Honorius

Proclaimed Augustus at the age of eight and ruler of the West at ten, Honorius presided over one of the most disastrous periods in Roman history while exercising little personal direction over events. The younger son of Theodosius I, born in 384, he received the western empire on his father's death in 395 under the guardianship of the general Stilicho, whose place in the dynasty was secured by marriage: Stilicho's wife Serena was Theodosius's niece and adoptive daughter, and Honorius in turn married Stilicho's daughters Maria and, after her death, Thermantia. Both marriages were childless, and the emperor left no heir.

The reign was defined by invasion. The Gothic leader Alaric pressed repeatedly into Italy from 401, prompting the court's move from Milan to the defensible marshes of Ravenna in 402. In the winter of 406 large groups of Vandals, Alans and Sueves crossed the Rhine into Gaul, and the usurper Constantine III stripped Britain of troops; the island passed permanently out of imperial control around 410, when, as the historian Zosimus reports, the cities of Britain were told to look to their own defense.

In 408 Honorius authorized the arrest and execution of Stilicho, whose fall was followed by massacres of barbarian soldiers' families that drove thousands of recruits to Alaric. Negotiations between the court at Ravenna and the Goths repeatedly collapsed, and in August 410 Alaric's forces entered and sacked Rome for three days, the first capture of the city in eight centuries. The emperor's half-sister Galla Placidia, carried off by the Goths, later married their king Athaulf, and after his death returned to marry the general Constantius, whom Honorius raised as co-emperor Constantius III in 421.

The reign's later years brought partial stabilization in Gaul and Spain under Constantius and the suppression of successive usurpers. Honorius died of illness at Ravenna in August 423, aged thirty-eight. After an interlude under the usurper John, the western throne passed to his nephew Valentinian III, Placidia's son, continuing the Theodosian line.