Rome's Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric (Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity) (12 page)

Between 313 and 316, Constantine and Licinius maintained the cordial neutrality that had allowed them to work together during the last years of the civil wars, but their truce was uneasy and they came to blows in 316. The western Balkans fell to Constantine in this war. He took over Licinius’ residence at
Sirmium, dividing his time between that city and
Serdica, and leaving his son and caesar
Crispus in Trier to guard the
Rhine frontier and campaign against the Franks and Alamanni.
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Constantine’s eastern ambitions were now clear, as his choice of residence could hardly fail to demonstrate, and he used the old tactic of disciplining the barbarians to provoke a final confrontation with Licinius.
In 323, Constantine campaigned against the Sarmatians on the frontiers of Pannonia, winning one battle, over a king called
Rausimod, at
Campona in the Pannonian province of
Valeria, and a second considerably further downstream at the confluence of the Danube and Morava in
Moesia Superior.
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Coins issued at Trier, Arles, Lyons and Sirmium celebrated
the success with the legend
Sarmatia devicta
(‘Sarmatia conquered’) and Constantine took the
victory title
Sarmaticus
.
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He may also have instituted new celebratory gladiatorial games, as an epigraphic reference to
ludi Sarmatici
, Sarmatian games, suggests.
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Regardless, the campaigns were a provocation of Licinius, into whose territory Constantine had marched while attacking the Sarmatians. Almost certainly intentional, this violation of his fellow emperor’s sovereignty led to the final break between Constantine and Licinius – the latter supposedly melting down Constantinian gold coins celebrating the victory in order to make the point as publicly as possible.
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In the ensuing civil war, both sides made substantial use of barbarian soldiers.
Licinius had won a victory over the Goths before 315 and peace terms may have included Gothic service in his army.
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In the war against Constantine, Goths fought on the side of Licinius, probably under a general named Alica. Constantine had used
Frankish auxiliaries in his earlier campaigns and by the time of the war with Licinius, the Frankish general
Bonitus had reached a position of rank in Constantine’s army.
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As we have seen, barbarians had always served in imperial armies, but there is some reason to think that the build-up to war between Constantine and Licinius represents a new phase in this phenomenon. For one thing, the early 320s were the first period since the onset of military crisis in the third century during which rival emperors had ample leisure to recruit troops for themselves. For another, both Constantine and Licinius were competing for roughly the same pool of manpower, that is to say, barbarians from the middle and lower Danube – Sarmatians and Goths, generically “Scythians” – and such competition almost always increases both supply and demand. This increasing reliance on barbarian recruits is partly hypothetical, but is probably confirmed by the testimony of the
Caesares
, a satire on his predecessors written by the emperor Julian, which is scathing about Constantine’s recruitment and subsidy of barbarians.
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Certainly, as the fourth century progressed, emperors made more and more use of barbarians in filling up the ranks of the army. That being the case, it seems likely that the precedent set by Constantine and Licinius in the early 320s was validated by its very success: Constantine routed Licinius.

That victory allowed Constantine a free hand in the Balkans, which he used partly for grandiose construction schemes. The manpower which these projects required is attested by a dramatic increase in the region’s supply of bronze coinage in the late 320s. In the valley of the Porecka near the Iron Gates, a major wall system was put up to control threats from across the river. That was eminently practical, but a more spectacular venture was a new bridge over the Danube from
Oescus to
Sucidava, which in 328 established a real and a symbolic bridgehead onto what one source now calls the
ripa Gothica
.
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Constantine also continued the tetrarchic program of constructing
quadriburgia
along the Danube. These small forts, enclosing less than one hectare, were a new development of the early fourth century. They were characterized by a tower at each of their four corners (hence their name), and were built both on the right bank of the river in the Roman provinces of
Moesia Secunda and
Scythia, and also on the barbarian left bank. Primarily useful for keeping the barbarians under observation,
quadriburgia
could also serve as advance posts for Roman military action. Although the whole Danube frontier received this sort of imperial attention, the lower stretch of the river, and hence presumably the Tervingi beyond it, was the main focus. Thus in parallel to the
Oescus-Sucidava bridge, Constantine built a new
quadriburgium
at
Daphne, on the left bank of the Danube across from Transmarisca
.
How should we account for this focus on the stretch of the Danube opposite the lands of the Gothic Tervingi? Perhaps the most obvious explanation is the fact that Goths had fought on Licinius’ side in the recent civil war. But the support which the tetrarchs and Licinius seem to have given to the rise of Tervingian power in the region probably also worried Constantine.

The later 320s witnessed a series of disturbances beyond the Danube frontier which may have justified such worries. As with the displacement of the
Carpi twenty years earlier, these events can be understood in terms of Tervingian threats against their neighbours. First, in 330, a number of
Taifali invaded the Balkan provinces, perhaps driven
there by the Tervingi.
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A request for imperial aid from some of the Tervingi’s
Sarmatian neighbours soon followed, and developed into a major Gothic war. The Sarmatians had long been subject to the usual Roman mixture of subsidy and punishment. The remains of the large Sarmatian defensive systems just to the east of the Danube bend – most famously the
Csörz-árok mentioned earlier – were undoubtedly built with Roman permission and suggest the sort of alliance that would have justified the Sarmatians’ request for assistance. The extent of Gothic power is revealed by the response to this request. Constantine launched a campaign against the Goths, the first stage of which was won ‘in the lands of the Sarmatians’, thus beyond the Pannonian section of the Danube frontier.
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That implies a range of Gothic military action far away from the point where the Goths had hitherto appeared in our sources.

One must surmise that, in the aftermath of Constantine’s victory over Licinius, and while he himself was distracted by internal political problems, a Tervingian king had seized the opportunity to expand his hegemony at the expense of barbarian neighbours, although without directly threatening a Roman province. Probably he expected events of the previous two decades to repeat themselves: his defeated enemies would be accepted into the Roman empire and settled there, while he would be allowed to continue expanding his control in the trans-Danubian lands. If that was indeed his calculation, he did not foresee the scale of the imperial response. Constantine sent his oldest surviving son and caesar
Constantinus to campaign across the Danube. This imperial thrust, so we are told, drove many Goths (the sources speak improbably of 100,000) into the wilderness to die of hunger and cold. Constantinus demanded and received Gothic hostages, amongst them a son of the Gothic king
Ariaric.
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The defeat of the Goths was followed by a successful campaign against the
Sarmatians, who had supposedly proved unfaithful to their agreements with the emperor.

Constantinus had won a major and lasting victory that remained worthy of note two decades later: in 355, when Constantine’s nephew Julian delivered a panegyric to another of Constantine’s sons, the emperor
Constantius, the scale of the Gothic victory could still be
celebrated.
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In fact, for more than thirty years after 332 the lower Danube was at peace. Yet despite its evident importance, we know very little about Constantine’s Gothic peace. The limitations of our evidence have encouraged modern scholars into much hypothetical reconstruction along two different lines, the first on the continuity of Gothic leadership, the second on the terms of the peace. In both cases, the testimony of
Jordanes is a complicating factor. The real problem is the obscurity of the contemporary fourth-century sources, none of which allows us to gauge how important a king Ariaric was, and none of which tell us how, or whether, he was related to Tervingian leaders of the later fourth century. Instead, we have to infer this information from the limited evidence at our disposal.

The first clue to doing this lies in the location of Constantine’s first Gothic campaign. Given that it took place in distant Sarmatia, and given the scale of the tribal displacement that preceded it, we can perhaps infer that Ariaric was the ruler of a very substantial polity. Although we cannot be sure that he was the only Gothic king involved in the war of 332, he is the only one attested by name, probably another sign of his importance. We are on less certain ground when it comes to his connection to later Tervingian leaders. It is widely agreed that Ariaric was the grandfather of
Athanaric, the powerful Tervingian chieftain against whom the emperor Valens campaigned in the 360s. However, that genealogical connection is based on the hypothetical identification of Ariaric’s unnamed hostage son with the equally unnamed father of Athanaric who is said to have had a statue erected to him in Constantinople.
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The only ancient source that explicitly connects Ariaric with the Tervingian leaders of the later fourth century is Jordanes.
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But as we have seen, Jordanes was determined to construct a continuous Gothic history. Given that he elsewhere invents demonstrably spurious connections to provide genealogical continuity, the value of his testimony for Ariaric is suspect. In other words, while some connection between Ariaric and later Tervingian kings is plausible, it can only remain speculative.

The same holds true for the terms of the treaty. Fourth-century evidence is limited, while Jordanes imposes on it an anachronistic Byzantine interpretation. He supposes that Ariaric’s Goths became
foederati
, a word that by the sixth century had a technical legal content implying specific responsibilities on the part of both empire and federate allies. In 332, however, the formal status of
foederatus
did not exist, and the word for treaty,
foedus
, is not a technical term. Even though many scholars think that the treaty of 332 invented the type of technical
foedus
known in the sixth century, nothing in the fourth-century evidence makes that plausible
. The peace of 332 marks a significant stage in both Roman and Gothic history not because of any legal innovations, but because it was so very decisive. It imposed more than thirty years of peace on the lower Danube or, as bishop
Eusebius of Caesarea put it in the
Life of Constantine
that he wrote shortly after the emperor’s death in 337, ‘the Goths finally learned to serve the Romans’.
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Indeed, some of the defeated Goths would continue to claim a special loyalty to the Constantinian dynasty for many years, decades later supporting a usurper named
Procopius on the grounds of his dynastic connections.
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In the interim, they offered tribute to the emperor, and provided a large supply of military recruits for the Roman army. Such military service was not explicitly required by the terms of 332, as Eusebius’ testimony makes clear: he is nowhere able to state that Goths served in the army as a result of the treaty, even though elsewhere in his
Life
he is consistently very enthusiastic, and very specific, about Constantine’s recruitment of defeated barbarians.
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Regardless, the peace brought benefits to both sides.

The frontier was opened to trade all along its length, a most unusual measure, given that Roman emperors had for centuries regulated the export of Roman technology outside the empire. Yet the fact that trade surged all along the river is demonstrated by the large number of
bronze coins found in the band of territory north of the Danube. Bronze issues of the late 330s to the early 360s dominate the archaeological record, which suggests that the Gothic side of the lower Danube came to be quite thoroughly integrated into the Roman monetary economy in those years. In fact, the distribution of bronze coins in the region immediately beyond the frontier is very nearly as intense as in the Roman province of
Scythia itself.
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That such coins were used for commercial exchange is placed beyond serious doubt by the existence
of locally produced imitations of Roman coins which must have been struck to eke out insufficient supplies of genuine Roman coinage in commercial circulation. It must be noted that bronze coin finds are dramatically concentrated right beside the frontier, generally within fifteen or twenty miles of it, but less so in the Gothic regions opposite Scythia and
Moesia Secunda than those across the river from Moesia Prima
. Although this fact has led some scholars to question the level of monetization of the Gothic economy, the sheer quantity of low-value coinage beyond the frontier make these objections hard to sustain.

That Roman diplomatic connections with the Gothic elite also increased rapidly from the 330s onwards is suggested by the distribution of Roman silver coins. Much less common in the immediate vicinity of the Danube, silver is instead found in large quantity further north and east, in modern-day Moldova and Ukraine. Unlike the bronze, silver coinage is uncommon in stray finds at industrial and residential sites. Instead, silver
siliquae
are concentrated in small hoards, for instance one found at
Kholmskoě near Lake Kitaj or another at
Taraclia in Moldova. The Kholmskoě hoard is especially significant: its ninety-three silver coins of Constantius Ⅱ were all of the same value and type, struck between 351 and 355, bearing the legend VOTIS.ⅩⅩⅩ – MULTIS.ⅩⅩⅩⅩ, and virtually unused
. This fact raises some doubts about whether they circulated as money or as bullion. It is possible that our extant finds of silver coinage are not evidence for trade across the frontier – especially since silver
siliquae
are very rare in the Roman province of
Scythia itself – but rather for gift-subsidies to Gothic chieftains whom the empire had an interest in cultivating. All the same, there can be no question that the economy of Gothia was both fairly sophisticated and closely linked to the Roman world. Indeed, archaeological evidence from modern-day Romania, Moldova and Ukraine gives us precious insight into the social and economic world of the fourth-century Goths.