151- Bursting a Blood Vessel

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Hello, and welcome to the history of Rome,

episode 151: Bursting a Blood Vessel.

After he defeated Procopius in May of 366 AD, the Eastern Augustus Valens never again faced a serious threat from inside his half of the Empire.

By passing that initial test, the word appears to have gone out that he was here to stay and that everyone ought to just get along with their business.

However, though he faced no more internal threats during his years governing the Eastern Empire, that did not mean that Valens was not constantly rushing around dealing with external threats.

Just as his brother dealt with some new crisis every other week in the West, so too did Valens deal with some new crisis every other week in the East.

Broadly speaking, however, there were two big issues that occupied most of his attention what to do about the Goths and what to do about the Sassanids.

Dealing with both at the same time would prove to be a tricky proposition, and eventually deep concentration on the latter would lead to a mishandling of the former, and then, yeah, you know the rest.

Valen spent the rest of 366 enjoying relative peace in his half of the empire, but in the spring of 367 it was right back into the thick of things.

First up on the docket was a punitive campaign against the Goths.

Now, as you may have noticed, the Goths have receded into the background a bit after being featured prominently during the crisis of the third century.

Successive defeats at the hands of Gallianus and Claudius and Aurelian in the 260s and 270s AD had brought an end to their high flying partying, and so they had withdrawn back across the Danube to nurse their hangovers.

Since those heady days, the Goths had been acting more as trading partners with and mercenaries for the Romans rather than blood enemies of the Romans.

But that was all about to change.

Not because the Goths were feeling particularly belligerent again, but because desperate times were about to call for desperate measures.

Shortly after Valens became emperor, smallish Gothic raiding parties had begun to make incursions into Roman territory, a problem Valenci dealt with by transferring two legions into the affected area.

These two legions are famous to us, however, not because of the battles they fought with the Goths, but because, as they were passing through Constantinople, they were the two legions talked into supporting Procopius' revolt.

When the usurper successfully captured Constantinople, he began casting about for allies, and in an interesting twist of fate, those very same Goths the legions had been sent to subdue turned out to be keen on an alliance.

They had always been on good terms with the Constantinians, and with Procopius waving Constantine's standard around, supporting his cause seemed to the Goths like the right thing to do.

If he won, then they would be well positioned for years to come.

Except Procopius didn't win, and after Valens re-secured Constantinople, the Emperor was eager to show the Goths just how poor their position now was.

With both the initial raids and the support of Procopius to revenge, Valens crossed the Danube in the spring of 367 with retribution on the brain.

But retribution was not the only thing on Valens' mind.

He launched himself across the Danube not just because he wanted to teach the Goths a lesson, but also because he wanted to make sure that the Goths would not continue to stir up trouble when the Emperor inevitably headed back to the far east to deal with the Sassanids.

Recall that before he had to return to Constantinople to deal with Procopius, that Valens had been on his way to Syria.

Shapur was still riding high from his victory over Julian, and, as you'll remember, the Persian king had taken Jovian surrender to mean that he now had carte blanche to do whatever he wanted.

Territories had been invaded, the pro-Roman king of Armenia had been captured and then tortured and then executed.

The border with Persia was where the real action really was.

The campaign against the Goths was just a preliminary sideshow.

Hopefully a personally satisfying sideshow, but a sideshow nonetheless.

Driving the point home that the Far East was the critical theater of Valens' territory, at the same time that the Emperor was crossing the Danube, Shapur was invading Iberia.

Not the Iberian Peninsula, of course, but the for some reason identically named region in the Caucas Mountains, roughly lining up with modern Georgia.

In addition to Shapur's general goal of simply controlling more disputed territory, his invasion of Iberia was also undertaken with the specific goal of capturing the dead king of Armenia's son.

The young prince was named, and I don't mean to sound rude, but frankly, I find this name hilarious, Pap,

and he had fled to Armenia following his father's death and was in hiding in one of the main cities of Iberia.

Completely eliminating the pro-Roman royalty of Armenia was obviously in Shapur's interests.

So the Persian king laid siege to the city that sheltered young Prince Pap.

Meanwhile, back in the central central part of the empire, Valens was finding his campaign against the Goths to be much less satisfying than he had hoped.

As soon as the legions crossed over, the majority of the Goths, or at least those Goths who had sided with Procopius, fled up into the Carpathian Mountains to avoid a confrontation.

They were led up into the mountains by a charismatic leader named Athenaric, who will, just so you know, pop up repeatedly in our story as we move forward.

At least partially aiding Valens in his hunt for Athenaric, though, was another Gothic leader, who will also pop up again and again as our story unfolds, a fierce rival of Athenaric's named Fridigern.

Despite their mutual desire to see Athenaric in chains, though, there was just no upside to marching into the mountains to track down some scattered Goths, and so the campaign of 367 turned out to be an empty affair for Valens and Fridigern.

The next year was even more frustrating, as heavy rains flooded the Danube and made crossing over an impossibility.

Still wanting to ensure that the Middle Empire would remain safe when he eventually headed east, though, Valens hung around and helped direct a complete reconstruction of the region's fortification network.

It was while he was overseeing this project that a beleaguered refugee showed up at his doorstep begging for aid.

The refugee was, of course, Pap.

The prince had managed to slip through Shapur's siege line and was now requesting Valens do something about the illegal Persian aggression.

Valens agreed that something needed to be done, and further agreed that with his father dead, that Pap was the rightful king of Armenia.

The Emperor emperor ordered a couple of legions to escort Pap back to Armenia and see him safely restored to the throne as soon as the next spring arrived.

In the spring of 369, then, the focus of the emperor was clearly shifting toward a confrontation with the Persians.

With the Danube's water receded, he once again crossed over the river with the overriding goal of quickly bringing Athenar to some kind of battle, defeating him, and then working out a peace agreement.

It didn't have to be the world's greatest peace agreement, but Valens did want it to come after some kind of Roman victory, for obvious political reasons.

Obliging the Emperor's strategy, this time Athenaric did not flee into the mountains, and Valens was able to track him down.

An oversized skirmish broke out, the Romans drove off the Goths, and Valens declared victory.

He then headed back across the Danube to Roman territory, and summoned Athenar to come talk terms like a good little supplicant.

But the Gothic leader, defeated, but not cowed, refused to cross the river, stating that he had sworn an oath never to set foot in Roman territory.

Obviously, it was out of the question for Valens to cross back over the river, as it simply wouldn't do for the Emperor of the Romans to go call on some Gothic chieftain, so the two sides were at an impasse.

But since Valens wanted to get a deal done as quickly as possible, he was amenable to a compromise solution, and so the two leaders met on an island in the middle of the Danube, which allowed both to save face.

Once they were across the table from each other, the two leaders hammered out peace terms, which was good, but those terms in the end wound up hurting both sides, which was bad.

Athenaric would no longer be required to provide troops for the Roman Empire, and in return, the Romans would no longer recognize the free trade rights of Athenaric's Goths.

The short-term result of the deal was that the Goths ceased hostilities, and Valens was able to turn his attention east with something resembling peace of mind.

The long-term result of the deal was that Valens had cut himself off from a major source of new recruits for the army, and the Gothic economy was devastated by all the duties, restrictions, and taxes Roman merchants were now able to throw up in their faces.

But that was for later.

For now, Valens was finally able to turn his attention to the Persian question.

When Pap arrived in Armenia backed by Roman muscle, the plan was for him to be simply placed back on the throne.

But things turned out to be a wee bit harder than that.

When Shapur heard what the Romans were up to, he gathered up a full army and invaded Armenia, easily putting the couple of thousand Roman soldiers who had served as Pap's escort to flight, and the would-be king fled after them.

With the Romans gone, Shapur went a little berserk and laid waste to the Armenian countryside.

Maybe in an effort to get the people of Armenia to blame Pap and the Romans for the devastation, you know, one of those stop supporting the guerrillas and we'll stop bombing your cities kind of things.

Or maybe it was just out-and-out terror tactics.

Whichever, after Valens concluded his peace with the Goths, he was able to muster a larger force, and in the spring of 370, he sent them to put Pap on the throne of Armenia.

This far larger force was quite a bit more intimidating than the previous escort had been, and the Romans succeeded this time in retaking the western half of the country and declaring Pap king.

Over the course of the next year, the Roman army pushed steadily east until by mid-371 they were knocking on the door of Iberia.

Shapur made a stand near the border between Armenia and Iberia, but in the ensuing battle he was beaten, but not necessarily decisively, by the Roman army.

At this point, Shapur found himself in much the same place that Valens had just found himself with regard to the Goths.

That is, what he needed right now more than anything else was a quick peace treaty.

In the far east of the Sasanid kingdom, the Kushans had revolted, sending the region into chaos.

Shapur needed to break off hostilities in the west so he could go deal with the far less stable crisis in the east.

The Persian king and the Roman high command at the scene came to terms establishing the pro-Roman neutrality of Armenia, the independence of Iberia, and, treaty in hand, Shapur raced toward India.

This would have all been well and good for Valens, had not Pap turned out to be a bit of a despicable jackass.

Upon assuming control of Armenia, Pap proceeded to alienate the ruling aristocracy, the common people, and the Roman ambassadors.

At some point between 371 and 374, things with Pap came to a head, with the young king's execution of a bishop possibly serving as a breaking point.

Valens decided to take care of the problem once and for all.

Sick of getting nothing but aggravating reports about what Pap had done now, Valens decided to just start over.

He ordered his men in Armenia to arrest Pap and execute him.

No one in the country was really a fan of Paps, so I'm sure Valens was figuring an assassination wouldn't really be too much of an issue.

Except that when Shapur found out about it, he decided to make it an issue.

The treaty he had signed with Rome clearly stated that Pap was the rightful ruler of Armenia, and that the Romans would stay out of the country's internal affairs.

There was a line between Armenia being pro-Roman but independent and Armenia being merely an extension of the empire, and Valens had just crossed it.

So, with the cushions subdued around 374, the Persian king marched back across his kingdom to once again square off with the Romans over the issue of Armenia.

Which brings us to the fateful year of 375 AD.

You will recall from last week that an invasion of Illyria by the Quadi and Sarmatians had dragged Valentinian over to the Danube frontier from his base along the Rhine, and that shortly after his arrival, the barbarian raiders were begging for leniency.

The Emperor was in no mood to just let them off the hook, though, and so, over the course of 375, he prosecuted a little war north of the Danube to punish the tribes for their aggression.

We left off, you'll remember, with the Emperor finally accepting the Quadi's apologies after he had kicked them around some.

And specifically, we left off with the Emperor agreeing to a face-to-face meeting with the Quadi ambassadors before they went home.

Now, as we've seen over and over again, Valentinian was a man of pride and a man who was very protective of the awesome stature of the Roman Emperor, and he was highly sensitive to any perceived slights to his authority.

Not to engage in armchair psychology, but given how often in the last ten years his will had been thwarted, his demands had been unmet, and his orders had gone unfulfilled, I think perhaps Valentinian had drifted into oversensitivity about perceived slights to his authority.

Anyway, for whatever reason, Valentinian made an exception to his general rule of not meeting with foreign ambassadors.

And what a fatal exception it turned out to be.

The meeting began well enough, with the Emperor berating the Quadi for their transgressions, and the Quadi taking it, and saying, Thank you, sir, may I have another.

But then, when it was the Quadi's turn to speak, they did not do what they were supposed to do, and beg humbly for the Emperor's continued benevolence.

Instead, they took the opportunity to reiterate their original argument, that they had been provoked to war first by the building of Roman forts in their territory, and then by the murder of their king.

Upon hearing this, Valentinian's blood began to boil.

As emperor, he had already determined the guilt and innocence of the parties involved, and he had determined that the Quadi were guilty, and Marsalianus was innocent.

To continue to argue otherwise was an insult to his Majesty the Emperor.

But then the Quadi ambassadors went on.

They reminded the emperor that the Quadi were not some monolithic thing.

They were a loose confederation of independent tribes.

That while the representatives present fully intended to hold up their end of the bargain on behalf of the specific tribes they represented, they couldn't necessarily guarantee that other tribes not represented would do the same.

They mentioned this because they didn't want to get smacked around for something somebody else had done, which was an understandable point.

But what Valentinian, already pretty ticked off, heard was, oh yeah, by the way, the treaty we just signed isn't actually worth a damn, and we're just going to keep doing whatever we want to do.

This was too much for the Emperor.

He got up and began angrily berating the quad I ambassadors for their insolence, picking up steam as he went along until he was in the middle of a full-blown screaming rant.

At the peak of this tirade, the emperor suddenly paused, and then he fell over.

Court officials rushed to his side and attempted to revive him, but to no avail.

Valentinian had worked himself up into such a towering rage that he had suffered a fatal stroke.

He was fifty-four years old and had ruled the empire for almost twelve years.

His death is by far my most favorite of all imperial deaths.

As I mentioned, when Valentinian first became emperor, his legacy is difficult to assess, in no small part because Ammianus Marcellinus, one of our prime sources for this period, clearly doesn't like Valentinian one bit.

Marcellinus constantly paints Valentinian as an arrogant, uneducated boar, which he may well have been, but is it safe to assign all the bad things that happened during his reign to the Emperor's lack of character?

Maybe yes and maybe no,

but we just really don't have that much to go on.

What I think is clear, though, is that Valentinian's reign was a transitional period for the West, not at all in a good way, and that the Emperor did very little to help turn the situation around.

He seems to have spent a lot of time acting like he was living in the age of the Antonines, when the Empire was well run and all-powerful.

But he wasn't.

He was living in a time when the Empire's grip over the provinces was slipping, and, while still powerful, could not simply do whatever it wanted to do.

There were chinks in the armor all over the place, and instead of recognizing that obvious fact, Valentinian appears to have walked around like the Roman Empire was still invincible.

That said, he was effective, eventually, in dealing with the crises that erupted during his reign.

The Alemanni were pushed back, the loss of Britain was staved off, the problems in North Africa, first a corrupt administration and then a local revolt, were both resolved, and just now the Quadi and Sarmatians were back on the north side of the Danube, even if their attitude had just accidentally killed him.

In none of these instances did Valentinian get it right the first time, but in all of these instances he got it right eventually, and he does deserve credit for that.

As I just said, Valentinian's reign was a period of transition for the West, as intensified attacks from the outside exposed the weaknesses of the Empire's defenses, and poor administration on the inside exposed the weaknesses of the Empire's government.

Then, to top it all off, Valentinian's death would mark one of the greatest transitions of all, the transition away from strong imperial leadership.

Never again would the people of the West enjoy a powerful emperor ruling in their midst.

Mostly what they got after Valentinian was a series of weak puppets, hiding out behind a ring of swamps that surrounded Ravenna, afraid to leave their palaces and afraid to face the destruction of their empire.

We will have a great deal more to say about how and why the Western Empire fell apart, but one of the things definitely kicking around in there was the total failure of the imperial system to produce emperors worth a damn in the West.

I don't think this was the biggest reason for the fall, but I do think it was one of the secondary issues that compounded the Empire's larger problems.

Meanwhile, Valentinian's death could not have come at a worse time for his brother Valens.

If there was ever a moment when two strong emperors were needed, then right now was that moment.

In addition to the fact that war with the Sassanids was looming once again, a revolt had broken out in Cilicia.

Preparing for war in the east meant reassigning troops away from the Danube.

The revolt in Cilicia meant reassigning more troops away from the Danube.

Pretty soon the northern frontier was dangerously undergarrisoned.

Then the craziest thing happened.

An army of Goths began to mass on the north bank of the Great River.

But they weren't looking for a fight.

They were asking for asylum.

The fearsome Goths asking for asylum?

Who or what could they possibly be asking for asylum from?

Next week we will answer those questions by introducing the unstoppable juggernaut known as the Huns, whose irresistible Western migration was about to completely rearrange the face of the Roman Empire.

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