Battle of Adrianople (378): Goths Defeat Emperor Valens

The Battle of Adrianople, fought on 9 August 378 near the city of Adrianople (modern Edirne) in Thrace, was one of the worst defeats in Roman history. A Gothic army, made up largely of refugees who had been admitted into the empire two years earlier, overwhelmed the eastern Roman field army and killed Emperor Valens. The disaster changed how Rome dealt with the peoples beyond its frontiers and is often seen as an early step on the road to the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

Background: refugees on the Danube

In the early 370s the Huns, a nomadic people from the steppe, attacked the Gothic groups living north of the Black Sea and the lower Danube. The Greuthungi were broken first, and then the Tervingi, the Goths closest to the Roman frontier. The story of that collapse is told in Arrival of the Huns in Europe.

In 376 a large body of Tervingi, led by Alavivus and Fritigern, appeared on the north bank of the Danube and asked Emperor Valens for permission to settle in the Roman province of Thrace. Valens, who was preparing for war with Persia in the east, agreed. Gothic recruits would strengthen his armies, and settled farmers would pay taxes. The Goths were ferried across the river in great numbers; ancient writers could not count them, and modern estimates vary widely.

Some Goths already knew Roman ways. Many had been converted to a form of Christianity through the work of the missionary bishop Wulfila, whose story is told in Wulfila’s Gothic Bible. Valens himself favoured the same “Arian” or Homoian branch of the faith, which rejected the Nicene creed.

From asylum to rebellion

The crossing quickly went wrong. The Roman commanders in Thrace, Lupicinus and Maximus, were supposed to feed and settle the newcomers but instead exploited them. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus, a former army officer writing in the 380s and 390s, accuses them of selling dog meat to starving Goths in exchange for slaves, at the rate of one dog for one person.

Meanwhile the Greuthungi under their leaders Alatheus and Saphrax, who had been refused entry, crossed the river anyway while Roman troops were busy guarding the Tervingi. In 376 or early 377 Lupicinus invited Fritigern and Alavivus to a banquet at Marcianople (near modern Devnya in Bulgaria) and attempted to seize or kill them. Fritigern escaped, Alavivus disappears from the record, and the Goths routed Lupicinus’s troops outside the city.

What followed was a full-scale war across the Balkans. Gothic bands, joined by runaway slaves, miners and other discontented groups, plundered Thrace. In 377 Roman forces fought an indecisive battle with them at a place called Ad Salices (“By the Willows”) and tried to pen them in north of the Haemus (Balkan) mountains, but the Goths broke out after recruiting Huns and Alans as allies.

The road to battle

Valens made peace with Persia and returned to Constantinople, arriving on 30 May 378. His nephew Gratian, emperor in the West, promised to bring the western field army to help, but was delayed by a war against the Alamanni on the upper Rhine. Gratian defeated them at Argentovaria in Alsace in the spring of 378 and then marched east.

In the summer of 378 Valens moved his army to Adrianople. His general Sebastianus had already won a small victory over Gothic raiders near the city, which encouraged the emperor. Scouts reported that the Goths near Nike numbered only about 10,000 fighting men, a serious underestimate because much of the Gothic cavalry was away foraging.

At a council of war, some officers urged Valens to wait for Gratian, whose advance guard under Richomeres had already arrived with a letter asking him to hold back. Others, including Sebastianus, urged an immediate attack. Ammianus suggests Valens did not want to share the glory of victory with his young nephew, who had recently won a celebrated battle of his own. Valens decided to fight.

The battle of 9 August 378

At dawn on 9 August the Roman army left its baggage and treasury at Adrianople and marched towards the Gothic camp, a large defensive circle of wagons (a “laager”). It was a hot day, and the soldiers arrived in the early afternoon tired and thirsty. The Goths lit fires on the dry plain so that smoke and heat would add to their discomfort.

Fritigern sent envoys, including a Christian priest, to discuss terms. Ammianus believed he was playing for time until the Greuthungian cavalry could return. Negotiations over an exchange of hostages were still going on, with Richomeres volunteering to go to the Gothic camp, when Roman units on the right, led by Bacurius and Cassio, attacked without orders. The battle began before the Roman army had fully deployed.

At this moment the Gothic cavalry under Alatheus and Saphrax, together with Alan horsemen, arrived “like a thunderbolt”, in Ammianus’s phrase, and struck the Roman flank. The Roman left wing had pushed forward as far as the wagons but was left unsupported and was driven back. The infantry in the centre were then pressed together so tightly that, according to Ammianus, they could hardly raise their arms. As the cavalry fled, the foot soldiers were surrounded and cut down.

The slaughter continued until nightfall. Valens took refuge among a few units that still held their ground, but he was killed in the confusion. His body was never found. Ammianus records two stories: that he died of an arrow wound among ordinary soldiers, or that he was carried to a farmhouse which the Goths, unaware of who was inside, burned to the ground.

Key people and numbers

• Valens (emperor 364–378): co-emperor with his brother Valentinian I, ruler of the East. He admitted the Goths in 376 and led the army to defeat.
• Fritigern: the leading Tervingian chieftain, an able commander and negotiator who held the Gothic coalition together.
• Alatheus and Saphrax: leaders of the Greuthungi, whose cavalry decided the battle.
• Gratian (western emperor 367–383): Valens’s nephew, whose army arrived too late.
• Sebastianus and Trajanus: senior Roman generals, both killed in the battle.
• Ammianus Marcellinus: the Greek-born Roman officer and historian whose Book 31 is the main source for the campaign.

By the numbers

All of these figures, except the date and Ammianus’s statements, are modern reconstructions and are debated.

Consequences

The immediate aftermath was chaos. The Goths tried to storm Adrianople, where the imperial treasury was kept, but failed. They then advanced on Constantinople, where they were driven off, partly by a unit of Arab (Saracen) cavalry in Roman service; the city’s later fortifications are described in Theodosian Walls. Gothic bands continued to raid the Balkans for years.

Gratian appointed the Spanish general Theodosius as emperor of the East on 19 January 379. Theodosius rebuilt the army, recruiting heavily among barbarian peoples, but could not defeat the Goths outright. On 3 October 382 a treaty settled them south of the Danube as federates (foederati). Unlike earlier settlers, they were not broken up and scattered: they kept their own leaders and communities and served in Roman wars as allied contingents.

That arrangement became a model, and a problem. The Gothic federates later formed the core of the Visigoths, who under Alaric sacked the city of Rome itself in 410, as described in Sack of Rome (410).

Myths and facts

Myth: Adrianople marked the triumph of cavalry over infantry. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century military historians, notably Charles Oman, presented the battle as the moment heavy horsemen replaced the legion and the Middle Ages began. Modern historians reject this. The Gothic army was mostly infantry, the cavalry charge succeeded because of surprise and Roman disorder, and Roman armies continued to rely on infantry for centuries.

Myth: the battle ended the Roman Empire. The Eastern Empire recovered, and the West survived for almost another century. Adrianople was a severe blow, not a death sentence.

Fact: contemporaries saw it as a catastrophe. Ammianus compared it with Cannae, Hannibal’s great victory of 216 BC. Christian writers of the Nicene faith, such as Orosius, interpreted Valens’s death by fire as divine punishment for his support of Arianism.

Timeline

• 376: Tervingi under Fritigern and Alavivus are allowed to cross the Danube into Thrace.
• 376–377: The Marcianople banquet incident turns Gothic grievances into open revolt.
• 377: Indecisive battle at Ad Salices; Goths break out of the Balkan mountains with Hun and Alan allies.
• 378, spring: Gratian defeats the Alamanni at Argentovaria; Valens reaches Constantinople on 30 May.
• 378, 9 August: Battle of Adrianople; Valens is killed.
• 379, 19 January: Theodosius I is proclaimed emperor of the East.
• 382, 3 October: Treaty settles the Goths as federates inside the empire.

Why it matters

Adrianople showed that a Roman emperor and his main army could be destroyed by a people the empire had invited in. The peace that followed allowed an armed, self-governing barbarian group to live inside Roman territory for the first time on such a scale. That model of settlement, repeated and contested over the next century, helped transform the Roman West into a patchwork of Germanic kingdoms.