The Crisis of the Third Century

## The Death of an Emperor The summer heat bore down mercilessly on Rome in 235 CE as Emperor Alexander Severus's bloody corpse lay in his tent, surrounded by mutinous soldiers. The young emperor, only 26 years old, had been murdered alongside his mother Julia Mamaea by his own troops near Mogontiacum (modern-day Mainz) in Germania. The soldiers, frustrated with Alexander's cautious approach to warfare and perceived weakness in negotiations with Germanic tribes, had thrown their support behind the giant warrior Maximinus Thrax, a Thracian peasant-turned-soldier who promised glory and riches. This brutal assassination marked more than just another imperial death – it ignited what historians would later call the Crisis of the Third Century, a period of unprecedented chaos that would nearly tear the Roman Empire apart. As news of Alexander's death spread across the empire, the fragile threads holding together the vast Roman world began to unravel. ## An Empire Divided The assassinatio...