Valens

• 1. Introduction

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  Valens, Roman emperor from 364 to 378, died on the 9th of August 378 in a way that astonished the ancient world: not from assassination, not from illness, but from a military catastrophe so complete that two-thirds of his eastern army lay dead on a single afternoon. His body was never recovered. At Adrianople in Thrace, the empire lost not just an emperor but something harder to replace: the fiction that Rome's legions were invincible against barbarian armies on Roman soil.

  How did a man described by his own contemporaries as "utterly undistinguished" end up commanding the fate of half the Roman world? What pressures shaped the fourteen years of his reign? And what series of decisions, each plausible in isolation, produced a defeat that the historian Ammianus Marcellinus would rank as the worst Rome had suffered since the Battle of Edessa?

• 2. An Unlikely Emperor

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  Valens was born in 328 in Cibalae, a town in the Roman province of Pannonia Secunda, today's Vinkovci in Croatia. His father, Gratianus Funarius, was a military man who had served as a senior officer and as comes Africae. The family was Illyrian, not Roman aristocracy, and the brothers grew up on estates their father purchased in Africa and Britain, far from the marble corridors of imperial power.

  Valens served in the protectores domestici, a bodyguard unit attached to the imperial court, under emperors Julian and Jovian. He was not a general. He had not won a significant battle. According to the 5th-century historian Socrates Scholasticus, Valens did refuse pressure from the polytheist emperor Julian to offer pagan sacrifices, a small act of conviction that at least established his character as a man willing to hold a position under duress.

  When Valentinian was acclaimed augustus on the 25th of February 364, the new emperor faced an empire too large for one man. On the 28th of March, at the express demand of soldiers who wanted a second augustus, Valentinian selected his younger brother to share the burden. The ceremony took place at the Hebdomon, outside the Constantinian Walls. Valens had been appointed tribunus stabulorum less than a month earlier, on the 1st of March. The path from stable-commander to co-emperor took twenty-seven days.

• 3. The Usurper and the Nerve

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  On the 28th of September 365, while Valens was absent from Constantinople, a man named Procopius declared himself augustus. Procopius was a maternal cousin of the revered emperor Julian and was rumored to have been Julian's intended successor. He understood image-making: at public appearances he was always accompanied by Constantia, the posthumous daughter of Constantius II, and her mother Faustina, the dowager empress. The Constantinian bloodline, visible and in person, lent his revolt a legitimacy Valens could not easily counter.

  News of the revolt reached Valens at Caesarea in Cappadocia, after most of his troops had already crossed the Cilician Gates into Syria. His first reaction, by the account of the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, was despair. He considered abdication and possibly suicide. This moment of collapse would shadow his reputation for the rest of his life and well beyond it.

  Valens recovered. He reappointed the popular minister Salutius, whose earlier dismissal had contributed to public disaffection, and dispatched veteran generals Arinthaeus and Arbitio against Procopius. The revolt lasted eight months. Procopius was defeated in battles at Thyatira and Nacoleia, deserted on both occasions by his own followers when they faced Valens' commanders. Procopius was put on trial by members of his own escort and executed on the 27th of May 366. The quick collapse of the usurpation at the moment of military contact would prove a recurring feature of Valens' rule: the gap between the threat and the outcome was often smaller than the emperor's initial reaction suggested.

• 4. Fighting Goths and Persians

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  During Procopius' rebellion, the Gothic king Ermanaric had supplied troops to the usurper. Those troops arrived too late to help but still invaded Thrace and raided the province's farms and vineyards. Valens caught them with a superior force and compelled their surrender. When Ermanaric protested, Valens refused to make amends, and war was declared.

  In spring 367, Valens crossed the Danube and struck at the Visigoths under Athanaric, Ermanaric's tributary. The Goths retreated into the Carpathian Mountains and the campaign ended without a decisive result. A Danube flood blocked the following spring's crossing entirely; Valens used the pause to build fortifications. In 369, crossing again from Noviodunum, he devastated enough territory to force Athanaric into pitched battle, won, and took the title Gothicus Maximus. Athanaric's forces withdrew in good order and sued for peace. In early 370, the two leaders met in the middle of the Danube and agreed terms that largely severed relations between Goths and Romans, restricting trade and the exchange of troops for tribute.

  The Danube settlement was deliberately incomplete because the east was pulling Valens away. The Persian emperor Shapur II had exploited Jovian's 363 treaty, which had surrendered Rome's claim to Armenia, by steadily enticing Armenian lords into his camp. He eventually forced the defection of King Arshak II, whom he arrested and imprisoned. When Valens sent Arshak's son Pap back to Armenia, Shapur personally led an invasion force. The Armenian capital Artaxata was destroyed. Pap and his followers took refuge in the mountains.

  Valens sent his magister peditum Arinthaeus to support Pap, then sent twelve legions under Terentius to garrison Armenia near Mount Npat. When Shapur counterattacked in 371, his forces were defeated by Valens' generals Traianus and Vadomarius together with the Armenian sparapet Mushegh Mamikonian at Bagavan and Gandzak. A truce held for the next five years while Shapur dealt with a Kushan invasion on his eastern frontier. The boy-king Pap then became his own problem: he allegedly had the Armenian patriarch Nerses assassinated, demanded Roman cities including Edessa, and appointed a new patriarch without the traditional approval from Caesarea. Pressed by his generals and fearful Pap would defect to the Persians, Valens had him executed inside Armenia and installed another Arsacid, Varazdat, in his place.

• 5. The Gothic Crossing

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  Valens became the senior augustus on the 17th of November 375, when Valentinian died suddenly at Brigetio while campaigning against the Quadi in Pannonia. The west passed to Valentinian's elder son Gratian, who had been co-emperor since 367, and to his younger son Valentinian II, proclaimed augustus by the Danube army without consulting either Gratian or Valens.

  By 376, the political situation on the Danube had shifted in ways no Roman treaty had anticipated. The Huns were pressing westward, and the Goths who had once been adversaries were now refugees. Survivors from the former kingdom of Ermanaric, unable to hold the Dniester or Prut rivers against Hunnic pressure, retreated toward the Roman frontier in massive numbers. The Visigoths under Fritigern advanced to the lower Danube and sent requests for asylum to Valens, then in Antioch.

  Valens granted the crossing. Fritigern's people had allied with Rome in the 370s against Athanaric's persecution of Gothic Christians, and Valens saw an opportunity: the Gothic troops would have to be paid in gold or silver, but their presence would reduce his dependence on conscription from the provinces, thereby increasing revenues from the recruitment tax. The calculation was sound on paper. The execution was not.

  Valens' mobile forces were tied down on the Persian frontier. Only limitanei units, second-line border troops, were available to oversee an influx that Ammianus estimated at 200,000 warriors and close to a million people in total. The sparse Roman forces could not prevent additional Danube crossings by Ostrogoths, Huns, and Alans who had not been included in the original agreement. The controlled resettlement envisioned in Constantinople dissolved into something closer to an invasion. Roman commanders on the ground accepted bribes rather than disarming the Goths as Valens had ordered, then worsened the situation by charging exorbitant prices for food. In early 377, the Goths revolted after a confrontation at Marcianopolis, and defeated the Roman governor Lupicinus in battle near the city.

• 6. Adrianople

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  The eastern army reached Constantinople by the 30th of May 378. Valens' senior advisers, among them comes Richomeres, the generals Frigeridus and Victor, and letters from Gratian all urged him to wait for the western army before engaging. Public opinion in Constantinople, however, had turned hostile. The population criticized Valens for failing to control the Goths he had invited in and compared him unfavorably with Gratian as a military commander.

  Valens decided to advance alone and claim the victory before his nephew could share it. He moved from Adrianople against the combined barbarian force. Negotiations opened but broke down when a Roman unit attacked prematurely, pulling both sides into a battle neither had fully prepared for. Valens had left a substantial guard with his baggage and treasures, thinning his fighting strength. His right cavalry wing reached the Gothic camp before the left wing arrived. It was a very hot day, and the cavalry engaged without strategic coordination, wasting its efforts in the heat.

  Fritigern sent an emissary to stall while his forces repositioned. The delay allowed the Roman soldiers on the field to suffer further in the heat. An ill-timed attack by Roman archers forced the recall of Valens' own emissary, comes Richomeres, from the Gothic lines. The archers were repulsed and retreated in disarray. Gothic cavalry under Alatheus and Saphrax, returning from foraging, struck at that moment. The Roman cavalry fled. What followed was the destruction of the Roman infantry: surrounded, cut off, annihilated.

  Ammianus Marcellinus preserves two accounts of Valens' death. In one, Valens was struck by an arrow and died shortly afterward; his body was never found or given proper burial. In the other, he was wounded, carried to a small wooden hut, and died when the Goths, unaware of who was inside, set the hut on fire. A third account, which Ammianus flags as apocryphal, has Valens struck in the face by a Gothic dart while leading a charge without a helmet, having removed it to encourage his men. When the battle ended, two-thirds of the eastern army lay dead. What remained was led from the field under the cover of night by comes Richomeres and the general Victor.

• 7. Assessment and Legacy

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  The historian A. H. M. Jones wrote that Valens "was utterly undistinguished, still only a protector, and possessed no military ability," and that he "betrayed his consciousness of inferiority by his nervous suspicion of plots and savage punishment of alleged traitors." Jones also conceded that Valens "was a conscientious administrator, careful of the interests of the humble."

  Edward Gibbon, writing in the late 18th century, credited Valens with reducing the oppressive tax burden inherited from Constantine and his sons and noted his support for the institution of Defensors, guardians for the lower classes. Gibbon observed that Valens' moderation in his private life was widely noted, while his weak and fearful disposition produced continuous proscriptions and executions that stained the dozen years of his reign.

  Ammianus Marcellinus ranked Adrianople as the worst Roman defeat since the Battle of Edessa. The church historian Rufinus called it "the beginning of evils for the Roman empire then and thereafter." J. B. Bury, a later historian of the period, offered a terser judgment: it was "a disaster and disgrace that need not have occurred."

  Among Valens' less-remembered contributions was commissioning a short history of Rome from his secretary Eutropius. The resulting work, the Breviarium ab Urbe condita, tells the story of Rome from its founding; some historians suggest Valens needed it to help his circle engage more easily with the Roman senatorial class. Valens was deified after his death by consecratio as Divus Valens. His successor Theodosius I, appointed by a nineteen-year-old Gratian who could not manage the catastrophe alone, made Nicene Christianity the state religion and suppressed the Arians, ending the theological tradition Valens had personally favored and whose bishop had baptized him before his first Gothic campaign.