The Great Gothic Migration and the Battle of Hadrianople

To students of history, the battle of Hadrianople is perhaps best remembered as the first death knell of the Roman Empire, as evidenced by the death of the Emperor Valens at the hands of a previously little known barbarian people. These Goths, from somewhere in the dark lands beyond the Danube, would later go on to sack Rome itself, leaving their bloody mark forever imprinted in the writings of Western historians.

On the other hand, the battle, and the events preceding it, can also act as an insightful window into the greed and the arrogance that permeated much of the late Roman world. It is from the work of the Roman writer Ammianus Marcellinus (ca. 330-395) that we are perhaps best able appreciate how a foe armed with "indomitable rage united with despair" finally overmastered the seemingly invincible Eastern Roman army.

The story begins with the slow migration of barbarian nations from the steppes of Eurasia that so afflicted the Romans, especially their frontier garrisons emplaced at the Danube. For the Romans, this river was the wall that held back the vast, uncivilized world, but it was soon to be tested by the emergence of a new enemy from inner Asia.

Marcellinus names these peoples the Huns, who live "on the border of the Frozen Ocean, and are a race savage beyond all parallel." These people of the horse "being excited by an unrestrainable desire of plundering the possessions of others," were held to have generally hacked and slaughtered across the interior of Asia until they reached a people the Romans knew as the Alani, another suitably barbarous and horrible nation.

When this nation succumbed under the might of the Huns, the Goths were understandably alarmed and decided to migrate en-masse as a nation to Thrace, which was then a part of the Eastern Roman Empire. Not wishing to gain another enemy in their supposed refuge, the Goths, under their leader Alavivis, encamped on the far bank of the Danube and sent ambassadors across to the Roman Emperor.

One can hardly imagine what the emperor thought when he learned that an entire nation of barbarians, with numbers akin to "the waves in the African sea," had arrived at his borders, but it is perhaps conceivable to imagine that the two leaders could have ended up the best of allies.

Unfortunately, the Roman military men in charge of the province were at best considered generals of "tainted character." These misbegotten fellows ferried the Goths across the Danube, and then conceived of a plan to round up dogs and trade them to the starving Goths. The coin of the day was Gothic children, and many of these poor souls were subsequently enslaved.

When an angry mob issued out from a nearby city to speed the Goths on their way, (presumably after they had run out of children), the Goths quite understandably snapped and formed their own angry mob under the leadership of a chieftain named Fritigern.

With the Gothic host growing daily from a stream of returning expatriates, the Emperor Valens decided to leave Antioch and take care of the problem himself. After some inconclusive skirmishes between the Goths and Roman forces in the area, Valens arrived at a suburb of the city of Hadrianople. The day was August 9, 378, and though few knew it at the time, it was the end of an era for the Roman Imperium.

The Goths, meanwhile, had a few second thoughts, and offered to leave peacefully if they were given Thrace to settle. Valens, however, waved aside their attempts at peace, and pushed into battle without waiting for reinforcements under the Western Emperor Gratian.

Unfortunately, when the two armies met, the Roman infantry found themselves unsupported by the cavalry, which had presumably attacked early and then fled. By all accounts, the infantry fought bravely in the spirit of an older Rome, "disregarding their own safety, and seeing that every possibility of escape was cut off from them." Finally, overwhelmed by the sheer weight of numbers, and an unexpected Gothic reinforcement, the infantry collapsed and fled the field of battle as best they could.

Seeing as the main of his army had largely disintegrated, Valens was advised to seek out his allies, the barbarian Batavians, who had been held in reserve. Sadly, they were nowhere to be found, and Valens, imperator and primus inter pares of the Eastern Roman State was undoubtedly killed, though his body was never located.

Rome itself would fall about a century later at the hands of those very same Goths, who then themselves would eventually fade into the oblivion of history.

A good source of further information on the Goths and other barbarians is David McCullough's Chronicles of the Barbarians. (1998, Random House, Inc.)

My direct source was Liber XXXI of The Roman Histories of Ammianus Marcellinus, which can be found online in Latin and English at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Ammian/home.html