Battle of Adrianople

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Adrianople, fought on the 9th of August 378, cost the Eastern Roman Empire its emperor. Valens had marched his legions out of the city that morning, leaving the imperial treasury and administration under guard inside the walls. He never returned. His body was never found, and what happened to him in his final hours remains disputed to this day.

  Later writers would call Adrianople the beginning of the end. The battle is often considered the start of events that led to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. How had Gothic peoples who crossed the Danube as desperate refugees just two years earlier become capable of shattering a Roman field army? What drove Valens to fight rather than wait for reinforcements? And why do historians still disagree, more than sixteen centuries later, over what the battle actually proved?

• 2. A Refuge Becomes a Revolt

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  In 376, the Gothic leaders Alavivus and Fritigern led their people to the Danube and asked Emperor Valens for sanctuary. The Huns had driven them from their homelands. Valens agreed to let them settle inside the empire as foederati, allied troops bound to Rome by treaty. He expected them to become farmers and soldiers, useful rather than dangerous.

  Lupicinus and Maximus, the Roman provincial commanders assigned to manage the new arrivals, proved dishonest. The Gothic settlers suffered hardships. Revolt followed. Valens appealed to the western emperor Gratian, who sent reinforcements under the general Frigeridus and his guard commander Richomeres. For two years from 376 to 378, running battles across the Balkans produced no decisive result.

  In 378, Valens resolved to end it himself. He drew reinforcements from Syria and from the western reserves in Gaul. He left Antioch and arrived in Constantinople on the 30th of May. He appointed Sebastianus, newly arrived from Italy, to reorganize the Roman forces already in Thrace. Sebastianus chose 2,000 legionaries and began ambushing Gothic detachments with success. Gratian, meanwhile, was still occupied in Pannonia. The Lentienses, part of the Alamanni, had struck across the Rhine into Roman territory. After defeating them near Argentaria, close to present-day Colmar in France, Gratian's army began moving east.

  On the 6th of August, reconnaissance informed Valens that approximately 10,000 Goths were advancing from a position 25 kilometers north of Adrianople. Richomeres arrived carrying a letter from Gratian urging patience. Valens's own officers counselled the same. He refused, ready to claim the victory for himself.

• 3. The Forces at Adrianople

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  Bacurius, the prince commanding the Roman archers and shield cavalry, was a native of Caucasian Iberia, the territory now called Georgia. Victor, master-general of the Roman cavalry, was Sarmatian by birth. These names begin to describe what the Roman force actually was: a multinational army assembled from across the empire and beyond its borders.

  Valens drew on three distinct field armies. The Army of Thrace had its base in the eastern Balkans. The 1st and 2nd Armies in the Emperor's Presence had been stationed at Constantinople in peacetime. They were committed to the Persian frontier in 376 and then redirected west in 377-378. Modern estimates place the total Roman strength at approximately 15,000 men, with around 10,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry. Seven legions made up the infantry core, among them the Legio I Maximiana, with each unit ranging from 700 to 1,000 men.

  Fritigern led one main Gothic army, drawn largely from Therving exiles. Alatheus and Saphrax commanded a second force of Greuthung exiles, with Alans among them. Roman scouts counted the Gothic forces before the battle but missed the cavalry of Alatheus and Saphrax, which was away foraging. Ammianus Marcellinus dismissed the initial figure as an underestimate. Later historians have placed Gothic strength at 12,000-15,000 men.

  A Batavian battalion in Valens's force was designated as reserve. Victor, the comes, would try to bring them into action during the battle. He would not find them.

• 4. The Day the Army Broke

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  Fritigern sent an emissary to Valens on the 8th of August, proposing peace and an alliance in exchange for Roman territory. Valens, confident of victory, rejected the offer.

  Valens decamped from Adrianople the following morning and marched his army eight miles over difficult terrain. The troops arrived at the Gothic position around noon, tired and dehydrated. The Gothic camp was set on top of a hill. Behind a circle of wagons that sheltered their families and possessions, the Gothic fighters waited.

  Fritigern had the surrounding fields burned to slow the Romans with smoke. Negotiations for a hostage exchange began. Richomeres offered to serve as hostage to facilitate the talks. Equitius, a relative of Valens and a former prisoner of the Goths at Dibaltum, feared their revenge and refused. The soldiers grew impatient; some units broke forward without orders. The imperial scholae of shield-archers, under Bacurius, struck first. Finding no support, they were driven back. The Roman left wing then pushed forward to the wagon circle.

  At that moment the cavalry of Alatheus and Saphrax arrived. Ammianus Marcellinus described the charge as descending like a thunderbolt. The Romans, already disordered from their failed assault and crowded at the base of the hill, could not maneuver. Their heavy armor and long shields trapped them in place. The killing continued until nightfall.

  Valens was abandoned by his guards during the rout. One account has him dying anonymously on the field. Another story circulated in the years after the battle. It described him escaping to a peasant's cottage, where his bodyguard held off the attackers from the upper floor with arrows. The Goths, not knowing who was inside, set the building alight. By the time they learned the truth, it was too late.

• 5. The Long Argument After

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  Sebastianus, the general who had reorganized the Roman forces in Thrace, was killed in the battle. So were Traianus, described as an illustrious man whose death was a great loss, and Valerianus, Master of the Stable. Thirty-five tribunes died. The battle was ranked as the worst Roman defeat since the Battle of Edessa, the low point of the Crisis of the Third Century. A third of the Roman army managed to retreat. The Goths marched immediately on Adrianople and attempted to take the city. They failed; a number of Roman soldiers who had not been admitted inside the walls fought the Goths below them.

  Nearly all the armories across the Danubian provinces were destroyed in the aftermath. The empire lost experienced administrators it could not quickly replace. The army's lack of reserves deepened a recruitment crisis that already had no ready solution.

  Theodosius I, who succeeded Valens, eventually accepted the Goths once more as allied tribes. They were never expelled, exterminated, or assimilated. They remained a distinct people inside Roman borders, sometimes allied, sometimes hostile, never absorbed. The Goths' continued presence within the empire would remain an unresolved tension in the decades that followed.

  Charles Oman, writing in 1885, argued that Adrianople marked a turning point in military history. Heavy cavalry had defeated Roman infantry, he claimed, announcing the age of the medieval knight. T. S. Burns countered in a 1973 book. Valens, Burns argued, had actually fielded more cavalry than the Goths. Gothic infantry, not cavalry, had been the decisive factor. The medieval knight did not rise for several centuries after Adrianople.

  Potentius, the tribune of the Promoti cavalry and son of the former commander Ursicinus, died in the battle. Ammianus paused to record his passing. Potentius, he wrote, was a man respected by all persons of virtue, and he fell in the flower of his age.