Editing Alaric I (section)

==Early life, federate status in the Balkans==
[[File:Alarich steel engraving.jpg|right|thumb|Imaginative portrait of Alaric in C. Strahlheim, ''Das Welttheater'', 4. Band, Frankfurt a.M., 1836]]
According to [[Jordanes]], a 6th-century Roman bureaucrat of [[Goths|Gothic]] origin—who later turned his hand to history—Alaric was born on [[Peuce Island]] at the mouth of the [[Danube Delta]] in present-day [[Romania]] and belonged to the noble [[Balti dynasty]] of the [[Thervingi]]an Goths. There is no way to verify this claim.{{sfn|Boin|2020|p=31}}{{efn|To a large extent, Alaric's kin were largely Thervingi, with whom [[Constantine the Great|Constantine]] had concluded a lasting peace in the 330s.{{sfn|Kulikowski|2006|p=31}}}} Historian Douglas Boin does not make such an unequivocal assessment about Alaric's Gothic heritage and instead claims he came from either the Thervingi or the Greuthung tribes.{{sfn|Boin|2020|p=14}} When the Goths suffered setbacks against the [[Huns]], they made a mass migration across the [[Danube]], and fought a [[Gothic War (376–382)|war with Rome]]. Alaric was probably a child during this period who grew up along Rome's periphery.{{sfn|Boin|2020|pp=14–15, 37}} Alaric's upbringing was shaped by living along the border of Roman territory in a region that the Romans viewed as a veritable "backwater"; some four centuries before, the Roman poet [[Ovid]] regarded the area along the Danube and Black Sea where Alaric was reared as a land of "barbarians", among "the most remote in the vast world."{{sfn|Boin|2020|p=15}}{{efn|Ovid never singled out any particular barbarian group and at the time of his writings, was referencing the ethnic Sarmatians, Getae, Dacians and Thracians.{{sfn|Boin|2020|pp=15–16}}}}

Alaric's childhood in the Balkans, where the Goths had settled by way of an agreement with Theodosius, was spent in the company of veterans who had fought at the Battle of Adrianople in 378,{{efn|Many of Rome's leading officers and some of their most elite fighting men died during the battle which struck a major blow to Roman prestige and the Empire's military capabilities.{{sfn|Halsall|2007|p=179}}}} during which they had annihilated much of the Eastern army and killed Emperor [[Valens]].{{sfn|Kulikowski|2006|p=11}} Imperial campaigns against the Visigoths were conducted until a treaty was reached in 382. This treaty was the first ''foedus'' on imperial Roman soil and required these semi-autonomous Germanic tribes—among whom Alaric was raised—to supply troops for the Roman army in exchange for peace, control of cultivatable land, and freedom from Roman direct administrative control.{{sfn|Halsall|2007|pp=179–180}} Correspondingly, there was hardly a region along the Roman frontier during Alaric's day without Gothic slaves and servants of one form or another.{{sfn|Boin|2020|p=19}} For several subsequent decades, many Goths like Alaric were "called up into regular units of the eastern field army" while others served as auxiliaries in campaigns led by Theodosius against the western usurpers [[Magnus Maximus]] and [[Eugenius]].{{sfn|Kulikowski|2006|pp=152–153}}