T

he annals of the later Roman empire

are scarred by events that took place
near the Thracian city of Adrianople
on the afternoon of August 9, AD 378.
By that evening, the eastem Roman
Emperor Valens was dead along with
tens of thousands of irreplaceable warriors, in a
defeat that signaled the beginning of the end of
Rome's ability to resist external pressure and prevent
penetration of its defenses. According to the con-
temporary historian Ammianus Marcellinus, him-
self a Roman officer, "No battle in our history except
Cannae [Hannibal Barca's great victon' in 216
BC] involved such a massacre."
After the death of Emperor Constantine in AD 337,
the Roman empire saw the retum of sibling strug-
gles for total control. Constantine had hoped that his
three surviving sons would be satisfied with one-
third of the empire eachwestern Europe, south-
eastern Europe and the eastem provincesbut such
was not to be. After his three sons were killed, they
were followed not bv blood relations but bv a suc-
cession of generals from their armies.
The general who finally secured the imperial
purple on Eebruary 26, 364, was Flavius Valentini-
anus, a man of humble biiih but considerable mili-
tary skill. As Emperor Valentinian 1, he focused on
shoring up the h'ontier along the Danube River. To
keep the eastem part of the empire in friendly hands,
on March 28 Valentinian appointed his brother, Flav-
ius Julius Valens, to the position of co-emperor and
placed him in Constantinople. Valentinian died in
375 and was succeeded by his 16-year-old son, Flav-
ius Gratianus, or Gratian. Contemporaries described
Gratian as "a young man of remarkable talent: elo-
quent, controlled, warlike, yet merciful." During his
short life, he fought successfully against Rome's en-
emies and vigorously attacked the last vestiges of pa-
ganism. At the time he became emperor in the west,
however, Gratian was much too inexperienced to
hold any sway over his uncle, Valens.
In contrast to his brother, Valens did not join the
Roman army until 360, and thanks to Adrianopie he
has gone down in history as an ineffective military
54 MILITAKV HISTORY OCTOBER 2005
ADRIANOPLE
LAST GREAT BATTLE OF ANTIQUITY
Emperor Valens' haste to come to grips with the Goths cost him
his life and Rome its last predominantly Roman army.
BYJOEZENTNER
leader. In actuality, he was not without skill as a com-
mander. His earlier offensive campaign against the
Goths, fi"om 367 to 369, was conducted with vigor and
skill. In spite of difficulties in cairying out operations
against elusive enemies in their home territory, he was
able to bring his Goth foes to battle and defeat them.
According to their own traditions, the Goths origi-
nated in a land called Gothiscandza, identified as
southern Scandinavia, Those same traditions cite
population pressure as the reason for their move to
what would become their long-standing homeland
between the Oder and Vistula rivers, in what is now
Poland. However, no archaeological evidence exists
to support this idea. What seems to have happened
was a slow, steady drift from the Oder-\^stula region
into Scythia, now known as Ukraine. That region al-
ready contained a mixed population, and the Goths
would certainly have mixed with othei" peoples to
produce a populace that was far from homogeneous.
By the middle of the 3rd centuiy they had become
a formidable power.
The leader of a Visigothic tribe called the Tervin-
gians, Fritigem (derived fi-om the Goth word frit-
hugaims, "desiring peace"), was a prominent wanior-
king whose followers included a number of Roman
subjects as well as Goths. The former ranged from
escaped slaves and gold miners to Goth soldiers in
the Roman army who, although initially loyal to
Rome, had been driven to rebellion by the hostility
of the local populace. Fritigem must have been a
man of enormous charisma and strength of will. He
managed to hold together a confederacy of disparate
clans and tribes with no greater authority than their
belief in his ability to win. Since Fritigems follow-
ers included Huns, Roman expatriates and Ger-
Above left: Encircled by Goths in the Battle of
Adhanople, Roman legionaries make their final stand,
in a painting by Howard Gen"ard [Artwork by Howard
Gerrard, from CAM84 Adrianople AD 378, ^Osprey
Publishing). Above: A portrait coin of Emperor Flavius
Julius Valens (The Art Archive/Jan Vindrond/
Numismatist Pahs/Dagli Orti).
OCTOBER 2005 MILITARY HISTORY 55
<>
Fleeing oncoming
Hunnic hordes to
the east tribes of
Germanic Goths
drifted into Imperial
Roman territory in
growing numbers
in the mid-4th
century. Skilled
with the sword,
spear and battle-
ax, they also used
their wagons as
defensive weapons
by circling them
into a laager from
which their war-
riors would sally in
and out
manic tribesmen, large numbers wouid have de-
serted him had they felt better off under someone
else's leadership.
Compared to the vast trove of information avail-
able on the Roman army of the 4th century, virtually
nothing is known of the Goth fighting organization
if there was one. Nevertheless, the Goths were not
mere wild men, as popularly portrayed in Roman
and later accounts. Many had served in Roman
armies and knew how to wield a sword, spear or
battle-ax with skill. Such weapons were more of a
threat to the Romans than in previous centuries be-
cause of changes in the Roman infantry. Due to re-
ductions in available funds for military spending, the
Roman soldier wore less metal armor, his shield was
smaller and rounder and, to compensate, his short
stabbing gladius had been replaced by a sword
longer than the one he had used in the 1st century.
Roman infantn formations were still formidable but
had lost some of the invincible aura they had enjoyed
in the imperial heyday.
The Goths often fought fi-om laagers, a group of
wagons an^anged in a circle, from which they would
dart out to do battle, then quickly return. This
amounted to a mobile fortress that could protect
them no matter where they fought.
In the fall of 376, the Romans agreed to help Friti-
gem's people cross the Danube and settle in the
province of Moesia. In 377, however, a famine struck
the Roman areas settled by the Visigoths, and their
appeals for help went unanswered by the Roman au-
thorities. The magister militum (governor-general) of
the area, Lupicinus, and his dux secundae, Magnus
Maximus, treated the Visigoths badly, forcing them
to pay exorbitant prices for food and keeping Goth
women as concubines.
As the Goths became restive, Lupicinus invited
Fritigem, Alaxav and other Visigothic chieftains to a
banquet at his headquarters in Marcianople, plan-
ning to make them hostages to keep their tribes in
line. His plan faileda fight broke out the Gothic es-
corts and Alaviv were killed, but Fritigem escaped.
The Tervingians under Fdtigem now rose in open
revolt, pillaging the countryside surrounding Mar-
cianople. Lupicinus led a small force to confront
them nine miles outside the city, only to be over-
powered and massacred.
The crisis continued into 378, with the Visigoths
holding sway over much of Thrace, an ancient coun-
try in the southeastern part of the Balkan Peninsula,
reaching north to the Danube and comprising
modem Bulgaria and parts of Greece and Turkey.
Emperor Valens and his army were in Thrace,
marching west from Adrianople along the Martisa
56 MILITAKV HISTORY OCTOBER 2005
River valley when news reached him that the Goths
were moving south along the Tundzha River. At first
he thought it was only a small raiding party, but he
soon realized it was a much larger force. He there-
fore turned back toward Adrianople and established
a fortified camp just outside the city.
L
ocated at the western end of the Thracian
plain near the Greek border, 130 miles north-
west of Constantinople, Adrianople (now
Edime in Turkey) was originally named Hadrianop-
oiis, for the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who built it
in AD 125 on the site of the an-
cient city of Uskudama. Lying at
the confluence of the Martisa,
Tundzha and Arda rivers, it had
been of geographic and military
importance since ancient times.
Holding a conference with his
lieutenants during the night of
August 8.378, Valens faced a CITI-
cial decision: Should he engage
the Goths at once or wait for his
young nephew and co-emperor,
Gratian, to join him? This caused
a rift among his senior officers.
The more cautious among them
recommended that Valens wait
and allow Gratian to anive with
his army. The Romans could then
move as a combined fcjrce to fight
a stronger battle and wipe out the
entire Goth threat. Gratian's west-
ern contingent was not many
days' march away, they argued,
and communications between
the two armies had already been
established.
Another group of officers, led
by a general who knew what he
was doing, urged immediate
action. Comes (Count) Sebastianus had been ap-
pointed to overall command in the region two
months earlier, and in the previous weeks had
adopted an aggressive guerrilla-style mode of cam-
paigning. It had proven immensely successful thus
far, forcing the Goths to cease raiding in small bands
and coalesce into much larger groups for their own
protection. That made them \Tilnerable to a conven-
tional, lai^e-scale Roman attack. Sebastianus had, in
fact, caught and destroyed a large column of Goths
returning from a plundering expedition to Rhodope
in southern Thrace, shortly before joining Valens and
being appointed to command his infantrv'.
Several factors influenced Valens' final decision.
First, his scouts reported that the Goth force con-
tained only about 10,000 fighting men. Since Valens
had about 15,000 soldiers in his own arniy, it was
tempting to engage the Goths in battle then and
there. Moreover, Valens' standing in Constantinople
was very low at that time. If he allowed a Goth army
to take position between Adrianople and Constan-
tinople, he would not only find his supply lines cut
off but also risk the likelihood of the populace in the
eastern capital feeling abandoned by their emperor.
Valens' contemporary, Ammianus, and many later
historians believed that the emperorjealous of his
young nephew^decided on an immediate battle to
gain personal glory. Though that was perhaps true,
it would not have been the only reason for Valens'
hasty actions. He may have underestimated the
Goths' strength, for he had defeated them on the
Danube nine years earlier In any case, Valens
seemed confident of an easy victory on the morning
of August 9, as he led the field army of the east from
Adrtanople to attack the Goths, who were camped
12 miles from the city.
The Romans marched rapidly under a blazing
sun, coming upon the Goth camp at about 2 that
aftem(X)n. The Goths were encamped in a secure p<>
sition, probably on high and easily defensible
ground. The imperial troops were hastily drawn Lip
into battle formation while the Goths broke into
savage howls, as they were accustomed to do just
before an engagement.
Either because of unfamiliarity with the teirain or
by mistake, the right wing of the Roman cavalry
came within sight of the Goths while the left was still
a considerable distance away, with many of the
horsemen on the left wing scattered along roads
leading up to the Goth camp. Some historians
Emperor Valens
permits the Goth
chief Fritigem to
lead his Tervingian
Goths into the
province of Moesia
in 376. A famine,
combined with
shabby treatment
by the Roman au-
thorities, drove the
Goths to revolt the
next year.
OCTOBER 2005 MILITARY HI STORY 57
Valens' 19-year-old
nephew and co-
emperor,, Flavius
Gratianuis, was
leading a second
Roman force to join
him and was just a
few days' march
from Adrianople on
August 8,378, After
weighing both op-
tions, Valens de-
cided to immedi-
ately strike at the
Goths with what
soldiers he had
[Getty Images).
assume that the Goths fought fiom behind their
wagon laager at Adrianople, but that would have
been unlikclv. Their usual procedure was to engage
their enemies in the open and fall back on the camp
only when an encounter was not going well. Had
they remained behind the laager, they would have
not only surrendered the initiative to the Romans
but also would have been unable to use their pre-
feired fighting tactic of charging into hand-to-hand
combat with spears, swords and shields. On several
occasions Ammianus' descriptions of the battle ex-
plain that one part of the Roman line managed to
fight its way foi'ward as far as the wagons, clearly in-
dicating that the fighting took place primarily in the
open, beyond the wagon laager.
Riding boldly into the Roman right wing, the Goth
cavalry scattered the surprised Roman cavalry line
and then turned to attack the Roman left wing. Within
moments, all the Roman horsemen had been driven
from the field, leaving the weary infantry exposed.
Fritigem chose that moment to burst from the
laager at the head of his own infantry, Ammianus de-
scribed the Roman soldiers' plight: "The different
companies became so huddled together that hardly
anyone could pull out his sword, or draw back his
arm, and because of immense clouds of dust, the
heavens could no longer be seen...,Hence Goth
arrows whirling death from every side found their
mark with fatal effect, since they could not be seen
beforehand nor guarded against."
Hemmed in from all sides, the Roman foot was
packed together too tightly to create any effective
battle formation. The slaughter was frightful as Friti-
gem's infantry closed in, while his cavalry kept any
Romans who broke out from getting very far. The
battlefield ran red with blood, most of it Roman.
Men slipped on the bloody ground and many died
after falling on their own weapons. Heaps of bodies
littered the field, including Comes Sebastianus.
There are two stories concerning Valens' fate. One
claims that an arrow struck him while among the
ranks of his army, and his body was never foimd. The
other claims that, w^ounded by an arrow, he was
taken by his guards to a nearby peasant dwelling,
which the Goths subsequently attacked. The Roman
defenders initially managed to drive back the Goths
with aiTows, but they soon returned, piled up brush-
wood and straw against the house and set fire to it.
One Roman soldier jumped from a window and was
captured by the Goths, but the others, including the
emperor, perished in the blaze. The prisoner later es-
caped to tell the story,
Ammianus stated that two-thirds of the Roman
army died at Adrianople. His comparison ofthe mas-
sacre to Hannibal Barca's tactical masterpiece at
Cannae is apt because in both battles Roman horse-
men were driven from the field, leaving the infantry
to be encircled, hemmed in and destroyed.
T
he outcome at Adrianople shocked the West-
ern world. The Romans had lost battles
before, but never so decisively. Nor had bar-
barians made Roman commanders look so utterly
incompetent at the art of war. From beginning to
end, Valens and his generals had been outguessed,
outsmarted and outmaneuvered by Fritigem's Goths.
Various explanations have been offered for this
improbable victory by an ad hoc force of refugees
and deserters over the best organized, equipped and
disciplined army in the world. Some observers
claimed that, contrary' to Valens' faulty appraisal, the
Goths enjoyed a numerical superiority of as many as
200,000 warriors. In fact, given the logistical diffi-
culties of feeding and sustaining so many men, Friti-
gem would have been lucky to muster one-tenth that
number. Other historians claimed that the battle
proved the superiority of cavalry over infantry. The
truth is that while a timely cavalry charge sealed the
battle's ultimate outcome, it was primarily a clash of
infantry with infantry-.
The Roman defeat at Adrianople can be attributed
to both strategic and tactical reasons. At the strategic
level, the Romans were unable to assemble enough
high-quality troops to deal rapidly and decisively with
the Goth threat. Although the empire had some
500,000 men under arms at that time, they were com-
mitted to guarding imperial borders from Britannia
to Syria. There was a real danger that if a significant
number were moved from one point to another, a
potential enemy would take advantage of the weak-
ened border segment to attack. Moreover, while
Roman fieid armies were supposedly mobile and
rapidly deployable, orders to move to a new area of
58 MILITARY HISTORY OCTOBER 2005
Battle of Adrianople
August 9,378
fNFANTflY CAVALRY
VISIGOTHS Hi
ROMANS I I
WAeONLAAGER
CAVALRY
operations often resulted in mass desertions that
critically thinned their ranks.
When it came to using the force at their disposal,
the Roman commanders at Adrianople acted with
an arrogance typical of leaders of a well-equipped
"civilized" army faced with what they perceived as
rabble. Those commanders allowed themselves to be
drawn into battle without proper reconnaissance
and without ensuring that the odds were stacked in
their favor before committing their forces to a fight.
It is also probable that the quality and morale of
eastem Roman soldiers were low before the cam-
paign began. Only 13 years earlier, Valens had led
them on a rigorous but reasonably successful cam-
paign against the Sassanian Persians, only to aban-
don the effort and leave Armenia in Persian hands.
In any case, it was an overwhelmingly hot August
day when Valens' soldiers had marched hmriedly
from Adiianople to the plain near where the Goths
had been reported. Consequently, they were ex-
hausted and thirsty before the fighting began. It
would be unjust, however, to cite the Roman failings
without crediting the strategic skill shown by Friti-
gem; in spite of his logistic problems, the Goth com-
mander managed to dictate the terms and tempo
throughout the campaign.
G
ratian was well advanced in his march to
assist Valens at Adrianople when he learned
that his impatient co-emperor had been
killed and most of his army destroyed. In light of this
setback and distracted by his own affairs in the west-
em empire, he believed that imperial administration
in the east would require undivided attention that he
would be unable to give. Gratian therefore placed
Flavius Theodosius, the son of a distinguished gen-
eral and himself a commander of some experience,
in charge. On Januan' 19, 379, Theodosius was pro-
claimed co-emperor and officially assigned to mie
the eastern provinces.
Fritigem's victory at Adrianople gave the Goths
control of nearly the entire Balkan Peninsula, They
raided Greece, leaving only the city of Athens and
other small areas of that country unravaged.
Theodosius' plan for pacifying the Goths proved
to be as damaging as Valens' original decision to let
them cross the Danube. He would grant them the
right to occupy Thrace if they would swear loyalty
When his horse-
men drove the
Roman cavalry
from the field,
Fritigern and his
warriors defending
the laager went
over to the offen-
sive, encircling
Valens' infantry.
OCTOBER 2005 MILITARY HISTORY 59
After the debacle
at Adrianople, the
western empire's
army ceased to be
primarily Roman,
becoming increas-
ingly dependent on
Goth soldiers to fill
out its depleted
ranks.
to the empire and become Roman soldiers, Peace
was restored, but at a tremendous cost. With the
empire lacking the human resources to replace its
losses in the wake of Adrianople, the Roman army
was transformed into an aiiny of Goths fighting for
the emperor. As the fourth century ended, the Goths
bloodlessly gained control of the army. For the first
time in its history, the Roman army was no longer
composed primarily of Romans.
S
cholars have given a variety of dates for the fall
of Rome, the latest being 1453, when Con-
stantinople, capital of the eastern Roman
empire, fell to the Ottoman Turks, but that was a
new, Byzantine, Greek-speaking empire far removed
from the Caesars. The fall of tiie wcslem empire is
set at 476, when its last emperor, Romulus Augus-
tulus, surrendered to the Ostrogoths. That, however,
was just the coup de grace following a succession of
disasters, such as the murder of Valen-
tinian m in 455, the loss ofthe African
provinces to the Vandals in 429 and
Alarics sack of Rome in 410.
It might be argued that ancient
Rome received its mortal blow in 378,
and simply took almost a century to
die. The empire had been in bad shape
before, but not so bad that a single
strong leader could not have saved the
situation. After Adrianople, however,
Rome's decline became irreversible.
Once the Romans had to rely on the
Goths to fight their wars for them, the
emperor's power collapsed, and the
new Goth-dominated army was unable
to fend off other marauding peoples
who spilled over the eastem frontiers.
It may be stretching the point for
military historians to pronounce Adri-
anople a victory of cavalry over in-
fantiy thai ushered in the era of the
medieval knight. After that battle, how-
ever, Roman armies lost their classical
character, Cavaliy came to predomi-
nate and because horsemen, especially
those from the east, were also archers,
their ability to attack at long range se-
verely limited the power of infantry
fomiations. Not until the 15th century
did weapons such as the longbow and
crossbow begin to overturn the effec-
tiveness of cavalry on the battlefield.
As the r-eliability of the native Roman
army declined after Adrianople, em-
perors, generals and even private citi-
zens began to hire bands of retainers,
usually GeTTTianic in makeup. By the
mid-fifth century, Roman field armies
had evolved into large bands of
mounted warriors owing their alle-
giance directly to poweiful warlords rather than to
the state. Those aimies had more in common with
a feudal host than with Rome's republican or impe-
rial legions of classical limes.
Although il was fought in the east, the Battle of
Adrianople had its most direct effect on the affairs
of Rome's western provinces. It initiated a huge influx
of Gennanic peoples who continued their migrations
to oveniin the westem Roman empire within the
next century. In ironic contrast, the eastem Roman
empire, with its capital at Constantinople, would sur-
vive the fall of Rome itself and, adapting to the east-
em envii^onment in which it was isolated amid a sea
of barbarians, endure for another 1,000 years, MH
For further reading. Caiy, N.C.-based contributor Joe
Zentner recommends: Adrianople AD 378: The Goths
Crush Rome's Legions, by Simon MacDowall; and
Barbarians, ^v Tim Newark.
60 MILITARY HISTORY OCTOBER 2005