Alaric I (Civ5)/Civilopedia

In the face of the Huns' advance, the Visigoths entered Byzantine service as auxiliaries for the right to settle in Roman lands. As a young man, Alaric joined the legions. In 394 he led a Gothic force to aid the empire in defeating the rebel Arbogast. The next year Alaric was elected chief of the Visigoths.
That same year, Theodosius, emperor of Byzantium and Alaric's patron, died. Despite his service to the empire and role as the king of the Visigoths, Alaric was ignored and dismissed in the shuffling of imperial offices that followed. Soon after Theodosius' death Alaric struck at Eastern Rome. Ravaging Greece, he reached the walls of Constantinople in 397 AD, whereupon the emperor appointed Alaric magister militum, who had autonomous military authority.
In 407 AD, after estrangement between the two halves of the empire threatened civil war, Alaric led a Visigoth army across the Julian Alps to the outskirts of Rome. Starvation eventually led the Roman Senate to negotiate. Alaric kept his forces in the region, and when the Senate reneged on its treaty, he besieged Rome again. Following this siege, and another settlement with the Senate in 409, in which Alaric set up a puppet emperor in Rome, the Visigoths marched north.
But it was not long before Alaric was forced to return to dethrone his puppet and declare himself king in Italy. In August 410, the Visigoths burst through the Porto Salaria into the city. Alaric showed amazing clemency to the people of Rome; Christian churches were not pillaged, and protection was afforded the thousands of pagans and Christians who took refuge there. Alaric now marched south into Calabria in preparation for invading Africa and securing lost Roman provinces there. But he died suddenly, probably of fever, in the port of Cosenza.