Rome is sacked
Alaric's Goths take the city, and the shock is felt across the Mediterranean.
- When
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Classical, Holocene
In 410 CE a Gothic army under Alaric enters Rome and plunders it for three days. Militarily it changes little — Rome had not been the capital for a century — but the psychological effect is enormous: a city that had not fallen to a foreign enemy in eight hundred years. Jerome wrote that the light of the world had gone out. Augustine responds by writing the City of God, arguing that no earthly city was ever the point.