153- Adrianople

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Hello, and welcome to the history of Rome.

Episode 153,

Adrianople

In early 377 AD, after months of deprivation, frustration, and humiliation, the Goths finally snapped.

They had begged for entry into the Roman Empire because they thought they might find refuge there.

Instead, they had been unforgivably mistreated by the local authorities.

What was the point of fleeing from the Huns, who, and I can't believe I messed this up, used composite bows, not compound bows, because compound bows weren't invented until like the 1960s, and God help us all if the Huns had ever gotten a hold of compound bows.

Anyway, what was the point of fleeing from the Huns if the Romans were going to prove just as menacing a threat?

Was this a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire?

Not exactly, more a case of out of the frying pan and onto the ground next to the fire.

Still in danger, but not quite so immediately, especially given the military situation on the Danube frontier.

The Goths may have been weak from a year of flight and harassment, but as we saw last time, the Romans were not exactly in tip top shape themselves.

They were outnumbered locally, and run by a commander whose judgment has to be seriously questioned.

You'll recall from last week that following Lupikinus's botched attempt to blackmail the Goths into submission by taking their leaders hostage, the Tervingai leader Fritigern promised to go to his people and calm them down.

Instead, as much snapped as his fellow Goths, Fritigern stirred them to war.

The morning after the fatal banquet, Lupachinus led a Roman army out of Marcianopolis toward the Gothic camp, where he hoped to put down their rabble rousing once and for all.

But Fridigern and the Goths were now eager for a fight, and when Lupachinus arrived, he was hit full in the face by a bunch of really ticked-off Gothic warriors.

Like most of the engagements we'll run through over the next couple of years, the battle that ensued is not well described, but it appears that Lupachinus' army was overwhelmed, broken, and put to flight.

Once the Goths were ready to move on, there was literally no one around to stop them.

The immediate vicinity had been defended only by the Roman forces the Goths had just broken.

What garrisons remained on the frontier line were spread out and isolated.

Attempting to do something about the Goths without reinforcements would have been suicide, so these garrisons simply sat tight behind their walls and waited.

The word immediately went out to east and west that the Goths were loose in the central part of the empire.

In the east, Valens had to have greeted this news with a profanity-laced tirade.

I know that I would have anyway.

The emperor was gearing up for a major war against the Sassanids, and the last time he had checked, the Goths were supposed to be supplying troops for that major war.

Now they've gone berserk, smashed the local Roman army, and are running amok in Thrace?

What the hell happened?

As had been the case with Constantine II twice during his reign, Valens was left with a problem that could only be solved by moving in a major force to contain the damage right at the moment when he absolutely could not pull troops off the Syrian frontier.

Hell and damnation.

In the West, the young Emperor Gratian received word of the Gothic revolt and immediately wanted to do something something to help.

But in his rush to be helpful, he got a bit carried away.

Pretty soon, orders were flying around to the effect that the whole of the Rhine legions were to pack up at once and march east.

But proving that General Maributus, the one who had elevated Valentinian II, still had absolutely no confidence in Gratian's military judgment, and that Gratian's power at this point was not at all absolute, the Roman high command rewrote the orders in transit.

A major force from the Rhine could and should be detached to go fight the Goths, but to leave the Rhine unprotected, no matter how calm it had been the last few years, would have been dereliction of duty.

As we will soon see, the decision to leave the Rhine well defended would come back to do whatever the opposite of haunt the Romans is.

The Western expeditionary force that was sent was led by a general named Rickomir, who, so far as I can tell, is in no way related to the more famous Rickomir, who will deal with a bit down the road.

The movement of the Goths is no certain thing during 377, so we don't know exactly how the year went blow by blow.

But after running off Lupakinus, the Goths appear to have barreled south toward Adrianople, pillaging away to their heart's content.

After the humiliations of the previous year, first being chased off their land by the Huns, then being exploited by the Romans, you can bet that they had some rage to burn off, and mercy was not presently in their vocabulary.

Rickomir and his troops appear to have met up with an expeditionary force peeled off by Valens and sent in from the west.

Wary of an open confrontation, Fridigern responded to the news of the arrival of the new Roman forces by leading his people back north.

Rickomir followed until the Goths were once again contained to the lands near the border, whereupon the Roman commanders decided to make a play at ending the conflict right then and there.

They attacked the Gothic position, but were unable to break the barbarians, and the Battle of Adsilesis turned out to be nothing but a bloody draw.

It looked like a permanent solution to the Gothic problem was only going to come with the arrival of Valens, a fact that the Eastern Augustus was well aware of.

In the wake of the news that the Goths were loose, Valens, again like Constantine II, rushed an embassy off to Shapur to work out a peace treaty with the Persians that would free up his men to march west.

It took some time to get the terms worked out, and Valens had to agree to a treaty that was not at all favorable to Rome, but in the winter of 378, the two empires were once again technically at peace.

Valens then assigned a skeleton crew to man the eastern frontier and turned the rest of his army west.

But Valens knew instinctively that his own army might not be enough to overwhelm the Goths, and so he kept in communication with Gratian, constantly demanding more firepower from his younger colleague to help guarantee victory on the Danube.

Gratian, as we've already seen, did not need much convincing, and when Valens announced that he was finally heading west, Gratian gathered up a mobile field army of his own and marched them into Illyria.

By all accounts, then, it looked like the Goths were about to be hit hard from both sides, and that the Gothic war would go down in history as just another temporary barbarian raid rather than a full scale war.

But all the troop movement along the Rhine had caught the attention of the Alemanni, and they decided to take the opportunity to launch a raid of their own.

The troops Maributas had refused to redeploy did an excellent job slowing the progress of the Alemanni, but getting them back on the other side of the Rhine was going to take a more concerted effort.

Gratian was forced to march his men back out of Illyria to deal with the crisis, writing to Valens that as soon as the Rhine was resecured he would be back, and that it shouldn't take more than a couple of months.

This is normally where you'd expect to hear that, of course, it didn't take months for Gratian to push back the Alamanni, it took years, which left Valens to face the Goths alone.

But the thing is, it did only take a few months.

By the middle of summer 378, Gratian was back in Sirmium with his army, ready, willing, and able to help crush the Goths.

So the question is, why did Valens go off and face them alone?

Which is what he's about to do?

It's a good question, a very good question.

The frosty reception the emperor received from the people of Constantinople when he arrived there in May of 378 probably forms the beginning of the answer to that question.

Valens had never been popular in the capital, as evidenced by the ease with which Procopius had been able to take control of the city ten years before,

and Valens was now entering the capital a year and a half after the Goths had broken free of all restraints.

Where, the people of Constantinople wondered, have you been?

Valens was made acutely aware of the fact that the citizens of the city were not at all impressed by his handling of the situation thus far.

They wanted no more delays.

They wanted action.

They wanted Valence to go out and do something about the Goths.

And more than that, they wanted victory.

Serious leaders like to pretend that public opinion plays no role when serious men are making the serious decisions of state, but the fact is that it does, always has, and always will.

Compounding Valens' public relations problem was the news from the Western front that Gratian had just won a decisive victory against the Alemanni.

So now people were not just asking why Valens hadn't acted yet, they were asking why they were stuck with Valens at all.

If only Gratian were here, this whole mess would be cleaned up by now.

By the time Valens left Constantinople a few weeks later, this was all rattling around inside of his head.

And at this point, the emperor looks an awful lot like a man with something to prove.

And as we all know, men with something to prove often blunder off recklessly and wind up making a huge mess of things.

The other dynamic at work is that Valens was lulled into a false sense of security.

In June or July, an advance guard of 2,000 Romans moving west encountered a unit of Goths and defeated them easily in a quick skirmish.

News of the victory spurred the notion that the Goths were eminently beatable.

They just needed to be hit the right way.

Plus, as this was yet another victory that Valems himself was not present for, the skirmish likely also snowballed the emperor's own sense that he needed to get in on the action to prove that he too was a great military leader.

In late July or early August, Roman scouts reported that a force of around 10,000 Goths was was moving south toward Adrianople.

Though we sadly don't have reliable troop numbers for the Roman army, the assumption is that Valens' force was somewhere between 20 and 30,000 strong,

giving the Emperor a two or three to one advantage.

Why hesitate with an advantage like that?

Valens advanced to Adrianople and occupied the city.

At this point, it appears that Rickomir joined the Emperor at Adrianople to advise Valens on his next move.

The Western general was emphatic that Valens ought to wait for Gratian's reinforcement.

They were already in Illyria.

The only question was how quickly could they link up with Valens to help deliver the final blow.

Half of Valens' staff concurred with this opinion.

With the combined power of East and West, victory was practically guaranteed, so why risk defeat?

But Valens was more inclined to listen to the hawks on his staff.

They reminded the Emperor that he already had a massive numerical advantage, that he was operating out of a heavily fortified position, and that further delay just left time for the Goths to gather more men.

Hit them now before they are reinforced, and it'll be a walk in the park.

Plus, do we really need to remind you that if you wait for Gratian, that you'll be living with the fact that you had to be bailed out by your teenage nephew for the rest of your life?

Good luck with your reputation.

Valens' decision became apparent after Fritigern sent envoys about a peace deal.

The Emperor dismissed them without even offering terms.

So there it was.

Valens was suffering from a PR problem, did not want to share the glory of victory with Gratian, and believed that he had a sizable numerical advantage over the approaching Goths.

Except there was a huge, large, gigantic flaw in his rationale for forcing battle.

It was not 10,000 Goths approaching, it was more like 15 or 20,000.

The scouts had reported only on Fritigern's Tervingai infantry, which was indeed 10,000 strong.

What they had missed was the Grutungai cavalry, who were scattered across the countryside foraging for supplies.

Add them together, and Valens was planning on marching off to face an enemy that could possibly match him man for man.

And even if he did enjoy a slight numerical advantage, that was not going to make up for the totally surprising come out of nowhere appearance of the Gutungai cavalry in the middle of the battle.

Nothing drops your heart faster than the sudden appearance of unaccounted for enemy troops.

Am I right, fellas?

On the morning of August 9, Valens led his army out of Adrianople, leaving behind only the imperial treasury and a small company of soldiers to guard the city walls.

The rest he marched northwest toward the Goths.

And what a march it turned out to be.

Though we call what is about to ensue the Battle of Adrianople, the Romans marched for a good seven or eight hours before they finally made contact with the enemy, which did not exactly get the Romans off on the right foot.

Instead of meeting the Goths rested and ready, the Romans met them tired and panting in the afternoon heat.

But, whatever.

These were highly trained soldiers used to that kind of physical exertion.

It shouldn't be too big of a deal that our guys are exhausted and their guys are fresh.

Right?

Fridigern had deployed his men in a compact mass protecting their wagon train, which was drawn up on a low hill.

At this point, the Romans really did have a numerical advantage, so Fritigern's main objective was to stall for as long as possible until the Gruthungai cavalry could be rounded up.

He and his men lit fires to create a huge smokescreen to confuse the situation, and then repeatedly asked to negotiate a peace.

But Valens refused all entreaties, convinced that Fritigern was stalling to allow time for potential reinforcements to arrive, which is, of course, exactly what the Gothic king was doing.

But though he was eager for battle, that did not mean that Valens ever actually gave the order to charge.

In one of those funny little twists of fate, the Battle of Adrianople got going not because the opposing generals were ready for it too, but rather because an overzealous Allied king on the Roman right flank advanced without orders.

Before anyone could pull him back, the Battle of Adrianople was on.

At first, the surprising commencement of hostilities worked out just fine for the Romans.

The eager beaver allied king on the right was pushed back, but the Roman left surged forward and before too long had pressed the Goths all the way back to their wagons.

Capturing the baggage train meant taking the women and the children and all of the Gothic possessions.

Another half an hour, maybe, and the Romans would have won Adrianople outright, accidental start or no accidental start.

But then the cavalry arrived.

Literally, the cavalry arrived.

The Grutungai horsemen, who had not at all been taken into account when the Romans were making their war plans, suddenly exploded onto the scene and broadsided the Roman left, blowing right through the Roman cavalry which was supposed to be guarding the wing.

Now the Roman left, which had been so close to winning the battle the minute before, was now pushed back and became trapped between the Tervingai infantry, the Gruthungai cavalry, and the hill that the Goths had positioned their wagons on.

Crammed together, the Roman soldiers were too close to one another to maneuver, retreat, or even fight for their lives.

And so they started to be slaughtered.

From the moment the Gothic cavalry arrived, the Battle of Adrianople was over.

The Romans wound up leaving fully two-thirds of their army dead in the field, with only isolated pockets of soldiers escaping the carnage.

Valens himself was lost in the fighting.

No one knows exactly what happened to the emperor, but a later story has him being taken to a nearby farmhouse after being wounded and then dying when the Goths set fire to the building.

But no contemporary account mentions this incident.

In all likelihood, he simply fell anonymously in the thick of the fray and was never heard from again, becoming the second emperor in Roman history to die in battle, following the ignoble example set by Decius at a Britis a hundred and twenty five years before.

Valens was fifty years old and had ruled the eastern half of the empire for fourteen years.

It is difficult to overstate the significance of the Battle of Adrianople.

Though you cannot trace the fall of the Western Empire back to any single event, more people have tried to trace it back to Adrianople than just about anywhere else.

I should mention, though, that there is one area that the significance of Adrianople is often overstated.

For years, military historians repeated a line about how the decisive role played by the Gothic cavalry in the battle changed the nature of armed conflict in the West.

In this telling, Adrianople serves as the dividing line between the infantry battles of antiquity and the heavy cavalry battles of the medieval period.

That is, that once everyone saw how effective the horsemen could be, they dropped their old infantry model and picked up a shiny new cavalry model.

Except, as we all know, the Romans and everyone else were already well aware of how effective cavalry was by the time of of Adrianople and had long ago adopted a more horse-reliant model for their armed forces.

How long ago did I introduce Gallienus' mobile cavalry force?

Something like 40 episodes back, right?

To say that the world woke up on the morning after Adrianople and said, My God, cavalry is now the thing, is to just ignore a whole century's worth of history.

It's a minor point, but since it's a point often wrapped up in accounts of the battle, I figured I'd just go ahead and join in the debunking of it.

Now, as to the bits about the battle that can't be overstated, the sheer obliteration of Valens' army definitely rocked the balance of power in the Mediterranean and led to a total recalibration of Roman priorities.

Though the Roman Empire was still the biggest kid on the block, they were fast becoming just another kid on the block, if that makes any sense.

The Goths and the Huns, and pretty soon the Vandals and the Franks were all about to prove that they were more than a match for the Roman armies they faced.

This had happened once before, in the middle of the third century, and the Empire had almost cracked up as a result.

Only after a huge effort, a complete military and political reorganization, and a healthy dose of luck, did an intact Roman Empire manage to limp into the fourth century.

This time, however, they would not be so lucky, as this time only half the Empire would live to fight another day.

And that was just the long-term impact of the battle.

The short-term impact of the battle was almost too nightmarish to contemplate.

The Emperor was dead, his army destroyed.

The eastern frontier was now manned by just a skeleton crew.

The middle frontier was manned by no one at all.

A Gothic army was loose inside the empire that was now not just unchecked, but unbeatable.

North of the Danube the Huns were only picking up steam, and who knew when they were going to attack the empire directly?

And to top it all off, at this darkest of dark hours, Rome was ruled by a nineteen-year-old boy who had no inclination towards soldiering, and a seven-year-old boy who was, well, a seven-year-old boy.

Many historians find only the days after Canny to be remotely comparable in terms of the sheer mind-blowing disastrous of it all.

What were the Romans going to do now?

Next week, we will find out what the Romans are going to do now.

Without a capable heir ready to step in and rule the East, Gratian will be forced to look outside of the family and turn to the son of the man that his father Valentinian had turned to time and time again to mop up the worst messes in the Empire.

Stuck in a forced retirement in Spain, Theodosius the Younger will answer Gratian's call, somehow manage to steer the East away from utter destruction, and in the end become the last man to serve as the sole and undisputed master of the Roman Empire.

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