Adrianople 378: Emperor Valens, the Gothic Wagon Fort and a Roman Crush

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In 376 two Gothic groups fleeing the Huns reached the Danube, and their leaders Fritigern and Alavivus asked Emperor Valens for asylum. Valens saw farmers, taxpayers and foederati recruits and let them cross, but the local commanders Lupicinus and Maximus withheld the authorized food and extorted the refugees. Ammianus Marcellinus records Roman guards trading dead dogs for Gothic children sold as slaves. The Goths rose in revolt and spent two years raiding the Balkans. In 378 Valens took command himself, and after his general Sebastianus won small ambushes in Thrace and his nephew Gratian beat the Alemanni in the West, he chose to fight without waiting for Western reinforcements.

Scouts reported only about 10,000 Goths, missing cavalry out foraging far from camp. Valens rejected Fritigern's peace offer and ignored Richomeres and his cavalry commander Victor, who urged him to wait. On August 9, 378, an estimated 15,000 to 30,000 Romans marched eight miles in the heat to a wagon fort on high ground near Adrianople. Fritigern stalled with talks while the Goths fired the brush. Shield archers under the Iberian prince Bacurius attacked without orders, and the returning cavalry of Alatheus and Saphrax hit the Roman flank. About two thirds of the army died, along with 35 tribunes, Sebastianus and Valens.

• Roman soldiers were packed so tightly in the crush that they could not draw their swords.
• Valens's body was never found, and one account says Goths burned him alive in a cottage without knowing who was inside.
• On August 10 the victors failed to take Adrianople, where Valens had left his treasury.
• Theodosius I later signed a treaty settling the Goths permanently inside the empire as allies.
• Charles Oman's 1885 claim that the battle began the age of cavalry ignores that stirrups only reached Europe in the 6th century.