On August 9, 378 AD, the Eastern Roman Emperor Valens marched out of the city of Adrianople with an army of about 25,000 troops determined to destroy the forces of the Gothic rebel Fritigern (in Gothic=*Frithugairns). By the evening of the same day he lay dead on the field of battle along with up to one third of his army - a defeat the historian Ammianus Marcellinus declared the worst since Cannae. How did Gothic refugees from over the Danube, who up to that point had been on the defensive against the Romans, inflict such a crushing defeat on the Empire? And was this surprise Gothic victory the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire?

The events of that day actually began with some movements of nomadic tribes far from the borders of the Empire a few years before. In the early 370s the Huns successfully conquered the Alans, a nomadic Iranian tribe who lived east of the Don. Then the Huns and Alans began to put increasing pressure on the kingdom of the Greuthungian Gothic ruler Ermanaric (*Airmanareiks).

Ermanaric had been a powerful ruler, whose sphere of influence had extended well beyond the Ukrainian steppes on which his people had settled. There's evidence that his power was acknowledged as far away as the Baltic region - the area from which the Goths had migrated 200 years before. The Greuthungian Goths, who later formed the core of the people known as the Ostrogoths, had adopted many of the practices of their Alanic and Sarmatian neighbours once they settled on the plains. They had taken up more extensive use of cavalry, including some heavy cavalry armed with the two-handed kontos lance, and they adopted many Sarmatian styles of dress and decoration. Despite this, they remained a Germanic people and remembered their kinship with the Tervingian Goths who lived in the forests to their west (who later became known as the Visigoths).

By the mid-370s, however, Ermanaric was old and the pressure from the Alans and Huns was starting to be harder to resist. Eventually the Greuthungian Goths suffered a crushing defeat and King Ermanaric, possibly in a pagan rite of self-sacrifice, commited suicide. He was succeeded by King Vithimer (*Winithamers) who made several attempts to stem the advance of the Huns. He seems to have successfully allied himself with some bands of Huns and Alans against their fellow tribesmen and managed to resist the invaders for a while.

By this time the Tervingian Goths were aware of the threat from the east and their leader Athanaric (*Athanareiks) sent a force to his eastern border to guard against the Huns and prevent the retreating Greuthungians from entering his territory. Around this time Vithimer was killed in battle and the majority of his people began a century of submission to the Huns. His infant son Videric was taken into care by two of his warband leaders, Altheus and Saphrax (who were possibly Sarmatian and Alanic, or even Hunnic, respectively), and they then led a fragment of the Greuthungian people and what was left of Vithimer's army westward to seem asylum in the Empire.

Now it was the Tervingians' turn to try to fight off the Huns. In the summer of 376 Athanaric had led a Tervingian Gothic army to the River Dneister and set up a fortified position there. He then sent two of his chiefs, Munderic (*Mundareiks) and Lagariman, eastward over the river to scout for the Hunnic armies. The Huns, however, crossed the river themselves in a surprise night advance and drove Athanaric's army back west, forcing them into the Bessarabian forests. Athanaric had proved himself the master of the tactical retreat during a defensive campaign against the Romans not long before, and his army remained largely intact. He then proceeded to build a series of static defensive fortifications to guard against further Hunnic advances, possibly by rebuilding the old Roman Limes Transalutanus north of the Danube.

This strategy also failed - the Huns circumvented Athanaric's defences and ravaged the Tervingians' food supplies. Completely out-manoevered, Athanaric began to lose political support. An opposition party of influential Tervingian chiefs, led by Fritigern and Alaviv, began to talk of seeking refuge from the highly mobile invaders within the Empire. Athanaric retreated into the mountains of Transylvania with those followers who were still loyal to him, while Alaviv and Fritigern led the bulk of the Tervingian people to the border with the Empire - the River Danube.

Thus at the end of the summer of 376 AD, with the Emperor Valens away in Antioch, word came to Constantinople that several hundred thousand refugees - Tervingian Goths along with Greuthungian Goths, Sarmatians, Alans and Taifalians - were seeking permission to cross the Danube and enter Roman territory. The decision to let them cross was to have grave consequences for both Valens and the Empire.

(To be continued ...)