Balkans without bothering to consult Valens. Troops from these provinces would have helped solve some of Valens’s manpower problems with the Persians and the Goths. But Valens, instead of taking a page from the emperor handbook and murdering the lot of them, consolidating the empire under his rule, labored on like a good farmer.
Facing numerous enemies with few friends, the problems of the empire were starting to overwhelm the farmer-cum-emperor. Preoccupied with his Persian problems, the Goths, who Valens thought he had handled with his mercy-riddled treaty, were turning out to be a problem again.
WHAT HAPPENED: OPERATION “STUPIDUS MAXIMUS”
In 376 the weakened Goths suddenly found themselves at the mercy of the Huns, a terrifying horde who blitzed out of the eastern steppes, deploying very prescient skills of mobile warfare, and pushed the Goths back up against the Danube, the northeastern border of the empire in the Balkans. The Goths were caught between the Huns, apparently unaware that such a thing as mercy existed, and the Romans, whose survival depended on the maintenance of a mercy-free zone, gods forbid. The Goths were desperately looking for a break.
The mass of Goths — men, women and children — in a group perhaps as large as 200,000, had created a giant refugee crisis for Valens. Always looking for some extra troops, Valens decided to let the barbarians cross the Danube… but only those of the clan of chieftain Fritigern, who was an opponent of Athanaric, the king with whom Valens had made his earlier midstream treaty. It was a bad decision, driven by the need to solve his manpower problem against the Persians. The other Goth tribes, unfortunately, would have to stay on the other side and be exterminated by the Huns.
The Goths, welcomed into the empire, imagined themselves not as temporary immigrants or landless refugees but standing on a somewhat equal footing with the Romans, who promised them land and food in exchange for the inevitable draft notices for the young men. But the merciless Roman soldiers knew better how to handle the refugees than did their emperor. Without the usual order to slaughter the hungry barbarians, the frontier troops, headed by General Duke Maximus, created a black market among the impoverished refugees by exchanging dog meat for slaves. So desperate were the Goths they even exchanged their children for moldy bread and wine of a poor vintage. But the Roman legions assigned to the sector were so undermanned that when the refugees revolted over their rough treatment, the Romans pushed them farther into the empire to isolate them. The Romans patted themselves on the back for this clever strategy. But it now left the border undefended, and the Goths of the Greuthungi tribe snuck over.
Meanwhile, the scheming Roman generals, still apparently unconvinced of the wisdom of inviting barbarians into the empire and eager to roll the Goths like every other defenseless barbarian strolling down the via, invited the Goth leaders to a feast in the city of Marcianople. Their plan was to use an old Roman trick of inviting the Goth leaders to a feast, which would also happen to be their last meal on earth. While the restless and hungry Goth masses stuck outside the city gates began to revolt against the Roman overlords, inside the city the wily Romans took out the Goth guards and cornered Fritigern, their leader. The Roman leader of the province, Count Lupicinus, put a knife to Fritigern’s throat. They had him. But mercy once again reared its ugly head. Perhaps infected from a recent meeting with Valens, Lupicinus pulled back. The quick-thinking Fritigern convinced the Romans to let him go in order to calm his people. But now Fritigern pulled a fast one and, once among his people outside the gates of Marcianople, flipped on his ungracious hosts. The Romans formed up ranks and came out for what was expected to be a walkover, but they found themselves outmanned and on the business end of a good whipping. Lupicinus retreated into the city with his surviving troops. The Goths were now rampaging inside the empire without constraint, their forces bolstered by other barbarians streaming over the borders and spiced with deserters from the barbarian-riddled Roman legions. In 376 Valens was stuck on the eastern edge of the empire tangling with the Persians when he got wind of the problems with the Goths. He made a quick truce with the Persians and sent a request to his thankless nephew Gratian, now emperor of the west, for help. Bogged down in Mesopotamia, Valens needed a year to trek back to handle the uprising himself, all the while waiting in desperation for the promised surge from his nephew. In the meantime, Valens ordered his generals on the scene to attack the Goths with the few Roman legions he had in the area. The understaffed Roman legions, many of them poorly trained border guards, were defeated time and time again by the resilient Goths, who continued their rampage.
By the time Valens arrived in 377 the high-stepping Goths stood beneath the gates of Constantinople. Valens, not eager to linger in the despised city that had supported the rebel wannabe Procopius against him, cobbled together enough troops, including some formerly peace-loving monks who had been conscripted into the manpower-short eastern empire army. Valens managed to break out of the city and carve out some room to maneuver for his army on the plains west of the city. His plan was to stop the Goths from occupying the east–west road, where the hoped-for troop surge from Gratian would arrive.
Out in the western empire, meanwhile, Gratian was playing emperor by the book, which included showing no mercy for family who had become rivals, let alone barbarians seeking a warm, dry spot inside the empire. Gratian set out to help his uncle but delayed his march east to take a few whacks at some Germanic invaders who had made the mistake of crossing the Rhine. Gratian’s handlers insisted on leisurely slaughtering them to the last man to really make the moment of his first great triumph shine before moving on down the road to help Valens. Gratian’s only timely effort was to dispatch a small force down the Danube in boats, which unfortunately landed a few hundred miles away from Valens and his 20,000 troops camped west of Constantinople. Gratian’s troops proved to be of no help except to inform Valens that the bulk of long-awaited reinforcements would be late due to his victorious slaughter of the Germanic hordes. Now Valens really was being outshone by his young nephew.
Meanwhile, the Gothic king Fritigern had assembled his forces northwest of Constantinople outside the town of Adrianople in the western spur of modern-day Turkey. Valens, impatient of waiting for reinforcements from the ungrateful teenager Gratian, was eager to conclude his own triumphant campaign with a sound drubbing of the annoying Goths. Valens held a council of war and was encouraged by a report that a Goth force of approximately 10,000 soldiers had been spotted marching south through a mountain pass to take Adrianople. If they succeeded, Valens would be cut off from his supply base.
Valens’s commanders were split on their recommendation: some wanted to fight immediately while others advised waiting for the reinforcements to ensure an overwhelming victory. But Valens finally gave in to his anger, jealousy, and impatience. He decided to vent his frustrations as only an emperor can. The surge from Gratian was nowhere in sight. But he didn’t care. The time had arrived to punish once and for all the sneaky, border-crossing, backstabbing Goths. Valens’s big moment had arrived. With his force of approximately 20,000 troops, he headed out to cut off the Goths at the pass.
The day before the battle Fritigern made an offering of peace in exchange for Thrace, which was a nice chunk of the eastern Balkans bordering the Black Sea. Valens, feeling an emperor level of confidence, turned it down. Perhaps Fritigern’s offer of peace was taken as a sign by Valens that he had caught his enemy in a weak position. Valens decided to attack the next day, August 9.
In AD 378 Valens marched his troops seventeen kilometers north through the dusty heat of the countryside outside of Adrianople. The summer heat would have been ferocious. Once he arrived in front of the enemy in the early afternoon, he found the Goth army inside a giant wagon circle, the custom of this mobile tribe. The well-rested Goths seemed to be sitting ducks. They could be destroyed at Valens’s leisure.
As the two armies stared each other down Valens rejected another peace offering. One of the previous Goth offers from Fritigern had included a secret letter offering a truce but indicating the necessity of the Romans to show force to the Goths, which would give Fritigern the necessary cover to explain his surrender. Valens, not trusting him, had refused then and anticipating victory, refused now.
One can assume the hot and thirsty legions took a breather, drank water, sought out shade. But now another offer to negotiate was made. This one included an exchange of high-ranking prisoners as a first step in the negotiations, a typical arrangement to keep the two armies facing each other over a few hundred feet of meadow from tangling. Valens accepted it, perhaps now considering the fatigue of his troops and for some reason giving Fritigern the benefit of a doubt about his previous offer of tanking in front of the arrayed might of the Roman legions. As his legions arranged themselves in battle order to finish acting out the surrender ploy, a high-ranking hostage from Valens’s entourage prepared to deliver himself to the Goths to start the negotiations.
