Flavius Stilicho, who was one of the last competent generals in the West (only beaten out a generation later by Aetius, and then a decade after him, Emperor Majorian, the former killed by court intrigue, the latter by a military coup), was the caretaker of the Emperor Honorius when he was young, and later his father-in-law when Honorius was married to Stilicho’s daughter. Stilicho was half-Vandal by birth, but was educated and raised as a Roman, and served the Empire with absolute devotion, even under the short-tempered Emperor Theodosius, whom he made his career under. Raised for his talents to the command of the armies of the Western Empire, he managed to repel multiple barbarian incursions even with the extremely limited and steadily-draining resources of the Western Empire, and was widely celebrated for this.

However, prejudices against him for being half-barbarian persisted, and jealousy over his successes made him many enemies in the blinkered, backstabbing, hyper-aristocratic court of the Late Empire. Furthermore, he was blamed for a renewed incursion of Germanic tribes over the weakened German border despite not really having the resources to address every crisis in the Empire at once, and when he convinced the Senate to pay for peace to buy the Empire’s forces time to prepare, he made more enemies still. He was soon after arrested and executed with the complicity of Honorius, his own son-in-law and former ward. Thousands of barbarian or half-barbarian troops who had faithfully served the Empire were also killed or driven out during this purge, with many joining, out of spite and vengeance, that same Germanic incursion which saw little reason to comply with a peace treaty with a state actively involved in destroying itself.

Two years after Stilicho’s death, that incursion sacked the city of Rome.

Oops.