Battle of Naissus — Claudius Gothicus Crushes the Goths
A Roman army destroyed a very large Gothic force at Naissus in 269 and began the recovery from the worst decade the empire had known. The invasion was extraordinary in scale. A coalition of Goths, Heruli and other groups moved down the Black Sea coast and through the Aegean in a fleet the sources put at 2,000 ships and 300,000 people, which is certainly inflated and indicates something unprecedented. They sacked Byzantium's hinterland, raided Greece, burned the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and reached Athens. The empire at that point was in three pieces — a Gallic empire in the west, Palmyra in the east — the currency was worthless, and plague was general. Gallienus won an action in Macedonia and was murdered by his own officers; Claudius II took over and fought the main battle at Naissus, in what is now Serbia. The details are unreliable because the surviving accounts were written later under a dynasty that claimed descent from Claudius, and the figure of 50,000 Goths killed comes from that tradition. What is solid is that the invasion was broken, that large numbers of survivors were settled in the Balkans or taken into the army, and that the frontier held. Claudius took the title Gothicus and died of plague at Sirmium the following year. Aurelian succeeded him, cleared Italy, reunited the whole empire in four years, and built the walls around Rome that still stand. The decade before it is the closest the empire came to ending five centuries early. That it did not is largely the work of a run of Illyrian soldier-emperors who took the throne by violence, fought continuously, and were mostly murdered by their own officers within a few years.
- Year: 269 CE
- Category: Military
