36
BEFORE 1000 CE
… our infantry were exhausted by toil and danger… they had
neither strength left to ght, nor spirits to plan anything…
AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS DESCRIBING THE DECIMATION OF THE ROMANS IN LATER ROMAN HISTORY, C.380 CE
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37
ADRIANOPLE
◼
378 CE
In the mid-370s CE, the eastern Roman frontier on the
Danube came under growing pressure from the Goths,
a Germanic people who had been forced westward
by the migration of the Huns. In 376
CE, one group of
Goths, the Tervingi, was permitted to enter Roman
territory. However, the cruel treatment meted out
to them by the Roman commander Lupicinus, which
included denying them food supplies, led them to revolt under their chieftain
Fritigern. By now another group of Goths, the Greuthingi, had crossed the Danube
and joined Fritigern’s forces to create a single army, some 200,000 strong.
Alarmed, the Roman emperor Valens marched from Constantinople with
50,000 men—virtually the entire eastern Roman eld army. When he encountered
the Goths near Adrianople, Valens chose to attack, even though reinforcements
sent by his western colleague Gratian were only three days’ march away. The
main force of Gothic cavalry was away foraging, and Fritigern used negotiations
to buy time, forming his wagons into a circle to protect the remaining warriors.
On August 9, however, a group of Roman cavalry attacked, leading their infantry
to surge forward. This left the Roman infantry exposed when the Gothic horsemen
returned and joined the battle. The Roman cavalry were thrown back and the
infantry, exposed by the surrender of units of Thracians, were surrounded and cut
to pieces. Valens himself was among the two-thirds of the army that perished at
Adrianople, in Rome’s worst defeat since Cannae (see pp.26–27). His successor
Theodosius was forced to allow the Goths to settle in the Balkans, threatening
the very existence of the Eastern Empire.
Adrianople
378 CE
◼
NORTHWESTERN TURKEY
◼
ROMAN EMPIRE VS. GOTHIC TRIBES
ROMAN-GOTHIC WARS
From the mid-3rd century CE, Roman
frontiers on the Rhine and Danube came
under strain from Germanic barbarians
migrating west and south. Border troops
struggled to contain these incursions and
after Adrianople, when the Goths invaded
Italy in 401
CE, the frontiers began to
collapse. Goths, Alans, and Vandals surged
across the Rhine in 407
CE, occupying
most of France, Spain, and North Africa.
A succession of weak emperors failed to
recapture the lost provinces, and in 476
CE
the last western Roman emperor was
deposed by his own army commander.
THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS
4 The Ludovisi battle sarcophagus
from the 3rd century CE depicts a battle
between the Romans and Dacian barbarians.
1
ROMAN INFANTRY IN ACTION
Although
this mid-3rd-century
CE synagogue fresco depicts
a Biblical battle, it shows equipment similar to
that of the late Roman infantry. The longer
swords and chain mail armor are characteristic
of the comitatenses, the mobile forces that later
Roman emperors relied upon in the eld as the
backbone of their eorts to defend the empire
against barbarian invasions.
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