The world in AD 400

Africa

Rome ate African grain, and in 397 and 398 the grain stopped. Gildo rose in revolt in Africa and held up the corn fleet, and Claudian’s poem The War Against Gildo pictures the city of Rome as starving and feeble. Platnauer’s introduction to the poems gives the outcome: Stilicho sent Gildo’s own brother Mascezel against him, Gildo was defeated at Tabraca on July 31, 398, and Stilicho had Mascezel executed later that same year. Platnauer adds that the real credit for the victory belonged to Mascezel, and he thinks the poet, himself probably a native of Egypt, prudently left the poem’s second book unwritten or suppressed it once Mascezel was dead.

• Which African kingdom minted gold coins and raised 23-meter stelae?AD 350

West Asia

Yazdegerd I (r. 399-420) came to the Sasanian throne after three predecessors whom, in A. Shapur Shahbazi’s account for the Encyclopaedia Iranica, the nobility had either deposed or killed. The Persian-based histories remember him as “the Sinner,” a verdict Shahbazi traces to priests and nobles who resented his peace with Rome, his religious tolerance and his effort to curb their power. Procopius, writing on the Roman side, called him a sovereign “whose nobility of character had won for him the greatest renown,” and reports that Arcadius, dying in 408 with an infant heir, named the Persian king as the boy’s guardian in his will. The scholar Biruni credits Yazdegerd with a two-month calendar intercalation of about 401, though Shahbazi judges the attribution unfounded.

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• Did Persia really capture a Roman emperor alive in AD 260?AD 260

Europe

Constantinople spent the year in a Gothic crisis. According to the chronology Jona Lendering keeps on Livius.org, the chamberlain Eutropius fell in 399 amid a conspiracy of the Gothic general Gainas; in 400 Gainas held Constantinople, the praetorian prefect Aurelian was exiled, and street fighting broke out until Gainas left the city and Aurelian returned. The following year the Hunnish leader Uldin killed him. In the West, Stilicho held the consulship of 400 and had married his daughter Maria to Honorius in 398. Alaric’s Visigoths invaded Italy in 401 and fought Stilicho at Pollentia on April 6, 402, a battle Livius calls indecisive; Alaric would capture Rome in 410, two years after Stilicho’s murder.

East Asia

Eight rival states shared north China, the successors of the Former Qin after its defeat at Feishui in 383, as Ulrich Theobald lists them on Chinaknowledge.de: Later Qin and Western Qin in Shaanxi, the Later Yan and Southern Yan in Shanxi, Hebei and Shandong, and four Liang states in Gansu, the newest of them, Western Liang, founded in 400. The Eastern Jin (317-420) ruled the south from Jiankang, and the Northern Wei, founded in 386, would not reunite the north until 439. In Korea, the National Institute of Korean History records that Gwanggaeto, king of Goguryeo since 391, answered a plea made the year before by Naemul of Silla and in 400 sent 50,000 infantry and cavalry, who pushed Wa forces out of Silla and pressed on into Gaya. That same year the Later Yan ruler Murong Sheng led 30,000 men against Goguryeo’s western border, took the fortresses of Sinseong and Namso, and carried off more than 5,000 households.

South Asia

The Gupta king Chandragupta II held northern India, whose reign the Cleveland Museum of Art places from around AD 380 to 415. The museum holds a gold coin of his, 1.9 centimeters across, dated to about 400, and describes the Guptas as the first native dynasty to unify northern India since the Maurya empire. Faxian, who had left Chang’an in 399 with a group of fellow monks, crossed the Taklamakan Desert and the Pamirs to reach northern India, spent five years there and two more in Sri Lanka, and came home by sea; Theobald’s entry on his travel record, the Foguoji, has him landing on the Shandong coast in 414. His account of Gandhara mentions no foreign invasion, a silence the historian Frantz Grenet uses to date the Kidarite conquest of that region after 412.

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Central Asia

Beyond the Don lay the country that Ptolemy, in the second century, had assigned to a people called the Khounoi, between the Sea of Azov and the upper Kuban; Martin Schottky, writing for the Encyclopaedia Iranica, locates them there. Schottky calls the identification of the Khounoi with the later Huns beyond doubt. The Huns had overrun the Alans between 370 and 375, and in the summer of 395, in Schottky’s account, a Hunnic force crossed the Don, rode through the Caucasus and struck both Roman and Persian territory, one detachment under Basikh and Koursikh reaching Ctesiphon before a Persian army caught it and, according to Priscus, freed 18,000 prisoners. Farther east, numismatists read the name of a ruler called Kidara on gold coins buried about 390 at Tepe Maranjan near Kabul; Grenet accepts the reading as possible but notes room for doubt, since the written sources point to the Kidarites’ rise only in the 420s or 430s.

The Americas

Twenty-two years earlier, on January 16, 378, a lord named Sihyaj K’ahk’ had arrived at Tikal in the Maya lowlands. David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin, speaking at Dumbarton Oaks in 2022, reads the inscriptions at Tikal and nearby Uaxactun as recording that arrival and the installation of a new Tikal king, Yax Nuun Ayiin, whose father was the figure scholars call Spearthrower Owl; Stuart connects the newcomers with Teotihuacan in highland Mexico and thinks the new king was a child ruling under Sihyaj K’ahk’ as regent. On the north coast of Peru, Moche potters were making vessels such as the earthenware llama in the Cleveland Museum of Art, dated about 200 to 550, which shows the animal as a pack carrier.

Oceania

Lake cores from Atiu in the southern Cook Islands put the first sign of pigs or people on that island around AD 900, according to a 2020 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences led by D. A. Sear, which links the voyages to a drought lasting some 200 to 400 years in the islands to the west. A 2011 meta-analysis of 1,434 radiocarbon dates by Janet Wilmshurst and colleagues placed the first settlement of East Polynesia later still, in the Society Islands about AD 1025 to 1120. On either chronology, Hawaii, Rapa Nui and New Zealand had no human inhabitants in AD 400.

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Iranica, A. Shapur Shahbazi: "Yazdegerd I" (2003, updated 2012)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Martin Schottky: "Huns" (2004, updated 2013)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Frantz Grenet: "Kidarites" (2022)
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Honorius"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Arcadius"
• LacusCurtius, Claudian, Loeb Classical Library (1922), Maurice Platnauer: "Introduction"
• LacusCurtius, Claudian: "The War Against Gildo" (translated by Maurice Platnauer, Loeb Classical Library, 1922)
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "The Sixteen Barbarian States: Political History"
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Foguoji 佛國記" (2010)
• National Institute of Korean History (국사편찬위원회), 우리역사넷, 한국사연대기: "광개토왕 374~412"
• Cleveland Museum of Art, open access collection: "Coin of Chandragupta II" (1977.62)
• Cleveland Museum of Art, open access collection: "Llama Vessel" (1990.128)
• Dumbarton Oaks, Pre-Columbian Studies public lecture transcript, David Stuart: "Rulers from the West: Teotihuacan in Maya History and Politics" (December 1, 2022)
• PNAS 117(16) via PubMed Central, Sear, Allen, Hassall and others: "Human settlement of East Polynesia earlier, incremental, and coincident with prolonged South Pacific drought" (2020)
• PNAS 108(5) via PubMed Central, Wilmshurst, Hunt, Lipo and Anderson: "High-precision radiocarbon dating shows recent and rapid initial human colonization of East Polynesia" (2011)