A.D. 381

By now the relentless expansion of Roman power was beginning to falter. The republic, in which elected magistrates ruled the growing empire, had fragmented under the destructive ambitions of competing generals. The assassination of the last of these, Julius Caesar, in 44 BC led eventually to the emergence of his great-nephew Octavian as the emperor Augustus (27 BC), and republicanism never returned. Emperors continued to rule until the collapse of the western Latin-speaking empire in AD 476 and the fall of Constantinople in the east in 1453. (The eastern and western empires were divided administratively for the first time in the late third century, and permanently from 395.) Without the conflicting ambitions of commanders to drive it, conquest was more piecemeal, and emperors such as Hadrian (AD 117-138) favoured the consolidation of the empire within its existing borders over expansion. However, wherever the borders were drawn, there were always hostile outsiders, and by the second century these were gaining the confidence to attack.

By the late fourth century, the period that is the focus of this book, the empire had been under severe pressure for almost two hundred years. On the northern borders, which ran along the rivers Rhine and Danube, vital communication routes as well as boundaries, there was a mass of Germanic tribes whose internal tensions, shifting allegiances and hunger for resources coalesced in opportunistic raids on the empire. On their own these war bands were hardly a match for a Roman legion, but the border was long and often difficult to defend and raiders could strike deep into the empire before they were driven out. In the east, the Persian empire was a more stable opponent, but when wars broke out they tended to be major conflicts, with cities and large stretches of territory changing hands. In 363, the Persians gained an advantage when the Roman emperor Jovian’s armies were trapped in Persian territory and he was forced into a humiliating peace treaty in which control over border provinces was surrendered by the Romans.²

Jovian died in 364, less than a year after his defeat, and, as often happened at times of crisis, his army declared one of its well-tested generals, Valentinian, as the new emperor. It was to prove a good choice. Valentinian had his dark side - a terrible temper and a propensity to deal brutally with subordinates - but he was effective. Revolts in Britain and North Africa were suppressed and Valentinian swept far into German territory, devastating the forest strongholds of the local tribes. Back on the Rhine and Danube borders he rebuilt forts and strengthened defences.

On Valentinian’s elevation the army insisted that he appoint a co-emperor. Anxious to put in place an imperial dynasty, he delegated power over the eastern Greek-speaking provinces of the empire to his brother Valens. (The boundary was drawn so that, apart from Thrace, the whole of Europe remained under Valentinian.) There would have been better choices. Valens ruled conscientiously but he had none of the military flair of his brother. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus, one of the major sources for the period, describes Valens as ‘better at choosing between different options than devising them’ - a competent man but not one of initiative.³ Like his brother, he campaigned across the northern border, among the Goths, a Germanic people settled north of the Danube and around the Black Sea, but any major victory eluded him. When eventually he signed a peace treaty with the Goths in 369, he trumpeted it as a success, awarding himself the title of Gothicus Maximus, but if he had been stronger he would have imposed clauses allowing him to recruit from the Goths the men he desperately needed to keep up his forces.

In 375 there was a fresh challenge to Valens from the Persian Empire. The empire’s ‘king of kings’, Shapur, of the aggressive Sassanian dynasty, was threatening to take control of Armenia, a mountainous kingdom in eastern Anatolia (modern Turkey), which had traditionally been a buffer zone between the two empires. The Romans had themselves to blame for the confrontation as they had interfered in the kingdom’s affairs, to the extent of killing the Armenian king, Pap, and installing their own nominee on the throne. To meet the threat, Valens moved his base to Antioch, an ancient and wealthy city that served as the administrative centre for Syria and the east, and began deploying troops across the eastern provinces. His problem was lack of manpower, and a revolt in the Roman province of Cilicia in 375 stretched his resources still further. However, overall he seemed in relatively good control of the situation and there were signs that the Persians, who faced unrest in their own eastern empire, were ready to back down. No one could deny the immense pressures the Roman Empire was under, but between them Valentinian and Valens could, by 375, be pleased with what they had achieved.⁴

Then devastating news arrived from the Balkans. In his determination to strengthen the Danube border, Valentinian had ordered a fort to be built north of the river in territory belonging to the Quadi, a German tribe. The Quadi were bitterly resentful at the intrusion, and when their king Gabanius was assassinated by the local Roman commander, they exploded in revolt and rampaged across the border into Roman territory.

Valentinian had been at the western headquarters of Trier on the Rhine but quickly marched eastwards along the border and into the provinces of Pannonia where the disorder was taking place. His reputation as a ruthless soldier travelled before him and the Quadi came to treat for peace. They explained that it was not they but ‘bands of foreign brigands’ who had been responsible for the unrest, and that they would happily submit and provide men and supplies to the Roman armies. Valentinian was not taken in by their grovelling. He lost his temper and furiously berated the Quadi envoys. Eventually he seemed to calm down, but then he had a major fit. His men rushed him off the scene but his powers were failing. Ammianus Marcellinus tells how he flailed about in desperation as he lost his speech. Nothing could be done to save him and he died soon afterwards.

In hindsight, Valentinian can be seen to have been the last Roman emperor to enjoy military dominance over Rome’s enemies. The succession in the west was not secure and again rested on the elevation of Valentinian’s own family. His son, Gratian, had already been declared of imperial status in 367 when only eight, and so he, still aged only sixteen, became senior emperor in the west. Valentinian’s own commanders were determined to maintain their status against this inexperienced newcomer, so they declared Valentinian’s youngest son, also Valentinian, as his fellow emperor, Valentinian II. Even though he was only four, they gave him nominal responsibility for the provinces of Italy, Africa and Illyricum, which they could then rule on his behalf. Ostensibly, it was a direct affront to the dignity of Gratian, but the atmosphere of crisis was such that Gratian had to condone the move. He did his best to reassert control by moving Valentinian into his court at Trier.

So Valens, in the east, suddenly found himself the senior of the three emperors, but he was now without the support of his formidable brother and with only two young nephews as his fellow rulers. It was unlucky that there were signs that the northern borders of his part of the empire were also troubled. At first it was not clear what was happening, but there were dispatches telling of masses of Goths migrating southwards towards the Danube. Shadowy reports suggested that beyond them a new people, the Huns, had been sweeping across the steppes from the east. ‘This wild race, moving without encumbrances and consumed by a savage passion to pillage the property of others’ was how Ammianus Marcellinus described them.⁵ The Goths were refugees from the onslaught of the newcomers, and before long they were crowding along the banks of the Danube. The first that Valens may have heard of the crisis was in the autumn of 376, when envoys from the Goths arrived in Antioch, five hundred kilometres away from the border, pleading to be allowed into the empire.

Valens’ response was probably dictated by his desperate need for manpower. He knew that here would be several thousand young men who would be glad of a place in the Roman armies, while other migrants could be settled as peasant farmers and then made subject to Roman taxation. This had happened before - it was one of the many strategies the Romans, who were always pragmatic in such things, had adopted in order to keep peace on the borders. It was essential, of course, that the migration should be orderly so that the newcomers could come under direct Roman influence and be found land where there was room. Accounts of earlier migrations - there was one of another tribe, the Sarmatians, in 359 - show that a contingent of Roman troops would supervise the movements of the incomers.

Valens learned that there were two tribal groups of Goths assembling on the banks of the Danube: the Tervingi, under their leader Fritigern; and the Greuthingi. In order to keep control of events, he ordered that the Tervingi should be allowed into the empire while the Greuthingi were to be kept out and patrol boats were to be stationed along the river so that they could not cross. The Tervingi appear to have asked for land in Thrace (the modern Bulgaria and European Turkey) to the south of where they were massed on the Danube. Valens agreed to this, a sign perhaps that he was already losing the initiative.

Things began to go wrong as soon as the migration began, sometime late in the autumn. The numbers may have been far greater than Valens realised: one estimate is that the Tervingi totalled some 200,000, a massive group to keep fed and under control. Certainly the reception was not well planned. Ammianus Marcellinus tells how the refugees swarmed across the Danube in boats, rafts and even hollowed-out tree trunks, with many drowning as they attempted to swim across. Those that did reach shore were met by unscrupulous Roman commanders who bartered dogs, as food, in return for taking the younger men as slaves for themselves. Disorder began to spread and the local Roman commander of Thrace, Lupicinius, penned the Goths into a camp near the town of Marcianople, the regional headquarters for the border area. When he clumsily tried to separate Fritigern and the other Goth leaders from their men, a major revolt broke out. Desperate to keep order, he now had to withdraw the troops policing the Danube, and the Geuthingi too poured across the river. The Geuthingi and Tervingi made contact, and Lupicinius’ small force was overrun

The Goths, desperately in need of supplies, now swept over the Haemus mountains towards the city of Adrianople, where a Gothic contingent in the Roman garrison mutinied and joined them. Although the Goths were unable to take walled cities, they rampaged over the open plain of Thrace. ‘All places were ablaze with slaughter and great fires; babies were torn from the very breasts of their mothers and slain, matrons and widows whose husbands had been killed before their eyes were carried off, boys of tender or adult age were dragged away over the dead bodies of their parents’, wrote Ammianus Marcellinus.⁶ Archaeologists have been able to date the destruction of luxurious Roman villas along the slopes of the Haemus mountains to this time.

Valens was now seriously worried. We know of a desperate mission by his court orator, Themistius, to Rome to ask Gratian to supply troops, while Valens sent some of his own men westwards from Armenia. These arrived in Thrace in the summer of 377 and had some success in pushing the Goths back across the Haemus mountains and holding them in battle at Ad Salices, ‘the place by the willows’. It was a temporary respite. The Goths were now back in touch with the border tribes, and they even seem to have recruited some Huns with the promise of booty from further raiding. During the winter of 377 and 378 a fresh, larger enemy force moved back into Thrace.

It was essential that the Romans used the campaigning season of 378 to regain the initiative. By May, Valens had made concessions to the Persians and had returned from Antioch to his capital Constantinople, but a sullen welcome from the local population, who would have known of the devastation in neighbouring Thrace, must have brought home to him just how vulnerable he was. (The relationship between Valens and the inhabitants of Constantinople had never been good, and an attempted coup by one Procopius in 365 had found widespread support in the city.) The status of an emperor always depended heavily on his ability to defend the empire, and if Valens was to stay in power he had little option but to move quickly on into Thrace, where he began gathering his troops as they arrived from the Persian border. Gratian had also agreed to send men, but there had been a setback in his half of the empire. In February 378, one of the German tribes had crossed the Rhine while it was still frozen, and there were rumours that thousands more Germans, the Alamanni, were set to follow. Gratian could not leave his rear unprotected and the invasions took months to repel.

By July, Valens was beginning to panic. Gratian, though still very inexperienced, was proving an astute emperor. He made sure that his campaign on the Rhine was reported as a series of steady victories and this meant that Valens’ own image was all the more fragile. Valens was torn between setting off on his own to secure a victory, and waiting until his nephew could arrive to support him. As it was, he was swayed by faulty intelligence. Reports suggested that the Goths had about 10,000 fighting men, but it was probably nearer 20,000. Even so, this number should have been easily containable by Valens’ force of 30,000, many of whom were highly trained infantry. Fritigern, who had managed to remain in command of the Goths, certainly knew how vulnerable he was now that the Romans had assembled a proper army. He sent a priest to negotiate on his behalf (the Gothic tribes had been converted to Christianity in the middle years of the fourth century), in the hope that Valens would acknowledge him formally as leader of the Goths and help him keep order over his unwieldy band of followers, but Valens refused to meet the envoy. He had decided to upstage Gratian and go for battle.

On 9 August 378, the Roman army left its baggage outside the city of Adrianople and set off across the plain in the summer heat. It took them eight hours to reach the Goths, who were now drawn up in front of their wagons; even the toughest of the Roman infantry must have been exhausted. Once again Fritigern tried to sue for peace, but by now nerves were frayed. The Goths had added to the heat and confusion by lighting fires on the plain, and smoke drifted towards the Romans making them even more uncomfortable. Skirmishing broke out, which degenerated into full-scale fighting even before the Roman army had been properly deployed.

Despite this, the battle started well for the Romans. They advanced with their infantry in the centre and a combined force of cavalry and infantry on each wing. The left wing of the cavalry pushed the Goths back on to their wagons, and their line appeared to be about to break. Suddenly a large contingent of Gothic cavalry bore down on the Romans and to their horror they found themselves trapped between the wagons and the enemy cavalry. As the Roman cavalry disintegrated, the Goths were able to attack the infantry from the left. Roman legionaries were virtually unbeatable on open ground, where they could make use of their weapons, but in a restricted space they quickly lost the initiative.

The infantry was so closely huddled together that a man could hardly wield his sword or draw back his arm once he had stretched it out. Dust rose in such clouds as to hide the sky, which rang with frightful shouts. In consequence it was impossible to see the enemy’s missiles in flight and dodge them; all found their mark and dealt death on every side. The barbarians poured on in huge columns, trampling down horse and man and crushing our route so as to make an orderly retreat impossible. Our men were too close-packed to have any hope of escape; so they resolved to die like heroes, faced the enemy’s swords, and struck back at their assailants ... In this mutual slaughter so many were laid low that the field was covered with the bodies of the slain, while the groans of the dying and the severely wounded filled all who heard them with abject fear ... In the end the whole field was one dark pool of blood ...⁷

As many as 20,000 of the best Roman troops may have died at the battle of Adrianople, and killed alongside them, some reports say burned to death in a house in which he was taken after being wounded, was Valens. His body was never recovered. It was an appalling disaster. The empire was left virtually unprotected, its borders open to further invasion, and if the Goths had been better organised and skilled in siege warfare they could easily have taken some of the major cities of the east. As it was, they advanced in some confusion, finally reaching the walls of Constantinople and looting its suburbs but unable to take the city itself. They could not destroy the empire but they had humiliated it. They had disrupted much of the administrative framework of the Balkans, and made its shortage of manpower even more acute, not least because the local Roman magister militum of the eastern provinces, one Julius, picked out the Goths serving in the Roman armies and had them all killed.

The focus was now on Gratian. He was still only nineteen, but rather than being overwhelmed by the situation, he and his leading commanders kept their heads. He had, at last, arrived in the Balkans and established his base on the Danube at Sirmium, an important imperial command centre. It was there that the remnants of Valens’ shattered armies, together with displaced officials, made their way. It was essential that a strong man be found, one who, unlike Valens, was a hardened soldier, to take control and regroup them.

Gratian’s choice was a tough Spanish general, Flavius Theodosius. Theodosius was the son of Valentinian I’s Master of Cavalry, another Theodosius, who had played a crucial role in bringing the rebellions in Britain and Africa to an end. The elder Theodosius had taken his son on campaign with him, so Flavius Theodosius had spent his early life on the march. He had learnt fast, and already, at the age of twenty-seven, he had been made dux, military commander, of the frontier province of Moesia. Here he inflicted a defeat on the Sarmatians, one of the many tribes threatening the empire. All was going well in his career when Valentinian died, but in the turmoil of intrigue that swirled around the young Gratian, the elder Theodosius was arrested and executed. His son realised that he would be better off out of the limelight and retired to the family’s estates in Spain. He married one Aelia Flaccilla and the couple soon had two children, a daughter, Pulcheria, and a son, Arcadius. (Another son, Honorius, was born in 384.) By now, most of the Spanish aristocracy had converted to Christianity, and although Theodosius had not yet been baptised, he seems to have been a devout Christian. When his family’s supporters regained the upper hand after a fresh bout of factional infighting at court, they petitioned Gratian that Theodosius deserved a new command. When Theodosius had proved his worth with another defeat of the Sarmatians, Gratian appointed him, in January 379, fellow emperor to replace Valens in the east. To strengthen his position he was also given responsibility for the strategically important area of Illyricum, which covered what is now Croatia northwards to the Danube border, for the duration of the Gothic wars. Theodosius was at thirty-three the oldest of the three emperors.⁸