Eharding on the fall of the Roman Empire, Part VII/XII: the Goths of 376 and the revolt of Maximus
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SOURCES: Ammianus Marcellinus, Themistius, Ambrose of Milan, Theodosian Code, Sozomen, Socrates, Theodoret
The first affected frontier by the mass migrations resulting from Hunnic movement into Eastern Greater Germany was not the Gallic or Upper Danube frontier, but today’s Bulgaria. The tale is told by the late fourth century historian Ammianus Marcellinus. In 376, a large group of Goths from both North and South of the Dniester decided to abandon their ancestral homelands as a result of Hunnic and Alanic raids West of the Dnieper. The Alans were an Aryan grouping of horse-riding nomads who had been known to the Romans since the first century. In contrast, the first Roman mentions of Huns that have come down to us are in the History of Ammianus, mentioning the Persian emperor Shapur II campaigning against them to the East of Iran 356 and a treaty of alliance between them and Persia in 358. Gibbon (probably correctly) attributes their migration to the ascent of the Xianbei in Mongolia. By the time the Goths arrived on the lower Danube, Huns are known from numismatic evidence to have seized power from the Persians in Sogdia, Bactria, and the valley of Peshawar. The Huns would keep the Persians busy for the next century and a fifth. By the time they disappeared as a notable people during the latter part of the fifth century, the Goths had been forced out of Ukraine virtually in their entirety. In all the lands to the East of the Siret, they maintained only a presence in Crimea, though they kept it for a surprisingly long thousand years until both the Goths and Romans on that peninsula were at last conquered by the Ottomans, bringing an end to the last independent Eastern Roman and Gothic polity. They were the first ever group of Asiatic nomads to raid southeastern Europe, marking an altogether new phenomenon in Eurasia which became a peculiar mark of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The Slavs of the sixth to eighth centuries and Magyars of the tenth are exceptions to the general pattern of the invaders of East and Southeast Europe having origins far to the East of the Urals.
The horse was only domesticated in the mid-fourth millennium BC; the chariot was not invented before the twenty-third century BC; the war chariot, invented by steppe-dwelling Indo-Europeans, only became widespread in the seventeenth century BC; horseback riding as a means of warfare did not exist in Assyria before the early ninth century BC, its origin among steppe-dwelling Indo-Europeans must be perhaps a couple centuries earlier, but certainly not more than four. Archaeology indicates the steppe did not begin to turn to full nomadism (in place of the Gothic-style seminomadism that began with the Pit Grave culture) until the tenth century BC. Horseback riding was first introduced into present-day Mongolia in the mid-first millennium BC. The chief steppe nomads known to the world of Classical Antiquity- Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, and Alans- were Aryans, and were all of the R1a Y-haplogroup peculiar to Aryans and Slavs and originating more than ten thousand years ago between the Don and the Urals, a pattern which had prevailed in Central Asia for two thousand years -but –no longer than that. Though all these Aryans had often quite substantial Asiatic admixture, at no point prior to the Huns was the steppe nomad population of Ukraine majority-Asiatic. The origin of the Kushans of Afghanistan is less clear, but there is no reason to doubt their Indo-European status. No evidence whatsoever exists for Eastern Asiatic domination of any part of Central Asia prior to the second century AD, after the Northern Xiongnu were destroyed by the Chinese and Xianbei. From the first half of the fourth century to the Russian conquest in the nineteenth century, present-day Kazakhstan became continuously dominated by Asiatics. Several more groups of Late Antique and Medieval Asiatics -the Kutrigurs and Avars of the sixth century, the Bulgars of the seventh, the Khazars of the eighth, the Pechenegs of the eleventh, the Cumans of the twelfth, and, lastly and most impressively, the Mongols of the thirteenth would all follow in the Huns’ footsteps. Both the Chinese and Russians liberated themselves from these nomads over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though only during the New Imperialist era would their upper hand over these steppe nomads be fully assured. During the fourth to eighth centuries, it was the Eastern Greater Germans who bore the brunt of Hunnic, Avar, and Slavic invasions, and were in much the same position during these centuries the Rus were be in the thirteenth. As in the Turkic expansion six centuries later, the primary axes of conflict would be Iran’s Northeastern frontier, followed by the Roman Danube frontier, followed by India’s Western frontier.
This Gothic arrival would only be the first of five attempted mass migrations of major Germanic chiefdoms into the Roman Empire prior to Attila. The others would be Goths into today’s Bulgaria in 386 (fully defeated), Goths into Italy in 405 (fully defeated), Vandals, Alans and Sueves into Gaul in 406 (uncontained; took advantage of the previous incursion and state of war between East and West), and Burgundians into eastern Gaul in 408(?) (partially contained; took advantage of a Roman civil war). The 376 Gothic incursion was partially contained. Much unlike the occasional bouts of autoimmune disorder that afflicted the Roman Empire about once per decade, every single one of the incursions of major Germanic mobile chiefdoms prior to 410 that were not fully defeated became persistent infections coursing through the bloodstream of the Western Empire. These could not come to an end except by the hand of other Germanic chiefdoms or by the Arab’s sword.
The offspring of the adults who had arrived on the lower Danube in 376 would rebel in 395, initiate the first fifth century invasion of the core of the Western Empire in 401-2, take advantage of a coup and usurpation to sack Rome for the first time in centuries in 410, reconcile with the Empire in 415, settle in Aquitane in 418 as a reward for their service to the Empire, fight wars of rebellion against the Empire in 425-6, 431, 436-439, and 457-8, and, last but not least, finally immolate the carcass of the Western Empire in 469 by creating an independent Visigothic kingdom that would last for a quarter of a millennium. In order to have done all that, the number of initial migrants must have numbered at least in the tens of thousands. The total number of people of Germanic origin subject to barbarian chiefdoms within the borders of the Roman Empire would at no point be higher than 1% of the population of the Western Empire -or, in other words, never higher than the mid-fifth century population of Constantinople. These numbers, however, were more than sufficient to give Roman armies a run for their money. This barbarian invasion has no resemblance whatsoever to the cosmopolitization of American cities today, which is substantially more similar to the cosmopolitanization of Italy by men from the Levant and Anatolia under the late Republic and early Principate. Since the Gothic war would ultimately be won, if rather indecisively, and problems with the Goths would only seriously trouble the Empire again after the death of the first Theodosius, the only reason I include the below paragraph is to demonstrate that, even when the Empire was operating at tip-top shape with no internal political problems (something which could never be taken for granted), the Gothic barbarians, especially if aided by Alanic allies, were a truly formidable force.
Only those Gothic migrants from the South of the Dniester, the Thervingi, were, due to the immigrants’ vast numbers, imperial desire to divide and conquer the Goths, desire to increase tax revenue and military recruits, and the Thervingi’s historically better relations with the Empire, accepted by the Eastern Emperor, Valens. Obviously this was nowhere close to a majority of the Thervingi, but it was enough for the Empire to be concerned. Valens was then residing in Antioch with most of the Empire’s mobile forces in order to focus on the Persian threat. The Thervingi refugees were disarmed by the Romans prior to their entry. They were moved en masse into what is today eastern Bulgaria. The sheer size of the refugee population made supplying them difficult.
When the Trevingi inevitably rebelled against the Roman forces’ black marketeering and other predictable mistreatment, the local Roman troops, accustomed to protecting strongholds more than to large-scale mobile warfare, failed to quell their rebellion. Thanks to the Thervingi rebellion, as well as the arrival of Greuthungi Gothic illegal immigrants from North of the Dniester taking advantage of the Eastern Empire’s withdrawal of forces from the frontier to subdue the Thervingi, the migrants, one thousand years prior to the entry of the Ottoman Sultan into Hadrianopolis, began raiding present-day northern Bulgaria, destroying and looting estates, but captured no fortified cities. Valens sent forces from Armenia, led by commanders Trajanus and Profuturus, to quell the Gothic rebellion in 377, but the offensive failed.
In response, Valens made peace with Persia and returned to Constantinople in 378, hoping for a joint East-West offensive against the invaders, who by this time had moved to raiding present-day southern Bulgaria. However, the much younger Western Emperor, Gratian, the son of Valentinian I, born in Sirmium, Vojvodina, was himself delayed by Germanic raids on the upper Rhine and Alan raids on the lower Danube. Hearing of Gratian’s victories against the barbarians along the Rhine, Valens decided to disregard the Goths’ requests for negotiations and attack the Gothic army, which had been reinforced by Hunnic and Alanic allies, near Hadrianopolis without Western aid. The result, on August 9, 378, was an utter military disaster, with Valens dying in the battle and the majority of the attacking Eastern Roman force becoming casualties. Five months after the death of Valens, Gratian recognized a former general known for his campaigns against Sarmatian raiders in the region of today’s Vojvodina, Theodosius, born in Hispania, to be Eastern Emperor. In order to strengthen Theodosius’s hand, Gratian transferred responsibility for the region Theodosius once governed to the Eastern Empire. However, the Eastern army again failed at quelling the Goths. After this failure, Gratian moved his capital from Trier to Milan in March of 381 and decided on using his own generals, Arbogast and Bauto, both of Frankish origin, to finish the war. His generals did succeed in their offensives against the Goths in Thessaly by summer of that year. Theodosius then, rather then engaging in direct battle with the Goths, decided to simply garrison towns threatened by them in order to cripple their ability to exort the towns for supplies. This anti-Gothic strategy would stand the test of time.
The third of October of 382 resulted in the surrender of the various remaining groups of Goths. They were settled in the Balkans and appear to not have been sold into slavery or forced into tenant farming (on this, see Halsall, who denies the existence of any treaty between the Goths and Romans at this stage or any settlement of Goths under independent leaders). As Heather points out, the Roman wealthy residing within the region raided by the Goths did not leave it entirely, but simply moved their residences into the better defended cities. Despite demonstrable defects in both the effectiveness of the Roman armed forces and imperial judgment, during this particular Gothic War, the system worked- the Western Empire did bail out the East when the latter was in severe difficulties. This would be quite far from the case for the West in the early fifth century.
Despite the great long-run consequences the 376 Gothic invasion would have, compared to their stunning victories during the Gothic war of 249-74, the Goths’ performance in the 376-82 war was actually extremely underwhelming. During the Gothic War of 249-74, the Goths, then still predominantly headquartered to the North of the Dniester, not only killed the emperor Decius, born in Martinci, Vojvodina, as well as his son in 251 at Abritus, thus beginning the most disastrous period of the Crisis of the Third Century, they had actually destroyed Philippopolis, then the Thracian provincial capital (something not even Attila managed -see here p. 62), then, taking the entire Roman treasury with them, went back to present-day Romania to go on pirate raids across the entire Aegean and beyond. And yet, the impact of the 376 entry would be much greater than that of the 249-74 war.
Barbarian border raids were fairly typical. Attempted permanent relocations of one or more mobile chiefdoms from their homelands into the Empire while making every possible effort to avoid being subjugated to Roman rule were certainly extraordinary events. They require explanation. Even in the severely degraded state the Western Empire found itself after 410, it did not experience another entry, whether permanent or temporary, of a major mobile barbarian chiefdom into the heart of the Empire until Attila. The one just previous to 376, which does not appear to have had the intention of permanent mass resettlement, was over a century before. The rarity of mass migration of mobile chiefdoms into the Empire is readily explainable by the population of Greater Germany never being more than a tenth that of the Roman Empire. An explanation for those mass indestructible migrations of mobile chiefdoms into the Empire that did happen is also readily available, plausible, and indirectly supportable by both archaeological and literary evidence: the westward expansion of the Huns combined with climate change making it impossible for the migrants to move northward. Any true simultaneous movement of tens of thousands of people out of Germanic lands must have made a much greater visible archaeological impact on Greater Germany than on the Roman Empire. And, indeed, archaeological evidence for population shifts in Greater Germany at the time mass outmigration is recorded in the written sources definitely exists. In the decades following the coming of the Huns into Ukraine, two great East Germanic archeological cultures – the Chernyakhov and the southern extension of the Przeworsk culture known as the North Carpathian Group- would shrink in population dramatically. The relevant archaeological period for the Gothic migration of 376 is the Chernyakhov culture’s Period D1. The areas of Greater Germany West of the Carpathians show increasing settlement in this period. The Gothic lands East of the Carpathians, meanwhile, show clear evidence of settlement decline. It is no coincidence that the beginning of the crippling of these great East Germanic cultures in Ukraine/Romania and southern Poland/Slovakia is so closely associated with the influx of the two great migrant groups that would both proceed to create the two great Germanic kingdoms that would bedevil the Western Empire of the mid-fifth century- the Visigoths, the creators of the Kingdom of Toulouse, and the Vandals, the creators of the Carthaginian kingdom, respectively. These were not expensive wars of territorial expansion, like those of Persia, nor mere loot raids like those of Attila the Hun and the Goths victorious at Abritus. These were Völkerwanderungs by whole chiefdoms that had abandoned their previous homelands.
Traditionally, Roman forces had been more unified and larger than those of the individually stronger, but collectively more pathetic Germans. Tough conditions make tough men; they do not make tough institutions. The movement of Germanic chiefdoms out of Greater Germany, however, naturally sharpened their minds against their single greatest weakness -their traditional disunity. The Roman Empire was much more densely populated than Greater Germany. As a result, the mobile Germanic chiefdoms could raid the countryside for supplies; this would be a much dicier proposition for the Romans in Greater Germany. The only way the Romans could end the existence of mobile barbarian chiefdoms within their territory was to destroy their armies, while not even a partial destruction of the Roman army was required for the barbarians to continue their raids deep into the Empire. The only way the Romans could prevent this plunder -the fortification of strongholds- would divert even more of the Roman military away from the mobile army. The Empire, given good harvests, could generally increase its army by about two Principate legions per year if it tried. Preindustrial modern European states in peak war years generally had a hard limit on military as a percentage of total population close to 2%; for the Roman Empire, it was closer to 1%. The rate of mobilization for the barbarians must have been at least an order of magnitude higher, and much more of that mobilization could be used for battles. When within the Empire, the barbarians were concentrated. The Romans were dispersed. All these were grave weaknesses of the barbarians in attempting to conquer lasting kingdoms (cf., the multiple Visigothic campaigns into Hispania against the Sueves during the fifth century and the Sueves’ similar inability to retain their conquests in Southern Hispania), but most of the barbarians’ movements throughout the bloodstream of the Empire (e.g., the great treks of Alaric, Gunderic, and Gaiseric) required no conquests.
The Roman leadership learned from its mistakes of 376. Inspired by the example of the Huns and Alans, dozens of new cavalry units were added to both Western and Eastern armies, and cavalry would form a core part of the Roman army for the coming centuries. A Sarmatian attack against Roman Pannonia in 384 was repelled. A 386 attempt by a Greuthungi chiefdom to cross into the Empire failed; the survivors were, unlike the wave of Goths ten years prior, broken up and scattered in settlements across Anatolia. As a result, Gothic settlement would increase greatly in Western present Romania, a process recorded by Ammianus Marcellinus. At the same time, Vandalic settlement would increase greatly in southern Moravia until the arrival of the Huns there around 405. The Vandalic settlement shift was likely due primarily to climate change; settlement in northern and central Poland declines precipitously around this time. But, despite a great deal of contemporary optimism that the Goths of 376 would be assimilated in the same manner as the Galatians, the subjugated Goths in the Eastern Empire would remain subjugated for a mere dozen years and within the Eastern Empire for a mere thirty, counting from their entry.
For the next century, the climate would grow increasingly hot, but would continue increasing in precipitation until around 440. The economic impact on the Empire as a whole would generally be positive, though likely negative in the Empire’s more northerly regions.
Heather’s narrative (especially the portion about Alaric) becomes unnecessarily badly written and poorly organized at this point. The next few paragraphs should give a clearer summary of the disaster than the book does. I have used various secondary sources to describe the events of 382-415, including Kulikowski’s Imperial Tragedy, Ian Hughes’ Stilicho: The Vandal Who Saved Rome, A.H.M. Jones’s historical section, Thomas Burns’ Barbarians within the Gates of Rome, Halsall, Heather’s other works, and others.
SOURCES: Gregory of Tours, Vegetius, Symmachus, Theodosian Code, Pacatus, Themistius, Notitia Dignitatum, Sozomen, Socrates, Theodoret, Zosimus, Libanius
Though the difference between Eastern and Western Empires was visible as early as the War of the Eight Princes (four usurpers in the West as against one in the East) and the wars of Magnentius and Julian the Apostate, it is only after 382, and especially after 405, that the fates of the two empires increasingly diverge.
Theodosius became the first emperor to mint the tremissis, a gold coin equivalent to one third of a solidus which would become widely used during the fifth century. As is much better known, he, along with his colleagues in the West (in particular Gratian and Maximus), also had great impact on the Roman Empire’s turn toward the trinitarian variety of the Christian religion that is ancestral to today’s Miaphysite, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic, and the major Protestant churches. Councils at Antioch, Constantinople (the famous Second Ecumenical Council), Milan, Aquileia, and, finally, Rome were held to squelch the anti-trinitarian heretics. The prominent Cappadocian theologian Gregory of Nyssa was rehabilitated.
The anti-trinitarian Bishop of Constantinople Demophilius was ousted and replaced by Gregory Nazianzen, who, after his struggle with Maximus and retirement in 381, was unexpectedly replaced by the command of the Emperor with Nectarius. Lucius of Alexandria was ousted from his position as Pope of that great city and replaced with Peter II. The anti-trinitarian Euzoeus was replaced with Meletius, who quarreled with Paulinus II over his status. The Meletian controversy over the correct Bishop of Antioch was resolved in favor of the Meletian side with the appointment of Flavian I as sole bishop of the city in 393.
Subsidies to the cults of the gods of Old Rome were at last cut off in 382, thus bringing an end to the official Roman urban state cult that had flourished for more than a thousand years less than seventy years after Licinius’s defeat of the persecutor Maximinus Daza. Much in contrast to the now dead non-trinitarian Christian Valens, Theodosius and Gratian banned all heresies from the Nicene Creed in the early years of his reign (Theodosian Code 16.1 and 16.5). From this point on, all Roman emperors, including all usurpers, would be Christians. Theodosius continued and strengthened policies against Christians serving in pagan temples. By 391, he was demanding the closing of all pagan temples, and by 392 the prohibition on burning incense to the pagan gods even on one’s premises, a move which his sucessors would increasingly enforce. It was due to his lasting echo throughout history that most of the Christian writers alive during the time of the fall of the Western Roman Empire would enthusiastically support the acts of his successors. Pagans, however, would not be eradicated from literary life until the days of Justinian, born in Tauresium, North Macedonia. It is not my purpose here to reiterate the triumph after triumph of the Christian religion in the fourth and fifth century Western and Eastern Empires. Just the fact I do not mention these triumphs does not mean they were not happening at the time the Western Empire was declining and falling. Indeed, these triumphs are much better recorded than the actual history of how the Roman Empire declined and fell. The Christian elites of the Medieval era generally found theology and church history a much more topical subject than the secular history of the Late Empire.
In 383, just after the end of the Gothic war, Magnus Maximus, also born in Hispania, took power in Britain, crossed the Channel, and came to power in Britain, Gaul, and Hispania. The legitimate Western emperor, Gratian, having moved his troops from fighting the Alamans in present-day southern Germany to having his troops desert him near today’s Paris, was killed by the master of horse Andragathius near Lyon on 15 August. Roman military metalwork disappears from the highlands of western Britain at around this time, suggesting a shift toward the use of irregular forces for frontier defense. Britain’s economy visibly declines during the last fifth of the fourth century, likely due to the effect of the redirection of Roman forces away from Britain and the Rhine frontier and toward civil wars. After a period of peace within the Western Empire, Maximus invaded Italy and forced the figurehead legitimate Western Emperor, the nontrinitarian-sympathetic Valentinian II, out of Milan in 387, on the pretext Valentinian II was persecuting the bishop Ambrose.
It was about this time the bureaucrat Vegetius, condemning the slackening in military training and recruitment that had resulted from the “long years of peace” prior to the Gothic war, wrote his Epitoma rei militaris, the source of the classic aphorism Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum. Vegetius’s tome would, due to a scarcity of new Latin-speaking authors on the subject, become the most widely read work on warfare in the Medieval, and Early Modern West. To some extent, Vegetius was not totally wrong about the “long years of peace”; if one excludes the rebellions of Firmus and Theodorus, neither of whom did so much as mint coins, the Empire had no civil wars between the defeat of Procopius in 366 and the rise of Maximus seventeen years (!!!) later. One does not attempt to reoccupy the Libyan desert if one has real wars to attend to. If one also excludes Magnus Maximus’s relatively bloodless 383 takeover, the Bagrevand-Gandzak campaign, the rebellion of Procopius, the usurpation of Julian, Julian’s Persian war, and the minor rebellion of Claudius Silvanus, the Empire had not fought a “real war” for the twenty-three years between the defeat of Magnentius and the Gothic war. No wonder Vegetius compared the peace of his day to that between the Punic Wars. The experience of the decade following 387 would show that the central problem with the Roman military, however, was not a lack of real wars for it to fight in, but its willingness to support usurpers. In fact, Vegetius’s thesis had already been invalidated even when he wrote by the repeated losses to the Persians in the decade following Constantius II’s reconquest of the West.
The Emperor Theodosius made peace with the Persian empire in 387 from a position of weakness, leaving the Romans only one fifth of the buffer kingdom of Armenia, and proceeded to overthrow the usurper following a battle in what is today Croatia (Battle of the Save) and another in what is today Slovenia (Poetovio) in 388 with the help of Gothic, Alanic, and Hunnic forces. Maximus was finally defeated outside Aquileia. Franks (or so says Gregory of Tours, quoting Sulpicius Alexander) took advantage of the war between Maximus and Theodosius to raid northeastern Gaul and inflict serious casualties on Western imperial forces, but they were eventually repelled. After a period of peace during which Theodosius visited Rome and Milan and then returned to Constantinople, Arbogastes, the same commander who defeated Maximus and helped defeat the Goths of 376, then helped set up another Western usurper, Eugenius, in 392, as a result of the death of Valentinian II in Vienne in Gaul.