Authors: Michael Kulikowski
Roman victory was, after all, expected by everyone, not least the Gothic leader Fritigern. At Adrianople, within striking distance of the imperial army, he showed himself more eager for a peaceful settlement than at any time since the very first crossing of the Danube. Perhaps he feared risking battle in the continuing absence of the
Greuthungi under
Alatheus and
Saphrax, whom he had long since sent for. Perhaps, on the other hand, he worried that the Goths could not defeat a proper imperial field army when their victories had thus far come only against smaller, provincial commands. Be that as it may, on 8 August he sent a Christian priest and some provincials of humble status to offer terms to the emperor: he and his followers, poor exiles driven from their own lands and with no place else to go, wanted only Thrace with its crops and its lands. In exchange for that, he could offer the emperor lasting peace. Thus ran Fritigern’s public message. With it came a private message for Valens himself, in which the Goth assured the emperor that he really did want peace, but that for him to enforce himself upon his followers, the emperor would have to keep his army mustered and active as a visible threat to the Goths. Valens distrusted these overtures, and at any rate wanted very much to fight a battle he was convinced he could win.
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Thus on the morning of the 9th, leaving his civilian court officials and his treasury safely inside the walls of Adrianople, he marched his troops northeastward out of their encampment into the rolling plain where Fritigern and his army were based. We cannot really be sure how many men either side fielded, but tens of thousands of men went into battle on that August morning. Not long before noon, the Romans spotted the Gothic camp, probably near the modern village of Muratgali. Massing on a low ridge line in front of their wagon circle, the Gothic warriors were well rested and eager for battle. Valens began to dispose his troops in line of battle, cavalry units on each wing, and the mass of his infantry in the centre. Neither side was as prepared for a pitched battle as they might have been: the left wing of the Roman army was still scattered in columns-of-march, while the Greuthungi under Alatheus and Saphrax had not yet arrived. Fritigern therefore played for
time, sending envoys to beg for peace while the imperial forces roasted in the blazing sun, and choked on the fires which he had lit to punish them further. Watching as the condition of his troops deteriorated, Valens thought better of his refusal to negotiate – possibly he even decided wait for Gratian – and made ready to send higher-ranking officials to meet representatives of the Goths.
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This was a mistake, and one cannot imagine Valentinian or Constantius Ⅱ opening protracted negotiations with the enemy while their soldiers’ readiness withered away in the wake of a forced march. Yet as so often happened in ancient battles, fighting began by accident, before either side was ready.
Two units of the elite
scholae palatinae
, the
Scutarii under
Cassio and the
Sagitarii under
Bacurius, probably on the right wing and near to the emperor where
scholae
were usually posted, advanced prematurely and engaged the enemy.
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Their move disrupted the imperial line of battle, which was then disordered still further by the sudden appearance of
Alatheus and
Saphrax and their followers, in company with a unit of Alans.
What followed was a military disaster, described by all our sources in lurid colours. The Roman left wing drove too far beyond the Gothic line and was cut off, surrounded and slaughtered. With the main infantry’s left flank thus exposed, the Roman line was compressed in on itself, hampering the ability of the soldiers to fight and causing many to die from wounds inflicted by their own side. Towards late afternoon, the Roman infantry line broke and the rout began. The imperial bodyguard and the
scholae palatinae
must have been almost totally destroyed, for Valens was forced to take cover with the
Mattiarii, a unit of the regular field army rather than an imperial
schola
, but seemingly one of the few Roman units to have stood its ground. Some of the generals attempted to rally the auxiliaries who had been held in reserve, but these had already melted away off the battlefield. Seeing that further attempts at rallying the disintegrating army were useless, the
generals Victor, Richomeres
and
Saturninus fled the field. There, the butchery continued until nightfall.
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The fate of
Valens was uncertain even at the time. Some said that towards evening he was struck by an arrow and fell dead amongst the common soldiers. Others claimed that, mortally wounded, he was
carried off the field by a few loyal bodyguards and eunuchs, and hidden in a farmhouse; there, as the emperor lay dying, Goths surrounded the farmhouse and, rather than waste time breaking in, set the house ablaze and burned to death the emperor and his attendants. Only one man escaped through a window and explained that the Gothic firebrands had just deprived themselves of the glory of capturing a Roman emperor on the field of battle. Whichever story – if either of them – was true, Valens’ body was never recovered.
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With him at Adrianople fell the generals Traianus and
Sebastianus, the tribune and Valens’ relative
Aequitius, thirty-five senior officers, and fully two-thirds of the army that had taken the field on the morning of 9 August 378.
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As Themistius would put it five years later: ‘Thrace was overrun, Illyricum was overrun, armies vanished altogether, like shadows’.
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The psychological impact of Adrianople was immediate. Pagans at once interpreted the defeat as punishment for the neglect of the traditional gods.
In distant Lydia, the pagan rhetor Eunapius of Sardis composed what has been termed an instant history, to demonstrate that the empire had headed inexorably towards the disaster of Adrianople from the moment of Constantine’s conversion. For Eunapius, it seems, the Roman empire itself had ended at Adrianople: ‘Strife, when it has grown, brings forth war and murder, and the children of murder are ruin and the destruction of the human race. Precisely these things were perpetrated during Valens’ reign’.
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From a distance of longer years, and with considerably greater penetration,
Ammianus made the same argument, choosing the disaster as the terminal point for his history and loading it with coded venom towards the Christians on whom he, like his hero Julian, blamed the empire’s decline.
No Christian response was immediately forthcoming, though Nicene Christians seem to have blamed Adrianople on divine punishment for the homoean beliefs of Valens, and Jerome ended his
Chronicle
in 378, just as Ammianus did his history. This dialogue of blame and excuse, the pagan side of which is now largely lost to us thanks to
suppression by the Christian winners, went on throughout the fifth century, exacerbated by Alaric’s sack of Rome. After all, how could the barbarian scourge have stung so painfully if God or the gods were not murderously displeased?
For the modern scholar, too, the battle of Adrianople is a turning point of major importance, though we seek historical rather than divine explanations. As we saw in the
last chapter
, the causes of the disaster lay not in any single event but in a series of human errors. The aftermath of the battle, however, represents a new phase in the history of both the Goths and the Roman empire. In this new phase, the historian’s framework of analysis changes dramatically. We can sum up the core of the change quite simply: until 378, Gothic history was fundamentally shaped by experience of the Roman empire. The central fact of Gothic existence was the Roman empire looming on the other side of the frontier, and much of the political and social life of the Goths can be explained by reference to their relations with Rome. For the empire, by contrast, the Goths were one of dozens of barbarian neighbours, and by no means the most important. They were a marginal force even in the political life of the empire, and invisible to its social and institutional history. After 378, however, the Goths were a constant and central presence in the political life of the empire. Even though the material damage of Adrianople was repaired more rapidly than anyone at the time could have imagined possible, tens of thousands of Goths now lived permanently inside the Roman frontiers. In a very short time, that fact profoundly altered the way in which the imperial government dealt not just with the Goths, but with barbarian peoples more generally. Before long, imperial institutions from the army to the court changed in response to the challenges of the new situation, and the social world of many regions was profoundly altered. In many ways, the Gothic settlement in the aftermath of Adrianople laid the foundation of the new and changed world of the fifth century.
Contemporaries found making sense of the disaster a slow and painful process, but practical responses could not wait. In the Balkans, the
immediate aftermath of Adrianople was chaos, just as one would have expected.
Gratian halted at
Sirmium, where he was joined by those generals who had escaped the slaughter. He went no further east.
The Goths laid
siege to Adrianople itself without success, then pressed on to
Constantinople where they were again repulsed, in part thanks to a troop of
Arab auxiliaries so bloodthirsty that they terrified even the triumphant Goths.
Not until 381, three years after the battle, did most of the Balkan peninsula again become safe for Roman travellers. In the interim, to those outside the region, Thrace produced nothing but rumour. So confused was the situation that, for the latter part of 378 and much of 379, the eastern provinces had basically to operate without reference to any emperor at all. Government ticked over in the hands of those imperial officials who were in place in August 378, and they were left to make their own decisions as best they could. Most of all, they had to decide how to stop the Balkan unrest spreading into the rest of the eastern empire.
This was a real possibility, as is demonstrated by events in
Asia Minor. There, and perhaps in other parts of the East, riots broke out amongst native Goths in various cities. The exact outline of the episode, and the extent of it, has always been unclear, because
Ammianus and
Zosimus, the latter relying on
Eunapius, give very different accounts. Ammianus says that in the immediate aftermath of Adrianople, the
magister militum
of the East, Julius, forestalled the eastward spread of the Balkan troubles by systematically calling up all the Gothic soldiers from the ranks of the army and having them massacred outside the eastern cities.
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Ammianus favoured this approach as the correct way of dealing with barbarians, but when he wrote – in the 380s – he may have been holding up the bracing harshness of Julius as a reproof of the emperor
Theodosius’ Gothic treaty of 382. Zosimus tells a different story. According to him, when Julius found himself unable to contact the emperor or anyone in Thrace, he instead sought the advice of the
Constantinopolitan senate, which gave him the authority to act as he thought best. With that licence, he lured the Goths of Asia Minor into the cities and there had them massacred in the confines of urban streets from which they could not escape. Zosimus, moreover, suggests that these slaughtered Goths
were not soldiers, but rather the teenage hostages who had been handed over to the Roman government in 376 to guarantee their parents’ good behaviour. Finally, Zosimus dates the massacre not to the immediate aftermath of Adrianople, but rather to 379.
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Although the patent contradiction between these accounts is often resolved by accepting Ammianus over Zosimus, additional evidence suggests an alternative.
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Two sermons of
Gregory of Nyssa, the younger brother of Basil of Caesarea, mention depredations by
Scythians in Asia Minor in 379.
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This corroboration of Zosimus points the way forward: Ammianus, for polemical purposes, has telescoped a long process into a single swift move by Julius, while Zosimus preserves the longer time frame and the sense of uncertainty that followed a battle which left no one in real control of the eastern empire. What probably happened is that Julius, knowing that there were Goths in the local army units as well as any number of young Gothic hostages of very nearly military age and prone like all teenage males to violence, decided to prevent any repetition of the Thracian debacle. He began with the forts in the frontier provinces – the
castra
mentioned by Ammianus – but his actions were either meant to, or interpreted as meaning to, prefigure a systematic massacre of Goths in the eastern provinces. As word spread, those Goths who were in a position to riot did so, and were killed in large numbers across Asia Minor and Syria.
That so many – presumably quite innocent – Goths should have been done away with in this fashion emphasizes as nothing else can the scale of the dangers, and also the scale of the confusion. For us, looking back dispassionately and trying to work out what happened, it is easy to forget how hopeless of repair the whole situation must have seemed. But we can only explain the failure of
Gratian and his generals to coordinate a systematic response if we remember the depth of the shock that Adrianople caused. Rather than system or coordination, survivors switched to habitual, automatic responses to deal with the crisis. We have seen this already with the response of
Julius and, presumably, other eastern officials as well. Most of them carried on doing what they
normally did, the state continuing to function without any clear notion of what it was continuing for. Gratian’s immediate reaction was a similarly conditioned response: with the Balkans in chaos and the Goths running riot, he turned not to the immediate problem, but rather to the Alamanni, a foe that was always worth fighting and against whom he had a reasonable chance of success. As we saw, some Alamanni had attacked Gaul the minute they heard that Gratian intended to march east.
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Given Valens’ catastrophic failure, Gratian must have felt it necessary to hurry back to the West lest equivalent disaster strike there.