blockley)