Battle of Adrianople

The Battle of Adrianople was fought on 9 August 378 CE near the city of Adrianople, today Edirne in European Turkey. A Gothic army led by Fritigern destroyed much of the eastern Roman field army, and the emperor Valens was killed. The defeat showed that Rome could no longer simply crush or expel the peoples settling on its lands, and it is often seen as an early step on the road to the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

In the 370s the arrival of the Huns from the steppe, the people who later formed the Hunnic Empire, drove Gothic groups living north of the Black Sea and the lower Danube from their lands. In 376 large numbers of Goths, mainly Tervingi under Fritigern and Alavivus, asked to be admitted into the Roman Empire. Valens, the emperor in the east, agreed, hoping to gain recruits for his army. The crossing of the Danube was poorly organised, and Roman officials in Thrace exploited the refugees, selling them food at extortionate prices. Other Gothic groups, the Greuthungi, crossed without permission.

In 377 the Goths rose in revolt near Marcianople, defeated the local Roman forces, and began plundering Thrace, joined by escaped slaves, miners and other discontented groups, as well as some Huns and Alans. Roman troops fought an inconclusive battle against them and tried to pen them in north of the mountains, but without success. In 378 Valens, who had been dealing with the Sasanian frontier in the east, brought his main army to Thrace. His nephew Gratian, the western emperor, promised to bring reinforcements but was delayed by fighting against the Alamanni on the Rhine.

Valens's scouts reported that the Goths near Adrianople numbered only about 10,000 men, and his officers were divided over whether to wait for Gratian. Valens chose to attack at once, perhaps eager to win a victory without sharing the glory with his nephew. Fritigern, whose cavalry was away foraging, sent envoys to discuss terms, which may have been a way of buying time.

On 9 August the Roman army marched for several hours in the summer heat to the Gothic wagon laager, arriving hot and thirsty. The Goths lit fires to blow smoke and heat towards them. While talks were still taking place, some Roman units attacked without orders, and the battle began before the Roman line had fully formed. At this point the Gothic cavalry under Alatheus and Saphrax returned and struck the Roman left wing, which had advanced up to the wagons and was left unsupported. The Roman infantry was pressed together so tightly that the soldiers could hardly use their weapons, and the army collapsed into a rout.

Valens was killed in the fighting; one account says he died when the Goths burned a farmhouse in which he had taken refuge, and his body was never found. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus, the main source, writes that only about a third of the army escaped. Modern estimates of the Roman force vary widely, from around 12,000 to 20,000 men, and of the dead from about 10,000 to 20,000. Many senior officers also died.

The Goths could not take the walled city of Adrianople or Constantinople and continued to raid the Balkans. Gratian appointed the general Theodosius as emperor in the east in 379. After several years of inconclusive campaigning, a treaty in 382 allowed the Goths to settle within the empire under their own leaders, in return for military service. This arrangement set a precedent for autonomous groups living inside Roman territory. Some of these Goths later formed the core of the army of Alaric, who sacked Rome in 410.

Our 300 CE map shows the Roman Empire undivided along the Danube frontier, and the 400 CE map shows the empire two decades after the battle.