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

by Michael Kulikowski

  The extent of Constantine’s prestige is illustrated by the immediate aftermath of his death in 337: for almost two years, we have no record of any campaigns against northern barbarians, an unheard of stability given that barbarian neighbours almost inevitably seized the opportunity provided by imperial successions to raid the Roman provinces. In the year of his death, Constantine had been preparing for a massive invasion of Persia, perhaps meant as the culmination of his world-conquering career. His death bequeathed a legacy of instability on the Persian frontier to his successors, and their own competition made matters worse. Constantine was succeeded by three sons and two nephews, the latter of whom died in a massacre of nearly all Constantine’s male relatives which was organized in order to ensure his sons a firm hold on the throne. But those sons – Constantinus, Constantius Ⅱ, and Constans – soon came to blows themselves. The eldest son, Constantinus, was displeased with his share in the division of the empire. He attacked his younger brother Constans in 340, but died in the war that followed. Thereafter, Constantius and Constans cohabited more or less peaceably for a decade, having probably campaigned together against the Sarmatians shortly before their elder brother’s death.[93] When Constans was overthrown by an army coup in 350, Constantius waged a bitter war against the usurper Magnentius. In the midst of this civil strife, the inhabitants of the frontier provinces were the greatest losers. Just as it had in the third century, the defence of the frontiers took second place to the prosecution of internal disputes, and thus the outbursts of civil war during the 340s and 350s encouraged barbarian incursions. Along the lower Danube, the peace of 332 continued to hold, the Tervingi honouring its terms and providing soldiers for the military ventures of the emperor Constantius. The Rhine frontier, by contrast, posed almost continuous difficulties. It was there that Constans had faced the revolt of Magnentius, and thence that Magnentius had drained troops in order to prosecute his war against Constantius. The connection between usurpation and barbarian invasion is made explicit in a speech attributed to the emperor Constantius, just before he appointed his cousin Julian as caesar and gave him the unwelcome task of restoring the Rhineland.[94]

  Our Most Important Source: Ammianus Marcellinus

  The source for this speech is Ammianus Marcellinus, one of the greatest historians of all antiquity and our main source for later fourth-century history, including the relationship between the Goths and the empire: without Ammianus, this and the next chapter could hardly be written. Given his importance to our understanding of the Goths, we must take a few moments to look at Ammianus himself before moving on. Ammianus was a Greek from one of the great cities of Syria, probably Antioch. He came from a good family which had been excused from its obligation to serve in the local town council and was instead closely linked to the larger imperial administration. As a young man, Ammianus served as protector domesticus, part of an elite group of soldiers who carried out a variety of special functions and often operated in the close vicinity of the emperor himself. Protectores frequently went on to command units of active-service troops in later life: the institution can be seen as a sort of officer training academy and more than one protector went on to become emperor. Ammianus found himself personally involved in a number of high-profile missions, and ultimately joined the invasion of Persia launched in 363 by the pagan emperor Julian, cousin and heir of Constantius. Unlike his Christian cousins and his uncle Constantine, Julian (r. 361–363) had repudiated Christianity, probably in reaction to the Christian piety of Constantine and his sons, who had murdered all but one of Julian’s close relations. Julian’s reign saw a determined attempt to undo Constantine’s Christianization of the empire, an attempt that fizzled out immediately upon Julian’s premature death on campaign. Julian, however, was Ammianus’ hero, and Ammianus may even have been an apostate from Christianity just as Julian was. Certainly his promising career came to a sudden halt with Julian’s death in 363 and it may be that Julian’s more committed pagan followers found their prospects stymied in the Christian reaction against the dead emperor.

  Ammianus, his career prospects finished, devoted himself to research and, eventually, to writing the history of the Roman empire. We know that he travelled widely, and that he had moved from his native Greek East to Rome by 384. He wrote much of his history in Rome, perhaps under the patronage of one of the great senatorial families who dominated that city. His work liberally intermixes a political history of the empire with scholarly asides and Ammianus’ personal reminiscences. It was probably finished within a year or so of 390 and Ammianus may have died soon afterwards, for we know nothing more of him thereafter. The title he gave his history was Res Gestae, literally ‘deeds done’, and it indicates that the political history of the period it covers – from the reign of the emperor Nerva (r. 96–97) to that of Valens (r. 364–378) – was its primary concern. The surviving version of the text, unfortunately, begins with the start of book 14 and relates the events of summer 353 onwards, before ending, with book 31, just after the death of Valens at the battle of Adrianople in August 378. The structure of the history is complex and we cannot be sure of how it was originally organized, or indeed whether the numbering of the books as we have them is correct – it is possible that the original text consisted of thirty-six books, five of which are now lost and the rest misnumbered.[95] Almost all of Ammianus’ Gothic material is contained in the extant book 31, which is structurally and thematically very different from all those that precede it and may perhaps have been initially composed as a separate treatise. Regardless, the pessimism that pervades the Res Gestae is shaped by and focused on the catastrophic defeat of Valens by the Goths at Adrianople. The whole narrative is therefore filtered through the understanding of the terrible disaster that was to come, a disaster that Ammianus blames on a failure to honour Rome’s ancient traditions. This penetrating gloom must inform our own reading of Ammianus whenever we try to mine his text for information on the events of this period – we must always ask why he says what he says in the way he says it, for he is a master of innuendo and misdirection. On the other hand, he was a keen observer of Roman decline, and understood how Roman failures could lead directly to barbarian successes. Indeed, he alone demonstrates that at least some contemporaries understood and could articulate why the intersection of Roman internecine strife and barbarian invasion was so lethal: the barbarians ‘were like wild beasts who have acquired the habit of stealing their prey through the negligence of the shepherds’.[96]

  Constantius on the Danube

  The greatest barbarian danger, as the narrative of Ammianus shows, lay along the Rhine and the upper Danube, where neglect and the civil war that followed the death of Constans had weakened the frontiers. Both Alamanni and Franks were restive and the latter even succeeded in sacking so important a town as the imperial residence of Trier. Constantius, the last surviving heir of Constantine, was a deeply suspicious man, mistrustful of everyone, not least his own family. But he could not govern alone, certainly not with simultaneous disturbances on Rhine, Danube and eastern front, and even a suspect cousin was preferable to another usurper like Magnentius. Constantius turned to his only surviving male relatives, but the caesar Gallus, Julian’s elder brother, proved a disaster and soon met his end at the hands of the executioner. In 356, Julian alone remained and was duly appointed caesar. For half a decade, he campaigned more or less continuously along and beyond the Rhine. Constantius, meanwhile, devoted himself to the Sarmatians and Quadi of the middle Danube in year after year of campaigning. In 358 and 359, Constantius conducted massive punitive raids against Sarmatians and Quadi, and then against the Sarmatians’ former subjects the Limigantes. Deliberately sowing terror, Constantius sat in judgement on the many petty kings of the region, allocating territories to different groups.[97] As a result of these campaigns, the Sarmatians were eliminated as a serious power in the barbaricum. What is more, the suppression of the Limigantes created a sort of no-man’s land opposite the Danube bend between the powerful Quadic chi
eftains to the northwest and the Tervingian ones to the south and east. Both Quadi and Tervingi were to benefit.

  Gothic power was presumably rendered all the more stable by these campaigns. Certainly neither Constantius, nor later Julian, ever felt the need to campaign along the ripa Gothica of the lower Danube, which was entirely peaceful between the 330s and the 360s. That peace allowed for the trade relations advertised in the name of a little fort called Commercium – ‘the marketplace’ – and for the recruitment of Gothic soldiers into the garrisons on the imperial side of the river.[98] Such garrison troops are probably responsible for the fairly widespread distribution of Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov decorative styles in places like Iatrus south of the frontier, and we know that Constantius was able to recruit many Goths for his Persian campaigns of the later 350s. The price of Constantius’ Danubian peace only became clear in the long term. His eventual successors, the imperial brothers Valentinian (r. 364–375) and Valens (r. 364–378), were spared any serious fighting between the Danube and the Tisza rivers where Constantius had suppressed the Sarmatians and Limigantes. But the absence of those troublesome neighbours only strengthened the power of Quadic and Tervingian rulers in their own territories and Valentinian and Valens each died on campaign, against the Quadi and the Goths respectively. Ammianus recounts how, in 361, the emperor Julian declared himself content to leave the Goths to the slave traders, so little did they merit military attention.[99] No doubt Ammianus wrote with the omniscience of hindsight, and wanted to bring home to us the tragic decline in Julian’s good judgement that would end in his death on a Persian battlefield. But if Julian really did speak those words or others like them, it was a stunning underestimate of Tervingian power. That power, in no small measure a product of imperial policy, would be revealed in three years of bitter warfare between the Tervingian iudex Athanaric and the emperor Valens. Before that, however, another element of imperial policy had begun to impinge heavily on Gothic society, in the shape of Christian missions.

  Ulfila and Gothic Christianity

  In the long years of stability after 332, Constantine’s ambition to evangelize the Goths was partly fulfilled. Constantine, as we have seen, had become a devoted Christian, certainly by the year 312 if not before. By the time he won his Gothic victory in 332, he had been implementing pro-Christian policies throughout the empire for several decades, particularly in the Greek East, which he had conquered from Licinius as the liberator of eastern Christians from persecution. He saw himself as a bishop to those outside the empire, and clearly regarded himself as called to evangelize the gentes beyond the frontier. The war against Persia which Constantine was preparing at the time of his death was prompted at least in part by his sense of Christian mission. Whether Constantine had explicitly planned for the evangelization of the Goths by 337 is controversial. It is sometimes argued that Constantine deliberately imposed Christianity on those Goths with whom he made peace in 332, but the evidence for that is not good.[100] On the contrary, it may simply have been a matter of chance that an opportunity to bring Christian teaching to the Goths arrived in the person of the Bishop Ulfila, sometimes known as Wulfila or Ulfilas.

  Our information on the life of Ulfila is derived from just two sources, a letter written by one of his disciples, Auxentius, and a heavily abbreviated version of Philostorgius’ fifth-century Ecclesiastical History. Ulfila was descended from Cappadocians taken captive in the Gothic raids of Gallienus’ reign, but he himself bore a Gothic name. The date of his consecration as bishop and the start of his mission is debated. He came from Gothia on an embassy to the emperor – perhaps Constantine, perhaps Constantius Ⅱ – and was consecrated in either c. 336 or c. 341 by Eusebius of Nicomedia and other bishops. Eusebius was an adherent of a variety of Christianity associated with the Egyptian priest Arius who had argued that God the Son was subordinate to God the Father in the holy trinity. Arianism had been condemned as false doctrine – heresy – at the council of Nicaea, convened by Constantine in 325 immediately after his conquest of the eastern empire. In rejecting Arianism, the bishops at Nicaea decided that the Father and Son were identical, of the same substance (homoousion in Greek). Despite this, modified forms of Arius’ homoean theology – so-called from the Greek word for ‘likeness’, because it argued that the Father and Son were of like but not identical substance – continued to have considerable appeal, not least to Constantine, who was ultimately baptised by Eusebius of Nicomedia himself. Modern readers – including most professed Christians – are unused to and almost entirely indifferent to theology, and so find it very hard to understand why christological or trinitarian definitions aroused such passions in the early church. They did so because the consequence of getting the definition wrong – of believing the wrong thing about the persons of the trinity – was to compromise salvation. Because, after Constantine, the Roman state took on the task of guaranteeing Christian orthodoxy, the political cost of having one’s theological views condemned as heresy was very high. To understand the history of the fourth century, we need to take seriously both the political and the religious significance of theological disputes.

  The fact that the Nicene position was not universally accepted by several fourth-century emperors was a particular complication. Constantius Ⅱ, for one, was a convinced supporter of homoean belief and attempted to enforce it as orthodoxy, even though he was defied by many bishops in the empire who supported the Nicene definition of the trinity. Ulfila was a member of the homoean party, and as a consequence of that fact, the earliest evangelism among the Goths brought Christianity in its homoean form. The homoean tendencies of Gothic Christianity were heavily re-enforced by later events under Valens, a fervent homoean who diligently persecuted his Nicene opponents. When he agreed to let many Tervingi into the empire in 376, he may have made some form of conversion a prerequisite for admission, and he had certainly sponsored missions among them before 376.[101] Valens, however, was the last emperor to support homoean doctrine and, upon his death, an overwhelming Nicene reaction meant that any doctrine with Arian tendencies would thereafter remain a reviled heresy. Over the years, however, Gothic Christians remained committed to their homoean doctrine and its homoean liturgy. When, a hundred years after Ulfila’s first mission, a powerful Gothic kingdom existed inside the Roman empire, Arianism functioned both as a defining symbol of Gothic identity, and as a major obstacle to peaceful coexistence between Gothic kings and the Nicene Romans over whom they ruled.

  All the same, when his mission began, by 341 at the latest, Ulfila was simply adhering to the form of Christian doctrine endorsed as official orthodoxy by the emperor and those bishops whom he favoured. Ulfila was meant to serve as bishop for all the Christians already in the land of the Goths, but we have no idea how many such Christians there might have been, nor how many of them were descendants of former captives from the Roman empire and how many were converts won beyond the frontier. Within a decade of Ulfila’s arrival in Gothic territory, however, the number of Christians must have grown large enough to worry Gothic leaders, who associated the new religion with imperial power and therefore found the loyalty of Gothic Christians somewhat suspect. We do not know what sparked it, or indeed which Gothic leaders were involved, but eight years after Ulfila’s arrival in Gothia a persecution of Gothic Christians began. An offhand remark by bishop Cyril of Jerusalem seems to imply that this persecution produced martyrs, though none are known by name.[102] Ulfila and his followers were driven out of Gothic territory and into the empire, where they were granted lands in the province of Moesia Secunda, possibly around the city of Nicopolis.[103] Constantius addressed Ulfila as a new Moses, for leading his people out of servitude in their trans-Danubian Egypt.[104] Inside the empire, Ulfila became heavily involved in the ecclesiastical politics of Constantius’ reign and by the time of his death in 383 had been an influential theologian for many years.

  The Gothic Bible

  Ulfila and his followers in Moesia may have maintained close connections with
co-religionists beyond the Danube, but we cannot be sure because the evidence comes from the fifth-century church historian Sozomen, who often misunderstands or oversimplifies fourth-century events. It would make good sense if Ulfila continued to be involved in diplomacy between emperors and Goths, yet in the 370s, the bishop of Tomi on the Black Sea, and not Ulfila, probably had responsibility for all the Christians of Scythia – both the Roman province of that name and the broader Gothic region beyond the frontier.[105] Regardless of that, Ulfila’s greatest impact on Gothic history came through his invention of an alphabet in which the Gothic language could be written. He based this alphabet on the Greek, but included new letters which could represent sounds not found in Greek.[106] Ulfila had only one purpose in creating this alphabet – to translate into Gothic the text of the Bible, so as to aid the work of evangelization. He translated into Gothic the whole text of the Bible apart, we are told, from the books of Kings, ‘because these books contain the history of wars, while the Gothic people, being lovers of war, were in need of something to restrain their passion for fighting rather than to incite them to it’.[107] This work of translation may well have involved not just Ulfila, but his followers as well, and was probably a product of their time in Moesia, rather than the eight short years they had been able to spend in Gothia. Yet the work they did endured. In the Gothic kingdoms of the fifth and sixth centuries, this Gothic Bible was the basic text for the homoean liturgy, and fragments of the Gothic Bible have been transmitted to us from many different sources. Almost all of these remains come from the New Testament, while only small fragments of Old Testament texts still survive. These biblical texts, however, are the earliest substantial evidence we possess for the morphology and vocabulary of a Germanic language, and are thus of priceless value to modern philologists.