Adrianople

On 11 January 381 an old Goth named Athanaric walked through the gates of Constantinople. Twelve years earlier he had made peace with the Emperor Valens on a boat in the middle of the Danube, because he had sworn never to set foot on Roman soil. Now his own people had driven him out, the emperor he had treated with was dead, and a new one, Theodosius, met him at the walls. Jordanes says the old judge looked at the ships and the crowds and said he had heard of all this and not believed it. He was dead within two weeks, and Theodosius gave him a state funeral.

Four years earlier the empire had lost an emperor and most of its eastern field army to the Goths. Now it was burying one of their leaders with the honors of a Roman general. Something had changed, and the question of this book is what.

The Battle of Adrianople has been called the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire, the death of the legion, and the first victory of the medieval knight. This book is not about an afternoon. It is about the eighteen years, 364 to 382, in which a routine decision on the Danube became a war, the war destroyed an army, and the peace that followed put a Gothic people inside the frontier on terms Rome had never offered anyone.

From a Boat on the Danube to a Treaty in Constantinople

The story begins with two brothers from Pannonia, Valentinian and Valens, chosen by their officers in 364 and dividing the empire between them. Valens, the younger and the lesser, took the East, Persia and the lower Danube: a conscientious administrator with no military training who nearly gave up the throne when a kinsman of Julian revolted in his second year. The Goths had sent that rebel three thousand men, and Valens never forgot it. His war against them ended in 369 on the boat with Athanaric and a peace that cut off the trade and subsidies the Goths had lived on since Constantine.

Then the Huns arrived. The Romans knew almost nothing about them; the book spends a chapter on what they did to the Gothic world beyond the river: a kingdom broken, Athanaric's night defense on the Dniester overrun, and the greater part of the Tervingi, under Fritigern and Alavivus, marching to the Danube to ask for admission. Valens, at Antioch and busy with Persia, agreed. The Roman fleet ferried them across in the summer of 376 on his order.

What followed on the riverbank is the hinge of the book. The two officers responsible for feeding the Goths let them starve and sold them dogs for meat, at a rate Ammianus Marcellinus gives as one dog for one person handed over as a slave. A banquet at Marcianople meant to seize the Gothic leaders turned into the first battle, and a year of fighting in Thrace settled nothing. In August 378 Valens brought the eastern field army up to Adrianople while his nephew Gratian, delayed on the Rhine, wrote to ask him to wait. He did not. By dusk on 9 August the army was gone, the senior command was dead, and the emperor's body was never found. Four years later, on 3 October 382, Theodosius settled the Goths inside the empire as a people, on their own land and under their own leaders, because he could neither destroy them nor remove them. What kind of treaty that was is still argued. That it changed Roman frontier policy is not.

Why I Wrote This

What caught me was not the battle. It was the fact that Ammianus stopped. He had lived through the decade after Adrianople, he had the whole story in hand, and he put down his pen in the autumn of 378 with a short note telling younger men to write the rest in a grander style. A historian who chooses his own last page is telling you where he thinks the catastrophe was, and his was not where the textbooks put it.

The other thing was the dog trade. Ammianus gives it in a few lines, without a speech or a scene, as an explanation rather than a horror: this is why there was a war. I wanted a book that took that sentence seriously, that followed the decision from Antioch to the riverbank and asked at every step who knew what and who chose what. The Goths in it have names and wants of their own. So do the Romans who failed them, and Ammianus wrote those names down on purpose.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this a book about the battle, or about the whole Gothic war?

The whole war, with the battle at its center, and no prior reading is assumed; the introduction gives a reader starting cold the fourth-century context in three paragraphs. The afternoon of 9 August 378 gets two full chapters, told as closely as Ammianus allows and marked plainly where he does not. The other eleven cover the years around it, because the battle makes no sense without the riverbank before it or the treaty after it.

Was Adrianople really the beginning of the fall of Rome?

The book does not pretend the question is settled. The case for rests on the precedent of 382 and the military weakness that followed; the case against is that the army destroyed was the eastern one, and the eastern empire recovered and lasted another thousand years. The conclusion sets Adrianople beside Cannae, Teutoburg and Carrhae and asks which disasters Rome recovered from.

Did cavalry defeat infantry at Adrianople?

No, and the book shows why that claim, which dates from the 1880s, does not survive a reading of the source. The Gothic cavalry decided the day by the timing of its return from foraging, not by any new superiority of horse over foot; the Roman infantry was beaten because it was deployed from the march, in heat, with both its wings already gone.

How long is it, and is it in Kindle Unlimited?

About 72,000 words: thirteen chapters in four parts, an introduction and conclusion, and three appendices on the two armies, the chronology and the sources. It is released wide, so it is not in Kindle Unlimited; it is on the major ebook stores, in paperback and as an audiobook.

If You Liked This, You Might Like

• The Fall of Rome — picks up the chain this book ends with, from the settlement of 382 through Alaric and the sack of 410.
• Attila — the Huns are offstage in this book and the cause of everything in it; that one tells their story.
• Teutoburg Forest — the other Roman army that marched into ground it had not scouted, and the comparison this book's conclusion draws.
• Hannibal's War — Cannae is the only disaster Ammianus could find to set beside Adrianople, and this is the book that tells it.

An emperor dead and unburied, a field army gone, and a treaty no Roman had signed before. Adrianople: The Goths, the Huns, and the Battle That Broke the Roman Army tells how a decision made in good order at Antioch came apart on a riverbank, and what the empire paid to put it right.