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Emperor Valens and the Battle of Adrianople

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Salah ad-Din View Drop Down
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    Posted: 14-Feb-2012 at 17:49
Along with Cannae and the Teutoberg Wald, the Battle of Adrianople has become one of the most legendary defeats in the history of ancient Rome. Some modern scholars and history enthusiasts go so far as to lay the blame for the "fall" of the Roman Empire directly on the shoulders of those Romans and barbarians who fought at Adrianople, on that hot August afternoon in 378 CE.

The Roman commander at Adrianople was also the reigning emperor of the Eastern provinces, and had been so for fourteen years at the time. His name was Flavius Valens. His reign, and his character had been mixed in quality, but would be forever tainted by the debacle that was his final battle.

Origins and Rise to Power

Flavius Valens was born in the year 328 - four years after Constantine I became the sole master of the Roman Empire. His father was Flavius Gratianus, a prominent military man hailing from Cibalae in Pannonia. Gratianus and his sons, Valentinianus and Valens, were all Arian Christians, and as such Gratianus and Valentinianus enjoyed the patronage of Constantine's Arian son, Constantius II.

Valens does not appear to have shown much early aptitude - he probably spent most or all of his youth on his father's estates. Valentinian is known to have held military commands in Mesopotamia late in Constantius' reign, but was supposedly relieved from his duties by the new emperor Julian in 362 due to his refusal to abandon his Christian faith. Valens is said to have suffered this same disgrace, though some historians question whether it in fact happened, or just where Valens was if it did.

If Valentinian and Valens were indeed exiled for their Christianity, they were forgiven in June of 363 when the Empire was restored to the hands of a Christian ruler. This time, the emperor was not a kinsman of Constantine, but was a lowly soldier named Flavius Jovianus, hailed emperor by the troops while Julian's officers bickered over the succession. Jovian was to spend most of his short reign negotiating a Roman withdrawal from Mesopotamia, relinquishing Armenia to the Persians - an unpopular but necessary move on his part.

Valentinian and Valens became members of the protectores domestici under Jovian, this was a cavalry bodyguard unit. Valentinian was dispatched to Gaul to bring word of Julian's death and Jovian's succession; this task proved dangerous but was ultimately greeted with success, and Jovian rewarded him by placing him in command of a unit of scutarii. Almost immediately afterwards, in February of 364, Jovian died and the army chose Valentinian to be his successor. Valentinian in turn chose his younger brother as his co-emperor, and placed him in control of the Eastern provinces.

The contemporary historian Ammianus Marcellinus supplied us with a detailed description of Valens, writing that he was dark-skinned and had sight impairment in one eye. He was of average build but had a protruding stomach. He had a churlish and occasionally cruel manner, but hated injustice and did not tolerate financial irregularity in his underlings. He was, however prone to listening to informers, and inflicted sporadic persecutions on Catholic Christians as well as pagans. He was not an impressive general, but was a keen administrator who seems to have had some interest in architectural projects.

Valens married sometime before his reign; his bride's name was Albia Domnica. She bore him three children, Valentinianus, Carosa, and Anastasia; the eldest was Valentinianus, not born until 366. History has not recorded why Valens seems to have been so slow to make progress in his life, starting a military career and a family when he was already middle aged.

Reign

Valentinian and Valens were not the first emperors to divide the Empire between them, but this trend was to prove effectively permanent after their reigns. Valens ruled over Greece, the Danube provinces, Asia minor, the East, and Egypt, with his capital at Constantinople. His regime was far from stable in its opening years, however.

In 365 Valens made plans to invade Persia and began massing troops in the East, apparently overseeing preparations from Ancyra. In Constantinople herself, a revolt broke out when one Procopius was declared emperor by several military units. Procopius was a cousin of Julian who had apparently been plotting a usurpation ever since the death of his relative. Valens greeted this crisis with indescisiveness and despair, having to be persuaded to keep from preventing suicide.

After several reverses Valens finally managed to face Procopius in battle and defeat his general Gomoarius at Thyatira in Phygria in the summer of 366; shortly thereafter the armies met again at Nacoleia where Valens stirred up a mutiny in Procopius' army. Procopius was executed and his head sent to Valentinian. Valens' weak and tardy response to this revolt had allowed Procopius to take control not only of Constantinople but of much of Greece and western Asia minor - it was indicative of a lethargic and perhaps even cowardly personality.

Procopius had sought support on the other side of the Danube, amongst the Gothic tribes. Most prominent of these were the Tervingi, presently led by a chieftain named Athanaric who was noted for his loathing of Christianity. Passions had been stirred amongst these tribes against Rome, but Procopius' temporary occupation of Rome's Danubian territories had caused the Goths to put off their planned invasion.

Valens took the War to the Goths in 367 CE, pursuing them into the Carpathian Mountains of Dacia. His army spent the next year rebuilding fortifications along the Danube - an age-old task of the Roman army. Only in 369 did Valens manage to catch the Goths on a battlefield, and inflict a defeat on them and their Sarmatian allies. Valens and Athanaric are said to have met on a boat in the middle of the Danube and negotiated terms in which neither side demanded tribute or hostages from the other.

After the conclusion of this Gothic War, Valens spent his time weeding out internal enemies, or at least perceived enemies. Some were executed on charges of witchcraft and divination, while prominent leaders of the Catholic Church in the Eastern provinces were executed or banished. Treason trials followed, Valens becoming increasingly paranoid in 372 when he caught his secretary Therodoros in a conspiracy against his life.

Valens' religious intolerance and treason trials did little to improve his image as an enlightened Christian ruler, but he made a genuine effort to beautify his capital. At Constantinople he constructed the Basilica of the Apostles, as well as finishing Constantine's great project, an aqueduct. In an incident of poetic justice, Valens is said to have demanded stone for the aqueduct from the city of Chalcedon, where Procopius had found some of his most passionate support.

Like almost every Roman emperor, Valens dreamed of Eastern conquest. In 369 or 370, Pap, the teenaged son of the Armenian client king, had fled in exile to Valens' court after the Sassanid Persian Emperor Shapur II overthrew his father. Valens dispatched a succession of armies in 370/371 into Armenia to reinforce Pap's claim on the throne and keep the Persians out. This culminated in a great battle at Bagavan in 371, in which Shapur was defeated by Valens' generals Traianus and Vadomarius. Pap was subsequently placed back on Armenia's throne, but shortly thereafter was removed in favor of a more mature and stable personality, one Varazdat.

The defeat at Bagavan had bloodied Persia's nose, but had certainly not brought an end to the hostilities. Both Rome and Persia were preparing for a showdown 374/375, but Valens found himself distracted by a number of comparatively tedious dilemmas. These included the far-ranging raiding parties of the Arabian Queen Mavia, who were pillaging Palestine and Roman Arabia, as well as obscure internal revolts in southeastern Asia minor. By the time he had taken care of these disturbances, Valens found himself faced with an emergency more pressing than the simmering hostilities with the King of Kings.

Adrianople

In 376 the Goths - still partly under the control of Athanaric - were defeated and forced out of their lands by the Huns. Panic resulted on the Roman frontiers, as horror stories about these 'devilish' horsemen spread. The chaos the Huns caused amongst the Goths, however, was not exaggerated and soon several displaced Gothics communities, numbering in the tens of thousands, were requesting permission to cross the Danube and enter the Empire. Valens, returning from the East to handle the situation, saw them as potential draftees into his armies, and allowed the Goths to cross the River in digestible chunks. Most of these groups were under the overall leadership of a Christian chieftain named Fritigern, though other names, especially Alavivus, are given.

The Roman officers tasked with overseeing the Gothic passage into the Empire, Lupicinus and Maximus, are depicted in our sources as being cruel and avaricious to an extreme. Forced into squalid refugee camps, it was not long before the Goths were starving - Lupicinus eventually had Gothic fathers selling their youngest children into slavery so as to buy a dead dog to feed the rest of their family with. Unsurprisingly, resentment against the Romans rose as the Goths' situation became more desperate, and this was not helped when another branch of Goths snuck across the Danube and joined their brothers, apparently preferring the possibility of starvation to another encounter with the Huns.

The Goths were already on the brink of revolt late in 376 or early in 377, when Lupicinus made a bungled attempt to murder their chieftains at a gathering. Alavivus seems to have been killed, but Fritigern escaped and assumed complete leadership of the Goths - who flew into a rage. The rebellious Goths soon enjoyed support from deserters in the Roman army - many of whom were Goths who had been subjected to prejudice - as well as warbands of Alans and even Huns from across the Danube. It was this mixed force that destroyed the hastily-gathered army of Lupicinus at Marcianople. Cowardly as he was corrupt, Lupicinus abandoned his soldiers and fled, never to be mentioned in history again.

Valens' movements in 376/377 are unclear, but the Goths roamed at will across most of Thrace, living off of Roman crops and arming themselves with the equipment of Roman soldiers they killed or captured. In 377 the Magister Militum of the Westen Empire (now under the control of Gratianus the Younger), a German named Richomeres, confronted Fritigern and his Goths and fought an indecisive battle with them. Early in the next year, another Western general, one Sebastianus, made a moderately successful attempt at conducting a guerilla war against the Goths - his speciality was attacking Gothic camps at night and killing the barbarians in their sleep.

In the summer of 378 Valens massed an army probably numbering 15-20,000 men, much of the cream of the Eastern Roman Army. His forces included guard units, legionary units, and even some Gothic warbands, and included many commanders of widely varying quality - including the general Traianus who had fought in Armenia on his behalf several years before, as well as Sebastian and Richomeres from the West. Ironically it was Sebastian, who had conducted a skillful guerilla war in the previous months, that eagerly encouraged Valens to attack the Goths rather than wait for reinforcements from the West.

Historians have traditionally blamed Valens' choice not to wait for reinforcements for the subsequent defeat. The Roman and Gothic armies drew up for battle on an open plain outside of Adrianople, on a stiflingly hot and particularly dusty morning on August 9th of 378. Having spent two years looting Roman armies and townships, the Goths had acquired most or all of the same weaponry and armor as the Romans - outwardly this battle may well have resembled a clash in a civil war.

Fritigern was indisputably the Gothic commander at Adrianople. He drew his warriors up between the Roman army and the wagon train in which the women and children of his people were sheltering. Valens and Fritigern made an attempt to negotiate, but this was cut short by the enthusiasm and bloodlust of the Roman cavalry, who charged the Goths. The result was an all-out battle under particularly congested conditions due to the dust as well as fires that broke out on the battlefield. At first the Battle went well for the Romans, but they were subjected to a surprise attack by Gothic cavalry which threw them into confusion. Those soldiers who survived the rout took shelter in Adrianople, where they helped repulse the subsequent, half-hearted siege by Fritigern and his over-zealous warriors.

Valens himself, along with two-thirds of the rest of his army, never left the Adrianople battlefield alive. There are conflicting stories about how he died - he may have went down fighting alongside the remnants of a bodyguard unit, or he may have been burned to death when a party of Goths set fire to a barn he took refuge in after the battle. Either way, on August 9th of 378 the Eastern Roman Emperor Flavius Valens died in battle with the Goths, at the age of fifty.

It is up for debate how much influence the defeat at Adrianople had on Rome's sharp decline in the next century, but considering his track record as a general and an soldier, it would be safe to lay most of the blame for this defeat on Valens. Valens was neither stupid nor a coward, but his indecisive temperament and his lack of motivation, along with his indulgence in treason trials and religious persecutions, make him one of Rome's less attractive emperors.
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