Battle of Adrianople
The Goths destroyed an eastern Roman army at Adrianople on 9 August 378 and killed the emperor Valens. The crisis had begun two years earlier. Hunnic pressure drove the Tervingi Goths to the Danube in 376 asking for asylum, and Valens admitted them — a defensible decision, since they were potential recruits and taxpayers, and one ruined by the officials who then extorted and starved them, selling dog meat at the price of a child sold into slavery. They revolted, and two years of inconclusive campaigning followed. Valens came west from the Persian frontier in 378 and camped near Adrianople with something like 15,000 to 20,000 men. His nephew Gratian was marching from Gaul with the western army and had asked him to wait. He did not. His scouts reported the Gothic force as smaller than it was, negotiations were still open, and he attacked in the early afternoon after his troops had marched eight miles in August heat with no water — partly, the sources say, out of jealousy of Gratian's recent victory over the Alamanni. The Gothic wagon laager held. Their cavalry, returning from foraging, arrived on the Roman flank while the infantry were engaged, and pushed the Roman line together until men could not raise their arms. Two-thirds of the army died. Valens disappeared, and the accounts of a farmhouse burned around him are hearsay. Theodosius settled the Goths inside the empire as federates in 382, under their own leaders — terms no Roman government had conceded before.
- Category: Military
