The Book of Emperors: A Translation of the Middle High German Kaiserchronik

XXIV Lucius Accommodus

197 helius Adrianus then judged over the Roman dominions. Jerusalem , that city of marvels, was lying wasted and empty. The heathens had destroyed it, tearing down every bit of its walls. King Cosdras was responsible for that, but Eraclius was to take vengeance upon him for it. King Helius Adrianus had plans for Jerusalem. He had begun to love that city, and he restored it with magnificent buildings that may be admired to this day. He changed its name into one based on his own. According to him, it was to be called “Helia,” but God soon avenged his wonton pride. He was killed at Damascus, and Jerusalem took back the same name again that it had before. Damascus paid dearly for his death. The Romans avenged the loss of their ruler. They ravaged the territories ruled from Damascus with their armies, which destroyed their crops and left their landscape desolate —so that they soon regretted that the king had been killed in their city. Then the Romans entered the city of Jerusalem. XXIV Lucius Accommodus This chapter contains many historical names, sometimes with hints of their actual place in Roman history, sometimes without even those. While Hadrian had originally named Lucius Coeionius Commodus to succeed him—and that may have suggested our author’s name for Hadrian’s successor—it is also true that Lucius Commodus Antoninus (r. 186–192), famed for his devotion to the gladiator’s art, may be intended. Antoninus Pius (r. 138–161), the grandfather of that Commodus, makes a vignette appearance in one of the battle scenes below, although not as emperor. Alaric, king of the Visigoths, led forces that besieged and then sacked Rome much later in 410, an important episode in the 198 Chapter Twenty-four beginning of the fall of the Roman Empire. Actually, as Saint Augustine was to point out soon afterwards, Alaric’s destructiveness in Rome was limited. His notoriety remained, however, as an early victor over a Rome in political and military decline. Putting him nearly three centuries earlier at the head of hundreds of thousands of warriors from the “borderlands” and beyond—united in avenging the failure of Romans to name Alaric their emperor—is, of course, fiction. after conferring together, the Romans quickly selected Lucius Accommodus . They agreed that it portended evil for the imperial throne to stay empty and that he should be their choice for Judge; however, the strife that began with choosing him lasted a long time. Alaric and his men—so we hear the Book tell us—really wanted to leave for home. They thought that what had been done was scandalously against their interests. They requested their king to ride to Apulia, which was what he intended to do. But then when two factions—that of people from the borderlands and those from the interior of the empire— discussed the election with their allies, they discovered that those from outlying areas wanted to replace Lucius Accommodus with Alaric, which was unacceptable to those from the interior territories. Lucius Accommodus continued to judge the Roman dominions, but later the Romans suffered greatly for that. Many of them were destined to die when Alaric would take his vengeance and rip the foundations of Roman fortifications out of the ground. When the nobles returned to the city of Rome they were well received by friends and relations, young and old, who sang songs of praise to them and rejoiced at their arrival, expressing thanks to them for the triumph they brought them when they achieved victory in their invasion of Damascus. Not long after the nobles had been well received, the Senate decided that they should all swear their allegiance to Lucius Accommodus. These lords began to separate into groups. Some among them [who had sworn allegiance to Alaric] said they would rather die than break their oaths. These nobles suggested putting the decision off until the next day, but when night Lucius Accommodus 199 came they used cunning to get out of the city, leaving wives and others of their households behind. When those heroes arrived at the camp of Alaric, their lord, and told him what had happened to them and what they had suffered, he sought massive assistance from many kinds of countries. The brave Medes—I am fairly sure that is what is recorded here— brought him sixty thousand fine knights, while the Saracens and the Moors quickly...