11. The Thessalonica massacre evolved from an arrest of a man for sodomy
In the spring of 390 CE the Gothic magistrate of Illyricum, a region which included Thessalonica, arrested a local celebrity of charges of sodomy with another man. The public reacted with outrage, demanding his release. When the magistrate, a man named Butheric, refused rioting broke out in Thessalonica, and Butheric and several other Roman officials in the city and nearby region were killed. Roman Emperor Theodosius I learned of the revolt in the region and dispatched Gothic troops to quell it, with the orders to deal with the rebels harshly. The emperor’s original orders were for the troops to treat all of the inhabitants of the city as if they were in rebellion against the empire, executing them without trial and without mercy.
As the Gothic troops neared the city the emperor reconsidered, and sent a messenger to head off the army before it arrived, with instructions to arrest the ringleaders of the uprising, but not to punish the unoffending residents of Thessalonica. By the time the messenger encountered the troops they had already entered the city and carried out the original instructions from Rome. Several thousand of the city’s inhabitants had been slaughtered by the Gothic troops in the name of the emperor. Theodosius was rebuked by the church for the massacre, and was not allowed to enter into any Christian churches, effectively excommunicating him, until he agreed to a change in Roman law under which those sentenced to suffer the death penalty were granted a thirty day period before it was carried out. Modern historians place the death count at Thessalonica at around 7,000.