The Crisis of the Third Century

## The Murder of an Emperor On a sweltering March day in 235 CE, the Roman Emperor Alexander Severus paced nervously in his tent along the Rhine frontier. Outside, the grumbling of his legions grew louder by the hour. The 26-year-old emperor had committed what his battle-hardened troops considered an unforgivable sin - he had attempted to negotiate with the Germanic tribes rather than crush them in battle. To the soldiers who had marched hundreds of miles to face the enemy, this reeked of cowardice. As night fell, a group of soldiers from the XXII Legion, led by the giant Thracian warrior Maximinus Thrax, burst into the imperial tent. Within moments, both Alexander and his controlling mother Julia Mamaea lay dead, their bodies unceremoniously dumped in shallow graves. The soldiers proclaimed Maximinus their new emperor - the first of what historians would later call the 'barracks emperors.' This bloody coup marked the beginning of the Crisis of the Third Century, a 50-year period tha...