Rome's Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric (Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity) (20 page)

Gothic units in the Thracian army soon joined Fritigern as well. Two commanders named
Sueridus and
Colias, in winter quarters at Adrianople with their units, had observed with total unconcern the travails of the Tervingi admitted in 376. Nor did the revolt of Fritigern at Marcianople interest them. The fact that Sueridus and Colias demonstrably lacked any special feeling for fellow Goths is a salutary reminder that only extraordinary pressure of circumstances could turn different groups of Goths into ‘the Goths’. In this case, that pressure came from the managerial incompetence of local officials at
Adrianople. Early in 377, Sueridus and Colias received their marching orders, detailing them to the eastern front where they were needed for Valens’ Persian campaign. When they asked the local authorities in Adrianople for money to equip their units with food for the journey, they were refused by the head of the local city council, the
curia
. Ammianus tells us that the councillor was angry with the followers of Sueridus and Colias for the damage they had done to his suburban property. Now it is true that the quartering of a Roman army – any Roman army, regardless of who composed it – was a severe burden on townsfolk, but the magistrate was not acting solely out of anger. While cities were obliged to house and feed Roman units quartered on them, the legal obligation of the
curia
to give troops supplies for a march was by no means clear. Indeed, on most readings of late Roman practice, imperial officials should have taken charge of equipping Sueridus and Colias’ troops for their journey, without involving the
curia
of Adrianople at all.

The
curia
armed and brought out the staff of the local imperial arms factory – the
fabricenses
– and with that force at their back ordered Sueridus and Colias to be on their way at once. Even if the legal right was on their side, for the
curia
to have refused the generals’ request with such brusqueness was political stupidity of the highest order. Sueridus and Colias were genuinely shocked by the unexpectedly heavy-handed
treatment and made no move to go. At that point, no doubt egged on by their magistrates, the townsfolk and
fabricenses
began to harass the soldiers, pelting them with makeshift missiles and attempting to drive them off by force. Thus provoked, the soldiers of Sueridus and Colias fought back and, as usually happened when imperial troops were turned loose on civilians, massacred whomever they got their hands on.
That done, and presumably well armed with the stores from the imperial
fabrica
, they marched their followers off to join Fritigern.
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As this one example shows, the Gothic rebellion in Thrace was not a single, planned affair, still less a barbarian migration. It was, on the contrary, a series of local revolts that in time converged into a mass uprising which threatened not just those regions in which the rebels were active, but the security of the Danubian provinces as a whole. There is no point in tracing in detail every skirmish mentioned in our sources.
[146]
They are too similar and we know too little about how they were connected to one another. However, one vital point is abundantly clear: the Goths under the overall command of Fritigern transformed themselves into a potent fighting force in a very short space of time. Equipped with Roman arms and armour, they also constructed a substantial supply train which allowed them to carry with them foodstuffs and other necessities gathered from the well-stocked regions through which they passed. This large force was made up of Goths from many different backgrounds, as well as all sorts of provincial malcontents. It was no longer the group of Tervingi that Fritigern and Alavivus had led across the Danube the year before, and Ammianus recognizes this fact by ceasing to speak of Tervingi and beginning to speak generically of
Gothi
, ‘Goths’. These
Gothi
roamed more or less at will in the land between the Haemus mountain chain and the Danube during 377 and most of 378. The rationale behind these movements is totally obscure, but it is striking that neither the Roman nor the Gothic side seem to have made any effort to negotiate throughout this period of more than a year. It is possible that Valens is to blame. If the Roman generals on the spot acted indecisively, it may be that they had received no guidance from an imperial court more interested in Persian affairs. The Goths, after all, were barbarians, and northern barbarians had always taken second place to Persia. In those circumstances, lacking direction from
above and not wanting to take the wrong decision with so unpredictable an emperor as Valens, Rome’s Balkan commanders can hardly be faulted for trying to contain the Gothic threat rather than suppress it.

At some point in 377, however,
Valens became convinced of the seriousness of the problem. He determined to patch up a truce with the Persians over
Armenia, sending his longest-serving general,
Victor, to negotiate it.
[147]
In preparation for his own eventual advance, he sent the generals
Profuturus and
Traianus to keep the Goths in Thrace under control. Meanwhile, Valens’ nephew
Gratian likewise realized the gravity of the situation. He despatched two good generals,
Frigeridus and the
comes domesticorum
Richomeres, to support the eastern troops, but also to ensure that the trouble was contained in Thrace and Moesia and did not spread westwards into Pannonia and the Latin provinces.
[148]
Gratian’s intervention demonstrates how worrisome the Gothic revolt had become during the course of 377. Western generals did not, as a rule, intervene in eastern affairs, nor junior emperors in those of their seniors, lest it look too much like provocation. As recently as 366, Valentinian had declined to help Valens face down the usurpation of Procopius, a far more direct threat to dynastic control than the Goths could hope to be. Only the prospect of chaos along the whole Danube frontier can have prompted Gratian’s intervention.

As it happened,
Frigeridus fell ill and returned to the West for a time, leaving
Richomeres to lead the western troops to their rendezvous with Valens’ generals
Profuturus and
Traianus. In late summer 377, they brought the Goths to battle near a site called
Ad Salices (‘the Willows’). The precise location of this site remains unknown, though it probably lay somewhere between the coastal town of
Tomi and the opening out of the Danube delta into its many channels, very near the imperial frontier rather than in the immediate vicinity of Marcianople. The battle of Ad Salices that followed was a major one, but a draw, for the Goths were secure within their well-guarded wagon train and could retreat into it as necessary. The Roman forces seem to have been smaller than the Gothic, and Profuturus
himself fell in battle, but superior drill and training saved the army from total destruction.
Having suffered too
many losses to continue the assault, the Roman troops retreated south again, back to Marcianople, where the revolt had first begun in earnest.
[149]
At roughly the same time,
Frigeridus returned to the East, fortified
Beroe, and inflicted a major defeat on another Gothic noble,
Farnobius, who had been raiding through Thrace. Frigeridus sent the survivors of the slaughter back to Italy, where they were settled as farmers, a useful reminder that barbarian settlement within the empire could work perfectly well when managed with a minimum of care.
[150]

Despite Ad Salices, Richomeres and the other generals had inflicted serious damage on Fritigern’s Goths. Many of them withdrew into the safety of the Haemus mountains for the winter of 377–378. Richomeres went back to Gaul as autumn fell, planning to collect a larger force for the following year’s campaigning season.
Valens, for his part, re-enforced his troops in Thrace with a more senior commander, the
magister equitum
Saturninus. He, with
Traianus as his lieutenant, blockaded the Goths in the Haemus passes and deprived them of food. He hoped that by reducing them to desperate hunger and then removing the guards from the passes he could lure them into the open country and destroy them in pitched battle. The plan failed. Rather than moving north and standing to battle in the plains between the Haemus and the Danube, the Goths allied themselves with some unspecified Huns and Alans, and made their way south into Thrace.
In that country’s wide open spaces, with their excellent roads, Fritigern could move freely, laying waste great stretches of land between the Haemus, the Rhodope, and the shores of the Hellespont and of the Bosporus near Constantinople.
[151]
So badly ravaged were the provinces of
Moesia and
Scythia that the emperor officially lowered their tax burden in 377.
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Indeed, by early 378, much of Thrace itself was inaccessible to the outside world:
Basil of Caesarea wrote to an exiled fellow-churchman,
Eusebius of Samosata, then resident in Thrace, commenting on the unprecedented difficulty of communication and expressing surprise that Eusebius had managed to survive there at all.
[153]

Valens’ generals Saturninus and Traianus may have had only limited success, but Gratian’s commanders managed to quarantine the revolt.
By early 378,
Frigeridus had fortified the Succi pass, the vital conduit between Thrace and the western Balkans.
[154]
Thereafter, Fritigern’s Goths were effectively confined to Thrace. In that same year, not just
Richomeres but
Gratian himself led a large portion of the western army into the eastern empire to assist his uncle. He had wanted to come sooner, but some Alamanni in the Rhineland detained him: hearing of the troubles in Thrace and Gratian’s plans to assist in their suppression, they seized a chance to raid into the western provinces.
[155]
Only in 378 could Gratian spare his main army for the Gothic war.
By then, Valens had settled eastern affairs to the point where he felt able to march to Thrace. He arrived in
Constantinople in spring 378, staying there for perhaps twelve days and facing down riots among a discontented populace, one no doubt frightened at the continuing Gothic presence on their doorstep.
[156]
Valens’ first move was to reorganize his officer corps, dissatisfied with their conduct up to this point, and not without good reason. In place of
Traianus – whom Valens personally blamed for failing to stop the Goths at Ad Salices – the retired western general
Sebastianus was made commander-in-chief and was perhaps given a strike force drawn from the emperor’s own seasoned palatine troops.
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Certainly, he quickly won a couple of surprise victories over Gothic raiding parties.
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But this welcome success brought an unexpected side effect: fearing lest his various followers be picked off piecemeal, Fritigern ordered them to form together and operate as a single unit. From their rendezvous point at
Kabyle, a well-watered and easily defensible site in the plain between the Haemus and Rhodope mountain chains, the whole of the Gothic force began to make south for Adrianople. There Sebastianus was headquartered, sending back to Constantinople reports of his recent successes. On 11 June, Valens left Constantinople
for what would prove to be his last journey.

What actually happened on the battlefield of Adrianople is remarkably ill documented for so decisive a moment in Roman history, and one so comprehensively discussed in contemporary writings. Unfortunately for the modern historian, contemporary interest was chiefly concerned to explain why the disaster happened, not how it unfolded.
Ammianus, as so often, gives us our only detailed account of the battle, but his outline of events includes substantial gaps – some of his own making, some the product of a faulty manuscript tradition – so that a tactical description of the battle is impossible. Nevertheless, Ammianus’ broad outline seems clear and is corroborated by other sources. In the first week of August, Valens marched his field army – between 30,000 and 40,000 men, in all likelihood – out from its staging post at Melanthias, just west of Constantinople. The emperor made for Adrianople with all haste, supposedly jealous of the successes that Sebastianus had won and wanting a share of his general’s glory. Fritigern’s Goths bypassed Adrianople and its substantial garrison, making instead for the road-station at Nike. There the Gothic army was observed by the imperial scouts who fanned out in advance of the emperor’s main force. The intelligence they brought back was misleading, suggesting that the Gothic forces numbered only 10,000 men, much less than their real number. This news gave Valens, eager for battle and a victory he could call his own, all the excuse he needed to attack at once.
[159]

Advancing to Adrianople, he fortified a camp in the suburbs of the city and impatiently awaited the arrival of his nephew’s army. Perhaps on the 7th of August, the general
Richomeres arrived with the western advance guard, advising Valens to wait the very short time it would take for
Gratian’s main force to arrive.
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Delay, however, did not suit Valens, and he called a meeting of his high command to debate the issue. The generals themselves were deeply divided, but which generals argued for which plan is unclear: in the aftermath of the disaster, contemporaries strove to shield their favourites from blame and shift it onto others, a task made easier by the death of almost all those who had witnessed the debate. Thus
Ammianus claims that
Sebastianus led the group which argued for an immediate assault on the Goths, while the
magister equitum
Victor led those who argued for the delay that would guarantee victory.
Eunapius, by contrast, defended Sebastianus, as is clear even from the very confused Eunapian chronology preserved by Zosimus.
[161]
Regardless, the council decided on the course of swift action. Valens favoured it, and his civilian officials played upon his natural jealousy,
suggesting that he ought not to share with Gratian the glory of an inevitable victory.