4
BARBARIANS AND CHRISTIANS
Of all the problems that faced the Roman Empire at the end of the fourth century, none was more serious than the barbarian threat. Ever since the days of Augustus, Roman armies had learned to be wary of the dark German forests and bloodcurdling cries across the frozen Rhine. For nearly three hundred years, the barbarians had remained just beyond the borders of the empire, occasionally making raids across the frontier, but for the most part were restrained by their ever-shifting alliances and fear of Roman arms. By the time of Julian the Apostate’s death, however, all that had begun to change. From the east came a new and terrifying power, wild Huns so barbaric that the frightened Germanic tribes ignored the decaying imperial forces guarding the frontiers and came flooding across. This time, however, they came as settlers, not invaders, and the prize they sought was land, not gold. The influx of new people, unwilling to assimilate, provoked an identity crisis within the Roman world and stretched the creaking empire to its breaking point. The pressure would redefine what it meant to be a Roman and nearly bring down the classical world.
The particular genius of Rome had always been in its conception of citizenship, a fact made more extraordinary since it came of age in a world which more often than not restricted citizenship to individual cities. Fifth-century Greece, which had so dazzled the Mediterranean with its brilliance, remained at its heart a patchwork collection of city-states, and for all its glory could never quite transform a Spartan into an Athenian or an Athenian into a Spartan. Locked firmly behind their walls, the cities were unable to refresh themselves, and after a few remarkable generations the luster all too quickly burned itself out. The Romans, on the other hand, had expanded the concept beyond the narrow confines of a single city, spreading citizenship in the wake of its legions. Athens in all its splendid exclusivity had remained just a city; Rome had embraced the world.
Yet for all the empire’s inclusiveness, the Romans tended to look down their noses at the peoples just beyond their borders. Those outside of the Roman orbit lacked citizenship and were therefore barbarians, uncivilized regardless of their cultural achievements. Of course, the astute among them realized that their own ancestors had once been considered as barbaric as the tribes beyond the Rhine and were perfectly aware that a few centuries in the imperial melting pot had made Romans of them all. The most recent flood of newcomers, however, seemed different. The empire had always been able to absorb new people into its expanding body, and the immigrants had proved more often than not to be a source of strength, but times had changed. The empire was now on the defensive, and the Germanic peoples crossing its borders wanted its land, not its culture. They were coming on their own terms, unwilling to be absorbed, speaking their own languages, and retaining their distinct cultures. The influx of new blood was no longer the source of strength it had always been. For many of those watching the traditions of millennia getting swept away, the strangers seemed like a frightening wave threatening to overwhelm the empire.
It would have been difficult at the best of times to absorb the sheer volume of newcomers, but, unfortunately for the empire, this massive wave of immigration came at a time when remarkably shortsighted rulers sat on the imperial throne. There had been a depressing decrease in quality ever since Julian’s death. His immediate successor had left a brazier burning in his tent one night and suffocated only eight months into his reign, and this left the throne to a pair of rather boorish brothers named Valentinian and Valens, who split the empire between them and tried to shore up the crumbling frontiers. Valentinian, the older of the two, managed to keep the West together for eleven years, while at the same time maintaining a restraining influence on the brash young Valens, but he could never control his own temper and suffered a fatal aneurysm in the midst of a characteristic rant. His sixteen-year-old son, Gratian, inherited the throne but was too young to assert himself, and this left the mercurial Valens as the driving force behind imperial policy.
With the Roman stage conspicuously empty of statesmen, the Visigoths and Ostrogoths asked permission to settle in Roman territory. They had left the frozen lands of Germany and Scandinavia behind and had come in search of new lands, something the fertile Eastern Empire seemed to have in abundance. They promised to provide troops in exchange for land, and the emperor obligingly agreed, allowing two hundred thousand Goths to cross into imperial territory and lumber toward their new homes in Thrace.
In theory, Valens’s plan to bolster the depleted imperial army with Germanic troops and at the same time repopulate devastated lands was an excellent idea, but it was doomed from the start. There was no way that the eastern government could handle such a staggering influx of immigrants, and Valens hardly even bothered to try. Shipments of food promised to the Goths arrived rotten or of such low quality as to be barely edible. Local merchants fleeced the starving newcomers, and several magistrates even started kidnapping them and selling them into slavery. Provoked beyond endurance, the Goths erupted in revolt.
Valens, whose shortsighted policies had largely been responsible for the debacle in the first place, wrote to his nephew Gratian to plan a joint campaign and set off in August 378 along the Via Egnatia with an army forty thousand strong, determined to teach the newcomers a lesson. As he approached the Gothic camp near Adrianople, he got an erroneous report that the Goths numbered only ten thousand, and he decided to attack at once without checking to see if the report was true. Throwing caution to the wind in his desire to prevent Gratian from sharing in the glory of vanquishing the Goths, he plunged forward with the entire army. It was a disastrous mistake. The day was unseasonably hot, and the Romans were parched, exhausted from their long march, and in no condition to fight. The Ostrogothic cavalry mercilessly swept down on them, easily splitting their ranks and cutting off all hope of escape. By the time the carnage ended, Valens, two-thirds of his army, and the myth of Roman invincibility lay trampled under the blood-soaked Gothic hooves.
It was the worst military disaster in four centuries, and it opened the floodgates of invasion to every barbarian tribe on the frontier. The eastern government was brought to its knees, its armies shattered and its emperor dead. Unafraid of Roman arms, the Goths rampaged through the East, attacking its major cities and even threatening Constantinople itself. Terrified peasants fled from their farms at the approaching hordes, watching from the hills as the horrifying foreigners destroyed their homes, sending a lifetime of work up in flames. Civilians huddled behind the walls of their cities and prayed for deliverance, but the imperial government was listless in the wake of Valens’s death. If a savior didn’t arrive soon, the mighty Roman Empire seemed destined to dissolve under the strain.