All of this made perfect sense from Gratian’s perspective, but placed Valens in an impossible situation. He had arrived in Constantinople on 30 May and left the city twelve days later, advancing to an imperial villa at Melanthias, 50 kilometres further into Thrace, where his troops were concentrating. Pay and supplies were distributed and attempts made to bolster the troops’ morale in preparation for the campaign. But Gratian failed to appear. And while Valens waited, the Goths were far from idle. Their foraging parties continued to operate and their main forces were distributed between Nicopolis and Beroea, thus controlling both ends of the strategic Shipka Pass. The Goths, it would seem, were keeping their options open: they might move on north, or south through the Haemus Mountains. At this point, Valens’ generals got wind of a detached Gothic raiding party in the vicinity of Hadrianople, and rushed a column forward to ambush it. The night attack was a success, and prompted Gothic countermeasures. Fritigern called in all his raiding parties and moved the entire main body, wagons and all, south of the Haemus Mountains to Cabyle – then further south still, on to the Thracian Plain proper, to avoid the danger of further ambushes. The endgame was fast approaching. The mass of Goths were now north of Hadrianople on the main road from Cabyle. Valens was south of Hadrianople, with his army collected and rested. Gratian, however, was still nowhere to be seen, and summer was dragging on.
Valens joined his army outside Constantinople on 12 June. But July came and went, and still no Gratian. The eastern army had been sitting around for the best part of two months, and nothing had happened except for the ambush of one Gothic raiding party. The troops were becoming restive and morale was ebbing away. Then, instead of Gratian’s army, a letter arrived minutely detailing the victories the western emperor had won over the Alamanni. He was, he promised, still coming; but it was already August, late on in the season, and Gratian’s successes touched a nerve. Valens’ patience was fast approaching breaking-point. Then came news of the Goths’ advance south towards Hadrianople. Intelligence reports put the Gothic numbers at only 10,000 fighting men, many fewer than Valens was expecting. This figure was based, I believe, on the misconception that only Fritigern’s Tervingi, and not the Tervingi and Greuthungi combined, were nearing Hadrianople at this point. Jealous of Gratian’s success, Valens was deeply tempted. Was this an opportunity to win a morale- and esteem-boosting victory over a significant number of the enemy? Opinion among his generals was divided. Some urged boldness; others counselled waiting for Gratian. Provisionally, the hawks won. Trumpets sounded the advance, and Valens’ army moved in battle order up to Hadrianople, then constructed a defended marching camp (temporary earth ramparts) outside the city.
Now more letters arrived from Gratian. He was on the move, and his advance guard had kept open the vital Succi Pass between the Haemus and Rhodope Mountains, so that he could move straight down the great military road to Hadrianople. Some of Valens’ generals continued to argue for delay, therefore, but as Ammianus reports, ‘the fatal insistence of the emperor prevailed, supported by the flattering opinion of some of his courtiers, who urged him to make all haste so that Gratian might not have a share in the victory which, as they represented, was already all but won.’
On the night of 8/9 August, with the two sides now in close proximity, Fritigern sent a Christian priest to Valens as a peace envoy, but the emperor would have none of it. At dawn, the Roman army hastened on to the north of Hadrianople, leaving its baggage and a suitable guard in the marching camp; the imperial treasury and other more valuable items were left inside the city walls. All morning the Romans marched north, until, at about two in the afternoon, the Gothic wagon circle (‘as if turned by a lathe’, as Ammianus puts it) came into view. As the Roman army deployed, two further sets of Gothic peace envoys arrived. Valens dithered. He was in the process of arranging an exchange of hostages when two regiments on the Roman right wing, without having been ordered to do so, surged forward to attack. After months of waiting, battle had finally begun in earnest.49
Accounts of ancient battles are never all you would like them to be. Ancient audiences wanted to hear about great deeds of derring-do, not military science. In the case of Hadrianople, in fact, Ammianus presents us with one of his best efforts at battle depiction. The Goths had drawn up their wagons in a circle to reinforce their battle line; the Romans deployed with a mixture of cavalry and infantry on each wing, and the bulk of the heavy infantry in the centre. Although the left wing had not fully formed when the battle began, it seemed, at first, to be making the most progress. It pushed the oncoming Goths right back to their wagon circle and was on the verge of carrying even that by storm, when disaster struck. As the Roman left wing surged forward, Gothic cavalry under Alatheus and Saphrax, combined with some Alans (presumably the ones with whom an alliance had been made the previous autumn), ‘dashed out as a thunderbolt does near high mountains and threw into confusion all those whom they could find in the way of their sudden onslaught and quickly slew them’. With both Tervingi and Greuthungi confronting him on the battlefield, Valens was now exposed to a far larger enemy force than he had imagined. He had given battle on mistaken intelligence, and the Goths had achieved complete tactical surprise.
Ammianus is not absolutely clear about what happened next, but the Gothic cavalry seems to have smashed into the Roman left wing. It was certainly from the left wing that the disaster unfolded. First, its cavalry support was dispersed and then its main force was overwhelmed – caught, perhaps, between the defenders of the wagon circle and the onrushing Gothic cavalry. The destruction of the left wing in turn exposed the Roman centre to a massive flanking attack. Since the Romans were in their customary close order – in the fourth century they often still operated the wall-of-shields formation – the effect was calamitous:
The foot-soldiers thus stood unprotected, and their companies were so crowded together that hardly anyone could pull out his sword or draw back his arm . . . arrows, whirling death from every side, always found their mark with fatal effect since they could not be seen beforehand nor guarded against . . . and in the press of ranks no room for retreat could be gained anywhere, and the increased crowding left no opportunity for retreat.
Indeed, the heavy Roman infantry regiments of the centre were so closely pressed together that they had no hope of manoeuvring to bring the weight of their weaponry to bear. Their normal tactical advantages in arms, armour and training now counted for nothing.
The troops were also reaching exhaustion point. Valens had pushed them into battle, without rest or food, after an eight-hour march in the August sun; on the Thracian Plain, the average midday temperature at this time of year approaches 30 degrees Celsius. The Goths had turned the temperature up even further by taking advantage of a favourable wind to light huge fires, which were now pouring smoke and heat down on their opponents. After fierce fighting, the main Roman battle line eventually broke and fled. The result, as always in such circumstances, was a massacre. Army and emperor perished together. What exactly happened to Valens, nobody knew for sure. His body was never found. Some said that, wounded, he was taken to a farmhouse which the Goths surrounded and burned to the ground when arrows were fired at them from an upper window, and that one of his attendants escaped to tell the story. Ammianus doesn’t seem to have believed this account, although it is widely reported. Perhaps the emperor was stranded and simply cut down in anonymous fashion somewhere on the battlefield.
Valens’ gamble had failed. The emperor himself was dead, and the Goths, against all expectations, had won a stunning victory, destroying in the process the best army of the eastern Roman Empire. How many Roman troops died that day is hotly disputed. Ammianus tells us that thirty-five officers of tribune rank (approximately equal to regimental commander) died, along with two-thirds of the troops. From a complete listing of the eastern army dating from about 395, about twenty years after the event, we also know that sixteen elite regiments suffered such severe losses that they were never reconstituted. But no
ne of this gives us a total figure, since we don’t know the size of the original army and a number of the dead tribunes will have been staff officers rather than unit commanders. Some historians think that Valens brought with him upwards of 30,000 men – 20,000 dead at Hadrianople, then. Even given the peace deal with Persia, however, the emperor could not afford to denude the east of all its troops and we have to remember that he was expecting reinforcements from Gratian. My own opinion is that Valens brought more like fifteen thousand men to the Balkans in 378, and was looking for a similar number from Gratian. Between them, these forces would have enjoyed a 1.5:1–2:1 advantage over the Goths, which ought to have been more than enough. But because of the faulty intelligence report, Valens gave battle at Hadrianople, in my view, with perhaps a slight numerical disadvantage instead of, as he thought, a 1.5:1 advantage over just the Tervingi. His force was undone by the Goths’ extra numbers, but above all by the huge tactical surprise they brought off. If I’m right, Roman losses on 9 August will have been more in the region of 10,000 men.50
But in an important sense, the quarrel over numbers is academic. The central point is that Valens’ jealousy of Gratian, and his impatience, had undone the Empire. In Ammianus’ view, the Romans had known no such defeat since the battle of Cannae in 216 BC, when Hannibal had annihilated a whole imperial army. Victory left the Goths masters not only of the battlefield, but of the entire Balkans. Roman military invincibility had been overturned in a single afternoon, and Gratian could only look on helplessly from the other side of the Succi Pass, about 300 kilometres distant, as the triumphant Goths rampaged through the southern Balkans. Against all the odds, and despite their opponents’ advantages in equipment and training, the Goths had triumphed and the path to Constantinople lay open. As Ammianus reports, ‘From [Hadrianople] they hastened in rapid march to Constantinople, greedy for its vast heaps of treasure, marching in square formations for fear of ambuscades, and intending to make many mighty efforts to destroy the famous city.’
Valens was dead, his army destroyed; the eastern Roman Empire was there for the taking.
‘Peace in Our Time’
I’VE NEVER QUITE known whether to believe the vignette with which Ammianus, on almost the last page of his history, takes his leave of the Gothic war. Having shown us the victorious Goths preparing to besiege Constantinople, he then feeds us the following image:
[The Goths’] courage was broken when they beheld the oblong circuit of the walls, the blocks of houses covering a vast space, the beauties of the city beyond their reach, the vast population inhabiting it, and the strait nearby that separates the Black Sea from the Aegean. So they destroyed the stores of military equipment they were preparing . . . and spread everywhere across the northern provinces.51
It is almost too good to be true: a perfect metaphor for the entire war. And you have to remember that, by the time he was writing, in the early 390s, Ammianus knew the outcome of the war even if he chose to end his account in 378. Victory over Valens at Hadrianople was just enough to give the Goths a glimpse of the prize that was Constantinople; but that in turn was enough to convince them that they hadn’t the slightest chance of capturing it.
The Goths faced three overwhelming disadvantages that made it impossible for them to defeat the Roman Empire outright. First, even if, taking the maximum conceivable figure, we reckon that there were 200,000 of them in all, with the capacity to produce an army of 40–50,000 men – although I do think this figure too high – this would still have been rather paltry compared with the grand sum of imperial resources. The Empire’s army totalled, as we’ve seen, 300–600,000, and its population was in excess of 70 million (a minimum figure). In a fight to the death, there could be only one winner, and the cannier Goths – some of whom among the Tervingi had travelled the breadth of Roman Asia Minor to fight in the Persian wars – were perfectly well aware of this. Fritigern’s peace overtures to Valens before Hadrianople show that he, for one, never lost his sense of perspective. He told Valens that, if the imperial army put on a decent enough show of martial intimidation, he would be able to persuade his followers to reel in their military ardour and make a compromise peace.52 The quid pro quo that Fritigern had in mind for himself, interestingly enough, was that Valens should recognize him as king of all the now allied Goths, thus cutting out Alatheus and Saphrax, not to mention all his other would-be rivals among the Tervingi. As it turned out, the imperial army failed to deliver its part of the deal, perishing virtually to a man. But, a bit like Pearl Harbor, when there is a fundamental mismatch in resources and capacity one shock victory at the beginning of a struggle can’t change its course.
To this fundamental problem we can add two more. First, there is no record of the Goths taking any major fortified imperial centre during the six years of war. Conditions clearly became fraught in the Roman Danubian communities that were cut off from the centre for extended periods; we don’t know, for instance, if and when they were able to plant crops. But no city was ever taken by siege.53 This meant that the Goths were unable to get their hands on stocks of weapons and supplies, or to set themselves up in a defended stronghold of their own. The second problem arrived on the back of the first. The Gothic force at large south of the Danube between 377 and 382 wasn’t just an army, but an entire population group: men, women and children, dragging themselves and their possessions around in a huge wagon train. With no secure lands available to them for food production, and unable to break into fortified storehouses, the Goths were forced to pillage in order to eat, and, because so much food was required, it was extremely difficult for them to stay in the one place. Already in autumn 377, there was nothing left north of the Haemus Mountains, and the pattern of the subsequent war years, in so far as we can reconstruct it, saw them moving from one part of the Balkans to another. Sometimes it was the Roman army that forced them on, but this restlessness was largely attributable to their lack of secure food supplies.
Victory at Hadrianople allowed the Goths to range as they wished in Thrace during the rest of 378. The next year, however, even though the Empire had no more than light skirmishing forces available in the eastern Balkans, they shifted the centre of their operations further west into Illyricum, the combined Gothic force advancing north-west over the Succi Pass into Dacia and Upper Moesia (map 6). In 380, Tervingi and Greuthungi then divided, perhaps because of the difficulty of supplying their combined numbers. Alatheus and Saphrax moved further north into Pannonia, where they were defeated, it seems, by the forces of the western emperor Gratian. The Tervingi under Fritigern moved south and east along the Morava–Vardar trunk road to Thessalonica and the provinces of Macedonia and Thessaly. They seem to have learned from previous experience, contenting themselves with exacting only a moderate tribute from the cities – repeatedly taking protection money – rather than trashing the place and moving on. Whether this would have continued we cannot know, because in 381 forces of the western Empire drove the Goths back into Thrace, perhaps this time along the Via Egnatia rather than through the heart of the Balkans. It was in Thrace again, finally, in 382 that peace was made.54
The Roman Empire, however, could not in the end, after six years of war, claim total victory, although the formal ceremony that inaugurated the peace treaty on 3 October 382 certainly took the form of a Gothic surrender. Themistius was again an eyewitness, and he leaves us in no doubt:
We have seen their leaders and chiefs, not making a show of surrendering a tattered standard, but giving up the weapons and swords with which up to that day they had held power, and clinging to the king’s [the emperor Theodosius’] knees more tightly than Thetis, according to Homer, clung to the knees of Zeus when she besought him on her son’s behalf, until they won a kindly nod and a voice which did not rouse war but was full of kindness, full of peace, full of benevolence and the forgiveness of sins.55
But Themistius’ vocabulary immediately signals that this was not the kind of peace deal that normally followed Roman victories over hostile w
ould-be immigrants. The language of ‘kindness’, ‘benevolence’ and ‘forgiveness’ strikes a new note, and the difference is not merely rhetorical. For the surrender generated no theatrical bloodbaths, no mass selling of Goths into slavery, no large-scale distributions of Gothic captives as unfree farm labourers. When, in 383, an emperor wanted to reassure the population of Rome that the Empire was once more secure, it was Sarmatians who were slaughtered in the Colosseum, not Goths. But the Goths had killed a Roman emperor, destroyed a Roman army, and laid waste with fire and rapine large tracts of the Roman Balkans. In a world where a Roman emperor considered himself well within his rights to throw a fit if ‘barbarian’ ambassadors didn’t grovel with sufficient conviction, the absence of revenge, punishment and example-setting in the peace settlement of 382 is extraordinary.
Once again, we don’t know everything we’d like to know about the terms agreed. They clearly broke new ground in some important ways, but although they were strikingly generous to them, the Goths did not get everything they may have wanted. Before Hadrianople, Gothic peace offers tended towards the possibility of Thrace becoming an independent Gothic kingdom. Fritigern, as we’ve seen, was also angling to have Valens recognize him as new overall leader of all the Gothic immigrants. Neither of these things happened. Neither Fritigern nor Alatheus nor Saphrax survived to participate in the peace deal. They may have died in battle somewhere, but, if not, I have no problem in seeing their overthrow as part of the price the Goths had to pay for peace. The Empire needed tokens of victory to show off to its taxpayers, and the survival – indeed prosperity – of the victors of Hadrianople would have been completely unacceptable. Indeed, for the next decade or so, in a replay within the frontier of the policy commonly pursued towards the Alamanni beyond the Rhine (see Chapter 3), the Romans refused to recognize any overall Gothic leader, no doubt hoping to keep them politically divided. Nor did the Goths as a whole get Thrace as an independent fiefdom. The integrity of the diocese of Thrace as a centrally run unit of the Roman Empire was reasserted with vigour. Frontier fortifications were rebuilt and remanned where necessary; Roman law and tax-gathering resumed. In this sense, Gothic ambitions had been pruned right back.
The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History Page 22