User:Kansas Bear/Battle of Faesulae

The Battle of Faesulae was fought in 406 CE as part of the Gothic invasion of the Western Roman Empire. After General Flavius Stilicho repelled the Visigoths at Pollentia and Verona, he encountered a new incursion of Goths and Celts led by Radagaisus whose forces attacked Florence. Stilicho ultimately defeated the invaders at Faesulae (modern Fiesole) with support from Uldin the Hun and Sarus the Goth. Radagaisus was executed after the battle and survivors of his armies fled to Alaric.

Background
In late 405 or early 406, King Radagaisus crossed the Alps and marched into Italy with a large Celtic/Germanic force. After overrunning the undefended Rhaetia and northern Italy, heavily devastating the fertile countryside, they halted to besiege Florence, only 180 miles north of Rome. Stilicho, Master-General of the west, hastily gathered forces for the defense of Italy. He enrolled in his service a tribe of the Alani, a number of Goths under Sarus and Huns under Uldin. Stilicho's army amounted to some 20,000 Romans and auxiliaries. Radagaisus, by comparison, had in his army miscellaneous detachments of Goths and Alani, and as many as 20,000 barbarian warriors at his back. This totaled altogether with wives, slaves, and children, to between 50,000 and 100,000 people.

The battle
While Stilicho had been collecting his army, the garrison of Florence had held out with fortitude against the Radagaisus' army encamped outside their walls. As soon as Stilicho arrived with his army, he planned to smuggle desperately needed supplies and reinforcements into the beleaguered city. But instead of attempting to crush Radagaisus' army in an open battle, Stilicho adopted a more lengthy, though prudent, course of action. After surrounding the barbarians with entrenchments, he brought in thousands of people from the surrounding area to aid in the construction of a systematic entrenchment of the lines enclosing Radagisus' camp. Although Radagaisus' troops made repeated efforts to break out while the work was still in progress, the Romans were able to repulse every attack. After the trenches were completed Radagaisus realized the hopelessness of his situation. His army was trapped in the midst of enemy territory with no provisions and a vast number of non-combatants in need of subsistence. On August 23 he left his camp to capitulate in the tent of Stilicho. Though he had been promised equitable terms, or even an equal alliance, by Stilicho, the Radagaisus was immediately beheaded by the ruthless Vandalic general, who by thus emerging victorious received a second time the applause of a grateful people as the “savior of Italy”.

Aftermath
Although Stilicho had halted the invasion by the execution of its leader and momentarily averted the collapse of the empire, the issue was, in fact, less decisive than apparent since he was incapable of utterly destroying the enormous army of Radagaisus, and the barbarian survivors were not likely to return north to again confront their more savage Asian enemies, the Huns. Instead, a large detachment of the remnants of Radagaisus' army, comprising Suevi, Vandals, Alans and Burgundians, to a number of over 100,000 escaped north over the Alps, only to reappear on the frontiers of Gaul, which had been stripped of its defenders by Stilicho in 401 to meet Alaric's inroad into Italy at that time. Although initially resisted by the Franks and other Roman auxiliaries, the barbarians were soon enabled to devastate or conquer Gaul, which southwestern area (Aquitania) was lost at this point, never to be recovered by the western empire. Roman rule in Gaul survived in the north for another 80 years in the Roman Domain of Soissons until 486. Roman Armorica, also, was never overrun by the German Barbarians and would welcome Romano-Britons who would rule the area as Brittany for another 1000 years until 1486.