Alaric was a Christian.
But more than anything I feel this sense from my own history of sin, of needing to beg forgiveness, for NOTHING. If you accept Christian doctrine, you are born a sinner as a little baby, before you can smile, before you can babble, before you can crawl, and long, long before you can walk and talk. In your very crib you have been judged and found wanting.
Catholics get around this–and I will stipulate as a general principle that their theology is light years ahead of, and vastly superior to their rivals, even if their actual practice and actual organization have been and continue to be filled with mediocre and even awful human beings–by baptism at birth.
But most people who are not Catholic are born sinners, in the view of Protestant Christians, and can only with difficulty get rid of this stigma.
Christianity was unique in human history to that point in its radical intolerance, its violence towards alternative practices and beliefs, and in the fear it was able to exert in the cause of avoiding eternal damnation.
Islam was a logical outgrowth of Christianity. It takes a basic idea–that those who have not been saved face eternal damnation–and builds on-going wars, ubiquitous fear, and an absolute sense of superiority, even in the very processes of taking slaves, raping women, marrying children, and killing their enemies and taking their possessions, which would normally be called theft..