Rank brings on honour to a man; a man must bring honour to his rank.
Machiavelli
In 287, Maximian, utilizing auxiliary rather than the local legionary forces, drove back the barbaric hordes crossing the Rhine near Strasbourg.1 A year later, confronted with Frankish invasions prompted by the absence of the legion in the hands of Carausius, Maximian for the first time in Roman history permitted the invaders to remain on Roman soil as armed allies under their Germanic King Gennobaudes.2A century and a half later this Frankish presence would determine the fate of Gaul.
Judging from their absence on coinage honouring each of the many legions he claimed loyal to him, neither XII Victrix nor the Theban Legion was under Carausius’ command in Britain.
On the Gallic side of the Channel, Carausius had the support of a ‘cunei militum peregrinorum interclusis’,3 an isolated, cut-off or blockaded unit of men not citizens. A cuneus was a wedge-shaped battle formation typical of archers. Legally resident aliens, peregrini were allowed in Legio Julia Alexandriana, and perhaps other fleet units as well. Carausius also recruited barbarian Frisians, Saxons and Gallic merchants. Both Carausius and Maximian were using the Franks and being manipulated by them.
Carausius’ continental holdings were Rouen on the Seine and Boulogne on the Channel. Between 286 and 287, Maximian made a sweep behind the coast in which soldiers from an unidentified unit were martyred, the leader of their group, Terentianus, falling at Douai.4 The priest Quentin5 was killed near the town today bearing his name, the Armenian bishop Chrysolius at Tournai. At Xanten, Carausius’ headquarters was abandoned when he sailed away to Britain with its troops. The tomb of Mallosus6 and Victor uncovered beneath St Victor Kirche in the 1930s contained two male skeletons of an age to be father and son. Hacking cuts on the bones of the upper body suggest that both had been sitting at a table when attacked. The elder had worn a soldier’s-style cloak. As at Trier and Cologne, Xanten honours hundreds of unnamed military martyrs. Their cathedrals were built over army cemeteries and all the graves discovered in the Middle Ages deemed those of martyrs.
An inscription at Bonn speaks of unnamed martyrs buried there but the precise location of the tombs of Cassius and Florentius remain undiscovered.
A major find of Alexandrian coins from this period was found on Guernsey in the 1930s.7 A few single imperial coins from the era have been found in Iceland, suggesting that sailors aware of the impending conflict detoured to wait out the struggle.8
A medieval chronicle has it that Carausius’ fleet arrived near the Scottish border. Enlisting barbarian Picts and Scots, he marched southwards and clashed with the forces of the governor of Britain, Bassianus. Part of the governor’s army withdrew without a fight. His opponent dead, Carausius occupied the Saxon Shore forts on the coast and based his fleet at what is today Southampton opposite the Isle of Wight.
Maximian, deprived of the Channel coast by Carausius, was forced to hastily build and man a new fleet on the tributaries of the Rhine to send against Britain. In spring 289, with ill-trained crews commanded by army officers, they set sail.
In the ancient world, naval battles on the high seas were too unpredictable to be risked. The strategy was to trap the enemy close to shore, ideally by an ambush in a strait between an island and the coast from which the foe could not readily break out. The Isle of Wight amply suited the scenario.
Except for stating that they encountered bad weather, Maximian’s propagandist is silent concerning the armada’s fate. Carausius’ coins honour no victory but he consistently posed not as an enemy but a colleague of Diocletian and Maximian and honoured them on his coins. Nevertheless, his Southampton mint in 289 added to the legions on his coins the IV Flavia Felix,9 a Balkan legion. The invasion was a disaster, some of its ships, storm tossed and handled by inexperienced crews, apparently landing in Britain only to surrender.
Diocletian was not pleased with Carausius’ continued resistance nor overjoyed at the yielding of Roman soil to the Frankish chief Gennobaudes. A Roman writer remarked that the Franks ‘laugh at treaties broken’. In late 289, Maximian was temporarily stripped of his consular title as demonstrated by coinage.10 Numerous hoards buried in 289 across a wide area of northern Gaul suggest that he had suffered a defeat, massive desertions or a widescale and almost unopposed wave of Germanic intrusions in one of the ‘greatest unrecorded battles in history’ according to a British scholar.11Whatever the case, the morale of his followers had plummeted.
Summoned to meet Diocletian in Milan in the winter of 289–90, Maximian accepted an uneasy truce with Carausius who busied himself reinforcing his foothold on the continent at Boulogne. Deciding that the task of ruling the Empire was too much for two rulers, Diocletian appointed an assistant to each augustus. On 1 March 293, he titled Galerius caesar or viceroy in the East and Maximian’s aide Constantius viceroy in the West12 Each was compelled to divorce his wife and marry the daughter of his augustus to ensure loyalty and heirs to the throne.
Constantius had met his first wife Helena on an eastern campaign.13Tradition has it that she was an innkeeper’s daughter. He was derided for having married far beneath his station.
Constantine, his only child by Helena, would transform the Roman and Christian worlds. Divorced, Helena and her son would be palace prisoners for many years to come, hostages to Constantius’ love and loyalty. Maximian remained at Trier with Helena and her child while Constantius carefully planned the campaign against Carausius.
Besieging Boulogne by land, Constantius blockaded it from the sea by constructing a jetty of moored boats, barges and piles. He steadfastly tightened the siege as food within the port dwindled. Implacable yet generous in the terms he offered, Constantius won the surrender of Boulogne with minimum of bloodshed. The troops captured were asked to prove their trust by liberating the area between the Scheldt and the Rhine taken by the Franks. These were probably the isolated peregrini mentioned by Maximian’s propagandist. Otto of Freising’s mention of Theban martyrs at Bonn possibly referred to Boulogne, both cities are Bonnonia in Latin.
Maximian was at Cologne when he heard of his son-in-law’s victory. Acts declare that in response he executed fifty Moorish soldiers of the Theban Legion led by Gereon and a short time later others led by Gregory the Moor ‘returned from the expedition against the Morini’, the Celts of the Channel, i.e. the siege of Boulogne.14
Some 318 Thebans and sixty additional Moors are honoured as martyrs at Cologne,15 again probably a fallacious presumption based on the legionary cemeteries under several of the earliest churches. Gregory of Tours in the sixth century mentioned only a group of fifty military martyrs at Cologne. A gravestone of the same century in St Gereon Kirche is inscribed ‘near the martyrs’. The crematory sarcophagus presently exhibited bearing the inscription that it contains the remains of fifty Theban legionnaires, opened in 1869, held only the remains of bolts of expensive medieval cloth.
In the middle ages, a common grave was discovered deep under the Cologne cathedral with a stone inscribed X I V.M., eleven virgin martyrs. The M was nevertheless taken as the abbreviation for mille, a thousand, and a fantastic cult arose venerating a supposed 11,000 virgin martyrs ‘maidens and princesses from many lands’.16 Somehow, an Ursula was postulated to be their leader and they were assumed family members of the Theban legionnaires, their chaplain the Armenian bishop John.
The year after the fall of Boulogne, Carausius was assassinated by his treasurer, Allectus, in Britain. The eighteenth century historian William Stukeley would describe the find about 1751 of a large hoard of Carausian coins in a burial containing several bodies at Amersham in Buckinghamshire. He added that ‘the people here have a notion that Carausius was slain near this place in a field called Caversfield, about 4 miles from Newport.’17
At Penmachno in Cornwall a cairn tomb, an unusual Celtic archaism from the Roman period, exists with the Latin inscription that it is the burial place of Carausius.18 The only two instances of this name known are of the Roman admiral and whoever was interred in this tomb.
The Penmachno tomb is Christian. The martyrdoms in Britain in the era, Alban and Aaron and Julius, are attested to by the Anglo-Saxon writer Bede. Thereafter, Britain escaped persecution. Carausius sought to conciliate, not antagonize. He was not a persecutor.
Constantius had taken three years to systematically organize, build ships and train his men for the reconquest of Britain. The invasion plan was simple to avoid confusion yet draw the defenders away from the main landing. Asclepiodotus, unusual in being a Greek given Roman command, a sign of change in policy, sailed from the Seine to southern Britain, while Constantius led a diversion to the north in 296.19
As ships crept across the tossing Channel, the invaders were wary of being spotted by the leather-hulled skiffs with sails down and a lookout at the masthead used as scouts by the Channel fleet. Constantius’ anxiety was eased by a low fog concealing their approach. If scouts noticed them, their signals were lost in the mist.
Asclepiodotus’ troops landed, burned their ships and marched on London. Allectus dropped his efforts to counter Constantius’ landing and hastily set out for London with a horde of barbarian mercenaries. Encountering Asclepiodotus, he made no attempt to pull his troops together, use prepared defences or deploy and await reinforcements, but plunged headlong into battle. His army shattered upon the disciplined ranks of the reconquerors who had few casualties. Allectus’ Celts fled but his Franks fought to the death. His body was found on the field. Constantius arrived in London in time to stop it from being looted and burned by leaderless bands of Allectus’ hirelings.
In the 1920s, construction on the Thames embankment revealed a Roman vessel struck by several large stones hurled by catapults and burned to the waterline, dated by coins aboard to Constantius’ liberation of London.20 In the 1930s, a hoard found near Arras on the French Channel coast included a magnificent gold medallion issued by Constantius to commemorate the saving of London.
Britain was part of the Empire once more.
And the survivors of the Theban Legion, far from vanishing, had been given the most prestigious task in the army by the very men who had persecuted them.
Who else could they trust not to assassinate them?