Out in the western empire, meanwhile, Gratian was playing emperor by the book, which included showing no mercy for family who had become rivals, let alone barbarians seeking a warm, dry spot inside the empire. Gratian set out to help his uncle but delayed his march east to take a few whacks at some Germanic invaders who had made the mistake of crossing the Rhine. Gratian’s handlers insisted on leisurely slaughtering them to the last man to really make the moment of his first great triumph shine before moving on down the road to help Valens. Gratian’s only timely effort was to dispatch a small force down the Danube in boats, which unfortunately landed a few hundred miles away from Valens and his 20,000 troops camped west of Constantinople. Gratian’s troops proved to be of no help except to inform Valens that the bulk of long-awaited reinforcements would be late due to his victorious slaughter of the Germanic hordes. Now Valens really was being outshone by his young nephew.
Meanwhile, the Gothic king Fritigern had assembled his forces northwest of Constantinople outside the town of Adrianople in the western spur of modern-day Turkey. Valens, impatient of waiting for reinforcements from the ungrateful teenager Gratian, was eager to conclude his own triumphant campaign with a sound drubbing of the annoying Goths. Valens held a council of war and was encouraged by a report that a Goth force of approximately 10,000 soldiers had been spotted marching south through a mountain pass to take Adrianople. If they succeeded, Valens would be cut off from his supply base.
Valens’s commanders were split on their recommendation: some wanted to fight immediately while others advised waiting for the reinforcements to ensure an overwhelming victory. But Valens finally gave in to his anger, jealousy, and impatience. He decided to vent his frustrations as only an emperor can. The surge from Gratian was nowhere in sight. But he didn’t care. The time had arrived to punish once and for all the sneaky, border-crossing, backstabbing Goths. Valens’s big moment had arrived. With his force of approximately 20,000 troops, he headed out to cut off the Goths at the pass.
The day before the battle Fritigern made an offering of peace in exchange for Thrace, which was a nice chunk of the eastern Balkans bordering the Black Sea. Valens, feeling an emperor level of confidence, turned it down. Perhaps Fritigern’s offer of peace was taken as a sign by Valens that he had caught his enemy in a weak position. Valens decided to attack the next day, August 9.
In AD 378 Valens marched his troops seventeen kilometers north through the dusty heat of the countryside outside of Adrianople. The summer heat would have been ferocious. Once he arrived in front of the enemy in the early afternoon, he found the Goth army inside a giant wagon circle, the custom of this mobile tribe. The well-rested Goths seemed to be sitting ducks. They could be destroyed at Valens’s leisure.
As the two armies stared each other down Valens rejected another peace offering. One of the previous Goth offers from Fritigern had included a secret letter offering a truce but indicating the necessity of the Romans to show force to the Goths, which would give Fritigern the necessary cover to explain his surrender. Valens, not trusting him, had refused then and anticipating victory, refused now.
One can assume the hot and thirsty legions took a breather, drank water, sought out shade. But now another offer to negotiate was made. This one included an exchange of high-ranking prisoners as a first step in the negotiations, a typical arrangement to keep the two armies facing each other over a few hundred feet of meadow from tangling. Valens accepted it, perhaps now considering the fatigue of his troops and for some reason giving Fritigern the benefit of a doubt about his previous offer of tanking in front of the arrayed might of the Roman legions. As his legions arranged themselves in battle order to finish acting out the surrender ploy, a high-ranking hostage from Valens’s entourage prepared to deliver himself to the Goths to start the negotiations.
If it was a trap, it was perfectly laid and sprung on the plodding Valens. He had played into the Goths’ hands. The Goth cavalry, which had been roaming the countryside out of sight from the Roman scouts, appeared seemingly out of nowhere and fell against the Roman cavalry, an elite unit of the imperial guard, on Valens’s left flank. In all probability they had ridden down one of the almost-dry riverbeds to keep down the dust and hide their approach from the Romans. As they crashed into the left wing, the Roman cavalry was pressed back against the infantry in Valens’s center. The Romans were discovering the hard way that the Goth forces comprised probably 30,000 or more fighting men. But the veteran Roman horsemen stabilized themselves and led a thrust forward. The Romans were now winning, with the infantry pushing uphill toward the ring of wagons. But now the cavalry on the left wing was deeply engaged with the more numerous Goth cavalry, and Valens had no cavalry reinforcements to pour into the battle to force the issue. Clearly outmanned by the Goths, the battle soon swung once again to their side as they engulfed the left Roman wing.
The infantry legions were now left unprotected by the decimation of the left cavalry flank. Pressed back in on itself, they collapsed into a protective formation with their wooden shields and battled on. Using their long spears to hold off the enemy cavalry worked as long as the spears lasted, but when they were broken by the cavalry swords of the Goths the Romans were left with only their swords to stave off the swirling mass of Goth horsemen. The Romans were now sitting ducks. The battle continued until the bloodied mass of Roman soldiers finally broke and ran. The rout of the eastern emperor’s army was on.
A regiment of soldiers held in reserve joined the panicked flight instead of manning up and trying to rescue the emperor. Other key commanders who had fought before under Valens deserted him in the growing darkness, abandoning their emperor instead of going down fighting. Two-thirds of Valens’s army was killed, along with many of the generals.
Perhaps the simple, stubborn emperor, even after watching his generals abandon him and his soldiers massacred, refused to flee the field and was left dying on the ground surrounded by enemies. His imperial guard had left him at the mercy of his enemies. But they had been schooled in the Roman way of running an empire better than he. Valens’s body was never found.
The Goths — the very name reverberates through history to the present time. Oddly enough, the people themselves vanished shortly after sacking Rome in 410 under the leadership of their king Alaric. The Goths had originally made their name fighting an endless series of border wars against the Romans and had gained the dubious distinction of serving as slaves to many Roman households. Then the Huns overran them in their Black Sea homelands, and a great mass of Gothic refugees were allowed to enter the Roman Empire by crossing the Danube in 376. After crushing the undermanned legions of eastern emperor Valens at Adrianople, the Goths tried to make peace with the Romans in exchange for a slice of the empire to call their own. But after a series of treaties with the relentless Roman emperors they still didn’t have a homeland, and they took out their vengeance by sacking the great imperial capital. After all that they ended up with Visigothic territories in France and Spain as well as a sizable chunk of northern Italy for the Ostrogoths. The Goths who remained in Italy after the sacking of Rome were soon dispersed by more recent Teutonic invaders, and their influence and culture was almost completely washed away. In Spain and southeastern France the Goths soon found themselves at odds with the Roman popes, and the last of the Gothic kingdoms disappeared in the eighth century with the Muslim invasions of Spain.