Rome's Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric (Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity)

by Michael Kulikowski

  Tervingian Petition and Imperial Response

  Early in the year, before the start of the campaigning season, masses of Tervingi occupied the northern bank of the river, begging for admission into the empire.[131] They offered to abide peacefully inside the imperial frontiers and to furnish auxiliaries for the Roman army if required to do so.[132] These Tervingi were divided into many different groups, without any overall leadership. The one leader who might have claimed some sort of supremacy, Athanaric himself, was certainly not among them, fearing that the breach between him and Valens was too great for him ever to be admitted to the empire. We hear of two Tervingian chieftains, Alavivus and Fritigern, in the context of the Danube crossing, and it is clear from later events that they led not all the Tervingi, but rather the most significant of several independent bands. Although Alavivus led the negotiations with the empire, Fritigern was perhaps the more powerful of the two chieftains. He was probably better known to the empire, if Socrates’ story of his conversion to Christianity in the earlier 370s is correct, and he was certainly the more competent general, for by 377 he was in overall command of the Goths’ military operations.[133] As to Alavivus, we can reject outright speculation that he was the father of the later general Alaric, a theory based on nothing more than the alliteration of their names.

  Negotiations over terms of entry must have taken quite some time, certainly several months, given that messengers and ambassadors had to travel more than a thousand kilometres to Antioch in Syria before returning to Thrace with the imperial decision. Even if the senior negotiators moved very fast indeed, as a letter of Basil of Caesarea implies, agreements could not have been reached before high summer.[134] How order was maintained in the interim, we do not know, nor how the massed Tervingi were kept supplied with the necessities of life. But since we have no evidence for any disturbances during the ongoing negotiations, we must postulate a firm hand among the Goths, and an assumption on both sides that everyone involved was negotiating in good faith. In other words, the Tervingian leaders must have felt it likely that their petition would meet with success – success which was, to a degree, dependent upon their good behaviour.

  From Valens’ point of view, the Tervingian offer was both opportune and welcome – every source tells us as much, and there is no reason to disbelieve that evidence or maintain that the Gothic entry to the empire was permitted only because it could not be repelled. The emperor was in the midst of preparing a substantial war against Persia, made necessary by complicated manoeuvres over who should control the kingdoms of Armenia and Iberia. Persian wars were always costly and sufficient manpower could be hard to come by. If the Gothic petitioners were indeed allowed into the empire, that would fulfill the promises that the Valens’ orator Themistius had made in 369 at the end of the last Gothic war.[135] In that speech, as we saw in the last chapter, Themistius had been forced to put a good face on a clearly compromised peace, arguing for public consumption that the empire benefited more from sparing its enemies and keeping them alive as potential soldiers than it did from their destruction. What was at the time an argument of necessity, and a weak one at that, could now be made into happy reality for all concerned. The Tervingi could be admitted as humble suppliants, and then formed up into units to be dispersed to the eastern frontier. Given that, it is no wonder that Valens seized the chance which fate had offered him, giving orders that the Tervingi should be allowed to cross the river, fed for a time, and thereafter offered lands to farm; the Goths, for their part, probably gave hostages to the imperial government to guarantee an orderly crossing and settlement.

  The Crossing of the Danube

  It took several days and nights to transport all the Goths across the river, and Ammianus gives the impression of people coming over in their thousands.[136] Where exactly the transfer took place is unclear, though Durostorum, on a straight road line south to Marcianople, seems the likeliest point. Numbers are likewise not to be had. Eunapius speaks of 200,000 Goths, but few have taken seriously a figure that high. Although it has recently been defended as plausible in light of the constant losses which the Goths suffered in the course of the next six years – to have lost so many, there must have been masses of them to start with – that position gives too little weight to significant re-enforcements which the band received in those same years. Questions of manpower in the ancient world never have clear answers, and the best we can say here is that the scale of later fighting implies that the Goths admitted to the empire numbered at least in the tens of thousands, and perhaps considerably more than that.

  If Alavivus and Fritigern were the first to be received, there were other Gothic commanders as well. They came voluntarily, not in response to military defeat by the emperor, which may explain their relative strength. Certainly, few of them were disarmed. Standard imperial practice was to disarm barbarians before they were admitted to the empire, and only then to re-arm them out of imperial arsenals at times and places where they could not pose a threat. In this case, however, whether through corruption, neglect, or the sheer scale of the enterprise, many of the Goths retained the weapons they normally carried, despite the clear intention of the emperor that they be disarmed in the usual fashion.[137] When this oversight was combined with appalling abuse, the situation became volatile indeed. The officials put in charge of the crossing were Lupicinus and Maximus, the first a comes rei militaris, the second the dux of either Moesia or Scythia. For Ammianus they were homines maculosi, ‘men of tarnished repute’, but that seems like the judgement of hindsight, perhaps even the verdict of a later imperial inquiry into what had gone wrong in the lead-up to Adrianople.[138] Imperial officials were expected to profit from the offices they held, and we should not assume that the exploitation of the Goths by Lupicinus and his officials was in excess of the late Roman norm. Nor should we discount the possibility that limiting the Goths’ food supply was a deliberate way of controlling what was, after all, a large and potentially dangerous body of barbarians on imperial soil. By modern standards, however, the abuse was shocking. The food that ought to have been allocated to the Goths was diverted by the generals for sales that would line their own pockets. In its stead, the Goths were offered dogmeat at the price of one dog for one Gothic child enslaved. According to Ammianus, even the children of Gothic nobles could be rounded up and sold on to slavers.[139]

  Alatheus and Saphrax

  While this trouble was brewing, the Greuthungi of Alatheus and Saphrax – those Gothic duces who had taken custody of the child-king Videric – also arrived at the Danube, seeking entry into the empire. As Alavivus had done some months before, these two generals now sent envoys to Valens offering terms and asking for succour. Somewhere in the same vicinity, old Athanaric too had arrived, though it is not clear what finally drove him to seek refuge in the empire. We do not know why, but the request of Alatheus and Saphrax was refused. Some have argued that the emperor began to fear the consequences of letting in too many Goths at once, or that the Tervingi already inside the empire had become so restive that additional newcomers would impose too heavy a burden on an already overwhelmed officialdom. Perhaps, though, the treatment of the Greuthungi was simply a very public demonstration of the imperial power over barbarians: after all, the gesture proclaimed that the decision of whether or not to admit different Gothic groups was entirely in the hands of the emperor, who could pick and choose with total inscrutability. That, at least, was the lesson Athanaric learned: seeing the Greuthungian request rejected, he gave up on any prospect of accommodation and retreated to ‘Caucalanda’, perhaps the Transylvanian Alps, where he was to remain with his followers for half a decade. But if the deliberate arbitrariness of the imperial position was meant to intimidate the Greuthungi and cool their ardour, it did not do so. Instead, Alatheus and Saphrax bided their time.[140]

  The Tervingi, for their part, were understandably dissatisfied, and Lupicinus began to fear unrest. He decided that the time had come to move them, and the coming of spring 377 made poss
ible their dispersal out of winter quarters near the Danube. As Lupicinus and his officials began to organize the relocation of their charges, river patrols were neglected and the Greuthungi of Alatheus and Saphrax saw an opportunity to take for themselves what imperial orders had denied them. They crossed the river in makeshift boats and pitched camp at a great distance from where the Tervingi of Fritigern were being formed up for relocation at Marcianople (now Devnja in Bulgaria).[141] That substantial city, founded by Trajan during the Dacian wars, lay nearly 100 kilometres south of the Danube and was located at the junction of the east-west road to Nicopolis-ad-Istrum with the north-south road that led around the eastern edge of the Haemus mountains and down into open and populous Thrace. It was the ideal place from which to organize a major venture of this sort, and thus served as the headquarters of Lupicinus. At Marcianople, however, the disastrous train of events already underway became unstoppable.

  A Treacherous Banquet

  Lupicinus invited Fritigern and Alavivus to be entertained as his guests at Marcianople.[142] This was a perfectly normal gesture, for local commanders customarily invited officers in transit through their region to dine with them. If, as we must assume, Fritigern and Alavivus were being treated as the de facto commanders of Gothic units destined for inscription into the Roman army, then their reception and entertainment by Lupicinus makes perfect sense. At the same time, however, banquets were one of the usual venues for treachery in the Roman world. It was at banquets that usurpations were plotted and often set in motion, and it was at banquets that prominent barbarian hostages might be seized and spirited off to captivity.[143] Themselves quite innocent of treachery, Fritigern and Alavivus walked into a trap at Marcianople.

  The Gothic leaders took up temporary residence within the city together with a small group of attendants, but Lupicinus kept their main following at a good distance from the town, interposing Roman troops between the Goths and the city walls. Before too long, confused brawling broke out between these two groups, prompted by the Romans’ steadfast refusal to allow Goths into the city to purchase supplies, and perhaps by the continued attentions of slave traders. In the riot, a number of Roman soldiers were killed and robbed by the frustrated Goths. News of this reached Lupicinus while he and his guests were taking their leisure and deep in their cups. Clearing his head and seeking to forestall a full-blown revolt, Lupicinus ordered the resident bodyguard of Alavivus and Fritigern to be executed. Though the order was carried out in secret, rumour of it spread rapidly, and the Goths outside the city prepared to storm the walls. Fritigern, conscious of his own danger, convinced Lupicinus that the only way to avert catastrophe was to demonstrate to his followers that he, at least, was still alive. Lupicinus immediately grasped the wisdom of this counsel. Fritigern and those of his attendants who were still living went out to their followers and were greeted rapturously; Alavivus, by contrast, is never heard from again, perhaps killed or retained as a hostage, perhaps even betrayed by Fritigern as a dangerous rival.

  The Gothic Rebellion

  Then, however, rather than attempt to retrieve the situation and carry on with his reception into the empire as planned, Fritigern made a momentous decision. In the face of constant harassment and sudden betrayal, he would reject the terms under which he had been received into the empire, lead his followers away from Marcianopole and into open revolt. He and his Tervingi therefore marched out into the province of Scythia, and as news of Lupicinus’ treachery spread, all of the Goths who had crossed the Danube the year before joined Fritigern. Why did things go so very badly wrong at Marcianopole? Modern scholars, influenced by the black colours in which Ammianus paints Lupicinus, tend to assume that he plotted treachery from the beginning. That seems unlikely given the normal habits of Roman officialdom. Exploiting the perquisites of office to get rich was one thing, deliberately provoking a rebellion another thing altogether. If Fritigern’s Goths were already destined for a secure place in the Roman army, as other Goths in Thrace certainly were at precisely this time, then Lupicinus had nothing to gain from eliminating Gothic commanders who had up to that point kept their following obedient and quiescent. Again, the banqueting at Marcianople, and indeed the separation of commanders and attendants from the main body of troops, was perfectly normal – it is exactly paralleled twenty years before, when the caesar Julian entertained his high commanders at Paris while their units were encamped well away from the city itself. Although Lupicinus must have seen that he had a chance of entrapping the Gothic leaders at Marcianople, it seems most unlikely that he actually planned to do so from the beginning. On the contrary, when riotous skirmishing flared up between Gothic and Roman troop, Lupicinus panicked. That panic, in turn, convinced Fritigern that his only safety lay in rebellion.

  Retreating from Marcianople, Fritigern and his followers were pursued by Lupicinus and the army stationed there. Fourteen kilometres from the city, the two forces clashed and Lupicinus’ army went down to bloody defeat. The whole of its junior officer corps died on the field, the unit standards were lost, and Lupicinus himself only survived by escaping into Marcianople and shutting up the city behind him. Fritigern’s Goths equipped themselves with the weapons and armour of their fallen enemies and went on the offensive, raiding nearby regions, and then ranging further afield, as far south as Adrianople, about 320 kilometres to the south. We can be fairly certain that the rebellion would have been halted in its tracks had Lupicinus been victorious. Success, however, breeds confidence and Fritigern and his followers, tormented by Roman exploitation for long enough, were now in no mood to see reason. To their standards flocked not just the other Goths who had been admitted into the empire, but also the dissatisfied and oppressed of the provinces – slaves, some of whom were Gothic, miners, and prisoners of all stripes. These, in turn, made rebellion easier, for they knew their way around the provinces, knew the roads and imperial establishments, and thus made the task of supplying the rebels far less complicated than it would otherwise have been.[144]

  The Rebellion Spreads

  Gothic units in the Thracian army soon joined Fritigern as well. Two commanders named Sueridus and Colias, in winter quarters at Adrianople with their units, had observed with total unconcern the travails of the Tervingi admitted in 376. Nor did the revolt of Fritigern at Marcianople interest them. The fact that Sueridus and Colias demonstrably lacked any special feeling for fellow Goths is a salutary reminder that only extraordinary pressure of circumstances could turn different groups of Goths into ‘the Goths’. In this case, that pressure came from the managerial incompetence of local officials at Adrianople. Early in 377, Sueridus and Colias received their marching orders, detailing them to the eastern front where they were needed for Valens’ Persian campaign. When they asked the local authorities in Adrianople for money to equip their units with food for the journey, they were refused by the head of the local city council, the curia. Ammianus tells us that the councillor was angry with the followers of Sueridus and Colias for the damage they had done to his suburban property. Now it is true that the quartering of a Roman army – any Roman army, regardless of who composed it – was a severe burden on townsfolk, but the magistrate was not acting solely out of anger. While cities were obliged to house and feed Roman units quartered on them, the legal obligation of the curia to give troops supplies for a march was by no means clear. Indeed, on most readings of late Roman practice, imperial officials should have taken charge of equipping Sueridus and Colias’ troops for their journey, without involving the curia of Adrianople at all.

  The curia armed and brought out the staff of the local imperial arms factory – the fabricenses – and with that force at their back ordered Sueridus and Colias to be on their way at once. Even if the legal right was on their side, for the curia to have refused the generals’ request with such brusqueness was political stupidity of the highest order. Sueridus and Colias were genuinely shocked by the unexpectedly heavy-handed treatment and made no move to go. At that point, no doubt egged on by thei
r magistrates, the townsfolk and fabricenses began to harass the soldiers, pelting them with makeshift missiles and attempting to drive them off by force. Thus provoked, the soldiers of Sueridus and Colias fought back and, as usually happened when imperial troops were turned loose on civilians, massacred whomever they got their hands on. That done, and presumably well armed with the stores from the imperial fabrica, they marched their followers off to join Fritigern.[145]

  As this one example shows, the Gothic rebellion in Thrace was not a single, planned affair, still less a barbarian migration. It was, on the contrary, a series of local revolts that in time converged into a mass uprising which threatened not just those regions in which the rebels were active, but the security of the Danubian provinces as a whole. There is no point in tracing in detail every skirmish mentioned in our sources.[146] They are too similar and we know too little about how they were connected to one another. However, one vital point is abundantly clear: the Goths under the overall command of Fritigern transformed themselves into a potent fighting force in a very short space of time. Equipped with Roman arms and armour, they also constructed a substantial supply train which allowed them to carry with them foodstuffs and other necessities gathered from the well-stocked regions through which they passed. This large force was made up of Goths from many different backgrounds, as well as all sorts of provincial malcontents. It was no longer the group of Tervingi that Fritigern and Alavivus had led across the Danube the year before, and Ammianus recognizes this fact by ceasing to speak of Tervingi and beginning to speak generically of Gothi, ‘Goths’. These Gothi roamed more or less at will in the land between the Haemus mountain chain and the Danube during 377 and most of 378. The rationale behind these movements is totally obscure, but it is striking that neither the Roman nor the Gothic side seem to have made any effort to negotiate throughout this period of more than a year. It is possible that Valens is to blame. If the Roman generals on the spot acted indecisively, it may be that they had received no guidance from an imperial court more interested in Persian affairs. The Goths, after all, were barbarians, and northern barbarians had always taken second place to Persia. In those circumstances, lacking direction from above and not wanting to take the wrong decision with so unpredictable an emperor as Valens, Rome’s Balkan commanders can hardly be faulted for trying to contain the Gothic threat rather than suppress it.