" The fourth century had been a fateful one indeed for the Roman Empire. It had seen the birth of a new capital, and the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Empire. It ended, however, on a note of bathos: in the West with silence and inertia in the face of the barbarian menace, in the East with a whimper – the only possible description for the reactions of a feckless Emperor as his vicious wife held him up to public ridicule as a fool, an incompetent and a cuckold. The new century, on the other hand, began with a bang. In the early summer of 401, Alaric the Goth invaded Italy. "

― John Julius Norwich , A Short History of Byzantium