page_title: Battle of the Frigidus
section_title: Campaign preparation
hierarchical_section_title: Battle of the Frigidus / Campaign preparation
context_page_description: The Battle of the Frigidus, also called the Battle of the Frigid River, was fought between 5–6 September 394, between the army of the Eastern Emperor Theodosius I and the army of Western Roman ruler Eugenius in the eastern border of Regio X in Roman Italia.
  Because the Western Emperor Eugenius had pagan sympathies, the war assumed religious overtones, with Christianity pitted against the last attempt at a pagan revival.
  The battle was the last serious attempt to contest the Christianization of the empire; its outcome decided the outcome of Christianity in the western Empire, and the final decline of Greco-Roman polytheism in favour of Christianity over the following century.
  The defeat of Eugenius and his commander, the Frankish magister militum Arbogast, put the whole empire back in the hands of a single emperor for the last time until the final collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Theodosius passed
  the rule of the Western Empire to his younger son Honorius in the following year.
context_section_description: Over the following year and a half Theodosius marshalled his forces for the invasion. The Eastern armies had atrophied since the death of the Emperor Valens and most of his soldiers at the Battle of Adrianople. It fell upon the generals Flavius Stilicho and Timasius both to restore discipline to the legions and to bring them back up to strength through recruitment and conscription.
  At the same time another of Theodosius's advisers, the eunuch Eutropius, was sent out from Constantinople to seek the advice and wisdom of an aged Christian monk in the Egyptian town of Lycopolis. According to the accounts of the meeting given by Claudian and Sozomen, the old monk prophesied that Theodosius would achieve a costly but decisive victory over Eugenius and Arbogast.
  The Eastern army set out towards the west from Constantinople in May 394. The re-galvanized legions were bolstered by numerous barbarian auxiliaries including over 20,000 Visigoth federates and additional forces from Syria. Theodosius himself led the army; among his commanders were his own generals Stilicho and Timasius, the Visigoth chieftain Alaric, and a Caucasian Iberian named Bacurios Hiberios.
  Their advance through Pannonia until the Julian Alps was unopposed, and Theodosius and his officers must have had suspicions about what lay ahead when they discovered that the eastern ends of the mountain passes were undefended. Arbogast had, based on his experiences fighting against the usurper Magnus Maximus in Gaul, decided that the best strategy was to keep his forces united to defend Italy itself, and to that end he went so far as to leave the Alpine passes unguarded. Arbogast's forces consisted mainly of his fellow Franks, Alemanni, and Gallo-Romans, plus his own Gothic auxiliaries.
  Thanks to Arbogast's strategy of maintaining a single, relatively cohesive force, the Theodosian army passed unhindered through the Alps and descended towards the valley of the Frigidus River to the east of the Roman port of Aquileia. It was in this narrow, mountainous region that they came upon the Western army's encampment within the Claustra Alpium Iuliarum in the first days of September.
caption: Eugenius on a coin. The Western ruler was taken prisoner after the battle and beheaded. His head was displayed in Theodosius' camp.
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