THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW ORDER 19with the new Roman military dictator, the Master of the Soldiers
Constantius (d. 421), who was trying to restore imperial authority in
Gaul in the name of the emperor Honorius. Ataulph had married
Galla Placidia, half-sister of the emperor, who had been carried off
from Rome after the sack of 410. With the new rapprochement with the
imperial government and the birth of their son Theodosius, the
possibilities of a close working relationship between the Romans and
the Goths became very real, the more so as the emperor's half-sister
was his closest heir. However, the optimistically-named infant
Theodosius died at Barcelona (c. 415), recently occupied by the
Visigoths, and his father, King Ataulph, was murdered there in 416 in
an act of private vengeance. His successor Sigeric only lasted a week
before being murdered in turn, conceivably an act of revenge for
Ataulph, whose killing he probably instigated. The new king Wallia
(416-419) maintained Ataulph's alliance with Rome, but the per-
sonal ties with the imperial family were at an end, and at Constantius's
insistence Galla Placidia was handed back, to marry him in 418.^14
It was acting in the imperial interest that the Visigoths were let
loose in Spain to eliminate the barbarians established in the southern
provinces, the former allies of the regime of Maximus and Gerontius.
In the course of the years 416 to 418 the independence of the Aians
and the Siling Vandals was extinguished by the numerically superior
Visigoths. Their kings were killed and the remnant fled to the Hasding
Vandals in Galicia, with whom they merged. Whether the Visigoths
also intended to obliterate the Hasdings and the Sueves is uncertain,
for by 418 there was a clear danger that they were proposing to
transfer themselves to Mrica, as they had vainly attempted in 410. By
withholding their food supplies and denying them access to shipping,
Constantius forced the Visigoths to return northwards to Gaul in-
stead, and in 418 (or possibly 419) they were settled as federates in
Aquitaine, with a new capital at Toulouse. Their brief hold on Bar-
celona and the coast of Tarraconensis was probably also terminated
at this point.A False Start: The Kingdom of the Sueves
INTO the vacuum in southern Spain caused by the removal of the
Visigoths and the elimination of the Silings and the Aians, the Hasding
Vandals now moved. Their need for new lands, with their ranks swol-
len by the influx of the survivors of the slaughter of the two tribes,