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How did the Roman army and strategy change during the last two hundred years of the Roman Empire in the West?

“The best-known fact about the Roman Empire is that it declined and fell.” However, despite this topic being a popular one, thanks in no small part to possibly “the best known modern work of history” , Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “no consensus has emerged” for the reasons explaining the fall of Roma Aeterna. As Arther Ferrill stated, “historians of the twentieth century have multiplied the variety of explanations many times over” making it harder for students of the subject to come to any solid conclusions regarding the collapse of one the greatest empires the world has ever seen. However, it is the aim of this essay to assess the evolution of the Roman army from the preclusive strategy of Hadrian and the Severans to the field armies of Constantine and the increasing use of barbarian troops. I have decided to focus on this area because, like Arther Ferrill, I believe that, despite being affected by “many factors – political, social, religious and economic” which were undoubtedly important, the Roman Empire was still a military empire and most of what contributed to the Fall of Rome occurred on the battlefields of Europe. Throughout the history of Rome, since “the first legions had marched out against the Sabines” , the army had trampled Greeks, Carthaginians, Gauls, Spaniards and Persians, but by the late fourth century the infantry power of Rome had begun to wane and stagnate and less than a century later the Roman army existed only in name.

Before we look at the development of the Roman army, I must set out what I mean by the Fall of Rome. This is another question that has drawn a lot of attention in recent years, with there being seemingly no end to the theories on a specific date or whether or not Rome fell at all. Gibbon regarded the accession of Odoacer as king of Italy, following the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in AD476, as the “total extinction of the Western Empire” , but he then continued to refer to the Byzantine Empire as Roman . Those who follow this suggestion that the Byzantine Empire, and in particular Constantinople, was not an offshoot of the Roman Empire but the last remaining part it, will see the captures of Constantinople in AD1205 by the Fourth Crusade and by Sultan Mehmet II of the Ottoman Empire in AD1453 as the true Fall of Rome. I find this idea a bit difficult to accept as by the time of the conquests of Justinian, the Eastern Roman Empire had started to change significantly, especially with the establishing of Greek over Latin as the main language of the empire. Also the city of Rome itself was not a permanent possession of the Byzantines and while by this stage being Roman was very different to living in the city, not having the Urbs in the empire possibly takes away some of the justification for calling yourself Roman.

Another way to attempt the dating of the collapse of the empire in the west, which is mentioned by Ferrill , is to link it with the decline of imperial power. If we take this approach, there are several events that could have signalled the Fall of Rome. The separate sacks of the city, first by Alaric the Goth in AD410 and then by Gaiseric, King of the Vandals, in AD455, showed that the emperor, who was holed up in Ravenna, could do nothing about the frequent attacks on his remaining territory. By this time the Caesars were no more than pawns and held no real authority themselves. The line of short-lived puppet-rulers continued for another twenty years until Odoacer ended “the unbroken line of emperors” and it is this “demise of a once-great office” that I will use as the date for the Fall of Rome. This is due to the fact that the city itself had fallen out of Roman hands and without a western emperor there could not be an empire in the west . This was not a “sharp historical break” as the Western Empire had been crumbling for well over fifty years but “the traditional date for the fall of Rome in AD476 is basically a good one, despite many efforts to debunk it.”

The state of affairs in Europe during the middle part of the fifth century was a far cry from the stability and prosperity of second century AD for the united Empire. “In the days of Hadrian and his successors down through the Severans Roman emperors pursued a grand strategy based on preclusive security” and the static frontiers of the Empire were virtually impenetrable. This preclusive security was built upon a continuous single barrier of walls, which encompassed almost the entire northern border, including the vast stone cordon of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England. These defences were supplemented by the permanent legionary fortresses around the frontiers and made it very difficult for barbarians, who were very weak at any kind of siege warfare, to make severe incursions into the empire. While on the surface, with the series of interconnected roads and lines of transport , this system seemed secure, it was highly susceptible to simultaneous attacks on two fronts , as are armies throughout history, and once the barbarians were able to pierce the barriers in large numbers the “soft inner shell of the Empire was easy prey” . Luttwack even talks of a “Maginot-line mentality” in the Roman Empire.

The first evidence of changes to this system is the reign of Septimius Severus. Not only did he allow legionaries to “marry and to live with their wives and families in civilian accommodation outside the military camps” , but he also significantly strengthened the garrison of Rome from 11,500 to 30,000 men . It is possible that this was in anticipation of “ the later acts of Gallienus and the reforms of Constantine” but, as Ferrill suggests, to state that Severus used his new garrison of Rome as a central reserve is “to go beyond the evidence.” However, the preclusive strategy of second century AD Rome relied heavily on political stability and the constant presence of the legions on the frontiers. The repeated civil wars and rebellions of the third century diverted legions from the borders and this was like an open invitation for the barbarians to take advantage.

The chaos of the mid-third century saw the abandonment of preclusive strategy, allowing Goths and Alamanni to traverse the Danube, the Franks to cross the Rhine and the Heruli to sack Athens. The defence of their imperial regime became far more important to the “Barracks emperors” than the defence of the frontiers. They preferred to use an “elastic defence” , which was to seek out any attacking force and defeat it when possible, but with the emperor not in control of all the legions and a rejuvenated Sassanid Persia causing problems, it was not as easy to avoid the dreaded war on two fronts. It was during this period that the empire suffered several humiliating reversals on the battlefield, with Decius becoming the first emperor to fall in battle against a foreign army and then Valerian being captured and forced to live out the rest of his life in servitude to the Persian king, Shapur I. The empire did gradually restore its military strength, thanks in no small part to Aurelian, who defeated the break away Palmyrene alliance of Zenobia regaining control of the east, but political instability continued and Aurelian lasted no longer than most of the other “Barracks emperors.” The trend looked set to carry on with the accession of an Illyrian army officer called Diocles but, under the imperial title of Diocletian, he was to bring much needed stability and organisation to the reunited empire.

Diocletian’s political and administrative reforms were widespread and a lot of them affected his defensive policy. The institution of the Tetrarchy and the twelve imperial dioceses made the defence of the easier as the four imperial colleagues and their local representatives could take any wars on two fronts. To accommodate this new arrangement, the army had to be enlarged, possibly to as large 500,000 men . This is half as large again as the army of Severus, but it probably did not differ in either legion size, still around 5,000 men, or in overall military tactics. Apart from the size, the big change made by Diocletian and his colleagues was the variety in tactical units. The armies of the Tetrarchy incorporated more specialised units than they ever had before, with cavalry lancers, lanciarii, companion cavalry, comites, crack infantry divisions and shock troops, Ioviani and Herculianii , appearing on a regular basis. It also seems likely that a new imperial bodyguard of hand picked men, protectores, replaced the untrustworthy Praetorian Guard . Despite having a more well rounded army, able to deal with multiple scenarios, it is difficult to find any definite evidence to support Theodor Mommsen’s claim that the mobile field army was a joint creation of Diocletian and Constantine, although Mommsen himself conceded his evidence was shaky . Another area that we are unsure over is whether it was Diocletian or Constantine who was involved in the introduction of “the practice of requiring the sons of veterans to serve in the army.” This notwithstanding, Diocletian may have been trying to return to the consistency and preclusive strategy of the second century mentioned above, but the circumstances of the late third and early fourth centuries forced a change to the original format, with each of the tetrarchs taking one of the four major military sectors – based in Trier, Milan, Sirmium and Nicomedia. This “offered closer military supervision of the frontiers than emperors had done previously.”

Diocletian’s reforms were successful in stabilising the empire until it came to the problem of the succession. The generation following his retirement, Diocletian’s Tetrarchy fought with itself and eventually imploded leaving one man in control again – Constantine. It is during the reign of Constantine the Great that the “big change in Roman grand strategy came,” with the creation of the field army, something that Zosimus saw as catastrophic . Gibbon followed this idea and said that by completely abandoning preclusive security, Constantine “corrupted military discipline and prepared the ruin of the empire.” So what was this field army and why was it sneered at by both contemporary and modern sources? The field army of Constantine consisted of probably 100,000 men taken from the frontiers , leaving them in a weakened condition. Along with these men, Constantine incorporated several of the specialised units of Diocletian, including the lanciarii, Ioviani and Herculianii, and many Gallic and German troops . Straight away we can see that the infantry has taken something of a back seat to cavalry and shock troops and this would only escalate in the last century of the Roman Empire in the west.

According to Mommsen and his followers preclusive security was no longer valid and the “protection of the Empire in the trying times of the fourth and fifth centuries required a new grand strategy relying on a central mobile army and a system of defence-in-depth.” Whether Constantine thought this way is debateable but defence-in-depth is based on the assumption that the frontiers are not impenetrable and your enemies will inevitably pierce them . The mobile reserve would be used to back up any local forces under threat or to help contain any incursions into Roman territory. The local forces would use strong forts to wear down the barbarians, who “knew little about the techniques of siege warfare” and could be caught against the walls by the mobile reserve . This system was theoretically sound but once it came into practice the defects became obvious. As I have said, with only one central reserve and the frontier forces being stripped to man it, the empire was again extremely vulnerable to a two-pronged attack as the reserve could only be at full strength in one place at once. A second problem is that with the reserve stationed in northern Italy it was a good distance from some of the trouble spots and by the time it got there, they may only have been able to pick off a few stragglers of the barbarian raiders . The long-term consequences of the adopting of the defence-in-depth strategy were that the field army gradually became an elite force while the frontier troops devolved into second rate fighters and that it undermined the Roman infantry, which were not fast enough to answer a call for help.

Not only did Constantine change Roman strategy and institute the field army – comitatenses, he also made large changes to the traditional Roman army. He reduced the size of the army from 5,000 to 1,000 men, leading Berg and Herman to suggest that by this time there were over 175 legions in the field . He introduced a new imperial bodyguard made up of elite cavalry regiments of five hundred men, recruited mainly from Germans . The border and river guards, limitanei and ripenses respectively, became a virtual police force for the frontier provinces and this put an almost immediate strain on their discipline and training. It is very easy to put forward all these problems with the new strategy and army, but the fact remains that under Constantine and his sons the mobile army fought like the legions of old and were very successful, defeating the Goths on the Danube in AD332. However, the Roman infantry had been thrown into a downward spiral of gradual decline, starting almost immediately with the limitanei, who had traditionally been the best troops in the empire and then later spreading to the comitatenses, who “softened” and “treated themselves to shows and luxuries” by being allowed to live in the cities . “The grand strategy of Constantine took a terrible toll in military efficiency and espirt de corps” and the “militarisation of the Roman Empire in the fourth century did not necessarily produce a better.”

The first major campaign during which the new look Roman army could flex its muscles was that of Julian the Apostate, who launched a huge invasion of Persia . This invasion is given huge coverage by Ammianus Marcellinus, but what had started out as an attempt to gain revenge for the loss of Mesopotamia to Shapur II quickly turned into tactical disaster for the Romans. Julian had expected the Persians to defend their capital, Ctesiphon, but as he approached it Shapur’s field army simply retreated, leaving Julian with a nightmare scenario. He could not throw himself into the siege of Ctesiphon if the Persian army remained undefeated, and undefeated it remained as the Persians refused to engage time and time again. When Julian eventually went after the Great King into Persia proper, the Persians continued to retreat and resorted to a scorched earth policy. Even when there was a battle the Persians now considerably reinforced retreated without serious losses. It was a Pyrrhic victory for the Romans. Following Julian’s death, it was left to his successor Jovian to negotiate a humiliating settlement, with the surrendering of Nisibis being particularly devastating. This was a huge psychological defeat for the whole empire, but especially for the army, which had not been able to show its strength, having been failed by its leadership. Julian relied too much on second-guessing what the Persians would do and by splitting his army he left any chance of a swift and decisive outcome with Procopius and 30,000 men in Armenia.

The morale of the army had barely had time to recover from this debacle in Persia before it was hit with an even greater defeat, this time inside its own territory. Set against the background of the Hunnic onslaught in the Russian steppes, which was so devastating that it led Colin McEvedy to suggest “in three years they [the Huns] had obliterated a century of German expansion” . The desperation of the Goths caused them to appeal to the eastern emperor Valens to be allowed to settle in Roman territory south of the Danube. Buoyed by the opportunity to add some of these barbarians to his army , Valens agreed, but almost as soon as the first Goths began arriving in the Balkans problems arose. The Roman generals, Lupicinus and Maximus, who were charged with attaining food for the new arrivals “levied an ungenerous and oppressive tax on the wants of the hungry barbarians” and “collected all the dogs that their insatiable greed could find and exchanged each of them for a slave” . This mistreatment forced the Goths into a new wave of raids into the Balkans in search of food. By 378AD, the two emperors, Gratian and Valens, had decided to end the Gothic problem once and for all and coordinated a joint attack with both the Eastern and Western armies. However, with further to travel from Italy rather than Constantinople, Gratian was late and Valens, stationed by now in Adrianople, took the fatal decision, possibly through poor advice , to gain sole credit for the victory and led his Eastern army against the new Visigothic king, Fritigern.

The subsequent battle of Adrianople was an unmitigated disaster for the Romans, who lost perhaps 40,000 men including Valens. The engagement is summed up in just thirteen words by Gibbon; “the Roman cavalry fled; the infantry was abandoned, surrounded, and cut to pieces” . This brief account is basically what happened to Valens’ army. With the infantry over committed in the centre, the routing of their cavalry left the Roman army drastically exposed and when the Gothic cavalry wheeled round to attack the Romans in the rear and the flanks, no matter how courageously or skilfully the Romans fought, they were unable to extend their ranks or even to use their swords to fight back. It was Cannae all over again. This was another shattering and demoralising defeat for the Romans, with yet another emperor falling in the field. However, it must be noted that this was another defeat as a result of failed leadership. Despite the vast changes made by Constantine gradually weakening the Roman army , the level from which it was declining was so high that by the mid-fourth century the Roman army was still of a formidable quality. As the sun went down at Adrianople, the army was still fighting and no retreat was ever sounded. This shows that spirit, training and discipline were still very high but the losses were to prove disastrous. The men who fell at Adrianople were seasoned veterans and the raw recruits called up to replace them could not fill their shoes. While the army still followed Constantine’s system, there were some momentary changes. The comitatenses began to work more closely with the limitanei, with both interchanging their roles . While this was a military sound policy , it was not a permanent change and the long-term result of Adrianople turned out to be that the frontier troops became more and more detached from the field armies and began to deteriorate at a faster rate.

The bravery and discipline shown at Adrianople by the army proved that there was still a “military basis for recovery” , and after being installed as Augustus in the east by Gratian, Theodosius I was charged with the hunting down and defeating of the fragmented Gothic tribes scattered throughout the Balkans. He was met with some success but without the seasoned veterans lost three years previously by his predecessor Valens, in AD382, Theodosius came to terms with the Visigoths. The agreement “set the standard for barbarian settlement in the empire of the next hundred years” and has been seen as a “grave breach with precedent” . The emperors had allowed the Visigoths to settle in Moesia under their own rulers and still under arms in return for military service as foederati of the Roman Empire. The continued use of this status would gradually carve up the empire between barbarian elements and “in the end this legal barbarian penetration was never repulsed” . However critical we are of Theodosius’ treatment of the barbarian problem, we must remember that to be able to make his programme for military rebuilding a reality he had to stall the Visigothic problem quickly and as bloodlessly as possible and this settlement may have been the only viable option. It is easy to ask why did he not marshal the Roman army to crush and drive them out of imperial territory, but the simple answer is that Theodosius was not the military leader that Valentinian I had been, never mind a “truly inspirational leader of men, such as Alexander or Caesar” .

Theodosius’ settlements with the Goths and later the Persians proved to be successful, but almost straight away he was faced with severe internal strife. The emperor Gratian was killed by his troops, who then declared in favour of Magnus Maximus, who quickly took command of Gaul and Spain. With a under trained army, Theodosius was content to recognise Maximus, but when the latter invaded Italy four years later in an attempt to replace the young Valentinian II, Theodosius had little option but to meet him on the battlefield. The new Theodosian army proved its worth by defeating and killing Maximus outside Aquileia returning order to the west. It did not last long and six years later Valentinian II was killed by his general, Arbogast, who in turn had his pagan friend Eugenius elevated to the purple. The two armies met at the Frigidus River in AD394 and it was to be the last battle between pagan and Christian Romans. The battlefield left no room for manoeuvre and the confrontation caused heavy casualties on both sides. Theodosius’ foederati allies lost over 10,000 men on the first day , proving that Theodosius was not a tactical genius in any stretch of the imagination. Both armies held their ground, again suggesting that the morale of the Romans was still high, but eventually after a natural wind blinded Arbogast’s army and pushed forward Theodosius’, the Christian emperor emerged victorious .

While this victory reunited the empire, it had dire consequences for the united army. The forces that had met on the Frigidus possibly contained 100,000 men each and the best troops of east and west fell in the fighting, more than the Persian and Adrianople campaigns put together. The Gothic allies of Theodosius had played a huge part in the battle and could claim an even bigger place in the empire. In fact by ignoring these demands of the Goths and by snubbing a certain Gothic leader by the name of Alaric, Theodosius made a greater enemy for Rome than the one he had just defeated. Also to replenish the losses of manpower, Theodosius recruited more and more barbarian troops. The fact that these troops were allowed to serve under their own leaders showed the Romans that barbaric discipline was not as severe as what they had to endure and as time went by they may have decided that there was no reason “to do what barbarian troops were rewarded heavily for not doing.” Having said that, the army of Theodosius at the time of his death was still a powerful entity. It was huge, possibly 500,000 men , and from the Notitia Dignitatum, we see that it was full of highly specialised units, more so than that of Diocletian , to give more tactical flexibility . What Theodosius did with this army was to shape in next century of Roman history. On his death Theodosius spilt the empire between his two sons, Honorius and Arcadius. At a time when all the resources of the empire were needed to defend the west, only half were to be available as was only half of the army.

The nature of the Theodosian split immediately caused enmity between the two emperors. Honorius’ regent in the west, Stilicho, claimed that Theodosius had asked him to act as regent for Arcadius in the east as well, but this was unacceptable to Arcadius’ advisors. Stilicho remained adamant over his inherited position in the east to the detriment of the west. The strategy carried forward from Theodosius of appeasing the Goths made Stilicho an unpopular man and his unwillingness to face the Vandals meant that a large chunk of Gaul was lost virtually overnight . He was also responsible for stripping Britain and Gaul of her legions to be used in the defence of Italy, which had basically become the crux of his entire strategy. Although a strategic withdrawal from Italy may have been the better course of action, Stilicho did not see the abandoning of the ancient centre of the empire as an option .

Having used the British and Gallic legions to drive Alaric out of Italy in AD402, Stilicho and Honorius moved the imperial seat to Ravenna , which was an almost open declaration that the Rhine frontier was not important and even more drastic was that with the stationing of the field army in northeast Italy, Rome was virtually undefended. With much of the west lost to barbarians or usurpers and rumours of his treachery running rampant, Stilicho looked to the east to preside over the accession of Theodosius II. This was the last straw and Stilicho was made to pay for his strategic and tactical failures with execution. Following his death a witch-hunt was carried out against his army, with many Germans being killed. This led to the defection of some 30,000 foederati troops to Alaric , leaving Honorius without an army of any worth. The downfall of Stilicho and the treatment of his army became the turning point for the western empire as Stilicho, when he was not looking to the east, had been a good general defeating Alaric on several occasions, but without him or his army to stop him Alaric returned to Italy in AD410 and sacked Rome without any opposition. This disastrous event marks the beginning of the final decline of the western empire. The army, or what was left of it, had suffered demoralising defeats for the last fifty years and with much of it cut off from Italy by the invasions of Gaul, Spain and Africa , it would never recover its former status.

According to Vegetius, Rome’s military problem was the weakness of its infantry in the fifth century . As we have seen, the infantry that had fought in Persia and at Adrianople and Frigidus still “fought with the old discipline and held their ground or died trying” , but by the crisis of the first decade of the fifth century, barbarisation had eroded much of the old discipline and there was very little distinction between the armies of Stilicho and Aëtius and those of the Goths and Huns. In the past the Roman infantry had saved the day in several battles even when significantly outnumbered , but by the “fifth century the Roman infantry could save nothing” . The last campaigns of the Western Roman Empire, which not only served as its last victory but also an example of its ineffectiveness, are those against the rampaging Huns of Attila in the AD450’s. The Roman generalissimo Aëtius was by now the dominant Roman in the west and he spent much of his time in Gaul trying to settle the problems caused by the Visigoths. He allowed more and more barbarian groups to have land throughout the area, hoping to use them to control unrest and although he had had a good relationship with the Huns, to whom he owed his position, in the past, he was faced with a huge Hunnic invasion of Gaul in AD451. To his credit, Aëtius realised his Roman army was no match for the army of Attila and so he formed an alliance with the foederati who he had settled in Gaul (Alans and Burgundians) and with Theodoric, King of the Visigoths.

The two armies met on the Catalaunian Fields near Châlons in what Creasy included in his Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World. Despite the withdrawal of Attila, the battle showed how far the Roman infantry had fallen. It was arrayed on Aëtius’s left mixed with Frankish infantry. Evidently there were not enough Romans to make up an entire wing and they could not be relied upon to do their job as they did very little fighting during the battle except seizing the high ground at the beginning. The reported speech of Attila to his army tells us a lot about how even the barbarians viewed the fifth century Roman infantry – “The dust of battle overwhelms them while they fight in close formation under a screen of protective screens.” This may not seem like a bad tactic on the behalf of the Romans, but fighting in close formation requires Spartan-like training and discipline , and if these are not present, as they had not been throughout the fifth century, the close formation is worse than no formation at all. This is why Attila ordered his Huns to ignore the Roman infantry at Châlons, but we cannot blame Aëtius for this as he had inherited an almost impossible situation. Again a military genius, which Aëtius certainly was not, could have carried the day, but at the vital moment Rome could not produce another leader the calibre of Trajan or Caesar. The Hunnic invasion of Italy highlighted the stagnation of the western army and that the Western Empire was living on borrowed time and, although Aëtius had suggested a strategic withdrawal to Gaul, the Huns were able to plunder Italy without any real opposition. The death of Aëtius in AD454 “threw the Western Roman Empire into its death agonies” and twenty years later Rome had fallen.

We will never know for certain how barbarised the Roman army had become by the end, but what does seem certain is that the Roman army had lost its reputation as “the most efficient fighting force on the face of the earth” and if the speech of Attila is to be believed the Roman infantry had become even worse than that of the barbarians it had been fighting for the last century. However, one must only look east to see that the deterioration of Roman infantry was not an epidemic, as the Eastern Empire remained strong. The east had rebelled against the Theodosian policy of barbarisation and was therefore able to maintain a high level of discipline and training expressed by the small but effective army of Belisarius in the sixth century . If the western government had re-imposed the ancient discipline the army may have become reacquainted with its past successes, but this may have been virtually impossible especially after the losses of Britain, Africa and parts of Spain and Gaul, which together generated the remaining resources of the west. Without these resources the western army could not hope to stave off the “onrush of barbarism” . However, the decline of Roman infantry cannot be linked completely to a rise in cavalry tactics. As Richard Berg and Mark Herman wrote “The increasing power of cavalry stemmed not from any significant increase in their own capability, but to the gradual disappearance of trained infantry.” During the last years of the Roman Empire in the West, disciplined foot soldiers were still capable of fending off a good cavalry charge, but by the fifth these troops few and far between.

To conclude, I would like to return to a phrase I used in the opening paragraph of this essay. I said that it was “the aim of this essay to assess the evolution of the Roman army”. However, having looked through the last two hundred years of the Roman Empire in the west, I think that it is misleading to call it the evolution of the army. I will admit that Diocletian and Constantine did help the army to evolve into an integrated force, but by completely abandoning the preclusive strategy that had served Hadrian and his successors so well and by introducing large numbers of German troops into the army, Constantine started the Roman war machine down the road to oblivion. So I suggest that the last century of the Roman Empire in the west after the battle of Adrianople represents a case of retrogression, with the west eventually losing its superiority in strategy, military tactics and discipline therefore becoming no better than the barbarian armies that overthrew it.


Bibliography

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