Whether or not Ulfila’s mission was a direct product of Constantine’s own missionary ambitions, it was clearly a result of the Constantinian peace with the Tervingi. We have no way to correlate the growth of Christianity in Gothia with the meagre scraps of Tervingian history that are known to us during the reigns of Constantius and Julian. But we can be sure that Christianity was indeed spreading throughout the region, as retrospective evidence makes clear. As we shall soon see, the aftermath of Valens’ Gothic wars in the 360s brought on a second, much heavier, persecution of Christians in Gothic territory, one that is much better documented in ecclesiastical and liturgical sources. Most of the known victims of this second persecution seem to have been Nicene Goths, rather than homoeans. That would seem to imply that there were in fact two separate strands of missionary work beyond the lower Danube frontier in this period, however obscure their details may be to us.
Tervingi, Greuthungi and Other Goths
Still more obscure than the rise of Tervingian Christianity is the Gothic world beyond the Tervingi. There is no contemporary evidence, and almost everything we know about the larger Gothic world of the middle fourth century – apart from the archaeological evidence for its social structures, which we looked at in the last chapter – comes from retrospective accounts written after the disaster of Adrianople. Jordanes has much to say about this period, but it is almost all fiction that draws genuine figures from contemporary sources and inserts them into a spurious dynastic history of the sixth-century Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great. The one thing we can be quite sure of is that beyond the fourth-century territory of the Tervingi there lay another Gothic realm, whose inhabitants were called Greuthungi. The Tervingi and Greuthungi have been interpreted as the linear ancestors of the later fifth-century Visigoths and Ostrogoths, and the long-standing division of the Goths into two sections under separate royal dynasties is a fixture of older literature (and still maintained by supporters of ethnogenesis-theory, with their insistence that royal dynasties transmit ethnic identity). In fact, the division between Visigoths and Ostrogoths is a product of fifth-century politics within the Roman and Hunnic empires, and the names are retrojection from the sixth-century text of Jordanes: they bear no demonstrable relationship to fourth-century divisions. The Gothic groups that emerged in the fourth century, after Adrianople, and in the fifth century, after the collapse of the Hunnic empire, were of thoroughly mixed origin, with connections to several different Gothic polities of the fourth century. Of these, the Tervingian polity is moderately well attested, but our knowledge of the Greuthungi comes almost entirely from a few pages of Ammianus Marcellinus. He, in turn, only mentions the Greuthungi when he describes the destruction of their kingdom by the Huns and the death of their king Ermanaric.
Ammianus actually knew very little about the Greuthungian kingdom. He tells us that Ermanaric ruled ‘lands rich and wide’ and was a ‘most warlike king and, on account of his many and various deeds, feared by the neighbouring peoples’.[108] That, in full, is the only contemporary evidence for Ermanaric’s kingdom that exists. Jordanes, however, expands that account into an elaborate list of peoples over whom Ermanaric held sway, drawing on traditions of classical ethnography and extending this fictional empire as far as northern Russia. Utter nonsense, Jordanes’ ‘empire of Ermanaric’ warrants none of the attention given it by otherwise serious scholars desperate for any scrap of information on the early Goths. Apart from the single line of Ammianus, the extent of Ermanaric’s power must remain a mystery to us. After his kingdom collapsed in the face of a Hunnic attack, we learn of several different groups of Greuthungi whom we cannot positively identify as having once been Ermanaric’s followers. That fact suggests that, just as different factions are known amongst the Tervingi in the face of Valens’ invasions of the 360s, so amongst the Greuthungi, Ermanaric was not the single source of power. The archaeological evidence we have looked at offers no help, and there is no material difference between the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov territories in which the Tervingi were dominant and those in which Ermanaric’s Greuthungi lived. We must, in other words, content ourselves with only a very imperfect sense of Gothic history between the victory of Constantine in 332 and that of Valens in 369, to which we can now turn.
Valentinian and Valens
As with so much of the history of the Roman frontier, Valens’ Gothic wars are tied up in the internal conflicts of the empire, and particularly the legacy left to him by his predecessors Constantius Ⅱ and Julian. Julian, when we last saw him, had been appointed caesar by Constantius, in the hope that he would restore the Rhine frontier which had been so badly weakened by the usurpation of Magnentius. In 359, after many successes against Franks and Alamanni in the Rhineland, Julian was declared augustus by his troops. Both he and Constantius prepared for civil war, the latter bringing his Persian campaigns to an abrupt end in order to deal with his upstart cousin. A full-blown conflict was only averted by Constantius’ timely death, of natural causes, in 361. Julian immediately launched into a hugely ambitious program of reform, aimed both at reversing the Christianization of the Constantinian empire, and at fulfilling the dreams of his uncle and cousin and conquering Persia. After initial successes that brought the army to the walls of the Persian capital at Ctesiphon, Julian’s campaign ended in shambles; he himself died of a wound received in a sudden ambush. The army elected an ineffectual officer named Jovian (r. 363–364) to get them out of Persia, which he did at the cost of a humiliating peace-treaty that ceded several important Mesopotamian towns to the Persians. Jovian, a heavy drinker, soon died of self-indulgence, and the army high command elected Valentinian (r. 364–375) as emperor. Valentinian, a protector like the historian Ammianus, in turn appointed his younger brother Valens (r. 364–378) as his co-emperor.
The brothers were Pannonian, from the region of Lake Balaton in modern Hungary, and therefore from a region proverbially backward, the punchline in many a late Roman joke. This cultural stereotype deeply affects their treatment in our narrative sources, which invariably depict them as loathsome and cruel, a judgement mitigated only by Valentinian’s undeniable prowess as a general. Ammianus, the cultured Greek from Syria, found them unspeakable: Valens was subrusticum hominem, a half-witted man, who would have been murdered by his soldiers, had fate not spared him to suffer greater disaster.[109] Everything we know of Valens, in both Ammianus and the rich Greek historical tradition, is uniformly hostile. Our own interpretations of his reign, like those of his contemporaries, remain coloured not just by such slanders, but by his ultimate fate: killed by the Goths, along with most of the eastern Roman army, on the field of Adrianople. It has recently been argued that Valens was by no means a disastrous emperor, and certainly not the incompetent he is so often made out to have been. He was, on the contrary, a more or less average late Roman commander who faced an impossible concatenation of circumstances that ultimately brought him down.[110] Though that assessment may be a tritle generous, there can be no question that both Valens and Valentinian faced formidable challenges upon their accession to the throne.
The prospect of civil war between Julian and Constantius, and the fact that Julian launched his Persian war immediately upon the death of Constantius, led to the customary upheavals along the frontiers. As in the 340s and 350s, these disturbances were worst along the Rhine, though the Quadi, relieved of the pressure of their Sarmatian neighbours, required repeated campaigning by Valentinian to control. This demonstrates the structural dangers inherent in the standard imperial policy towards the barbarians. Constantius’ settlement of affairs between the Danube and Tisza had bred resentment amongst the Quadi, who had suffered demeaning punitive raids at the same time as the Sarmatians were suppressed, but it had also so strengthened them that as soon as the opportunity presented itself – as it did with Julian’s departure and death – they were able to launch devastating attacks on the provinces of Noricum and Valeria. So confident had the Quadi become in the security of their position that some o
f their envoys dared to address Valentinian as an equal during the campaigning season of 375. His outrage at this effrontery triggered the stroke which killed him, leaving the western provinces to his sons, one an untested youth named Gratian, the other, Gratian’s half-brother Valentinian Ⅱ, still only a toddler. Since 365, when they had divided the empire and its field army between them, the elder Valentinian and Valens had declined to interfere in one another’s affairs. Valens made no effort to intervene in the West upon his brother’s premature death, just as Valentinian had left Valens to his fate in the long series of disturbances that had faced him in the decade after 365. The earliest of these was the usurpation of Procopius, and it was from that venture that Valens’ Gothic campaigns ultimately stemmed.
The Usurpation of Procopius and the Breakdown of the Gothic Peace
Procopius could claim kinship with the Constantinian dynasty whose main line had died with Julian. He launched his usurpation at Constantinople in 365, suborning some troops who were en route to the Danube frontier, and almost succeeded in bringing down Valens’ new and insecure regime. Only the opportune treachery of some old associates of Constantius Ⅱ saved Valens, and Procopius was captured and executed in 366. Several Gothic kings had lent support to Procopius, supposedly sending 3,000 soldiers, but they excused themselves on the grounds of their treaty with the house of Constantine, whose legitimate heir they had taken Procopius to be.[111] We cannot tell if they believed their own excuses, but we do know their services were well rewarded: the largest hoard of silver coins in Gothic territory, from Caracal on the river Olt in modern Romania, contained nearly 3,000 silver coins, including thirty of Procopius.
Valens, as one can well imagine, had no intention of accepting this sort of excuse. He was in desperate need of a victory to shore up his prestige, badly damaged by a usurpation that had nearly unseated him. The Goths made an easier and more attractive target than did the intractable Persian frontier, and he could portray a Gothic war as well-merited punishment for lending support to a usurper. He seized the Goths who had come to support Procopius and deported them to Asia Minor. Then, in the three summer campaigning seasons from 367 to 369, Valens assaulted the Goths across the Danube. The campaigns were well prepared, as attested by a flurry of laws issued to the praetorian prefect Auxonius, responsible for organizing logistical support. What is more, the importance of the campaigns was widely anticipated in the eastern empire, for Valens received the dedication of a strange treatise, now anonymous, called De rebus bellicis, ‘On military matters’, which recommends both sensible measures well suited to Thracian conditions, and bizarre new war machines that no general could have deployed in reality. The orator Themistius, a great celebrity in Constantinople and a mouthpiece for imperial propaganda since the reign of Constantius, prepared public opinion for the successes that would soon be forthcoming. Sadly for Valens, Themistius’ enthusiasm went unvindicated by events.
Valens’ Three Gothic Campaigns
In the first campaign, launched in summer 367, Valens crossed the river at Daphne on a bridge of boats, which suggests that the Constantinian bridge from Oescus to Sucidava was no longer useable for large-scale military operations. The emperor laid waste the territory beyond the river, but failed to bring any large number of Goths to battle, because they fled into the Carpathians or the Transylvanian Alps in the face of his advance. He was, however, inspired to set a bounty on the heads of any Goth his men could capture, and this allowed him to at least salvage some claims to victory from the campaign.[112] In 368, rains and heavy flooding hampered the army’s movements, and Valens spent much if not all of the season encamped beside the Danube to no great military effect. He did, however, undertake a considerable construction campaign, restoring old and building new quadriburgia and smaller burgi, some of them named after himself or members of his family (for example Valentia, Valentiniana, Gratiana).[113] These building efforts are attested by bronze coins showing a burgus on their reverse, and by a fragmentary inscription from Cius that is dated to 368.[114] The third year of the war was more satisfying. After crossing the river at Noviodunum in the Dobrudja, Valens marched a long way into Gothic territory, sowing fear and destruction wherever he went. The Tervingian leader Athanaric gave battle and was defeated, as barbarian armies usually were when a Roman field army could pin them down in a set-piece battle. However, rather than pursue Athanaric in his retreat Valens returned to imperial territory, possibly because of the lateness of the season.[115]
The Terms of the Peace
Ammianus Marcellinus, who is our chief source for these campaigns, had reason to underplay their significance, knowing as he did that Adrianople was soon to come. But Valens’ three years of warfare had brought real successes. The new Danube forts strengthened Roman defences and the ability to project imperial power against the Goths. In fact, Valens shut down the frontier so effectively that Gothic access to Roman trade goods was systematically denied them. We saw in the last chapter how prominent a role trade with the Danube provinces played in the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov regions, and Valens’ measures must have caused real hardship. More even than the battlefield defeat of 369, the shortages of Roman goods throughout Gothic territory forced Athanaric to sue for peace.[116] The terms of the peace were arranged in late summer 369 by two of Valens’ trusted generals, Victor and Arinthaeus. Valens and Athanaric met to solemnize a treaty near Noviodunum, but they did so on boats, midstream, Valens respecting the Gothic king’s oath not to set foot on Roman soil.[117] Hostages were given on the Gothic side, the emperor stopped paying subsidies to the Goths, and trade was opened up again, though restricted to just two (unnamed) cities.[118] Yet the separation of the Goths from the empire was not quite as complete as these measures were meant to suggest, for translators from Greek to Gothic continued to receive their imperial stipend, suggesting that the lines of communication were to be kept open.[119]
In the aftermath of this treaty, both sides could claim some sort of victory. The obliging Themistius, addressing the senate of Constantinople in early 370, preserves for us the official line: Valens’ philanthropy has inclined him to mercy. Why, after all, should a conquered and subjugated foe be wholly destroyed when he might be preserved and put to use on the battlefield? Valens, for his part, used the cessation of hostilities, and the concomitant propaganda triumph, to deal with growing trouble on the eastern frontier, taking up residence at Antioch in Syria for nearly half a decade. Athanaric, by extracting from the emperor a dignified peace on equal terms, was free to reassert his authority among the Tervingi. He chose to do this in part by launching a persecution of Gothic Christians, which may have led him into war against other Gothic chieftains and provoked further Roman intervention. Certainly, the opposition he experienced gives us some hint as to how low his prestige had fallen in three years of inconclusive warfare against Valens. As usual, the available sources leave much open to debate, and it is not at all clear that Gothic Christians had played any active role in helping Valens or opposing Athanaric before he began to persecute them. But, as had been the case with Diocletian decades earlier, suspicion might be grounds enough for persecution. Not only could Christians appear to poison the health of the state by refusing to honour its protecting deities, they were, from Athanaric’s point of view, potentially spies for the emperor. If, as seems quite possible, Ulfila’s Gothic community in Moesia maintained ties with co-religionists across the Danube, then Athanaric’s suspicions are thoroughly explicable. In times of peace, this sort of contact might be unproblematic, not much different than the to and fro of trade that so characterized the lower Danube of the mid fourth century. But once the Romans went to war against the Goths, and when Valens’ activities cut trade down to a tiny trickle, perspectives were necessarily altered. Gothic Christians might come to look less like fellow subjects of the Gothic kings and more like prospective sympathisers with Valens. If, as the fifth-century church historian Socrates tells us, Valens began to send missionaries into Gothia in 369, the cas
e against Gothic Christians was that much clearer.[120] Persecution followed, its effects well documented in the extant sources.
The Story of Saba
The most extensive of these sources is the Passion of St. Saba, written shortly after 373, within a year or two of the death of its protagonist Saba. The Passion was sent to Basil, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, perhaps the single most influential Greek bishop of his day.[121] Basil corresponded with the Cappadocian native Junius Soranus, who had been appointed to a military command in Roman Scythia – as dux Scythiae – in 373. This sort of letter exchange was a normal part of life for provincial elites, and the accession of a fellow provincial to an imperial office in a distant province usually meant an extension of patronage towards natives of the home region. Maintaining one’s network of correspondents was therefore an essential prerequisite of being able to serve one’s clients, and Basil’s letter collection is one of many that survive to show us how sedulously useful contacts were cultivated. The Passion of Saba is still available to us because of just this sort of letter exchange: a Balkan cleric (either Ascholius of Thessalonica or perhaps more likely a simple priest of the same name) seized the opportunity of Soranus’ appointment and his known connections to Basil to inform the great bishop of church affairs in the Danubian provinces and beyond. Basil, in gracious reply, flatters the author as a ‘trainer of Gothic martyrs’, though we have no way of evaluating the truth of that epithet. Regardless, the dux Soranus was enchanted by the legend of the holy Saba, sending men across the Danube to collect the saint’s relics and ultimately sending them to Cappadocia, where they would thenceforth rest. The accidental connection of Gothic Christianity and Cappadocia, whence Ulfila’s ancestors had been taken more than a century earlier, was thereby perpetuated.
Rome's Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric (Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity) Page 13