Severus Alexander
Severus Alexander and Julia Mamaea murdered in the Rhine-army mutiny
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗Herodian says Maximinus won over his recruits by doubling their rations, then marched on the emperor's camp. No exact day for the killers' arrival is securely established.
The recruits who made their own emperor
The murders are listed under 22 March 235, near Mogontiacum — modern Mainz — where the Rhine army was preparing for a campaign against Germanic peoples. Herodian reports that recruits first acclaimed the equestrian commander Maximinus on their drill field; Maximinus then doubled their rations, promised gifts and marched toward Alexander's nearby headquarters.
Alexander had himself put Maximinus in charge of training those recruits. When the two forces met, Alexander's soldiers refused to fight, deserted him and joined Maximinus, who was then acclaimed by the combined army.
Maximinus sent a tribune and several centurions into the imperial quarters, where they killed Severus Alexander, his mother Julia Mamaea, and followers who resisted.
Why 22 March is not secure
The exact day is not securely established. Modern works variously give 19, 20, 21 or 22 March, while the Oxford Classical Dictionary conservatively gives February or March 235; the Livius chronology attached to Herodian's narrative labels the relevant episode February 235.
One influential chronological reconstruction identified 19 March as Alexander's death date and 6 March as Maximinus's accession — which would put the acclamation and the murders on separate days rather than one.
That separation is in Herodian too. His sequence has Maximinus proclaimed first and the killers dispatched afterward, so the mutiny and the murder are not a single dated moment even in the fullest ancient account.
What ended in the imperial quarters
With Alexander and Mamaea dead and the troops accepting Maximinus, the Severan dynasty ended. Maximinus held the Rhine army without having reached the throne through dynastic succession.
Herodian is the fullest narrative source for the episode, but his hostile gendered portrayal of Mamaea and his dramatized speeches are not verbatim evidence of what was said.
"The Crisis of the Third Century" is a modern periodization covering 235 to 284, not something contemporaries declared that day; counts of the emperors it produced vary with what is included, and one modern scholarly count gives at least 22.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources 2 audit passes, 1 issue open Date disputed
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →
Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~0235-03.
What the sources leave uncertain
- The exact day is not securely established. Modern works variously give 19, 20, 21 or 22 March, while the Oxford Classical Dictionary conservatively gives February or March 235.
- An influential chronological reconstruction identified 19 March as Alexander's death date and 6 March as Maximinus's accession, illustrating that the acclamation and murders may not belong to one exact date.
- Herodian is the fullest narrative source, but his hostile gendered portrayal of Mamaea and dramatized speeches should not be treated as verbatim evidence.
- The precise camp has often been associated with Bretzenheim near Mainz, but the broad description “outside Mainz” is safer.