by Ed Strosser
Cons — Ruined the empire by making his brother co-emperor.
Emperor Valens — Valentinian’s younger brother, a simple-minded farmer from the sleepy countryside whose sole qualification to be co-emperor was that his brother was forced to share power by the imperial guard.
Skinny — Didn’t speak Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern empire, so relied on interpreters.
Props — Built an aqueduct in his capital, Constantinople, which stands to this day.
Pros — Trusted that people were as simple as sheep.
Cons — Often forgot the concept of “show no mercy to barbarians.”
THE GENERAL SITUATION
Since the beginning of the Roman Empire in 510 BC, clean-shaven Roman aristocrats were determined to outdo the scope of Alexander’s Greek Empire through an unremitting fury of blood-spilling macho aggression. Power and togas mattered to the Romans. Once enemies were subdued by sword or treaty, power kept the peace and filled the coffers with gold. As the empire expanded, the Romans often incorporated the gods of the vanquished people under the big tent of Pax Romana while press-ganging many of their army-eligible men as soldiers and gobbling up their resources as booty and foodstuffs. Those generals who mastered the rape-and-pillage paradigm of forcibly welcoming non-Romans (i.e., “barbarians”) into the empire marched into Rome in triumph, trailing gold and slaves, with the power to stake their claims to be emperor, with the help of the imperial guard.
It didn’t matter anymore if the general were a Roman aristocrat, or gods forbid, a Vandal, Goth, or Hun. If the guard gave you the thumbs-up, you were in. This flexibility allowed the Roman republic to become the world’s first superempire.
By AD 364 the vast size of the Roman superempire required the emperor to spend most of his time battling barbarians on far-flung borders, closely guarded by his cohort of imperial guards, who traveled with him at all times, in case of one of those awkward moments when they found themselves with a dead emperor on their hands.
Which happened when Emperor Julian got himself inconveniently killed that year in combat against the Romans’ long-standing nemesis, the Persians. Then Julian’s replacement died on the way to Rome. The guard huddled yet again and settled on Valentinian I as the best of a weak field of blood-soaked soldiers short-listed for the position. He was a compromise figure, chosen because he was not from one of the dynastic families of former emperors jousting to regain power. After appointing Valentinian, the imperial guards, wise to the challenges and risks of helming the giant war machine, requested in their nonrefusable way that he nominate a co-emperor to run the eastern half of the empire. Valentinian shrewdly chose the one person he knew wouldn’t outshine him and whom he could control, his little brother Valens.
The imperial guards accepted Valentinian’s choice of Valens because he was weaker and even more inexperienced than Valentinian. They arrogantly assumed that even a weak emperor, not to mention his dumb little brother, was no threat to the continued existence of the superempire. Valens was seven years younger than Valentinian and had grown up on his family’s farm in the eastern Balkans while his brother was out campaigning in Africa and Gaul with his father, a soldier. Instead of a harsh life in an army camp, Valens was raised in a fairly gentle bucolic environment. He was known for sporting bowed legs and a potbelly, common enough afflictions but apparently unusual enough in a Roman emperor to be duly sniffed at by his contemporaries.
At first, things started off well for Valens and his new empire, which comprised modern-day Turkey, the Balkans, the Middle East, and Egypt. He astutely hired people who spoke the local languages who could explain the incomprehensible bleatings of his new constituents. He married the daughter of a soldier and began treating everyone fairly. But Valens soon ran into problems. Once he attempted anything more than basic administrative tasks, things had a way of backfiring for him. He and his emperor-brother decided to improve the quality of the coins by making them more pure. These new coins helped stabilize the currency in the mind of the average Roman citizen, but by minting new coins with more and finer gold, the ruling brothers were actually robbing themselves. Many of Valens’s decisions ended up hurting only himself.
Valens soon had bigger problems, however. The Goths, barbarians out of what is now lower Ukraine and the northeastern Balkans, were up to their old tricks. After being defeated by Emperor Constantine in AD 328 while unifying the empire under his control, Constantine had forced the Goths to contribute troops for the constantly undermanned eastern empire legions.
Now smelling weakness in the plodding new emperor Valens, the Goths invaded the eastern empire in AD 365. As per the emperor handbook, Valens dutifully dispatched legions to start working them over. Now an even bigger problem cropped up. He was facing a revolt in Constantinople, his very own capital. A former imperial secretary named Procopius, a relation of Emperor Julian in the Constantine dynasty, was struck for some reason with the happy thought that he deserved to be emperor. Procopius convinced Valens’s two legions to join his coup, made a deal with the invading Goths, and declared himself emperor. He struck new coins and started appointing his people in Constantinople. It was yet another classic Roman power-grab.
Valens sent a distress call to his brother Valentinian, the western emperor. Valentinian was too busy to send help. His excuse was that he was tied down battling Germans in Gaul. Valens, on his own, managed to defeat Procopius in AD 366 with the critical support of a respected general in the army named Arbitio, who defected to Valens after his estates were stolen by Procopius. The smooth-talking Arbitio convinced half of Procopius’s army to desert, and the remaining half, sizing up the situation, quickly flipped to Valens’s side. Celebrating his first martial victory, Valens gleefully slaughtered Procopius and in time-honored imperial Roman fashion shipped his severed head to big brother Valentinian in Rome. In reality, Valens had dodged only one bullet. There were more soon to follow.
Valens now declared a full-on war against the Goths for supporting Procopius’s coup, but he couldn’t manage to pin down the slippery barbarians, despite beating Athanaric, the Goth king, in open battle in July 369. But Valens didn’t follow the victory up with the coup de grâce. He turned away to rest his troops below the Danube for the winter, and let the moment pass against the reeling Goths, who sent emissaries to Valens and appealed for mercy. Mercy from a Roman emperor? This was an unheard-of proposition, but Valens was willing to try out this shiny, modern idea. He and King Athanaric of the Tervingi Goth tribe signed a peace treaty in mid-Danube, in effect bowing to the barbarian king’s refusal to set foot on Roman territory. It was another very un-Roman act, which violated the unwritten Roman law of running the empire as a mercy-free zone. Until then all Roman treaties had been signed in Rome or on the field of battle under Roman standards.
After that three-year slog in the eastern Balkans, Valens was free to return to the more glorious pursuit of reconquering Armenia from the Persians, who had been staying sharp by raping and pillaging the countryside. Kicking around the Goths was not seen by anybody as anything more than day-to-day empire maintenance; crushing the Persians and regaining Armenia would impress his brother much more. So, in 370 Valens set out to attack the Persians.
Valens still suffered from the chronic manpower shortage of the eastern empire. Despite a law that the sons of veterans were compelled to serve, inducements were often handed out to keep up the recruitment numbers, costing the empire’s treasury dearly. And Roman soldiers hated serving in the east. Dragooning barbarians was the cheapest way to staff up the legions. Propping up the Armenian king by attacking the hirsute Persians would require all of his forces. Unfortunately, that midriver treaty with the Goths had ended the payment of tribute in gold to the Goths and also ended the requirement of the Goths supplying troops to the Roman emperor, as had been established under their treaty with Constantine. Valens had exacerbated his chronic manpower shortage just when he needed bodies the most. In spite
of this, the glory-deficient Valens gave himself the title of Gothicus Maximus, or “Top Goth,” and emblazoned it on coins to trumpet his mercy-tainted victory around the empire. Still, Valens was getting no love or respect from his big brother in the west. Valentinian had shrewdly used one of the typical Roman-emperor ploys to help solidify his position as the head of a new dynasty of emperors. In 367 he had appointed his eight-year-old son Gratian as emperor-in-waiting, then married him off to the daughter of a former emperor. Valens’s young nephew now had more legitimacy as emperor in the eyes of the average Roman than he himself did.
Yet another blow came in 375, when Valentinian dropped dead of a stroke while berating barbarian ambassadors trying to justify their invasion of the superempire. Valens had lost his guiding hand and erstwhile protector, and now found himself competing with his nephew, the teenaged Gratian, now Emperor Gratian.
Valens was now the emperor-weakling. Gratian’s regents kicked sand in his face when they elevated Valentinian I’s other son Valentinian II, all of three years old, to co-emperor alongside his half-brother Gratian. This was a direct thrust at Valens, whose only son Galatens — consul at the ripe age of three — had died soon after the Procopius rebellion, reportedly bringing Valens to his knees in grief.
Upon the naming of Valentinian II as emperor, the regents handed him chunks of Valens’s territory in the Balkans without bothering to consult Valens. Troops from these provinces would have helped solve some of Valens’s manpower problems with the Persians and the Goths. But Valens, instead of taking a page from the emperor handbook and murdering the lot of them, consolidating the empire under his rule, labored on like a good farmer.
Facing numerous enemies with few friends, the problems of the empire were starting to overwhelm the farmer-cum-emperor. Preoccupied with his Persian problems, the Goths, who Valens thought he had handled with his mercy-riddled treaty, were turning out to be a problem again.
WHAT HAPPENED: OPERATION “STUPIDUS MAXIMUS”
In 376 the weakened Goths suddenly found themselves at the mercy of the Huns, a terrifying horde who blitzed out of the eastern steppes, deploying very prescient skills of mobile warfare, and pushed the Goths back up against the Danube, the northeastern border of the empire in the Balkans. The Goths were caught between the Huns, apparently unaware that such a thing as mercy existed, and the Romans, whose survival depended on the maintenance of a mercy-free zone, gods forbid. The Goths were desperately looking for a break.
The mass of Goths — men, women and children — in a group perhaps as large as 200,000, had created a giant refugee crisis for Valens. Always looking for some extra troops, Valens decided to let the barbarians cross the Danube… but only those of the clan of chieftain Fritigern, who was an opponent of Athanaric, the king with whom Valens had made his earlier midstream treaty. It was a bad decision, driven by the need to solve his manpower problem against the Persians. The other Goth tribes, unfortunately, would have to stay on the other side and be exterminated by the Huns.
The Goths, welcomed into the empire, imagined themselves not as temporary immigrants or landless refugees but standing on a somewhat equal footing with the Romans, who promised them land and food in exchange for the inevitable draft notices for the young men. But the merciless Roman soldiers knew better how to handle the refugees than did their emperor. Without the usual order to slaughter the hungry barbarians, the frontier troops, headed by General Duke Maximus, created a black market among the impoverished refugees by exchanging dog meat for slaves. So desperate were the Goths they even exchanged their children for moldy bread and wine of a poor vintage. But the Roman legions assigned to the sector were so undermanned that when the refugees revolted over their rough treatment, the Romans pushed them farther into the empire to isolate them. The Romans patted themselves on the back for this clever strategy. But it now left the border undefended, and the Goths of the Greuthungi tribe snuck over.
Meanwhile, the scheming Roman generals, still apparently unconvinced of the wisdom of inviting barbarians into the empire and eager to roll the Goths like every other defenseless barbarian strolling down the via, invited the Goth leaders to a feast in the city of Marcianople. Their plan was to use an old Roman trick of inviting the Goth leaders to a feast, which would also happen to be their last meal on earth. While the restless and hungry Goth masses stuck outside the city gates began to revolt against the Roman overlords, inside the city the wily Romans took out the Goth guards and cornered Fritigern, their leader. The Roman leader of the province, Count Lupicinus, put a knife to Fritigern’s throat. They had him. But mercy once again reared its ugly head. Perhaps infected from a recent meeting with Valens, Lupicinus pulled back. The quick-thinking Fritigern convinced the Romans to let him go in order to calm his people. But now Fritigern pulled a fast one and, once among his people outside the gates of Marcianople, flipped on his ungracious hosts. The Romans formed up ranks and came out for what was expected to be a walkover, but they found themselves outmanned and on the business end of a good whipping. Lupicinus retreated into the city with his surviving troops. The Goths were now rampaging inside the empire without constraint, their forces bolstered by other barbarians streaming over the borders and spiced with deserters from the barbarian-riddled Roman legions. In 376 Valens was stuck on the eastern edge of the empire tangling with the Persians when he got wind of the problems with the Goths. He made a quick truce with the Persians and sent a request to his thankless nephew Gratian, now emperor of the west, for help. Bogged down in Mesopotamia, Valens needed a year to trek back to handle the uprising himself, all the while waiting in desperation for the promised surge from his nephew. In the meantime, Valens ordered his generals on the scene to attack the Goths with the few Roman legions he had in the area. The understaffed Roman legions, many of them poorly trained border guards, were defeated time and time again by the resilient Goths, who continued their rampage.
By the time Valens arrived in 377 the high-stepping Goths stood beneath the gates of Constantinople. Valens, not eager to linger in the despised city that had supported the rebel wannabe Procopius against him, cobbled together enough troops, including some formerly peace-loving monks who had been conscripted into the manpower-short eastern empire army. Valens managed to break out of the city and carve out some room to maneuver for his army on the plains west of the city. His plan was to stop the Goths from occupying the east–west road, where the hoped-for troop surge from Gratian would arrive.
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 the
ir 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.
