THE BATTLE OF ADRIANOPLE
Introduction
On August 9, 378 AD, the Eastern Roman Emperor Valens marched out of the city of Adrianople with an army of about 25,000 troops determined to destroy the forces of the Gothic rebel Fritigern ( in Gothic =*Frithugairns). By the evening of the same day he lay dead on the field of battle along with up to one third of his army - a defeat the historian Ammianus Marcellinus declared the worst since Cannae. How did Gothic refugees from over the Danube, who up to that point had been on the defensive against the Romans, inflict such a crushing defeat on the Empire? And was this surprise Gothic victory the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire?
Movements on the Steppes
The events of that day actually began with some movements of nomadic tribes far from the borders of the Empire a few years before. In the early 370s the Huns successfully conquered the Alans, a nomadic Iranian tribe who lived east of the Don. Then the Huns and Alans began to put increasing pressure on the kingdom of the Greuthungian Gothic ruler Ermanaric (*Airmanareiks).
Ermanaric had been a powerful ruler, whose sphere of influence had extended well beyond the Ukrainian steppes on which his people had settled. There's evidence that his power was acknowledged as far away as the Baltic region - the area from which the Goths had migrated 200 years before. The Greuthungian Goths, who later formed the core of the people known as the Ostrogoths, had adopted many of the practices of their Alanic and Sarmatian neighbours once they settled on the plains. They had taken up more extensive use of cavalry, including some heavy cavalry armed with the two-handed kontos lance, and they adopted many Sarmatian styles of dress and decoration. Despite this, they remained a Germanic people and remembered their kinship with the Tervingian Goths who lived in the forests to their west (who later became known as the Visigoths).
By the mid-370s, however, Ermanaric was old and the pressure from the Alans and Huns was starting to be harder to resist. Eventually the Greuthungian Goths suffered a crushing defeat and King Ermanaric, possibly in a pagan rite of self-sacrifice, commited suicide. He was succeeded by King Vithimer (*Winithamers) who made several attempts to stem the advance of the Huns. He seems to have successfully allied himself with some bands of Huns and Alans against their fellow tribesmen and managed to resist the invaders for a while.
By this time the Tervingian Goths were aware of the threat from the east and their leader Athanaric (*Athanareiks) sent a force to his eastern border to guard against the Huns and prevent the retreating Greuthungians from entering his territory. Around this time Vithimer was killed in battle and the majority of his people began a century of submission to the Huns. His infant son Videric was taken into care by two of his warband leaders, Altheus and Saphrax (who were possibly Sarmatian and Alanic, or even Hunnic, respectively), and they then led a fragment of the Greuthungian people and what was left of Vithimer's army westward to seem asylum in the Empire.
Now it was the Tervingians' turn to try to fight off the Huns. In the summer of 376 Athanaric had led a Tervingian Gothic army to the River Dneister and set up a fortified position there. He then sent two of his chiefs, Munderic (*Mundareiks) and Lagariman, eastward over the river to scout for the Hunnic armies. The Huns, however, crossed the river themselves in a surprise night advance and drove Athanaric's army back west, forcing them into the Bessarabian forests. Athanaric had proved himself the master of the tactical retreat during a defensive campaign against the Romans not long before, and his army remained largely intact. He then proceeded to build a series of static defensive fortifications to guard against further Hunnic advances, possibly by rebuilding the old Roman Limes Transalutanus north of the Danube.
This strategy also failed - the Huns circumvented Athanaric's defences and ravaged the Tervingians' food supplies. Completely out-manoevered, Athanaric began to lose political support. An opposition party of influential Tervingian chiefs, led by Fritigern and Alaviv, began to talk of seeking refuge from the highly mobile invaders within the Empire. Athanaric retreated into the mountains of Transylvania with those followers who were still loyal to him, while Alaviv and Fritigern led the bulk of the Tervingian people to the border with the Empire - the River Danube.
Thus at the end of the summer of 376 AD, with the Emperor Valens away in Antioch, word came to Constantinople that several hundred thousand refugees - Tervingian Goths along with Greuthungian Goths, Sarmatians, Alans and Taifalians - were seeking permission to cross the Danube and enter Roman territory. The decision to let them cross was to have grave consequences for both Valens and the Empire.
The Gothic Revolt
Sometime in the autumn of 376 word came from Constantinople that the Tervingian Goths were allowed to cross the Danube. The settlement of 'barbarians' within the Empire was not new, and there was much to recommend this option to the Emperor Valens. Firstly, the Tervingians of Fritigern and Alaviv were Christians - unlike the followers of the pagan Athanaaric who they'd left behind north of th river. Secondly, they were (loosely speaking) Arian Christians, as was Valens himself. Thirdly, they were seeking land on which they could live, and Valens had vacant estates to give them in Thrace. Finally, they were a warrior people who would willingly furnish troops for Valens' armies. He was in the process of gearing up for a war with Persia over Armenia and had already taken on a number of Gothic warriors as troops. He saw Fritgern and Alaviv's people as a solution to several problems.
So the Tervingians were allowed to cross and to enter the Empire as dediticii - supplicants on the Emperor's mercy seeking to be settled as colonii. It's unclear whether they were disarmed as they crossed the river, but earlier examples of dediticii seem to indicate that they would have been. But while the entry of the Tervingians solved some problems for Valens, it created some others.
To begin with, the sheer numbers of people involved were daunting and a resettlement on this scale had not been attempted before. Additionally, Fritigern and Alaviv's people were not the only refugees seeking sanctuary in the Empire - the Greuthungian Goths led by Alatheus and Saphrax had now arrived on the Danube and were also petitioning to cross. Another group of Greuthungian refugees from Ermanaric's kingdom, this one led by Farnobius, and a band of Germanic Taifalians and their Hunnic allies also appeared on the northern bank of the Danube. Valens could not admit all these people at once, so he chose the largest group, Fritigern's, and ordered the troops in Thrace to keep the others out.
Dealing with Fritigern's Tervingians was difficult enough. The terms of the agreement between Valens and the two Gothic chiefs was that they were to be given land to cultivate and beyond that they were not to be a drain on Imperial resources. The problem was how the Goths were to feed themselves in the meantime, and Ammianus Marcellinus tells pitiful stories of Goths selling their own children into slavery to buy food in the crowded refugee camps south of the Danube. Valens also needed to find a way to break up the large and potentially dangerous confederation of Tervingian Goths the two leaders had brought over the river. It was, perhaps, with this in mind that Lupicinus, the Roman commander in Thrace, was ordered to kidnap a group of Gothic nobles, including Fritigern and Alaviv, after having invited them to a banquet at his headquarters in Marcianople.
Whatever Lupicinus' plan, it failed dismally. A fight broke out, Lupicinus had the chiefs' escorting warriors cut down and then the situation got completely out of control. Fritigern fought his way out of the trap, but Alaviv seems to have been killed in the fracas. News spread to the Tervingian warriors outside the city and they, already distrustful of the Romans and plagued by hunger, rose in open revolt. With Fritigern at their head, now the undisputed chief of the Tervingian Goths, they began to plunder and burn the area around Marcianople.
Lupicinus struggled to get the situation under control. Many troops had already been recalled from the Danube frontier, which had allowed the Greuthungian bands under Altheus, Saphrax and Farnobius to force a passage and enter Thrace. But Lupicinus' main problem was Fritigern. The Tervingians outnumbered his forces, but they were poorly armed and the Roman commander knew that a quick victory over the rebel dediticii would soon bring them to heel. But despite gathering all the available forces in Thrace and confronting Fritigern a mere nine miles from his headquarters, Lupicinus was completely defeated and his army massacred.
Now, with Valens still engaged with the bulk of the Eastern Roman Army in Armenia, Thrace was wide open to the army of the Tervingians, and other smaller forces of Greuthungians, Taiflai, Alans, Sarmatians and Huns. The defeat of the army in Thrace gave a signal to others and Thracian gold miners, Gothic slaves, dispossessed peasants and some Gothic units in the Roman Army now rallied to Fritigern and his tribesmen. Humbled by their defeat at the hands of the Huns and humiliated by their treatment by the Romans, the Goths went on the rampage and soon all Thrace was in flames.
The War in Thrace
The Eastern Emperor Valens seems to have initially underestimated the danger posed by the Gothic revolt in Thrace. He was still in action in the east and his attention was on his war with the Persians, so early actions against the Goths were piecemeal and uncoordinated. He had campaigned against the Tervingians north of the frontier in his Gothic War (367-369 AD), when the wily Tervingian chief Athanaric had consistently retreated before him, and he had a low regard for the Goths' capacity for war as a result. Confident they would be rounded up and destroyed quickly, he left the war against Fritigern to his subordinate commanders, with the infantry under Traianus and cavalry units under Profuturus being dispatched to deal with the rebels.
The Western Emperor, Valens' nephew Gratian was also asked for help, and he sent Frigeridus with a substantial part of the army of Pannonia Valeria. At first these commanders had some success and the Goths were contained in the Dobrudja region, where it was hoped that a lack of opportunity to forage for the huge amount of food required to sustain his large army would break Fritigern's hold on his warriors, causing rival chiefs to break the large Gothic army up. The Romans were then joined by Gallic units led by the Western Imperial comes domesticorum Richomeres (another Roman commander with a Germanic name). It was now late in the summer of 377, and the Roman generals, though still outnumbered by the Goths, thought the time had come to strike and destroy the Gothic army.
The Roman troops who faced Fritigern's warriors were a far cry from the legionaries of the old Empire. The extensive armour of Augustus or Trajan's times had long since proved too expensive to produce and maintain for the stretched economy of the late Empire. The elaborate Gallic or Italic style helmet - had been replaced by a much simpler and cheaper 'ridge-helm' - two beaten half-hemispheres joined by a central ridge piece with simple cheek and neck guards. The lorica segmentata cuirass worn by the old legionaries had also gone. The later Imperial soldiers either wore simple mail shirts or no body armour at all. The short stabbing gladius sword and long, curved scutum shield had likewise been replaced by the longer, slashing spatha and a flat oval or round shield.
Since Roman fashions, decoration and military equipment styles had long been filtering north into Germania, and since the recruitment of many ethnically Germanic troops had been going on for over two centuries, the dress, equipment, tactics and behaviour of the Roman army and their Germanic opponents had moved closer and closer together. Before one battle against Fritigern the Roman troops are said to have raised the barritus, the ancient war song of the Germans, which shows that this force was possibly almost as Germanic as they Goths they faced. And with the Goths stripping the Roman dead and raiding other sources of Roman arms, it was not long before they were comparatively well equipped with large quantities of helmets, armour and swords. In many ways the two sides would have resembled each other greatly.
That said, the average Tervingian Gothic warrior would have been a footman, armed with a couple of spears and protected solely by a shield. Despite the Goths' newfound weapons and their superior numbers, the Romans still had a well-trained and disciplined military force and they were confident that the Goths were about to face a crushing defeat.
Frigeridus and Richomeres found Fritigern's army encamped ad Salices ('at the Willows' - the exact battle site is unknown). The Tervingians were now on the defensive and they were drawn up within the circle of their wagon laager, so the Roman commanders decided to starve them out. Fritigern realised their plan and began to call in his foraging units to reinforce the besieged army, forcing the Romans to press their attack. The Goths counter attacked strongly, but after some hard fighting and many casualties neither side won the day. Both armies withdrew after taking heavy losses, but this meant Fritigern's force remained intact and at large. Changing tack, the Romans blocked the Balkan passes and gathered their food supplies in cities that the Goths could not take. Once again, they then waited to starve the Goths out.
Still confident of eventual victory, Valens stayed in the east, sending his vice-commander of cavalry, Saturninus to reinforce the army in Thrace. But at this point Fritigern managed something of a coup. He had been in contact with Alatheus and Safrax, the chiefs of the Greuthungian Gothic refugees and their Hunnic, Sarmatian, Alan and Taifalian allies since these cavalrymen had forced a passage over the Danube the year before. Now he managed to convince them to join the Tervingian rebels against the Romans. The entry of the Greuthungians into the war soon turned the tables and Saturninus was forced to abandon his blocking of the passes. The Goths broke out into Thrace once more and soon took their revenge on the Romans, burning and looting their way across the province with great savagery.
Traditionally the Tervingians fought on foot, but they had forged a strong alliance with their steppe-dwelling neighbours the Taifali who had generally provided a cavalry arm to their forces back in their homelands north of the Danube. Now Alatheus and Saphrax reinforced the Tervingian infantry in a similar manner, bringing a large force of mixed cavalry to bear on Fritigern's enemies. Their collection of eastern warbands included both the heavy lancers of the Greuthungians, Taifali and Sarmatians and the lighter horse archers of the Hun bands who accompanied them. Together with the Fritigern's large army of well-armed Tervingian Goths, Valens now had an even more serious military problem on his hands.
In response to these new setbacks, Gratian once again sent Frigeridus with Western Imperial troops to aid the Eastern Empire, but he soon found his defensive strategies were no match for the newly mobile and versatile Gothic force. In danger of attack from all sides, Frigeridus was forced to withdraw into the West again. As he retreated he encountered yet another force of Germanic refugees - the large force of Greuthungians and Taifalians led by the chief Farnobius. The Western general inflicted a crushing defeat on this warband and settled the survivors, mainly Taifali, in northern Italy where several towns still bear their name.
The winter of 377/78 AD brought more frustrations for the Romans. The Western Emperor Gratian was prevented from coming to the aid of the East in person by a sudden invasion by the Alamanni, to which Gratian responded with a massive counterattack. This was coupled by another defeat of the junior Roman generals in Thrace and Valens was soon arranging a peace with the Persians and hurrying back to Constantinople to deal with the Gothic threat once and for all.
He arrived in the strongly fortified city of Adrianople in mid-July, 378 AD with an estimated force of 20-25,000 troops and was greeted with several pieces of good news. Firstly, his infantry commander Sebastianus had just destroyed a large Gothic column returning from plundering the southern Thracian province of Rhodope. Secondly, word came from his nephew Gratian that he had concluded his war against the Alamanni and had already reached northwestern Bulgaria with a large reinforcing army of Western Imperial troops. Valens was strongly advised not to underestimate the Goths - indeed, Gratian's army had just been suddenly attacked by some of the Alanic horsemen from Alatheus and Saphrax's cavalry forces and taken surprisingly heavy losses. But Valens was eager to move in for the kill after Sebastianus' recent victory and was perhaps keen to win a victory over the Goths to match his nephew's defeat of the Alamanni.
Around August 8 Valens' scouts reported that Fritigern was heading towards Nike with only 10,000 warriors. Valens decided that this was his chance for a decisive victory over the Tervingian leader and prepared his forces to march out and crush the Gothic army while it was on the march. He was confident that he could win a decisive victory without his nephew's aid, but that was a decision that was to prove a costly and deadly mistake.
The Battle of Adrianople
Sometime in the morning of August 9, 378 AD, the Emperor Valens marched out of his camp outside the city of Adrianople with around 20,000 troops to find and destroy Fritigern and his Gothic army. According to his scouts, the Goth chieftain was encamped about eleven miles away with only 10,000 men, but the going was hard since the road was in poor condition and it was early afternoon before the Roman advance elements encountered the Goths, encamped behind their circled wagons.
Fritigern had sent an embassy to Valens the day before, but the sudden appearance of the Emperor with his entire army seems to have caught the Tervingian Goth by surprise. The most mobile part of his army, the Greuthungian cavalry and their allies, had been dispatched to forage for supplies - they had probably only been sent out that very morning. Now, as the Goths watched the cavalry of the Roman right wing form a screen behind which the rest of the army could deploy in battle array, Fritigern sent fast riders to recall his mounted troops at once.
Fritigern was not the only one to be surprised. As the Gothic laager came into view it became apparent to Valens that his scouts had been wrong. Far from approaching Nike with only 10,000 warriors, it was clear that this was the main Gothic force. Estimates of how many men Fritigern commanded that day vary widely, with some modern authorities claiming there were as many as 150,000 Goths, but its unlikely that the Roman scouts could have underestimated the Gothic force by a factor of fifteen. It is likely that the two armies were relatively evenly matched in number, with the Romans slightly outnumbered.
The large Roman army took some time to deploy, but Fritigern knew he had to buy more time. While the Imperial infantry formed up in the middle of the Roman line, he sent some emissaries to negotiate with Valens, but the Emperor rejected them, demanding that higher ranking Goths come forward to speak with him. The Goths in turn suspected a trap, so they demanded a high ranking Roman hostage come over to their side to ensure their envoys' safety. Then there was a debate amongst the Roman high command as to who would go, with Richomer, the Western Imperial general, finally volunteering. But as he prepared to cross the field to the Gothic laager word reached Valens' position that the battle had already begun.
While the negotiations and deployment had dragged on, the Romans had stood waiting in the hot sun. It was now mid-afternoon and they had been marching and then standing in scorching heat - it gets to 40 degrees Celcius in that region in August - for hours without food or water. To add to their discomfort and impatience, the Goths had set fire to the tinder-dry grass and scrub around them, so the Romans were plagued by heat, smoke and clouds of dust. By this stage, the cavalry right wing had formed up on the army's right flank and the infantry were more or less in postion. Skirmishing units, the Scutarii and their accompanying archers, were harassing the Goths while the straggling cavalry left wing was still taking position. Precisely what happened is unknown, but the Scutarii commander Bacurius seems to have pressed his attacks too strongly, some Goths counter attacked from the laager and soon the Roman infantry were fully engaged. Startled by this turn of events, the Roman commanders broke off negotiations and the battle proper began - with the Romans already in some disorder.
What happened next effectively won the day for Fritigern, though it was as much good luck as good planning. As the battle began in confusion, with both sides surrounded by thick smoke and choking summer dust, the Gothic allied cavalry led by Alatheus and Saphrax suddenly appeared as if from nowhere and fell immediately on the Roman right flank, turning it and then attacking it from behind. The cavalry on the right were swept away by the sudden assault, with Ammianus describing the charging barbarian cavalry as 'descending from the mountains like a thunderbolt'. While the mass of Tervingian warriors descended from the circle of wagons to fully engage the Roman infantry centre, a section of the cavalry then wheeled behind the laager and attacked the Roman left in a similar manner. It is possible that the cavalry there were still only partially deployed and they were driven from the field by Saphrax and Alatheus' horsemen. With their cavalry gone and now assaulted by the Goths from almost all sides, the Roman infantry stood their ground and fought for survival rather than victory.
The significance of the Gothic cavalry in the battle has been much debated. Sir Charles Oman chose to begin his influential The Art of War in the Middle Ages with the Battle of Adrianople, depicting it as a victory of Gothic heavy cavalry over anachronistic Roman legionaries on foot - a victory which ushered in the reign of the medieval knight. More recent historians no longer accept this view. While the timely arrival of the Alatheus and Saphrax effectively won the day, it is unlikely the cavalry formed a very large portion of Fritigern's army. They were versatile, effective and skilled, but they were far outnumbered by the Tervingian warriors on foot. And while the cavalry's sudden assault drove off the Roman horse and exposed their infantry, the hard fighting was done by the Gothic footmen who fought hand to hand with the Roman foot soldiers for hours in the hot sun and blinding dust and eventually defeated them. Far from being a medieval heavy cavalry battle, this was largely a victory of infantry over infantry.
The achievement of the cavalry at Adrianople was impressive, however. The Greuthungians had lived alongside their steppe neighbours for many generations and had learned their mixed cavalry tactics well. The bulk of the Greuthungian Gothic force would have been lightly armoured horsemen wielding their spears overhand with a shield, or casting them at the enemy like javelins as they charged before closing to fight with the slashing spatha-style sword. Alongside them would have been the heavier armoured Alans and their Sarmatian cousins who, along with the Greuthungian and Taifalian nobles and their retinues, wore mail and lammellar cuirasses and probably fought with the two-handed heavy kontos lance. They were supported by the fast moving and deadly light horse archers of the Huns - a troop type which the Romans were to learn to respect in the wars against Attila in the coming century and were later to adopt themselves en masse.
But it was the Tervingian Gothic warriors who won the day. The battle had begun in the mid-afternoon and it raged for several long hours until sunset approached. Ammianus Marcellinus, himself a retired soldier, describes the fighting vividly:
“But when the barbarians, rushing on with their enormous host, beat down our horses and men, and left no spot to which our ranks could fall back to deploy, while they were so closely packed that it was impossible to escape by forcing a way through them, our men at last began to despise death, and again took to their swords and slew all they encountered, while with mutual blows of battle-axes, helmets and breastplates were dashed in pieces. Then you might see the barbarian towering in his fierceness, hissing or shouting, fall with his legs pierced through, or his right hand cut off, sword and all, or his side transfixed, and still, in the last gasp of life, casting round him defiant glances. The plain was covered with carcasses, strewing the mutual ruin of the combatants; while the groans of the dying, or of men fearfully wounded, were intense, and caused great dismay all around.”
Fritigern knew this was his chance to win the decisive victory he needed and the Roman troops knew they had to fight simply to get off the battlefield alive. Their cavalry was either destroyed or in full flight and the reserve unit, the Batavii had also fled before they were even committed. Crushed and hemmed in by the Gothic warriors around them, the Roman infantry fell in their thousands, with Ammianus describing 'one black pool of blood' and 'piled up heaps of the dead.'
Finally, in the approaching twilight, Valens withdrew and he and several of the surviving Roman commanders fled the field. The Roman troops who could disengage were then thrown into complete rout as they retreated and it was only when the moonless night darkened the battlefield that the killing finally stopped. Sources indicate up to a third of the Roman army died that hot afternoon and modern estimates indicate that about 10-15,000 Roman troops were killed, including several high ranking commanders and a great many senior officers. Somewhere amongst the dead, probably killed in the last chaotic retreat, was the Emperor Valens himself. One later story says the wounded Emperor took shelter in a house near the battlefield, to which the pursuing Goths set fire, burning Valens inside. Later Roman historians blamed the Arian heretic Emperor for the crushing defeat and felt this was a fitting end for him.
The Aftermath
The Gothic victory at Adrianople was a terrible blow, both logistically and psychologically for both halves of the Empire, but the Romans recovered relatively quickly. To begin with, Fritigern was actually defeated by his own victory. While the Goths were under threat from several powerful Roman armies the Tervingian was able to hold together his alliance of Gothic refugees. After the victory over Valens, however, the united Gothic army began to break up as different chiefs went their separate ways. The need for food was paramount and Alatheus and Saphrax parted company from their Tervingian allies, making their way west, where they may have been settled in Pannonia or were possibly defeated and scattered by the Western Emperor Gratian. The war dragged on, with the new Eastern Emperor Theodosius suffering a major defeat at the hands of the Tervingians in 380 and was almost himself captured by Fritigern's warriors. For two more years the campaign against the Goths bogged down into stalemate and finally, on October 3, 382 AD, Theodosius accepted the inevitable.
Realising that he simply could not defeat the Tervingians, he entered into a treaty with them. They became foederatii of the Eastern Empire - allies who could be called upon for military service and who were granted land to settle within the Empire in return. They settled as an autonomous Gothic 'state within a state' in the northern dioceses of Dacia and Thrace, along the Danube frontier and they were to become the people later known as the Visigoths. It was these people who later rebelled once more against the Romans under Alaric and eventually marched on the Western Empire, sacked Rome itself and established a long lasting kingdom in Gaul and Spain, setting a precedent for their Greuthungian/Ostrogothic cousins who later established an even more powerful kingdom in Italy.
In many ways the victory at Adrianople in 378 and the subsequent foedus treaty of 382 were significant turning points in the end of the Roman Empire. From this point on the security of the frontiers was breached and the Romans were forced to deal with the Germanic invaders within their territory and on the 'barbarians' terms. The Empire in the east survived for centuries, of course, and even the West was to endure for another hundred years, but Fritigern's Goths, in effect, had won.
Contents copyright © Tim O'Neill 2000-2001.
