The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History

by Peter Heather

  The Limigantes’ acceptance on to Roman soil had been carefully negotiated before Constantius showed himself, so all should have been well. But when it wasn’t, there were plenty of Roman troops to hand and it was the Limigantes who were wiped out.24

  This highlights a key element in the generally accepted account of what happened in 376 that just doesn’t ring true. Valens, we are told, was filled with joy at the Goths’ arrival on the Danube. But in 376 the Roman army was demonstrably not in charge of the situation, and when things started to go wrong after the crossing, order could not be restored. Lupicinus, whatever his personal culpability for the Goths’ revolt, simply didn’t have enough troops on hand. After the banquet, he immediately rushed his available forces into battle against the rebellious Goths and was soundly defeated.25 In the absence of total military superiority, which was central to normal Roman receptiones, it is just not credible that Valens was anything like as happy about the arrival of the Goths on the Danube as the sources claim.

  The shortage of Roman troops in the Balkans had a simple enough cause. In the summer of 376, Valens was deeply embroiled on his eastern front, and had been for some time. As we saw in Chapter 3, he had ended his war against Athanaric in 369 with a compromise, because he was needed in the east to deal with Persian ambitions in Armenia and Iberia. After 371, taking advantage of Persia’s difficulties in its own far eastern territories, Valens had made some important gains, managing to put Roman nominees in control of these Caucasian territories. By 375, though, Shapur, Persian King of Kings, was back. Determined to hold firm, Valens sent three aggressive embassies in the summer of 376, which told him to back off or expect a fight. Such diplomatic posturing required appropriate military preparations, so that not only had Valens made haste to Antioch, the regional headquarters for Persian campaigns, but the vast majority of his mobile striking forces was in the east as well. When the Goths arrived on the Danube, therefore, Valens was already fully committed to an aggressive policy in the east, and it was bound to take him at least a year to extract his forces diplomatically, or even just to turn them around logistically.26

  For a while Valens probably still hoped that the Danube crisis could be managed in such a way as to allow him to pursue his Caucasian ambitions, perhaps even with the addition of some extra Gothic military manpower, as the sources report. Given how far the Danubian situation departed from normal Roman expectations of control, however, we might also expect him to have been treading very carefully, wary of potential problems. And the available evidence shows that he was. As we noted earlier, one thing is clear: of the two Gothic groups who arrived at the Danube, only the Tervingi were admitted.27 The Greuthungi were refused permission to enter the Empire, and such troops and naval craft as were available in the Balkans were placed opposite them to keep them north of the river.28 Valens did not, then, rush to accept every Goth he could find so as to build up his army and fill the treasury’s coffers at one and the same time.

  Let’s also have a closer look at his relations with the Tervingi. No source describes the terms agreed with this group in any detail, and, thanks to the rebellion, they were never fully implemented. The new relationship was certainly presented to the Roman public as a Gothic surrender – deditio – but that in itself tells us little; both Constantine’s and Valens’ earlier treaties with the Tervingi were described as such when they involved quite different relationships (see pp. 72-6). Everything suggests that the agreement of 376 incorporated some unusual features, highly favourable to the Goths. To start with, they exercised an unusual degree of control over their place of settlement. In normal circumstances, the emperor decided where to place immigrants, tending to spread them out. In 376, it was agreed that the Tervingi should be settled only in Thrace, and this was their choice. The details of how the settlement was to be organized are unclear; in particular, we are left in the dark on the crucial issue of whether they were to be settled in clusters large enough to preserve their political and cultural identity. This would again have been highly unusual, but, given that they were able to choose their own settlement area, may well have been part of the agreement. Otherwise, we know only that hostages were taken, and an immediate draft of young men for the regular Roman army; and that the agreement envisaged the Goths possibly serving en masse as auxiliaries on particular campaigns, much as they had between 332 and 369. There were also some confidence-building measures. In particular, the Tervingi leadership declared itself willing to convert to Christianity.

  The fact that the agreement was sold to its Roman audience as a surrender must not confuse the issue. In both its military and its diplomatic details it departed from Roman norms. The Tervingi extracted much better terms in 376 than those usually granted even to immigrants being treated as friends. Lacking sufficient military clout on the Danube, Valens was forced to depart from tried and trusted Roman methods. We might expect him to have been wary about admitting even the Tervingi, therefore, and there are, in fact, strong hints that he was.29

  As we’ve seen, the main cause of the Tervingi’s revolt was food shortages and black-marketeering beside the Danube. The Goths, it seems, spent autumn and part of winter 376/7 beside the river, and only moved on to Marcianople sometime in late winter or early spring. Even when the revolt got under way, they still had difficulty in finding food, because ‘all the necessities of life had been taken to the strong cities, none of which the enemy even then attempted to besiege because of their complete ignorance of these and other operations of the kind’. This relates to the summer of 377, but long before that year’s crops had ripened. The Romans, it would seem, had deliberately moved the harvest of 376 to fortified strongpoints which the Goths lacked the military technology to take. Feeding the hungry Tervingi was anyway a formidable task for the Roman state, given its bureaucratic limitations. It had to plan carefully enough for major military campaigns when its own troops needed feeding. The Goths, of course, had no means of growing their own food at this point, since the agreement hadn’t yet got as far as land allocations. Once their stocks had been consumed, securing all other food supplies gave Valens a lever of control over them.

  The emperor was also quick to negotiate military assistance from his western colleague, the emperor Gratian, son of his brother Valentinian I. Probably in 377 our old friend Themistius, orator, philosopher, senator of Constantinople and a close confidant of Valens, visited Rome. There he delivered his thirteenth oration. This speech, derivative and uninspired – perhaps delivered on the tenth anniversary of the emperor’s accession, which fell in 377 – celebrated Gratian as the Platonic ideal of a ruler. Much more interesting than the speech is the fact that Themistius was present in the west at such an important moment. And, as he makes clear, his journey from Syria had been made at breakneck speed:

  . . . my course was almost equal to the course of the sun, from the Tigris to Ocean [the Atlantic; i.e. the west]; it was an urgent journey, a flight over the surface of the earth, just as you [Socrates] say Eros once hurried, with sleepless days following the nights. I lived my life on the road and under the open skies, sleeping on the ground and out of doors, with no bed to lie on and no shoes to put on . . .30

  The pace he described here is much faster than you’d think the rather run-of-the-mill contents of the speech would demand, which suggests that his embassy had another, more urgent aim. The presence of some western troops, already available to the east for campaigning in the Balkans in summer 377, gives the clue. Such campaigning would have required prior negotiation sometime during winter 376/7, possibly even before the revolt of the Tervingi had broken out. It was this necessity that drove Themistius and his companions so relentlessly across land and sea. The ambassadors were charged with negotiating a joint imperial response to the Gothic problem that had suddenly appeared on Valens’ doorstep.

  A note of caution on the eastern emperor’s part too is suggested by the most mysterious of all the events that were unfolding at this time beside the Danube. As food shortages wors
ened, and the Goths’ hostility grew, Lupicinus moved the Tervingi on to his regional headquarters at Marcianople, as we noted. But to supervise the process, he was obliged to use the forces that had previously been keeping out the Greuthungi. The Tervingi did eventually move, but the redeployment of the Roman forces allowed the Greuthungi to cross the river on to imperial territory. Lupicinus, as commander, must have been getting desperate – clearly, the situation was spiralling out of control. Ammianus reports that, to cap it all, the Tervingi moved only slowly towards Marcianople, so as to allow the Greuthungi to catch up with them. (The Greuthungi may have crossed the Danube slightly more to the east than the Tervingi, at Sacidava or Axiopolis (map 6).) When the Tervingi were about 15 kilometres from their destination, Lupicinus invited their leaders to dinner. Ammianus describes the party:

  Having invited Alavivus and Fritigern to a dinner party, Lupicinus posted soldiers against the main body of the barbarians and kept them at a distance from the walls of the town . . . Great wrangling arose between the inhabitants and those who were shut out, which finally reached a point where fighting was inevitable. Whereupon the barbarians . . . killed and despoiled a great troop of soldiers. When Lupicinus learned by a secret message that this had happened . . . he put to death all the attendants of the two leaders, who as a guard of honour and to ensure their safety were waiting for them in front of the general’s quarters. When the [Goths] who were besieging the walls heard this news, in their resentment they gradually increased their number to avenge their kings, who, as they thought, had been detained by force . . . And since Fritigern was quickwitted and feared that he might be held with the rest as a hostage, he cried out that they [the Romans] would have to fight with heavy loss of life, unless he himself were allowed to go out with his companions to quiet the people . . . And when this request was granted, they all departed.31

  It is difficult to know precisely what happened. On the face of it, the botched attack was the result of misunderstanding and panic, but banquet hijacks were a standard tool of Roman frontier management.

  Removing dangerous or potentially dangerous leaders was an excellent means of spreading confusion amongst opponents. Ammianus describes four other occasions over a span of just twenty-four years when Roman commanders made dinner invitations an opportunity for kidnap. One of these four was the unauthorized initiative of a local commander, but the other three resulted from direct imperial orders. In one case, a commander on the Rhine was given a sealed letter, which he was not to open unless he saw the Alamannic leader in question on the Roman side of the river. When this happened, and he did, he was instructed to shunt him off to Spain. Lupicinus, I suspect, was in receipt of similarly contingent orders. Valens, still at Antioch, could not be consulted at every turn – requests for orders from his Danubian commanders would have had a turn-around time of weeks. So Lupicinus’ instructions with regard to the Tervingi must have left considerable room for personal initiative; all the same, I don’t believe that he would have been let loose on the Gothic problem without careful guidance about what to do in a variety of foreseeable scenarios. The arrival of a huge number of unsubdued Goths in Roman territory at a point when the main Roman army was mobilized elsewhere, was much too potentially dangerous not to have been thought through. Lupicinus had been told, I suspect, that if things looked as if they might be getting out of hand, then he should do what he could to disrupt the Goths – and hijacking enemy leaders, as already mentioned, was a standard Roman reflex. But it was Lupicinus’ call. In the event, he went for that worst of all possible worlds: first one thing, then the other, with neither stratagem whole-heartedly pursued. Instead of a continued if uneasy peace or a leaderless opposition, he found himself facing an organized revolt under an established leader.32

  Both common sense – would you be pleased to see chaos descend on a second front while you are heavily engaged on a first? – and comparison with other cases of licensed migration into the Roman Empire make it clear that Valens could not have been nearly so pleased to see huge numbers of Goths arrive on the Danube as our sources, however unanimously, report. As we have seen, imperial ideology required all barbarians to be shown to be subservient, and whatever the panicking going on behind the scenes in 376, the emperor’s policy had to be presented to his taxpayers as a freely chosen strategy that would benefit the Empire. Ammianus offers us a strong hint here. His account refers to the input of ‘learned flatterers’ (eruditis adulatoribus) into Valens’ Gothic policy.33 This immediately brings to mind Themistius, who did such a good job for Valens on the peace of 369. He was with the emperor in Syria in the summer of 376, before his sudden dash westwards, and I suspect that a speech such as that of 369 was one of the ways whereby he convinced the east Roman court that, contrary to all appearances, letting in a horde of untamed Goths was actually a jolly good idea. The unanimity of our sources, then, reflects the propaganda that the emperor used to justify his policy, not the real reasoning behind it.

  The Huns had thrown the Roman Empire and a large number of Goths into a new and unprecedentedly close relationship. The emperor certainly didn’t desire this relationship: not, at least, in the form it took. The Goths too had their doubts and hesitations. Their decision to seek asylum inside the Empire was not taken lightly. When the majority of the Tervingi broke with Athanaric, they had done so at a large gathering where the issues were debated at length.34 You can understand their wavering. Moving into the territory of such a powerful neighbour was no easy decision. Given the efficiency of the crossborder telegraph, they probably knew that Valens was currently overstretched on the Danube because of the war with Persia. The emperor might be willing to grant concessions for the moment, but there could be no guarantee that his attitude might not harden later. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, if the Goths were trying to think ahead: to prepare themselves to deal with the power of the Empire in the longer term as well as now.

  Although the Romans treated them quite differently, the Tervingi and Greuthungi remained closely in touch. Hence, as already noted, when the Tervingi were forced by Lupicinus’ troops to move on to Marcianople, they were already aware that the Greuthungi had crossed the river and so slowed their pace.35 The Tervingi were entering the lion’s den and, even if apparently receiving more favourable treatment than the Greuthungi, they had every interest in forming a united front with as many Goths as possible against the Empire’s overwhelming superiority in both manpower and resources. By so doing, of course, they broke at least the spirit of their agreement with Valens. But if the emperor could find ways of rewriting the agreement of 376 for the longer term, then so could the Goths.36

  And this, it seems to me, is the real story. Both the Goths and the Romans had been thrown by the Huns into a new and more intense relationship. Neither side trusted the other, and neither was totally committed to the agreement negotiated – when both were under duress – in 376. That this initial agreement failed to hold cannot really have surprised anyone. The way was now clear for a test of military strength, upon whose outcome would hang the nature of a more durable settlement between the immigrant Goths and the Roman state.

  The Battle of Hadrianople

  HOSTILITIES OPENED ON the morning after Lupicinus’ fatal banquet. The return of Fritigern and the violence of the night before prompted a first round of pillaging in the immediate vicinity of Marcianople. In response, Lupicinus gathered what men he could and advanced to the Gothic camp, about 15 kilometres outside the city. His force was quickly overwhelmed – few, apart from Lupicinus himself, managed to escape. Sometime in late winter or spring of 377, war began in earnest and was to last no fewer than six campaigning seasons before peace was restored on 3 October 382.37 The action of the first two years, up to the battle of Hadrianople, can be followed in considerable detail in the narrative of Ammianus Marcellinus (which is not to say that he tells us everything that we want to know). After the battle, the sources become thinner. What is very clear, however, is that the entire war – all six seaso
ns’ worth – was confined to the Balkan provinces of the Roman Empire. This is a landscape that has been fought over many times in history, and its very particular geography has always dictated the nature of the action.

  The northern part of the peninsula is roughly rectangular, broader to the north than the south, and to the west than the east (map 6), its salient physical feature being its mountains. To the east, the Stara Planina (or Haemus Mountains) rise to rounded summits averaging 750 metres; the highest peak reaches 2,376, while the more rugged Rhodopes are a touch higher with many peaks at over 2,000 metres. Further west, running north–south, are the Dinaric Alps. Over time, their limestone has eroded into sharp crags and pockmarked hillsides, often covered with prickly, unpleasant scrub: the characteristic Karst landscape of the western Balkans. Alongside the mountains lie three wide plains: the Danubian Plain to the north, the Thracian in the south-east, and the Macedonian between the Rhodopes and the Dinarics. Another characteristic feature of the peninsula is its many alluvial upland basins, where rainwater and snowmelt erosion have built up layers of fertile soil in pockets between the mountain peaks.

  The nature of this landscape has shaped the region’s history. Most obviously, the plains and upland basins define discrete sections of cultivable land, where there are likely to be concentrations of population. Many of the mountain zones are extremely rugged, which, especially combined with the region’s harsh winters, has limited longdistance communications to only two main routes. North–south, the key highway runs through the Morava and Vardar river valleys connecting the Danube via modern Skopje (the Roman Scupi) to the Aegean at Thessalonica. North-west to south-east, a second important route starts again at the Morava valley, but turns left at Nis? (the Roman Naissus) to work its way through fertile upland basins past the Bulgarian capital Sofia (the Roman Serdica), then over the Succi Pass to connect with the rich upland plain of the Sredna Gora and on to the Thracian Plain. In the Roman period, this was a military trunk road. Landscape also dictates communications more locally. The Rhodopes are extremely difficult to cross from north-east to south-west, for instance, and movement north and south through the Haemus mountains is channelled through just five major passes: the Iskar valley in the west, the Trojan and Shipka Passes in the centre, and the Kotel and Riski further east.