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IN 376 DISTURBING NEWS REACHED THE EMPEROR VALENS in Constantinople. Valens, co-ruler with his brother of the Roman empire, was familiar enough with troubles on his frontiers, but there had never been anything like this. Far to the north, beyond the Balkans, on the marshy northern banks of the Danube, refugees were gathering by the thousand, destitute and starving, fleeing their farms and villages in terror, rather than face – what? They hardly knew; only that, in the words of the historian Ammianus, ‘a hitherto unknown race of men had appeared from some remote corner of the earth, uprooting and destroying everything in its path like a whirlwind descending from high mountains’.
It was an apt image. These aliens were mounted archers who whirled into battle at the gallop, circling in to loose a rain of arrows before veering away to safety. They were horsemen such as no-one had ever seen before, riding as if nailed to their horses,forgedinto their saddles – writers struggled to find suitable images – so that man and mount seemed one, like the centaurs of old come to life. They had blown in from the voids of Inner Asia, driving the residents ahead of them like cattle. It would take some years for the ‘unknown race’ to appear en masse, under their most effective and devastating leader, but already their eruption across the steppes of today’s southern Russia and Ukraine had shunted tribe against tribe, the last of which now clamoured on the Danube’s banks. Something had to give.
Valens’ immediate concern was not the thud of alien hooves but the horde of refugees. They were Goths, members of a huge Germanic tribe that had wandered into eastern Europe and southern Russia two centuries before, and had now divided into western and eastern branches. These first refugees were western Goths, known as the Visi- (‘wise’) Goths, as opposed to the Ostro- (‘Eastern’) Goths, who, as Valens would soon discover, were hard on the heels of their distant kin.
Valens, approaching 50 and with twelve years of ruling behind him, knew a good deal about the proud and independent Visigoths, and had reason to be wary of them and their leader Athanaric. Wanderers no more, they had settled in what is now Romania and turned themselves from nomads into farmers, from marauders into disciplined foes. Thirty years before, they had supposedly become allies of the empire, having been bribed into supplying soldiers for the armies of Rome and Constantinople. But they would not stay put, and ten years ago Valens himself had gone to war with the intention of penning them into their homeland. Things hadn’t gone to plan. The Goths could be broken in battle, but they had the annoying habit of holing up in the mountains of Transylvania, and as guerrillas they were unbeatable. Three years into the war, Valens – bow-legged, paunchy, with a lazy eye – needed to bolster his shaky authority with a show of dominance. But Athanaric said he had sworn a terrible oath to his father never to set foot on Roman soil; so, instead of summoning his opponent to discuss terms, Valens had to talk peace on a boat in the middle of the Danube, as if emperor and barbarian leader were equals. They agreed that good fences made good neighbours, that the Danube was the natural fence, and that neither side would cross it.
What a difference seven years made. Here were the Visigoths, down and out, about to ignore the terms of the treaty by invading not as warriors but as a whole nation of asylum-seekers: families, children, sick and aged, by the wagonload. What if Valens took a hard line, forced the refugees to stay where they were and revelled in Athanaric’s despair? It could not be that simple, because this was not Athanaric’s doing. Rumour of the alien menace had inspired rebellion among the threatened Visigoths, and Athanaric was no longer a force. It was a new leader, Fritigern, who was now begging for imperial permission to cross the rain-swollen Danube, dreaming of a new life for his people in the welcoming and fertile valleys of Thrace.
The chances were they would come anyway; so Valens judged it best to turn the crisis to some advantage. Fritigern, smart enough to unite his desperate people and keep on the right side of Rome, made no threats; indeed, he promised not only to live peacefully, but also to supply more men for the imperial army. Both rulers knew there was a precedent: years before, a previous colony of Goths had been allowed to travel 150 miles south of the Danube to settle in Adrianople, today’s Edirne, and had proved exemplary citizens. Advisers urged Valens to see his former foes not as refugees but as recruits for the emperor’s overstretched army. Valens agreed, provided the Goths gave up their arms. Officials journeyed north, not to oppose, but to help, with transport, food and allocations of land in the frontier provinces.
So as the spring of 376 turned to summer the destitute Visigoths came plodding over the low-lying northern banks, past shallow lakes and marshes, taking to the river in boats and dug-out canoes hastily made from tree trunks, hauling rafts bearing their wagons and horses. Here the river, clear of the Iron Gate gorge that cuts through the Carpathian and Balkan mountains, runs broad and gentle for 400 kilometres before splitting up into its reedy delta. The challenge for the refugees was not the strength of the current, but the rain-swollen breadth of water, 2 or 3 kilometres across. Many, drawn by the sight of the low hills opposite, tried swimming, only to be carried slowly downriver to their deaths in the flood plain.
How many were on the move? The imperial officials wanted to know to calculate food supplies and land grants. It was hopeless. Ammianus quoted Virgil:
To try to find their number is as vain
As numbering the wind-swept Libyan sands.
Perhaps they did not try very hard. The commanding officers were not the empire’s finest. Flawed, sinister and reckless, according to Ammianus, they hatched schemes to profit from the unarmed refugees. One scam involved rounding up dogs, which they offered as food if in return they received one Visigoth as a slave: hardly treatment to inspire lasting friendship.
Besides, this was no promised land. So many people all at once would have overwhelmed the Thracian countryside. They had to be kept where they were. The southern banks of the Danube turned into a vast holding camp for the bedraggled and tunic-clad refugees. To the Visigoths, it seemed that they had fled one frying-pan only to land in another. They muttered about taking direct action to seize the lands they thought they had been promised. The flawed, sinister and reckless regional commander, Lupicinus, ordered up more troops from Gaul to quell disorder.
But time was running out. The Visigoths’ eastern cousins, crowds of Ostrogoths also fleeing the unnamed menace to the east, arrived at the Danube, saw it weakly held, and crossed, without waiting for permission. Pushed and reinforced by the new influx,Fritigern led his own people 100 kilometres south, to the local provincial capital, Marcianople (the ruins of which lie half-exposed near Devnya, 25 kilometres inland from the Bulgarian Black Sea resort of Varna). There Lupicinus, whose every act seemed to lead to disaster, invited the Visigothic leaders to a lavish dinner, ostensibly to discuss an aid package, while outside the walls the mass of their people, kept at bay by several thousand Roman soldiers, seethed with rumour and resentment. Suspecting their chief had been lured to his downfall, the Visigoths attacked a contingent of Romans and seized their weapons. When news of this foray reached the dinner table, Lupicinus had some of Fritigern’s attendants killed in revenge, and probably had plans to kill them all. But that would have been suicidal. The rioters were now an army. Fritigern had the presence of mind to point out that the only way to restore peace was for him to return to his people, sound, healthy and free. Lupicinus saw he had no choice, and released his guest – who at once, as Ammianus says, ‘took horse and hurried away to kindle the flame of war’.
Across Lower Moesia – northern Bulgaria today – outraged Visigoths robbed, burned and looted, seizing yet more weapons. A pitched battle ended with more Romans dead, more arms seized, and Lupicinus cowering in the sacked streets of Marcianople. The empire had overcome similar disasters, as Ammianus recalls – but that was before the old spirit of high morals and self-sacrifice had been undermined by a craving for ostentatious banquets and ill-gotten gain.
And, he might have added, sheer stupidity: for Valens, afraid that Goth would side with Goth, ordered the long-established and peaceful Visigothic colony in Adrianople to leave, at once. Adrianople, dominating the main pass out of the Balkan mountains on the way to Constantinople, was not a city to risk. He intended to secure the place, and achieved the exact opposite. When the Goths asked for a two-day delay to pack, the local commander refused, encouraging locals to drive them out by pelting them with stones. At this the colonists lost their tempers, killed a number of their oppressors and, quitting the city, threw themselves into the arms of their fellow Goths.
In the autumn of 377 the rival armies reached stalemate, with the main force of Goths seeking safety in the steep valleys of the Balkan range and the Romans in the parched grasslands of Dobruja, which today backs the Black Sea coast of Romania and Bulgaria. The Goths continued to pillage – the only course open to homeless refugees with families to feed – then broke through the Roman blockade to loot their way south into present-day Turkey. Ammianus paints a scene of anarchy anticipating future Balkan horrors: babies killed at their mothers’ breasts, women raped, ‘men led into bondage, crying out that they had lived too long and weeping over the ashes of their homes’.
What, meanwhile, were the prospects for reinforcement? Not good. Though the empire had perhaps 500,000 men under arms, half of these were frontier garrisons watching for trouble in the barbaricum, while only half formed mobile field armies. Besides, many of the troops were non-Roman mercenaries, and any order to move inspired desertions. Troops could come only from the Gaulish frontier, under the command of Valens’ young nephew Gratian, who had been co-ruler and emperor of the West for the last two years. Still only eighteen, he had a growing reputation as a leader, but it was all he could do to keep the peace along the Rhine and the Danube. The plan to shift troops from Gaul to the Balkans leaked across the frontier, inspiring German raids that demanded Gratian’s attention all that winter. It was not until early 378 that he set out to aid his uncle.
If at this point you had asked a Roman or a Greek what was at stake, you would have been told that two worlds stood face to face: the barbarian and the civilized. In fact, in western, central and southern Europe, we are dealing with many worlds. The empire of Rome, Gaul and Constantinople; barbarian tribes fighting each other and the empire; and the untamed forested borderlands of the north-east.
To its citizens, the Roman domain was their world, their foundation, their pride, their very life. As republic and then as empire, it had been there for over 700 years, as we know from archaeological research – even longer for Romans, whose history was rooted in legendary beginnings: for them AD 377 was 1130 AUC, ab urbe condita, ‘from the foundation of the city’. Rome’s cultural roots were deeper still, for it was the heir of ancient Greece. It was Rome’s manifest destiny, as the rock of civilization and good government, to rule the shores of the Mediterranean, to reach southwards down the Nile and northwards across the Alps, to Gaul, the Rhine, the North Sea and beyond, even to the remote northern reaches of the islands off Europe’s coast, where Hadrian finished building his rampart against the highland barbarians in 127. In the third century there had even been a brief advance across the Danube, into present-day Romania, when it seemed for a while that the true frontier in eastern Europe would be the Carpathians.
But expansion had its limits, dictated by non-Roman peoples and by geography. The north-east had a formidable barrier of forest. The Forest. To feel the trepidation inspired by the word demands an imaginative leap back to a time when much of Europe beyond the Rhine was still an untamed landscape, its vast, dark woodlands hardly touched. For non-forest people, it was the epitome of danger, the grim and forbidding abode of evil spirits. To Romans, the Ciminian forests of Etruria were bad enough; but those north of the Alps were the very essence of barbarism. In AD 98 Tacitus painted a picture of the landscape in his Germania. Beyond the Rhine, he says, the land was informis – unshaped, hideous, dismal: the word has all these senses. The Hercynian forest, named after an ancient Greek term for the forest of Bohemia in today’s Czech Republic, was by extension the tree-covered region that stretched from the Rhine to the Elbe. Pliny claimed that its huge oaks had never been cut or lopped since the world began. People said it took 9 days to cross north to south, and 60 days for the 500-kilometre east–west journey – not that, in the words of Julius Caesar, ‘anyone in Germany can say that he has heard about the end of this forest’. Here lived beasts unknown elsewhere, some dangerous – elk with horns like tree-boughs, brown bear, wolf and aurochs, the European bison. Rome and Greece looked back to legends of Arcadian groves, recalling a time when even Greece was forested; but not to anything so uncharming and impenetrable as this.
To Romans, the inhabitants of this wilderness were themselves wild, men descended from a primal deity, Tuisto, who had sprung from the soil like a tree. They wore cloaks pinned with thorns and lived on wild game, fruit and milk products. In all this huge area there was, they said, not a single town. Villages, linked by tracks, were of mean wooden houses. The picture was not all bad, of course. Tacitus was eager to point out that, in contrast to the sturdy simplicity of the forest peoples, Rome had become soft and corrupt. It was best, though, for civilized folk to steer clear; those who dared to probe risked a terrible fate. In AD 9, Publius Quintillius Varus had led 25,000 men into the Teutoburg forest, in north Germany somewhere between the Rhine and the Weser, where they were ambushed and slaughtered by Cheruscan spearmen materializing from among the swamps and trees. Varus saw the devastation and fell on his sword.
Of course, things had moved on in 300 years. The clan warriors of Tacitus’ day, typified by the image of a hot-blooded, blond, beer-swilling giant, had long since vanished or amalgamated into larger units, the Saxons, Franks and Alemanni from which future nations would arise. Already the forests were patched by the clearings and farms of a dozen tribes; but, by comparison with today, they remained largely intact. This was the primeval world of magic and power, the source of life and death, the habitation of prey and predator, where children were lost and witches found and spirits inhabited trees. It is recalled in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and the other fairy tales collected by the Grimm brothers in the nineteenth century, and later still in the Mirkwood of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
If the forest dictated the outermost limits of empire, the retreat from beyond the Danube had marked the beginning of its collapse. By the late fourth century, there were no thoughts of retaking trans-Danubian Dacia and of conquering the German forests. Soon Britain would be abandoned, Hadrian’s frontier wall left an empty monument to former greatness. Once all had been governed from Rome, by the emperor and the Senate. Now the Senate was a husk and real power was wielded by the army, while the emperor did his best from some campaign HQ, or from his residences in Trèves and Milan and Ravenna.
The real cancer in this vast body was the emerging problem of division. When Constantine founded his ‘New Rome’ in 330, it was to have been the heart of his new religion, Christianity, and the symbol of a new unity. In fact, from then on the Latin-speaking western empire began to part company with its Greek-speaking (though frequently bilingual) eastern wing. Rome’s decline was mirrored by Constantinople’s rise.
Constantine chose well when he decided to develop a small, ancient town on a rocky peninsula in the Black Sea into his new version of Rome. It was said, of course, that God had guided him, though it didn’t take omniscience to see that the peninsula was a much better base than Rome from which to secure the empire’s shaky eastern frontier. The little town of old Byzantium had occupied the tip of this rocky nose. Constantine enclosed five times that area behind a wall 2 kilometres long, and built into his new capital a triumphal arch, the first great Christian church and a marble-paved forum, its 30-metre porphyry column from Egypt topped by an Apollo with the head of Constantine himself. A hippodrome for processions and races was connected via a spiral staircase to the reception halls, offices, living areas, baths and barracks of the imperial palace. Within a century there would be a school, a circus, 2 theatres, 8 public and 153 private baths, 52 porticoes, 5 granaries, 8 aqueducts and reservoirs, 4 senatorial and judicial meeting halls, 14 churches, 14 palaces and 4,388 houses in addition to those of the common people. By then there were walls almost all around it, seaward as well, except along the Golden Horn river, which was protected by an immense chain (it was broken only once, in 1203, by soldiers of the Fourth Crusade, who loaded a ship with stones, fixed a huge pair of shears on the prow, drove at the chain and snipped it).
The beauty of the city and the speed of its construction made Constantine’s capital a glory. But within a generation it had achieved the opposite of what its founder intended: not unity but division, confirmed by the emperor Valentinian. He was an impressive character – champion wrestler, great soldier, energetic, conscientious in defence of the realm; and he decided the interests of the empire would be best served by the creation of two sub-empires, each of which could look to its own defence. In 364 he made his brother Valens the first eastern emperor, while he, Valentinian, kept control of the West. It might have worked, had the threats to unity been containable. They were not. The empire, though still nominally united by history and family, had begun to split: two capitals, two worlds, two languages and two creeds (each fighting its own sub-creeds of paganism and heresy).
This was no firm foundation for confronting enemies within and without. To the east lay the great imperial rival, Persia; in Africa, Moorish rebels; and right across northern Europe and the frontiers of Inner Asia the barbaricum, inhabited by those who spoke neither Greek nor Latin. With continual barbarian incursions across the Rhine and Danube, Rome – the term sometimes included Constantinople and sometimes didn’t, depending on the context – tried to defend itself with a range of strategies from outright force to negotiation, bribery, intermarriage, trade and, finally, controlled immigration. This last was in the end the only possible way to stave off assault, and yet it also led inexorably to further decay. Barbarians were good fighters; it made sense to employ them, with confusing consequences for both sides. Enemies became allies, who often ended up fighting their own kin. Peace came always at the price of continued collapse: the army was strengthened by an influx of barbarians, but taxes rose to pay for them; faith in government declined, and corruption spread. By the late fourth century the empire’s borders resembled a weakening immune system, through which barbarians crept, in direct assault or temporary partnership, while the army – the ultimate arbiter of political authority and the guardian of the frontiers – were like the blood platelets of this ageing body, always rushing to clot some new wound, and never in sufficient numbers.
Not all the empire’s enemies were on or beyond its borders. Since Constantine’s decision to adopt Christianity earlier in the century, his new capital had been the heart of division over and above the usual political squabbles about succession. Christians naturally fought against paganism, which proved remarkably resilient. In addition, Christians squabbled with each other, for these were the early days of church doctrine, with rivals arguing fiercely over the nature of a god who was somehow three-in-one, and somehow both human and divine. No-one could understand these mysteries, but that didn’t stop rival believers stating firm opinions, fighting for some new orthodoxy, and branding their opponents unorthodox and heretical.
The most challenging heresy was named after the Alexandrian priest Arius, who claimed that Jesus was wholly human – God’s adopted son, as it were – and thus by implication not divine, and therefore inferior to his father. This idea appealed to eastern emperors, notably Valens, perhaps because it did not appeal to the western ones. It was in this form that Christianity first reached the Goths, whose converts became stubbornly Arian.
This, then, was the glorious, vast and diseased structure that Valens was once again preparing to defend as he marched north from Constantinople in the early summer of 378, planning to join up with his co-emperor and rival, his ambitious nephew Gratian.
Now Valens’ battered ego took the reins. He, who had demanded Gratian’s help, had become jealous of his nephew’s success, and eager for a victory of his own. Marching north to Adrianople in July, he was told by his scouts that a Goth army was approaching, but that it consisted of only 10,000 men, a force rather less than his own of some 15,000. Outside Adrianople, he made his base near the junction of the Maritsa and Tundzha rivers, around which over the next few days arose a palisade and a ditch. Just then an officer arrived from somewhere up the Danube with a letter from Gratian urging his uncle not to do anything hasty until the reinforcements arrived. Valens called a war council. Some agreed with Gratian, while others whispered that Gratian just wanted to share in a triumph that should belong to Valens alone. That suited Valens. Preparations continued.
Fritigern, laagered in his wagons some 13 kilometres away up the Tundzha, was himself wary of giving battle. Around him were not just his warriors, but their entire households as well: perhaps 30,000 people, with an unwieldy corps of wagons, all arranged in family circles, impossible to re-form in less than a day. To fight effectively – away from the encumbering wagons – he would need help; and so he had sent for the heavily armoured Ostrogothic cavalry. Meanwhile he played for time, sending out scouts to set fire to the sun-scorched wheat fields between his encampment and the Romans’ – and a messenger, who arrived in the imperial camp with a letter: yes, ‘barbarian’ leaders were quite capable of using secretaries fluent in Latin to communicate with the Roman world. This missive was carried by a Christian priest, who would probably have become an aide to the Visigoth in the hope of converting him. The letter was an official plea to revert to the status quo: peace, in return for land and protection from the whirlwind approaching from the east.
Valens would have none of it. He wanted the fruits of victory: Fritigern captured or dead, the Goths cowed. He refused to reply, sending the priest away on the insulting grounds that he was not important enough to be taken seriously.
Next morning, 9 August, the Romans were ready. All non-essential gear – spare tents, treasure chests, imperial robes – was sent back into Adrianople for safety, and the horsemen and infantry set off to cover the 13 kilometres to the Visigothic laagers. It was a short march, but a gruelling one, over burned fields, under a scorching sun, with no streams in sight to refresh the heavily armoured troops.
After a couple of hours the Roman horsemen and infantry approached the Visigothic camp and its huddles of wagons, from which rose wild war cries and chants in praise of Gothic ancestors. The sweaty approach had caused the Romans to straggle, with one wing of the cavalry out in front and infantry behind blocking the way of the second. Slowly they pulled themselves into line, clattering their weapons and beating their shields to drown out the barbarians’ clamour.
To Fritigern, still awaiting help, these were unnerving sights and sounds. Again, he played for time, sending a request for peace; again, Valens sent the envoys away as of too low a rank. Still no sign of the Ostrogothic cavalry. Time for another message from Fritigern, another peace proposal, raising the stakes, suggesting that if Valens would supply someone of high status he would himself come to negotiate. This time Valens agreed, and a suitable volunteer was on his way when a band of Roman outriders, hungry for glory, perhaps, made a quick lunge at the Visigothic flank. The volunteer diplomat beat a hasty retreat – just in time, for at that moment the Ostrogothic cavalry came galloping in along the valley. The Roman cavalry moved forward to confront this new menace.
That was what Fritigern had been waiting for. His infantry burst from the wagons, firing arrows, throwing spears, until the two lines clashed and locked in a heaving scrum of shields, broken spears and swords, so tightly packed that soldiers could hardly lift their arms to strike – or, having done so, lower them again. Dust rose, covering the battle-ground in a choking, blinding fog. Outside the mêlée, there was no need for the Visigothic archers and spearmen to aim: any missile thrown or fired at random dropped through the dust unseen, and had to find a mark.
Then came the heavy cavalry, with no opposing Roman cavalry to stop them, trampling the dying, their battleaxes splitting the helmets and breastplates of infantrymen weakened by heat, weighed down with armour and slipping on the blood-soaked ground. Within the hour, the living began to stumble away from the Roman lines over the corpses of the slain. ‘Some fell without knowing who struck them,’ writes Ammianus. ‘Some were crushed by sheer weight of numbers, some were killed by their own comrades.’
As the sun set, the noise of battle died away into the silent, moonless night. Two-thirds of the Romans – perhaps 10,000 men – lay dead, jumbled with corpses of horses. Now the dark fields filled with other sounds, as the cries, sobs and groans of the wounded followed the survivors across the burnt-out crops and along the road back to Adrianople.
No-one knows what happened to Valens. At some time during the battle he had been lost or abandoned by his bodyguard and found his way to the army’s most disciplined and experienced legions, holding out in a last stand. A general rode off to call in some reserves, only to find they had fled. After that, nothing. Some said the emperor died when struck by an arrow soon after night fell. Or perhaps he found refuge in a sturdy farmhouse nearby, which was surrounded and burned to the ground, along with all those inside – except one man who escaped from a window to tell what had happened. Thus the story came to Ammianus. There was no way of proving it, for the emperor’s body was never found.
The violence continued, and the empire had no answer to it. The Visigoths knew from deserters and prisoners what was hidden in Adrianople. At dawn they advanced beyond the battlefield, hot on the heels of the survivors seeking refuge. But there was no safety to be had; for the defenders, scrabbling to prepare for a siege they never expected, fearful of weakening their defences, refused to open the gates to their fleeing fellows. By midday the Visigoths had encircled the walls, trapping the terrified survivors against them. In desperation, some 300 surrendered, only to be slaughtered on the spot.
Luckily for the city, a thunderstorm washed out the assault, forcing the Visigoths back to their wagons and allowing the defenders to shore up the gates with rocks and make ready their trebuchets and siege bows. When the Visigoths attacked the next day, they lost hundreds crushed by rocks, impaled by arrows the size of spears and buried under stones tipped from above.
Giving up the assault, they turned to easier targets in the countryside, looting their way across 200 kilo-metres to the very gates of Constantinople. There the rampage died, killed by the sight of the vast walls, and then by a horrifying incident. As the city mounted its defence, a Saracen contingent suddenly erupted from the gates. One of these fearsome warriors, carrying a sword and wearing nothing but a loincloth, hurled himself into the fray, sliced open a Gothic soldier’s throat, seized the corpse and sucked the streaming blood. It was enough to drain what remained of the Goths’ courage and force a retreat northwards.
The war dragged on for four more years, ending in a treaty that gave the Goths almost exactly what had been agreed in the first place: land just south of the Danube and semi-independence, with their soldiers fighting for Rome under their own leaders. It would not last, for the Goths were a nation on the move, the greatest of the many barbarian migrations that would undermine the empire. A Visigoth who fought at Adrianople could have lived through another revolt, a slow advance deeper into the empire, the brief seizure of Rome itself in 410, a march over the Pyrenees and a final return over the same mountains to find peace at last in south-west France.
And all this chaos – the refugee crisis, the rebellion, the disaster of Adrianople, the attack on Constantinople, the impossible peace, the slow erosion by barbarians – had been unleashed by the ‘unknown race’ to the east. Still no-one in the empire or even the nearer reaches of the barbaricum knew anything of them.
Perhaps they should have done. For, as Ammianus mentions in passing, among the cavalry that had come to Fritigern’s rescue was a contingent of these lightly armed horse-archers, no more than a few hundred, probably operating as outriders for the main Goth force. It was their arrival the previous year that had forced the Romans to withdraw, allowing the Goths to break through into Thrace. No doubt they had been doing very nicely as freebooters and spies, harassing enemy flanks. If they had been in the battle outside Adrianople, no-one would have taken much notice of these few coarse creatures with their minimal armour; but they were seen afterwards, during the looting. Then they vanished, for few cities had fallen and the pickings would have been meagre. They left, however, with another sort of treasure: information. They had seen what the West had to offer. They had witnessed Rome’s worst day since the defeat by Hannibal at Cannae 600 years before. They might even have guessed that Rome would in future rely more on heavy cavalry, which, as they knew, was no match for their own type of warfare. They had seen Rome’s wider problems: the difficulty of securing a leaky frontier, the impossibility of gathering and moving large armies to fight fast-moving guerrillas, the arrogance of the ‘civilized’ when confronting the ‘barbarian’. While the whole Balkan sector of the empire collapsed into rioting, these swift mounted archers galloped back northwards and eastwards with their few stolen items, and their vital intelligence: the empire was rich,and the empire was vulnerable.
These lightly armed, fast-moving horsemen were the first Huns to reach central Europe. It was their relatives who had unleashed the whirlwind that had blown the Goths across the Danube. Shortly, under the most ruthless of their leaders, they too would cross the river, with consequences for the decaying empire far in excess of anything wrought by the Goths.