Sometime in the morning of August 9, 378 AD, the Emperor Valens marched out of his camp outside the city of Adrianople with around 20,000 troops to find and destroy Fritigern and his Gothic army. According to his scouts, the Goth chieftain was encamped about eleven miles away with only 10,000 men, but the going was hard since the road was in poor condition and it was early afternoon before the Roman advance elements encountered the Goths, encamped behind their circled wagons.

Fritigern had sent an embassy to Valens the day before, but the sudden appearance of the Emperor with his entire army seems to have caught the Tervingian Goth by surprise. The most mobile part of his army, the Greuthungian cavalry and their allies, had been dispatched to forage for supplies - they had probably only been sent out that very morning. Now, as the Goths watched the cavalry of the Roman right wing form a screen behind which the rest of the army could deploy in battle array, Fritigern sent fast riders to recall his mounted troops at once.

Fritigern was not the only one to be surprised. As the Gothic laager came into view it became apparent to Valens that his scouts had been wrong. Far from approaching Nike with only 10,000 warriors, it was clear that this was the main Gothic force. Estimates of how many men Fritigern commanded that day vary widely, with some modern authorities claiming there were as many as 150,000 Goths, but its unlikely that the Roman scouts could have underestimated the Gothic force by a factor of fifteen. It is likely that the two armies were relatively evenly matched in number, with the Romans slightly outnumbered.

The large Roman army took some time to deploy, but Fritigern knew he had to buy more time. While the Imperial infantry formed up in the middle of the Roman line, he sent some emissaries to negotiate with Valens, but the Emperor rejected them, demanding that higher ranking Goths come forward to speak with him. The Goths in turn suspected a trap, so they demanded a high ranking Roman hostage come over to their side to ensure their envoys' safety. Then there was a debate amongst the Roman high command as to who would go, with Richomer, the Western Imperial general, finally volunteering. But as he prepared to cross the field to the Gothic laager word reached Valens' position that the battle had already begun.

While the negotiations and deployment had dragged on, the Romans had stood waiting in the hot sun. It was now mid-afternoon and they had been marching and then standing in scorching heat - it gets to 40 degrees Celcius in that region in August - for hours without food or water. To add to their discomfort and impatience, the Goths had set fire to the tinder-dry grass and scrub around them, so the Romans were plagued by heat, smoke and clouds of dust. By this stage, the cavalry right wing had formed up on the army's right flank and the infantry were more or less in postion. Skirmishing units, the Scutarii and their accompanying archers, were harassing the Goths while the straggling cavalry left wing was still taking position. Precisely what happened is unknown, but the Scutarii commander Bacurius seems to have pressed his attacks too strongly, some Goths counter attacked from the laager and soon the Roman infantry were fully engaged. Startled by this turn of events, the Roman commanders broke off negotiations and the battle proper began - with the Romans already in some disorder.

What happened next effectively won the day for Fritigern, though it was as much good luck as good planning. As the battle began in confusion, with both sides surrounded by thick smoke and choking summer dust, the Gothic allied cavalry led by Alatheus and Saphrax suddenly appeared as if from nowhere and fell immediately on the Roman right flank, turning it and then attacking it from behind. The cavalry on the right were swept away by the sudden assault, with Ammianus describing the charging barbarian cavalry as 'descending from the mountains like a thunderbolt'. While the mass of Tervingian warriors descended from the circle of wagons to fully engage the Roman infantry centre, a section of the cavalry then wheeled behind the laager and attacked the Roman left in a similar manner. It is possible that the cavalry there were still only partially deployed and they were driven from the field by Saphrax and Alatheus' horsemen. With their cavalry gone and now assaulted by the Goths from almost all sides, the Roman infantry stood their ground and fought for survival rather than victory.

The significance of the Gothic cavalry in the battle has been much debated. Sir Charles Oman chose to begin his influential The Art of War in the Middle Ages with the Battle of Adrianople, depicting it as a victory of Gothic heavy cavalry over anachronistic Roman legionaries on foot - a victory which ushered in the reign of the medieval knight. More recent historians no longer accept this view. While the timely arrival of the Alatheus and Saphrax effectively won the day, it is unlikely the cavalry formed a very large portion of Fritigern's army. They were versatile, effective and skilled, but they were far outnumbered by the Tervingian warriors on foot. And while the cavalry's sudden assault drove off the Roman horse and exposed their infantry, the hard fighting was done by the Gothic footmen who fought hand to hand with the Roman foot soldiers for hours in the hot sun and blinding dust and eventually defeated them. Far from being a medieval heavy cavalry battle, this was largely a victory of infantry over infantry.

The achievement of the cavalry at Adrianople was impressive, however. The Greuthungians had lived alongside their steppe neighbours for many generations and had learned their mixed cavalry tactics well. The bulk of the Greuthungian Gothic force would have been lightly armoured horsemen wielding their spears overhand with a shield, or casting them at the enemy like javelins as they charged before closing to fight with the slashing spatha-style sword. Alongside them would have been the heavier armoured Alans and their Sarmatian cousins who, along with the Greuthungian and Taifalian nobles and their retinues, wore mail and lammellar cuirasses and probably fought with the two-handed heavy kontos lance. They were supported by the fast moving and deadly light horse archers of the Huns - a troop type which the Romans were to learn to respect in the wars against Attila in the coming century and were later to adopt themselves en masse.

But it was the Tervingian Gothic warriors who won the day. The battle had begun in the mid-afternoon and it raged for several long hours until sunset approached. Ammianus Marcellinus, himself a retired soldier, describes the fighting vividly:

“But when the barbarians, rushing on with their enormous host, beat down our horses and men, and left no spot to which our ranks could fall back to deploy, while they were so closely packed that it was impossible to escape by forcing a way through them, our men at last began to despise death, and again took to their swords and slew all they encountered, while with mutual blows of battle-axes, helmets and breastplates were dashed in pieces. Then you might see the barbarian towering in his fierceness, hissing or shouting, fall with his legs pierced through, or his right hand cut off, sword and all, or his side transfixed, and still, in the last gasp of life, casting round him defiant glances. The plain was covered with carcasses, strewing the mutual ruin of the combatants; while the groans of the dying, or of men fearfully wounded, were intense, and caused great dismay all around.”

Fritigern knew this was his chance to win the decisive victory he needed and the Roman troops knew they had to fight simply to get off the battlefield alive. Their cavalry was either destroyed or in full flight and the reserve unit, the Batavii had also fled before they were even committed. Crushed and hemmed in by the Gothic warriors around them, the Roman infantry fell in their thousands, with Ammianus describing 'one black pool of blood' and 'piled up heaps of the dead.'

Finally, in the approaching twilight, Valens withdrew and he and several of the surviving Roman commanders fled the field. The Roman troops who could disengage were then thrown into complete rout as they retreated and it was only when the moonless night darkened the battlefield that the killing finally stopped. Sources indicate up to a third of the Roman army died that hot afternoon and modern estimates indicate that about 10-15,000 Roman troops were killed, including several high ranking commanders and a great many senior officers. Somewhere amongst the dead, probably killed in the last chaotic retreat, was the Emperor Valens himself. One later story says the wounded Emperor took shelter in a house near the battlefield, to which the pursuing Goths set fire, burning Valens inside. Later Roman historians blamed the Arian heretic Emperor for the crushing defeat and felt this was a fitting end for him.

(To be continued ...)