Battle of Adrianople, 378: how the Goths destroyed Valens and his army

Ammianus Marcellinus, a former Roman officer who closed his history with this day, could find only one comparison for it: the annals, he wrote, recorded no such massacre except Cannae. On 9 August 378 a Roman emperor died on a battlefield in Thrace among his own soldiers, and his body was never found. The army that killed him was made up largely of refugees whom the empire had let across the Danube two years before. Adrianople is one of the darkest chapters in the military history of ancient Rome.²

Who fought at Adrianople, and why?

The war began on the steppe. In the early 370s the Huns, nomads from Central Asia, overran the Alans north of the Caucasus and then the Gothic peoples north of the Black Sea. Ammianus tells how Ermenrichus, king of the Greuthungi, took his own life in despair, and how the Huns surprised Athanaric, leader of the Tervingi, on the Dniester. Many Goths decided that there was no safety for them north of the Danube.³

In 376 most of the Tervingi, under Alavivus and Fritigern, gathered on the river and begged to be received into the empire, offering soldiers in return. Valens, emperor of the East since 364, was at Antioch and at war with Persia. Ammianus says the court greeted the request with more joy than fear, seeing recruits and gold. The historian Peter Heather argues that the real reason was weakness: most of Valens's troops were tied down in the east, so he admitted only the Tervingi and posted every soldier he had to keep the Greuthungi of Alatheus and Saphrax north of the river.⁴

The crossing was a disaster in the making. Boats, rafts and hollowed tree trunks ferried a whole people over a swollen river, and many drowned. Food ran short. Ammianus accuses the commanders in Thrace, Lupicinus and Maximus, of trading dogs to the starving Goths for slaves, among them the sons of chieftains. Meanwhile the Greuthungi forced a crossing of their own, and Heather notes that Fritigern moved slowly from the river to give them time to catch up.⁵

At Marcianople, Lupicinus invited Alavivus and Fritigern to a banquet while their escort waited outside the walls, and a brawl ended with the chiefs' attendants killed. Fritigern escaped; Alavivus is never heard of again. The Goths rose, and Lupicinus, who marched out against them, was routed. Ammianus treats the trap as Lupicinus's own doing; Heather doubts that a senior commander would act alone and reads it as an attempt to break up the Goths' leadership, a standard tool of Roman frontier policy.⁶

The Gothic War, 376 to 378

For two years Gothic bands plundered Thrace in search of food. Fritigern gathered allies, among them runaway slaves and discontented provincials and, from 377, Huns and Alans. In 377 eastern and western troops met the Goths at Ad Salices, in the Dobruja, south of the Danube delta, in a hard battle that ended in a bloody draw; that autumn an attempt to hold the passes of the Haemus mountains failed.⁷

By 378 Valens had made a truce with Persia and came west with most of his mobile army; at the end of June, in EBSCO's chronology, he left his base near Constantinople for Adrianople. He gave the infantry command to Sebastianus, who surprised Gothic raiders near the river Hebrus, today's Maritsa. His nephew Gratian, emperor of the West, was bringing a field army, but trouble on the Rhine held him up: Ammianus describes how a raid by the Lentienses, an Alamannic people, ended in their defeat at Argentaria.⁸

Why did Valens attack without waiting for Gratian?

Scouts reported that the Goths they had seen numbered only about 10,000. In camp outside Adrianople Valens received a letter from Gratian, brought by Richomeres, asking him to wait. Ammianus describes a council of war at which Sebastianus urged an immediate attack, while Victor, the master of the cavalry, advised waiting for Gratian. Ammianus, Bury and Heather all point to the same two causes: a false report of the Goths' numbers and Valens's jealousy of his nephew's victories. He would not share the glory.⁹

Fritigern was negotiating too. Before the battle he sent a Christian priest to Valens with a letter asking for Thrace as a home for his people. EBSCO's summary calls it an offer of peace in return for land and food; Heather notes that Fritigern also asked to be recognized as an allied king, the traditional title of a friend of Rome. Ammianus doubted the envoy's sincerity, and Valens sent him away.¹⁰

Armies at Adrianople: how many fought?

Ammianus, himself a soldier, gives no totals, a gap J. B. Bury already lamented. Modern estimates of Valens's army run from about 15,000 to 40,000 men. The Czech historian Aleš Mučka lists figures of 15,000 (Thomas Burns, Simon MacDowall), 30,000 and 40,000, and estimates 20,000 to 25,000 himself; EBSCO says probably at least 20,000, and Heather puts it at about 15,000. It was the best of the eastern field army, with palatine legions such as the Lanciarii and Mattiarii, the Batavi, and the archers and shield-bearers of the guard.¹¹

For the Goths the range is wider still. Mučka collects estimates from 10,000 to 40,000 warriors and settles on 10,000 to 15,000. Their core was Fritigern's Tervingi, camped with their families behind a great circle of wagons. Their striking force was the cavalry of the Greuthungi under Alatheus and Saphrax, with a band of Alans, and on the morning of the battle it was away from the camp.¹²

The battle on 9 August 378

Valens left his baggage under guard by the walls of Adrianople and his treasury inside the city, and marched out at dawn. After some eight hours on the road, Heather writes, the army sighted the Gothic wagon circle at about the eighth hour of the day, in the early afternoon, some 13 kilometers north of the city by the reckoning of Livius and EBSCO; Mučka notes that some modern authors read Ammianus's "eighth hour" as the eighth milestone. The cavalry of the right wing arrived first; the left was still coming up as the infantry deployed.¹³

The Goths played for time. They sent envoys to ask for peace, and, Ammianus writes, lit fires on the plain so that heat and smoke would add to the thirst of men who had marched all day in the August sun; Mučka stresses the heat and thirst too. Fritigern asked for a Roman of high rank as a hostage. Equitius, the officer first chosen, refused, and Richomeres volunteered, but before he arrived the battle had begun.¹⁴

The archers and shield-bearers of the guard, under Bacurius, an Iberian from the Caucasus, and Cassio, pushed forward without orders, Ammianus says, attacked too early and fell back. Britannica's account agrees that Roman commanders launched the assault before the order was given and that the units following them came on piecemeal. Mučka notes that modern historians cannot tell whether they meant to attack or ran into the enemy while scouting.¹⁵

At that moment the Greuthungi and Alan horsemen of Alatheus and Saphrax returned and fell on the Romans, in Ammianus's words, like a thunderbolt. They drove off the Roman cavalry. The left wing, which had pushed right up to the wagons, was left without support and crushed. Heather sums up the decisive fact: all the Goths were present after all, and the fighting began before the Romans had fully deployed.¹⁶

The infantry, packed together, could hardly draw their swords or raise their arms. Dust hid the sky. Ammianus describes men fighting on with swords after their lances broke, under a scorching sun, until the line gave way and the army fled; Charles Oman, retelling his account in 1885, pictured the left, center and reserve wedged into one helpless mass. Night, without a moon, ended the slaughter.¹⁷

How did Emperor Valens die?

No one saw it clearly. Ammianus gives two versions. In the first, Valens, who had taken refuge among the Lanciarii and Mattiarii, fell at dusk among the common soldiers, mortally wounded by an arrow, and his body was never found. In the second, the wounded emperor was carried by a few bodyguards and eunuchs to a fortified farmhouse; the Goths, not knowing who was inside, set it on fire, and a single guardsman who escaped through a window lived to tell the story. EBSCO repeats both accounts.¹⁸

Valens was an Arian Christian who had persecuted the Nicene, or Catholic, party, Britannica notes, and his enemies in the church read his death as divine judgment. The Polish historian Sławomir Bralewski shows how the church historian Socrates of Constantinople presented it as God's punishment; EBSCO warns that Catholic writers' dislike of Valens may have colored the record of the disaster.¹⁹

Roman casualties at Adrianople

Ammianus counts among the dead the generals Traianus and Sebastianus and 35 tribunes and other officers, and says that barely a third of the army escaped. Britannica likewise speaks of two-thirds of the eastern army destroyed, many experienced officers among them, and notes that some accounts give more than 40,000 Roman dead, the figure Charles Oman accepted in 1885. Heather's estimate is far lower, 10,000 to 15,000 killed, because he thinks the army itself was smaller. Gothic losses were not recorded: the ancient authors give no figures for the Goths at all.²⁰

What happened after Adrianople?

The victors went straight for Adrianople and the emperor's treasure inside it. The assault failed: Ammianus describes stones and even column drums hurled from the walls, and Goths blaming one another for ignoring Fritigern's advice to stay away from walled cities. They moved on toward Constantinople, but, Ammianus writes, turned back before its walls after a sally by Saracen horsemen from the city. EBSCO and Bury agree that the Goths could not take Adrianople; Heather notes that they even considered a siege of Constantinople.²¹

Gratian chose a new colleague for the East. On 19 January 379 he proclaimed the Spanish general Theodosius emperor. Theodosius spent 379 and 380 at Thessalonica rebuilding the army, rounding up deserters and drafting Roman and barbarian recruits. Heather writes that his new army fell apart in battle in 380, and that only in 381 did Gratian's troops drive Fritigern's Goths back from Illyricum.²²

The war ended in a compromise. On 3 October 382 an agreement settled the Goths on land between the lower Danube and the Balkan mountains, under their own laws, in return for military service. Heather calls it a break with tradition that reflected the balance of six years of war: Rome had not been able to beat the Goths in open battle, and the Goths had to give up any hope of an independent kingdom. Fritigern disappears from the record after 380.²³

Why the Battle of Adrianople mattered

Ammianus saw the battle as a turning point, and Jona Lendering of Livius notes that many later authors followed him, though not necessarily rightly. EBSCO lists two lasting results: for the first time a Germanic people had won land and a large measure of self-rule inside the empire, a foretaste of the breakup of the West, and the destruction of an imperial army on Roman soil showed Rome's enemies what was possible. After Theodosius died in 395 the Goths rose again under Alaric, who sacked Rome in 410.²⁴

Older historians also made Adrianople a turning point in the art of war. Charles Oman wrote in 1885 that it was a victory of cavalry over infantry, the start of a thousand years of the mounted warrior, and J. B. Bury, in lectures published in 1928, drew the same lesson. Modern scholars reject this. Mučka summarizes Herwig Wolfram's case that infantry, Roman and barbarian, stayed the decisive arm in the battles of the next two centuries, and Peter Heather writes that most Goths fought on foot and calls the battle a fluke, not the start of a new order in warfare.²⁵

What remains is a story of a good army badly led. Britannica blames Valens's poor tactics; Heather points to false intelligence, a long march in the heat and a battle that began before the Roman line had formed. For Rome's other great defeats, see the greatest battles of ancient Rome, from Lake Trasimene to Adrianople.²⁶

Where was the Battle of Adrianople fought?

Adrianople is today Edirne in northwestern Turkey. The battlefield lies north of it, about 13 kilometers away by the estimates of Livius and EBSCO; Livius places it near the village of Büyükdöllük. The exact site is unknown. Mučka lists the hills that historians have proposed, near the villages he spells Demeranliga (proposed by Ferdinand Runkel), Muratcali, Sinakoy and Ortakci, and concludes that only archaeology will settle the question.²⁷