Adrianople: The Goths, the Huns, and the Battle That Broke the Roman Army

The Goths who destroyed a Roman emperor and two-thirds of his army on 9 August 378 had been invited in. The Roman army had ferried them across the Danube itself.

In the summer of 376, tens of thousands of Goths, driven off their land by a steppe people the Romans had barely heard of, camped on the north bank of the Danube and asked the Emperor Valens to admit them as settlers and recruits. He said yes. It was ordinary Roman practice and it looked like good business: farmland filled, regiments replenished, gold saved. Then the Goths were left on the riverbank to starve, and the two officers responsible for feeding them sold them dogs instead, at a rate Ammianus Marcellinus records as one dog for one person handed over as a slave. Within months the Goths were in revolt and Thrace was burning outside its walled towns.

Two years later Valens marched out of his camp at Adrianople without waiting for his nephew Gratian and the western army, deployed from the march after eight miles in August heat without food or water, and lost everything. The Gothic cavalry his scouts had failed to count came back to the field. The Roman left wing was cut off against the wagons. The infantry was crushed into a mass so dense that men could not draw their swords. Valens was last seen among the common soldiers. His body was never found.

This is the whole crisis, from the brother-emperors dividing the empire in 364 to the treaty of 3 October 382 that settled a Gothic people inside the frontier under its own leaders, on terms Rome had never granted before. It is told largely through Ammianus, the soldier-historian who closed his history with Adrianople and wrote it as a tragedy, read here as a great witness and a partisan one, and checked wherever he can be.

What you'll learn:

• Why Valens admitted the Goths, what the precedent was, and how two named officers on the river turned a managed settlement into a war
• Who the Goths were before 376: their judges and kings, their villages, their Bible, and their own quarrel over Christianity
• What the Romans knew about the Huns, which was almost nothing, and why a people who never appeared at Adrianople caused everything that happened there
• Why Valens did not wait for Gratian, with the cases for jealousy, bad intelligence and reasonable risk each set out fairly
• What the sources actually say about the battle, the size of the army (modern estimates run from about 15,000 to 40,000), and the two accounts of how the emperor died
• Whether Adrianople was really the victory of cavalry over infantry and the death of the legion, and what Ammianus's own account does to both claims
• Why the treaty of 382, not the battle, is the real turning point, and what it has to do with the sack of Rome in 410

This book is for you if:

• You know Adrianople as the battle that began the fall of Rome and want that claim tested against the evidence
• You have read about the late Roman army or the Huns and want the Gothic war as a story with named people making choices on both sides
• You want a narrative history that tells you who reported each scene and says plainly where the sources run out

The admission was policy. The riverbank was the failure. The treaty was the turning point. The afternoon took four hours; the story took eighteen years.