Adrianople AD 378: The Day Rome Lost an Emperor and an Army

A gold solidus of Emperor Valens, who was killed at Adrianople on 9 August 378. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

On a sweltering August afternoon, on a plain in what is now European Turkey, one of the most powerful armies on earth was destroyed in a matter of hours. The Eastern Roman army marched out of Adrianople in the morning. By evening it had ceased to exist, and the emperor who commanded it was dead. The Battle of Adrianople, fought on 9 August AD 378, was the worst Roman defeat in more than five centuries. The contemporary historian Ammianus Marcellinus wrote that the annals recorded no such massacre of a battle except the one at Cannae.

How Rome created its own enemy

Driven west by the Huns, the Gothic Thervingi reached the Danube in 376 and begged admission to the empire. Valens, eastern emperor since 364, settled them in the Balkans as foederati, allies expected to farm and fight for Rome.

What followed was a masterclass in how to turn allies into enemies. The Roman commanders put in charge of the settlement, Lupicinus and Maximus, treated the Goths as a resource to be strip-mined. Food was sold at extortionate prices, children were taken as slaves, and the promised land and supplies never materialised. In 377 the Goths revolted under their leader Fritigern, joined by the Greuthungi under Alatheus and Saphrax, by Alan horsemen, and by local rebels. The Gothic War had begun.

The road to the battlefield

Valens returned from campaigning in the east to face the crisis in person, reaching Constantinople on 30 May 378. His general Sebastianus, with 2,000 hand-picked legionaries, ambushed Gothic detachments with early success. It went to Valens's head.

Gratian, the western emperor, was marching to join him, but had been delayed fighting the Lentienses at Argentaria, near modern Colmar. Gratian sent the general Ricomer ahead with a letter urging Valens to wait for the combined armies. At the council of war Sebastianus argued for attacking at once; Victor argued for waiting. Valens chose attack. The glory of a Gothic victory, it seems, was not something he wanted to share with his nephew.

On the morning of 9 August the Roman army marched out of Adrianople toward the Gothic wagon camp, some eight miles away over difficult ground. The men reached the field around noon, exhausted and dehydrated in the August heat. Fritigern, still waiting for his foraging cavalry to return, sent envoys to negotiate. Valens, with a tired army baking in the sun, agreed to talk. It was a stall, and it worked.

The opposing forces

The Romans. Valens commanded the eastern field army: heavy legionary infantry with large shields, javelins and the long spathae swords, elite palatinae guards, scholae cavalry under the Iberian prince Bacurius, and archers. How many men stood in the ranks is disputed. Modern estimates range from 15,000 (the historian Peter Heather) to 30,000 (Williams and Friell), with Noel Lenski suggesting up to 40,000, based on the units recorded as missing from the eastern army after 378. Whatever the true number, it was a serious army, and it was destroyed.

The Goths. Fritigern's Thervingi formed the core, with the Greuthungi cavalry of Alatheus and Saphrax, Alan horsemen and rebel auxiliaries. Estimates put their strength at 12,000 to 15,000 (Hans Delbrück) or around 20,000 (Williams and Friell). They fought mainly on foot, with swords, spears, shields and bows; their great tactical asset was the wagon circle, a ring of wagons serving as fortress, depot and refuge.

Tactics and terrain

The Gothic camp stood on a hilltop, and the Goths had set fire to the surrounding fields so that smoke drifted across the Roman approach. The precise site of the battle is still argued over, with three proposed locations near modern Edirne in Turkey, but the conditions are not in doubt: high summer, broken ground, and an army that had marched eight miles to get there.

Fritigern's plan was simple and sound. Keep the Romans talking until the foraging cavalry returned, then fight on ground of his choosing with his full strength assembled.

How the battle unfolded

It was the Romans who broke the truce. Bacurius's scholae charged without orders and were repulsed, and the battle began before Valens had intended. The Roman left wing pressed forward, reached the Gothic wagon circle and seemed to be winning. Then everything collapsed at once.

Alatheus and Saphrax's cavalry returned from foraging and smashed into the Roman flank. Packed into a dense mass and hit from the side, the Roman infantry could barely raise their weapons, and began to be encircled. Panic spread faster than orders. Ammianus describes men so tightly crushed together that the dead remained upright, held in place by the press of bodies.

Valens died in the catastrophe. Some accounts say he was killed in the rout; others that, wounded, he was carried to a nearby farmhouse which the Goths then set alight. His body was never recovered. With him died Sebastianus and Traianus; the generals Victor and Ricomer were among the few senior officers to escape. Thirty-five tribunes were killed.

Casualties and outcome

Ammianus claims only a third of the Roman army escaped. Modern estimates put the Roman dead at between 10,000 and 20,000 men, roughly two-thirds of the force engaged, the greatest Roman loss of life in a single day since Cannae. Gothic losses are unknown. The Goths then tried to take Adrianople itself and failed; the city held. But the field army of the east was gone, and with it the emperor.

The consequences

Theodosius I succeeded Valens and fought the Goths to a standstill over four years. The settlement of 382 allowed the Goths to live in the Balkans in exchange for military service, while keeping their own leaders and a degree of independence. It was a fateful compromise: within a generation, a Gothic leader named Alaric would march on Rome itself.

Adrianople is often called the beginning of the end for the Western Roman Empire. That may overstate one battle's power, but it captures the shock: an emperor had died with his army on Roman soil, at the hands of people Rome had admitted as refugees two years earlier.

The lessons

Condition beats numbers. Valens marched his men eight miles in August heat and fought at noon, dehydrated and exhausted, against an enemy that had waited in position. Armies do not fight at their paper strength; they fight at the strength their logistics allow.

Do not let pride overrule intelligence. Gratian's letter urging Valens to wait was sound advice, and the council of war was split. Valens attacked anyway, unwilling to share the victory. The decision was personal, not professional, and it killed him.

Discipline is a weapon. Bacurius's unauthorised charge started the battle before Valens was ready. One impetuous subordinate can wreck a commander's plan.

Beware the simple story. The Victorian historian Charles Oman made Adrianople famous as the battle where cavalry replaced infantry, calling the Goth "the linear ancestor of all the knights of the Middle Ages." Modern scholarship largely rejects this: the cavalry proportions on both sides were roughly equal, infantry formed the bulk of both armies, and Rome lost through poor leadership, exhaustion and disorganisation, not a revolution in warfare. Neither side even used stirrups; those arrived with the Avars in the sixth century. For what genuine battlefield leadership under impossible pressure looks like, our feature on the Victoria Cross tells that story through Britain's highest award for bravery.

What is known and what is disputed

Known: the date (9 August 378), the place (near Adrianople, modern Edirne), the outcome (a crushing Gothic victory), the death of Valens, the context of the Gothic War, and the 382 settlement that followed.

Disputed: the size of both armies, the exact casualty figures, the precise battlefield location, and the manner of Valens's death, along with the grand thesis that Adrianople changed the nature of warfare.

Adrianople is a complete anatomy of military disaster: a political failure that created the enemy, a personal failure that chose the battle, a logistical failure that exhausted the army, and a tactical failure that threw it away in an afternoon. The Romans had the better army on paper. Paper does not fight.

This is the fourth instalment in our chronological series on the great battles of history. The previous instalment covered Mons Graupius, AD 83, where Rome's fortunes in Britain reached their high-water mark; the series began with the Medway, AD 43. For the human cost of misjudged campaigns in the modern era, see our report on the last British troops leaving Iraq.

Sources

• Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae (contemporary account, via History.com and HistoryMedieval.com)
• Battle of Adrianople, Wikipedia (strength and casualty estimates: Delbrück; Williams and Friell; Heather; Lenski)
• Warfare History Network: 378, the Siege of Adrianople
• History Today on Adrianople
• History of the Germans: Battle of Adrianople, August 9th 378
• Wiley Encyclopedia of Ancient History: Adrianople
• What we learned from the Battle of Adrianople