If it was a trap, it was perfectly laid and sprung on the plodding Valens. He had played into the Goths’ hands. The Goth cavalry, which had been roaming the countryside out of sight from the Roman scouts, appeared seemingly out of nowhere and fell against the Roman cavalry, an elite unit of the imperial guard, on Valens’s left flank. In all probability they had ridden down one of the almost-dry riverbeds to keep down the dust and hide their approach from the Romans. As they crashed into the left wing, the Roman cavalry was pressed back against the infantry in Valens’s center. The Romans were discovering the hard way that the Goth forces comprised probably 30,000 or more fighting men. But the veteran Roman horsemen stabilized themselves and led a thrust forward. The Romans were now winning, with the infantry pushing uphill toward the ring of wagons. But now the cavalry on the left wing was deeply engaged with the more numerous Goth cavalry, and Valens had no cavalry reinforcements to pour into the battle to force the issue. Clearly outmanned by the Goths, the battle soon swung once again to their side as they engulfed the left Roman wing.
The infantry legions were now left unprotected by the decimation of the left cavalry flank. Pressed back in on itself, they collapsed into a protective formation with their wooden shields and battled on. Using their long spears to hold off the enemy cavalry worked as long as the spears lasted, but when they were broken by the cavalry swords of the Goths the Romans were left with only their swords to stave off the swirling mass of Goth horsemen. The Romans were now sitting ducks. The battle continued until the bloodied mass of Roman soldiers finally broke and ran. The rout of the eastern emperor’s army was on.
A regiment of soldiers held in reserve joined the panicked flight instead of manning up and trying to rescue the emperor. Other key commanders who had fought before under Valens deserted him in the growing darkness, abandoning their emperor instead of going down fighting. Two-thirds of Valens’s army was killed, along with many of the generals.
Perhaps the simple, stubborn emperor, even after watching his generals abandon him and his soldiers massacred, refused to flee the field and was left dying on the ground surrounded by enemies. His imperial guard had left him at the mercy of his enemies. But they had been schooled in the Roman way of running an empire better than he. Valens’s body was never found.
The Goths — the very name reverberates through history to the present time. Oddly enough, the people themselves vanished shortly after sacking Rome in 410 under the leadership of their king Alaric. The Goths had originally made their name fighting an endless series of border wars against the Romans and had gained the dubious distinction of serving as slaves to many Roman households. Then the Huns overran them in their Black Sea homelands, and a great mass of Gothic refugees were allowed to enter the Roman Empire by crossing the Danube in 376. After crushing the undermanned legions of eastern emperor Valens at Adrianople, the Goths tried to make peace with the Romans in exchange for a slice of the empire to call their own. But after a series of treaties with the relentless Roman emperors they still didn’t have a homeland, and they took out their vengeance by sacking the great imperial capital. After all that they ended up with Visigothic territories in France and Spain as well as a sizable chunk of northern Italy for the Ostrogoths. The Goths who remained in Italy after the sacking of Rome were soon dispersed by more recent Teutonic invaders, and their influence and culture was almost completely washed away. In Spain and southeastern France the Goths soon found themselves at odds with the Roman popes, and the last of the Gothic kingdoms disappeared in the eighth century with the Muslim invasions of Spain.
WHAT HAPPENED AFTER
No Roman ever imagined this could have happened to one of their emperors. There were conflicting reports about what happened to the body of Valens. Some said he was burned alive. In any event, the body was never found, a humbling end for any man, let alone the leader of a superempire. The Romans found themselves suffering their worst defeat since Cannae at the hands of the Carthaginians seven hundred years earlier. The legacy of sacrificing everything to victory, established over the centuries by Roman leaders such as the general who had died spurring on his legions to victory in the climactic battle of the third Samnite War in 291 BC, which solidified Roman control over central Italy and put the Romans firmly on the path to empire, had vanished. And to the Goths no less.
Valens’s successor, Theodosius, a general appointed by Gratian as the new eastern emperor, gamely attacked the Goths but wasn’t able to defeat them. He was forced to make peace with them on their terms: they had pierced the empire and were there to stay. The Roman Empire was on its last legs — the defeat at Adrianople was overwhelming; the empire was mortally wounded. In 410 Rome was sacked by the Gothic king Alaric, who had been a boy among the refugees crossing the Danube back in 376.
By the end of the fifth century the empire was no more. Valens was committed to the black hole of history, on equal footing with the many others who had succumbed to Roman power. Such are the rewards of mercy when trying to run a superempire.
TWO.
THE FOURTH CRUSADE: 1198
Great debt, like great faith, or heat shimmering on desert sands, can distort reality. Debt can take hold of a person’s mind, twisting logic and converting no into yes, wrong into right.
At the dawn of the thirteenth century, religious fervor once again swept through the Christian population of Europe. Rallied by the pope and French nobles, crusaders set out for the fourth time in a century to capture Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Islamic infidels. Off they marched with the purest of intentions, untainted by the necessity of killing Muslims to achieve their holy goal.
This time out, however, the road to eternal salvation de-toured through Venice. The crusaders, eager to avoid the dusty overland route through Constantinople, hired a navy from the Venetians to sail them to the Holy Land. The emerging maritime power was controlled by the doge, a wily, money-loving, deal-making ruler, who had been elected for life by the aristocracy of the city. The doge’s sole mission in life was to enrich his beloved city- state. But the crusader army, lacking in gold-laden recruits from the finest families in Europe, quickly piled up a massive debt that the doge refused to forgive — not even for the greater glory of recapturing Jerusalem. His solution for relieving the crusaders of their unfortunate financial burden was to make a series of deals in which the crusaders first attacked a Christian city and then went on to sack, rape, and pillage the biggest, richest, most Christian city in Europe: Constantinople. The doge received his payment in full, but the holy warriors never set foot in the Holy Land.
THE PLAYERS
Prince Alexius — a footloose, wandering prince, the son of the deposed Byzantine emperor, bounced around Europe looking for a spare army to put him atop the throne of the Byzantines.
