After that three-year slog in the eastern Balkans, Valens was free to return to the more glorious pursuit of reconquering Armenia from the Persians, who had been staying sharp by raping and pillaging the countryside. Kicking around the Goths was not seen by anybody as anything more than day-to-day empire maintenance; crushing the Persians and regaining Armenia would impress his brother much more. So, in 370 Valens set out to attack the Persians.
Valens still suffered from the chronic manpower shortage of the eastern empire. Despite a law that the sons of veterans were compelled to serve, inducements were often handed out to keep up the recruitment numbers, costing the empire’s treasury dearly. And Roman soldiers hated serving in the east. Dragooning barbarians was the cheapest way to staff up the legions. Propping up the Armenian king by attacking the hirsute Persians would require all of his forces. Unfortunately, that midriver treaty with the Goths had ended the payment of tribute in gold to the Goths and also ended the requirement of the Goths supplying troops to the Roman emperor, as had been established under their treaty with Constantine. Valens had exacerbated his chronic manpower shortage just when he needed bodies the most. In spite of this, the glory-deficient Valens gave himself the title of Gothicus Maximus, or “Top Goth,” and emblazoned it on coins to trumpet his mercy-tainted victory around the empire. Still, Valens was getting no love or respect from his big brother in the west. Valentinian had shrewdly used one of the typical Roman-emperor ploys to help solidify his position as the head of a new dynasty of emperors. In 367 he had appointed his eight-year-old son Gratian as emperor-in-waiting, then married him off to the daughter of a former emperor. Valens’s young nephew now had more legitimacy as emperor in the eyes of the average Roman than he himself did.
Yet another blow came in 375, when Valentinian dropped dead of a stroke while berating barbarian ambassadors trying to justify their invasion of the superempire. Valens had lost his guiding hand and erstwhile protector, and now found himself competing with his nephew, the teenaged Gratian, now Emperor Gratian.
Valens was now the emperor-weakling. Gratian’s regents kicked sand in his face when they elevated Valentinian I’s other son Valentinian II, all of three years old, to co-emperor alongside his half-brother Gratian. This was a direct thrust at Valens, whose only son Galatens — consul at the ripe age of three — had died soon after the Procopius rebellion, reportedly bringing Valens to his knees in grief.
Upon the naming of Valentinian II as emperor, the regents handed him chunks of Valens’s territory in the Balkans without bothering to consult Valens. Troops from these provinces would have helped solve some of Valens’s manpower problems with the Persians and the Goths. But Valens, instead of taking a page from the emperor handbook and murdering the lot of them, consolidating the empire under his rule, labored on like a good farmer.
Facing numerous enemies with few friends, the problems of the empire were starting to overwhelm the farmer-cum-emperor. Preoccupied with his Persian problems, the Goths, who Valens thought he had handled with his mercy-riddled treaty, were turning out to be a problem again.
WHAT HAPPENED: OPERATION “STUPIDUS MAXIMUS”
In 376 the weakened Goths suddenly found themselves at the mercy of the Huns, a terrifying horde who blitzed out of the eastern steppes, deploying very prescient skills of mobile warfare, and pushed the Goths back up against the Danube, the northeastern border of the empire in the Balkans. The Goths were caught between the Huns, apparently unaware that such a thing as mercy existed, and the Romans, whose survival depended on the maintenance of a mercy-free zone, gods forbid. The Goths were desperately looking for a break.
The mass of Goths — men, women and children — in a group perhaps as large as 200,000, had created a giant refugee crisis for Valens. Always looking for some extra troops, Valens decided to let the barbarians cross the Danube… but only those of the clan of chieftain Fritigern, who was an opponent of Athanaric, the king with whom Valens had made his earlier midstream treaty. It was a bad decision, driven by the need to solve his manpower problem against the Persians. The other Goth tribes, unfortunately, would have to stay on the other side and be exterminated by the Huns.
The Goths, welcomed into the empire, imagined themselves not as temporary immigrants or landless refugees but standing on a somewhat equal footing with the Romans, who promised them land and food in exchange for the inevitable draft notices for the young men. But the merciless Roman soldiers knew better how to handle the refugees than did their emperor. Without the usual order to slaughter the hungry barbarians, the frontier troops, headed by General Duke Maximus, created a black market among the impoverished refugees by exchanging dog meat for slaves. So desperate were the Goths they even exchanged their children for moldy bread and wine of a poor vintage. But the Roman legions assigned to the sector were so undermanned that when the refugees revolted over their rough treatment, the Romans pushed them farther into the empire to isolate them. The Romans patted themselves on the back for this clever strategy. But it now left the border undefended, and the Goths of the Greuthungi tribe snuck over.
Meanwhile, the scheming Roman generals, still apparently unconvinced of the wisdom of inviting barbarians into the empire and eager to roll the Goths like every other defenseless barbarian strolling down the via, invited the Goth leaders to a feast in the city of Marcianople. Their plan was to use an old Roman trick of inviting the Goth leaders to a feast, which would also happen to be their last meal on earth. While the restless and hungry Goth masses stuck outside the city gates began to revolt against the Roman overlords, inside the city the wily Romans took out the Goth guards and cornered Fritigern, their leader. The Roman leader of the province, Count Lupicinus, put a knife to Fritigern’s throat. They had him. But mercy once again reared its ugly head. Perhaps infected from a recent meeting with Valens, Lupicinus pulled back. The quick-thinking Fritigern convinced the Romans to let him go in order to calm his people. But now Fritigern pulled a fast one and, once among his people outside the gates of Marcianople, flipped on his ungracious hosts. The Romans formed up ranks and came out for what was expected to be a walkover, but they found themselves outmanned and on the business end of a good whipping. Lupicinus retreated into the city with his surviving troops. The Goths were now rampaging inside the empire without constraint, their forces bolstered by other barbarians streaming over the borders and spiced with deserters from the barbarian-riddled Roman legions. In 376 Valens was stuck on the eastern edge of the empire tangling with the Persians when he got wind of the problems with the Goths. He made a quick truce with the Persians and sent a request to his thankless nephew Gratian, now emperor of the west, for help. Bogged down in Mesopotamia, Valens needed a year to trek back to handle the uprising himself, all the while waiting in desperation for the promised surge from his nephew. In the meantime, Valens ordered his generals on the scene to attack the Goths with the few Roman legions he had in the area. The understaffed Roman legions, many of them poorly trained border guards, were defeated time and time again by the resilient Goths, who continued their rampage.
By the time Valens arrived in 377 the high-stepping Goths stood beneath the gates of Constantinople. Valens, not eager to linger in the despised city that had supported the rebel wannabe Procopius against him, cobbled together enough troops, including some formerly peace-loving monks who had been conscripted into the manpower-short eastern empire army. Valens managed to break out of the city and carve out some room to maneuver for his army on the plains west of the city. His plan was to stop the Goths from occupying the east–west road, where the hoped-for troop surge from Gratian would arrive.