During the winter of 376–7, while the Roman generals on the border waited for Valens to spare troops from the eastern frontier to help deal with the refugees, the Goths endured a long, agonizing delay. The sea of tents and makeshift homes on the Roman side of the Danube belied the horrendous conditions they experienced that bleak, freezing winter. Poor sanitation and a crippling shortage of food made their life hell. The Roman generals had no inclination to do anything about it. In fact, they were quite prepared to make it worse. Turning black marketeers, they seized an opportunity to make a quick profit out of the suffering ‘barbarians’. In exchange for slaves and even children of some of the poorer Gothic citizens, the Roman generals gave the starving refugees fresh food. The Goths who had traded must have been doubly revolted to discover that they had bartered away children for dog meat.5
Tensions between Roman and barbarian quickly reached boiling point. In order to prevent the crisis spiralling out of control, the chief Roman general ordered the Goths to move on to the Roman regional base at Marcianople. However, he did not have enough soldiers both to police the frontier and to accompany the Tervingi Goths. The Greuthungi Goths, realizing that the border was no longer being patrolled, secretly crossed the river in makeshift rafts and canoes made from hollowed tree trunks, and thus slipped quietly into Roman territory. With the Greuthungi following at a significant distance behind, the Tervingi and the Greuthungi reached Marcianople. They were, however, in for another nasty surprise.
The majority of the Goths were kept outside the walls of the town by Roman soldiers. Inside, the Roman generals invited the ‘barbarian’ leaders to a sumptuous dinner. Perhaps in a bid to throw the Goths into confusion and thus seize control of the situation, the Romans made a botched attempt to assassinate the Gothic leaders. For the Goths, after their months of misery, this was the last straw. When their people outside Marcianople heard about the assassination attempt they were incandescent with rage. Hearing the riotous fury outside, the Gothic leaders thought quickly on their feet: they told the Romans that if they pressed ahead and killed them, there would certainly be a war. Only by setting them free could that be avoided.
Given the shortage of troops, the Romans were forced to release the Gothic leaders. But this was the most disastrous of all outcomes. The masses of refugees were not only starving, but utterly alienated and seething with anger. Once reunited with their angry, disenchanted leaders, the refugee Goths quickly overcame the Roman soldiers guarding them and pillaged Marcianople. War had been declared.
The war took place between 377 and 382, and the battlefield was the Balkans. Valens made a hasty peace with the Persian king, released whatever forces he could from the eastern frontier and raced to tackle the Goths. Although the conflict was unfolding in his half of the Roman empire, Valens nonetheless called upon the western emperor to help. Gratian agreed, but was unable to release his army immediately; he was preoccupied with securing the middle Danube from a further breach in the frontier made by a Germanic tribe called the Alamanni. During this delay, the Goths raided freely just to survive, and the people of Thrace bore the violent brunt of Roman inaction. Soon, however, the Goths would be brought into line again. It would not be long before they faced the full force of the Roman army.
The great conflict between the Goths and Valens’s troops turned on the events of 9 August 378. The battle was fought at Hadrianople (modern-day Edirne in Turkey) and it was riven with mistakes from the start. As the weeks of the summer passed and Gratian’s army failed to appear, Valens’s troops grew demoralized. Then, when the Romans believed they had the Goths in a position to engage them in battle, a fateful Roman council of war was called. Valens’s generals informed him that the enemy army was much smaller than it really was. Furthermore, while some officers advised caution, others did not. The latter were in belligerent mood, and in order to get their way, they knew how to press the emperor’s buttons. Valens was jealous of Gratian’s military success in the west. This was his chance, they now told him, to show what the eastern empire was made of. Valens had long ago run out of patience waiting for Gratian to arrive. Now, piqued and prodded by his hawkish generals, he decided to go it alone, to deal with the Goths once and for all. His advisers were right, he believed: he really did not need Gratian.6
After a forced march of eight hours over rough country and under a scorching August sun, Valens’s army was given neither food nor rest. All the soldiers received was the order to advance. When the two sides clashed, Valens and his men discovered to their horror that the Goths were no bedraggled barbarian horde. They were an organized, well-equipped and disciplined army 20,000 strong. The wings of the Gothic cavalry immediately wiped out the Roman left wing. Then the Goths brought all their power to bear on the Roman centre. Close-packed and with their shields raised, the Romans were too huddled together to draw their swords and use them to any effect. In addition, a cloud of dust blew up above the place where the fighting was at its fiercest and camouflaged the javelins and spears that rained down upon the Romans. The enemy fire was picking them off one by one.
Exhausted and confused, the soldiers of the Roman army thrust with their swords as best they could without any purpose or plan. Some killed their own men. Eventually, the Roman line gave way and the massacre reached its climax. By nightfall even the emperor’s bodyguard had been murdered, and Valens himself had been mortally wounded. What was unthinkable to the Romans had actually come to pass: a barbarian force had cut the heart out of the eastern Roman army, which had vastly outnumbered it. The principal general, no fewer than thirty-five military tribunes and perhaps as many as 13,000 soldiers had all died. The battle of Hadrianople was the worst Roman defeat at the hands of a foreign enemy since Hannibal’s annihilation of the Romans at the battle of Cannae nearly six hundred years earlier. By the time Gratian arrived on the scene, there was nothing to see but a field dark with blood and covered with Roman corpses.
The defeat sent a shock wave throughout the Roman world. Hadrianople had smashed the idea of an invincible Roman empire. Its integrity had been breached, and Rome would never get it back again. Goths were now the conquerors of the Balkans, free to roam as they pleased, free to stay. A region of the empire had been lost, but the reality of a Gothic nation camped out on Roman territory presented an even more threatening situation. The Goths continued to war with the Romans for six years and the result was the ravaging of the countryside, the wiping out of agricultural produce and the erosion of the empire’s tax base. A diminished tax base spelt a reduction in imperial expenditure on the army – bad news when two-thirds of the money paid into the imperial treasury was usually spent on the military. The bottom line revealed a truly bleak state of affairs: the circumstances in which the emperors of Rome most needed the army occurred at exactly the moment when their ability to pay for it was most under threat. Something had to be done.
Valens’s successor as emperor of the east was Theodosius I. He raised a new army, but that too was defeated. Having utterly failed to overcome the Goths in war, on 3 October 382 he was forced to talk peace. The terms of the treaty agreed with the Gothic leaders allowed the tribes of the Tervingi and the Greuthungi to settle in the Balkans, not as Roman citizens but as virtually autonomous allies of Rome. In Constantinople a spokesperson for Theodosius’s regime put a positive spin on the peace, casting it as a victory. The Goths, he said, had exchanged war for farming. The reality was very different. Throughout Roman history it had always been the Romans who controlled whether to accept immigrants or not. If they did, it was because the barbarian had sufficiently prostrated himself and abjectly begged to be a part of the empire and the Romans had benevolently, powerfully bestowed the gift of admittance.7 In 382, however, it was the immigrant Goths who, to a large part, had dictated terms to the Romans. The balance of power had shifted, but it would soon shift again.