LECTURE III. The Coming of the Huns.

Having thus given a cursory glance at the political and social condition of the Roman Empire and its German neighbours in the fourth century after Christ, let us now even more briefly survey the ethnological aspect of the barbarian world on its northern frontier at the same time.

Celtic nations.

Slavonic nations.

Of the three great groups into which the non-Latin nations of Europe are at this day divided, Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic, the Teutonic alone here claims our especial attention. The Celtic nationality had been beaten down in ten years of battle by Julius Caesar, and its last hope of offering a successful resistance to Rome vanished when Suetonius Paulinus crossed the straits of Menai and put the Druids to the sword in their hitherto inviolable island of Mona. The Slavonic group of nations, which now fills Russia and Poland, forms half the population of Austria and is founding new kingdoms and principalities in what was lately Turkey in Europe, had not then come fully on the stage of history. The vague term Sarmatians, used by Roman geographers, is probably the best indication that we have of their presence in Europe, but few ethnological questions are harder than to define the ever-shifting boundary which separated them from their Teutonic neighbours. It is very possible that many of the barbarian hosts that warred on Rome may have consisted of Slavonic marauders led on by Teutonic chieftains: but just because the initiative at any rate belonged to the Teutons, and because the Slaves originated so few expeditions against the Empire, we may practically leave them out of the question and consider only the great Teutonic population which, all round the northern frontier of the Empire, from the mouth of the Rhine to the mouth of the Danube, faced the Masters of the Soldiery and their Legions.

Tendency of the Teutonic nations to form confederacies.

Franks.

Alamanni.

Goths.

There had been a marked tendency during the third century after Christ in the barbarian nations to merge themselves into a few great confederacies, a tendency which possibly had something to do with the ill-success of the Roman arms during that period. A whole string of names of petty tribes on the lower Rhine, mentioned to us by Tacitus, disappears in order to form the nation of the Franks. In like manner the tribes which dwelt on the Main and the Neckar clustered together into the confederation of the Alamanni. On the Middle Danube the great nation of the Marcomanni, who once pressed Marcus Aurelius hard, disappeared, and no one nation of pre-eminent power arose in its place; but when we come towards the mouth of the Danube, to the countries which are now known as Roumania, Transylvania, and Bessarabia, we find them occupied by the great and powerful confederacy of the Goths. This race, of pure Teutonic origin, belonging to that which is called the Low-German family of peoples, and speaking a language much more akin to Lowland Scotch than to the modern German of Hanover, had migrated, probably in the second century of our era, from the district now known as East Prussia in the south-east corner of the Baltic. They had spread themselves along the northern shore of the Euxine, near the mouths of the Dnieper and the Dniester, and after a series of piratical expeditions by sea and marauding inroads by land upon the Eastern half of the Empire, had occupied without further opposition the Roman province of Dacia, constituted by Trajan in the early part of the second century. During the century before our narrative begins, they had been dwelling for the most part as friendly and peaceable neighbours of Rome. They had become gradually divided into two great groups of peoples, the Eastern and Western Goths, who eventually became known as the Ostrogoths and Visigoths.

Associations connected with the term Gothic.

A hard and undeserved fate, as well as an unmerited glory, has come upon the possessors of the Gothic name. The glory is that of having given their name to the most solemn and impressive order of architecture that the world has ever seen. Men speak, and doubtless will ever continue to speak, of Gothic buildings, though the last traces of Gothic nationality had expired many centuries before a pointed arch was seen at Canterbury or Notre Dame. On the other hand the expression ‘What a Goth!’ as indicative of rudeness and lack of culture, is constantly used by the descendants of men who were centuries behind the Goths in refinement and civilisation, and who do not know that ‘What a Frank!’ or ‘What a Saxon!’ would be far nearer to historic truth. In point of fact, of all the Teutonic races none showed so early an appreciation of what was best in Roman civilisation as the Gothic, none showed a greater power of assimilating that civilisation, and none, had its career not been prematurely cut short, would more happily for Europe have blended the old with the new by uniting the culture and refinement of ‘Romania’ with the rough energy and freedom of ‘Barbaricum.’

The Visigoths and the Empire.

Circa 350-376.

At the particular period which we have reached these remarks apply rather to the Visigoth than to the Ostrogoth. While the Ostrogoths, wandering wide over the vast plains of Southern Russia, were coming in contact with and subduing the dim Slavonic peoples of the interior, and thus building up for their great king, Hermanric, a vast but ill-consolidated empire which his flatterers—those of them at least who had some slight knowledge of classical history—compared to that of Alexander the Great, the Visigoths dwelling in Transylvania and Wallachia, and acknowledging perhaps in a general way the suzerainty of Hermanric, but under the especial rule of their own native chieftains who bore the subordinate title of Judges, were continually coming more and more under the influence of the Empire. Latin and Greek words were creeping into their language. The soldier talked of his pay as mizdo (evidently the same word as the Greek μισθός), and of his rations as anno (probably the Latin annona). The alewa displayed to the grateful husbandman the fatness of the olive-tree, and he carried home its produce in a sakkus.

Ulfilas and the Gothic Bible.

348-370.

Not only words like these and a knowledge of the arts of civilised life, but more far-reaching thoughts, those which overleap the grave and bind together in one all the generations of the family of God, were vibrating through the Visigothic brain. Ulfilas, the great Apostle of the Goths, himself a Goth, but resident in early manhood at Constantinople, began his missionary career in 341, and continued it for forty years, labouring during all that time by his tongue and pen at the conversion of his countrymen to Christianity. As an instrument in this great work he translated the Bible into Gothic, only omitting, according to the well-known story, the books of Samuel and Kings, ‘inasmuch as they contain the story of the wars, and the Gothic race was already fond enough of war, and needed rather a bit to hold it back from battle, than any spur to urge it thereunto.’ This Gothic Bible is a priceless possession for the philologist, being by far the earliest monument of any Teutonic language, and illustrating in a countless variety of ways, both the distant relationship which connects our family of languages with Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, and the points at which the members of our own family, German, Danish, Dutch, English, have parted company one from another.

Persecution of Gothic Christians. 370-375.

The success of Ulfilas in Christianising the Goths was so great that a persecution arose, under the stress of which many of his converts determined to leave their homes and seek shelter in the dominions of the great Christian Emperor. This happened about the year 348. The emigrants, with Ulfilas at their head, ‘a second Moses,’ as he was often styled by his contemporaries, crossed the Danube and founded a settlement in the country about Nicopolis, on the northern slopes of the Balkans. Here their descendants were still living after the lapse of nearly two centuries⁠[43]⁠, being known by the name of the Lesser Goths, ‘a numerous people, but poor and unwarlike, having no abundance of anything, save cattle of divers kinds, sheep and pastures and forests; having no wheat, though the soil is fertile in other crops. Vineyards they do not possess, but some of them as merchants buy wine from the neighbouring district: but most of them are nourished on milk.’

Probably Ulfilas did not remain constantly with his Lesser Goths in Moesia, but often crossed the Danube into Dacia, to strengthen the faith of his remaining converts there, or to add to their number. Apparently a second persecution broke out (if, indeed, it had ever ceased to rage) about 370. From a fragment of a Gothic calendar we learn that the 23rd October was dedicated ‘to the remembrance of many martyrs among the Gothic people, and of Frederic’ (doubtless one of the heroes of the persecution), and that the 29th was similarly dedicated ‘to the remembrance of the martyrs who remained, with Priest Vereka and Batvin, members of the Catholic Church, and were burned among the Gothic people.’

Athanaric Judge of the Visigoths.

The leader of the persecuting party at this time was Judge Athanaric, a stern, unbending Gothic chief, who would brook no compromise with Rome or Roman ways, who had sworn a terrible oath that he would never set foot on Roman soil, and who now, to the cruel utmost of his power, strove to prevent Odin and Thunnor from being driven out of the Home of Gods by the Nazarene, whose cross glittered upon the banners of Rome.

Fritigern.

On the opposite side, as leader of that section of the Visigoths which favoured the Roman civilisation and the Christian religion, appears the gallant Fritigern, one of the most attractive figures whom Gothic history presents to us. The contention between him and the bigoted old Gothic party under Athanaric was so sharp that it seems to have broken out into actual war, in which, as one author⁠[44] tells us, Fritigern, on formally announcing his conversion to Christianity, asked and received the help of the Roman Emperor against his rival.

Outlook in 375.

Such, then, was the relation of ‘Barbaricum’ towards ‘Romania’ about the year 375. Reading (as we are too apt to do) our knowledge of subsequent events into the history of that year, when the fourth century of our era had reached its fourth quarter, it is easy to imagine the Roman Empire lying rich and defenceless, at the mercy of barbarian foes all round its border and all athirst to devour it. But such was certainly not the aspect which it then wore to its contemporaries. The keen eye of a statesman, if he were also possessed of fine ethical instincts, might undoubtedly perceive many dangerous symptoms of moral and spiritual decay, from which he might forebode its future downfall; but to the ordinary observer, especially to the ordinary barbarian observer, seldom had the great fabric of Roman civilisation seemed stronger or more imposing. Of anything like a combined attack of the barbarian hordes upon the Roman frontier, no barbarian dreamed. A petty raid here or there might perhaps be successfully executed, and might enable its perpetrator to return with some cattle from a few Moesian farms, or some bracelets and golden chains from a sacked Illyrian town. But this was the height of his ambition as Rome’s enemy. He would much rather be Rome’s friend: enter her service as a leader of foederati⁠[45]⁠; mount guard in the ante-chamber of the Emperor; direct the arms of Rome against some hated rival chief; perhaps, even—supreme felicity—attain in his well-fed and corpulent old age to the overwhelming honour of a Roman consulship.

Sudden appearance of the Huns. 374.

The appearance on the northern shore of the Sea of Azof of a horde of squalid savages from the steppes of Central Asia, each riding a little pony as ugly and as unkempt as himself, changed the whole current of men’s thoughts, and was the first visible link in the chain which drew mediaeval Europe, the Europe of Charlemagne, Barbarossa, and Dante,

These savages were the terrible Huns, of whose history I shall have to speak somewhat more in detail in my sixth lecture. For the present it will be enough to quote a chapter from the work of the Gothic historian Jordanes, in order to show how the Asiatic intruders were looked upon by the first European nation with whom they came in contact⁠[46]⁠.

Description of the Huns by Jordanes.

‘After no great interval of time the nations of the Huns, more cruel than Ferocity itself, flamed forth against the Goths. An unhallowed union between unclean spirits wandering through the wilderness, and certain Gothic women expelled [centuries before] for witchcraft from the tents of their countrymen, gave birth to this most ferocious people, which dwelt at first among the marshes—small, foul, and skinny, hardly human, but spoken of as men because they possessed something which distantly resembled human speech. This wild race formerly dwelt on the further shore of the Sea of Azof, and there practised no other labour than hunting, except that after they had grown into a great people they harried the neighbouring nations with constant robberies and frauds. Now when the huntsmen of this people were, according to their custom, pursuing the chase on the further shore of Azof, behold, upon a sudden, a female stag presented herself to their view, and stepping into the pool, first going forth and then stopping, seemed to offer herself as guide of their journey. Following her lead, therefore, the huntsmen passed over on foot through the Sea of Azof, which they had before thought to be as impassable as the ocean. Soon, too, when the Gothic shore loomed up before those unknown visitors, the stag disappeared. This, I trow, was done by those spirits to whom the Huns owed their origin, in order to spite the Gothic people. The huntsmen who had before thought that there was no other world beyond the Sea of Azof, were stricken with admiration of the Gothic land, the road to which, hitherto unknown, they deemed had been shown to them by the gods, and going back to their own people, persuaded them to hasten by the path which the stag had pointed out to them into the territory of the Goths. All whom they met on the way fell victims to their fury, and as soon as they had crossed that vast pool, five nations [whose uncouth names I need not transcribe] were swept away by that whirlwind of savage tribes. The Alans also, who were a match for them in war, but very unlike them in civilisation, in appearance, and in diet, were wearied out by them in incessant fighting, and at length subdued. For those whom they would perhaps never have conquered in fair fight they put to flight by the terribleness of their appearance, throwing the utmost possible hideousness into the expression of their faces, which were naturally of a frightful blackness, and resembled, if I may say so, a shapeless lump of dough rather than a face, having two black points in them instead of eyes. This scowling countenance reveals the boldness [?cruelty] of their hearts, who rage against their new-born offspring even on the first day of their birth, for all the male children’s cheeks are gashed by them with an iron tool, in order that before they begin to receive the nourishment of their mother’s milk they may learn to bear the pain of a wound. Hence their youth lacks the beauty, and their old age the dignity of a beard, because their faces, furrowed with iron, lose through scars the seasonable beauty of hair. They are little in stature, but nimble and clever in their movements, and especially ready in horsemanship: with broad shoulders, arms well adapted to the use of the bow, necks strong, and heads always held erect with pride. In short these people, wearing the shape of man, practise in their lives the ferocity of beasts.’

Through the uncouth sentences of the half-educated Gothic historian the general character of the Hunnish invaders may be sufficiently discerned. They stood on a distinctly lower grade of civilisation than any of the Teutonic invaders of the Empire. The Goth, the Frank, the Alaman, the Vandal were barbarians indeed, but barbarians with some capacity—in the case of the Goth with an extraordinary capacity—for appreciating the advantages of civilisation. The Hun, fresh from his centuries of wandering over the high table-land of Tartary, was an utter, an irreclaimable savage. To compare them with some of the native races with which our own has recently come in contact, the Goth was like the Maori, the Hun like a stronger and more warlike Australian savage.

The Huns were ‘Turanians,’ not Aryans.

This social difference between the Hun and the Teuton corresponds to a deep ethnological chasm. Hitherto all the great struggles in which the European nations had been engaged (except the Punic wars) had been waged between members of the great Aryan family of nations. Persian, Greek, Italian, Celt, Teuton, however wide their divergences of religion, of culture, of intellectual development, were yet all children of the same family, some of whom, so to speak, had come of age, and entered into their inheritance, while others were still in a state of infancy and untaught childhood. But the Hun had no such link with the great historic peoples of the Mediterranean Sea. In his language probably no germ of affinity with Greek or Sanskrit would have been discernible. Wheresoever the common home of the Indo-European peoples may eventually be located, it is certain that the progenitors of the Hun never dwelt there. He was of kin to the Mongol, the Calmuck, the Turk, not to the Roman or the Englishman. In the world’s history he stands in line with Jenghiz Khan, with Tamerlane, with Bajazet, not with Alexander or with Caesar. In one word—to adopt a term which, however inaccurate, is convenient—he was not Aryan, but Turanian.

A nation of light cavalry.

Such then were the invaders from Asia, who, about the year 374, precipitated themselves upon the settlements of the Ostrogoths in Southern Russia. What they may have lacked in size they made up in nimbleness of movement, and against the Goths, who do not appear to have been pre-eminently an equestrian people, they had this advantage, that every man of the tribe was mounted, and mounted on a hardy wiry little steed, which was probably satisfied with the roughest food, and which so perfectly understood its rider’s wishes, that it seemed as if horse and horseman were one being.

Hermanric defeated.

Details as to the conflict between the Huns and the Ostrogoths are utterly wanting, but it is clear that the latter were completely defeated. Hermanric, ‘the Ostrogothic Alexander’ who is said to have reached the age of 110, in his rage and shame put an end to his own life. His wide but loosely compacted empire was broken up. Some Ostrogoths, under a prince of the house of Hermanric, moved southwards, and took part in the events which we are about to notice, on the Danube. But the larger part of the nation submitted to inevitable necessity and bowed their necks to the yoke. For three quarters of a century the Ostrogoths formed part of the great Hunnish Empire, and their sovereigns, descendants of the great Hermanric, ruled as vassals of the Hunnish king.

Athanaric defeated. 375.

The barbarian flood rolled on and reached the river Dniester and the long line of earthworks which apparently separated the land of the Visigoths from that of the Ostrogoths⁠[47]⁠. Here Athanaric had drawn up his men, expecting a regular attack, to which he would have been prepared with a regular reply. Little did he know the nature of the nimble savages with whom he had to deal. Having learned from their scouts where the bulk of the Visigothic army was posted (which was probably by the rampart rather than by the river), and having found a ford across the Dniester, they crossed that ford by moonlight and fell like a thunderbolt on the flank of the unsuspecting Athanaric. He was stupefied at the assault, he saw his bravest friends slain, and he found he had no resource but flight. Withdrawing to the Carpathians he began to construct a new line of defence, partly formed by those mountains and partly by the river Sereth. He would have had but little leisure to construct this new stronghold, had not the Huns been so burdened with their booty that they could not follow him in haste.

The Visigoths seek refuge within the Empire. 376.

And now that the strongest Gothic champions had been worsted, dismay and despair entered the hearts of the Visigoths. To share the hardships of a life in the Carpathians with Athanaric was not the course which commended itself to the majority. They looked across the broad Danube to the well-tilled plains of Moesia; they thought of the tightening bond which had of late united them to the Empire; they turned to Fritigern, the steadfast partisan of Rome, and deemed that through his friendship for the Emperor they might find a refuge from the storm. Fritigern (who, with a perhaps older colleague, Alavivus, is always spoken of as leader of the migration) may perhaps, through Ulfilas, have opened negotiations with the Imperial Court, negotiations which occupied many weeks, for Valens, the reigning Emperor, was at Antioch. The terms which Fritigern offered were that the Goths would all enter the military service of the Empire, and apparently that those who were still heathens would embrace the Emperor’s creed, which was one of the many forms of Arian Christianity. On the other hand there must have been some stipulation as to the supply of food, at least for one season, to give the new-comers time to till the fields for a future harvest.

The Goths on the shore of the Danube.

While the tedious negotiations were going forward, a strange sight might be seen on that Wallachian shore of the Danube, where Europe beheld, in 1877, the vast host of the Russians manœuvring backwards and forwards, in order to find a place where they might cross into Bulgaria. On that same shore in the autumn of 376 stood 200,000 Goths, stretching out their hands in the attitude of entreaty, bewailing the hard fate that had befallen them, and shouting out, whenever a Roman official came within hearing, their eager offers of fealty to the Emperor.

Valens gives them permission to cross.

At length the answer came from Antioch. Valens was flattered by the prospect of the submission of so many stalwart warriors; he persuaded himself that by enlisting them under his standards he might lighten the pressure of taxation on his subjects; he perhaps also thought that in the battle of the creeds which was still being waged, the adhesion of a strong and warlike nation to his own Arian form of faith would secure for it the victory. This last consideration, however, which is all-important on the pages of the ecclesiastical historians, was probably only a secondary one in the minds of the Emperor and his Council.

The Danube crossed.

Rapacity of the Roman officials.

Whatever the determining cause may have been, the Imperial orders came to Lupicinus the Count of Thrace, and Maximus the Duke of Moesia, that the refugees were to be admitted into the Empire on condition that they gave up their arms, and that the boys who were still under age for martial service should be surrendered as hostages to be quartered in various distant cities of the Empire. Thus the long suspense was ended. The Visigoths, who night after night had feared to see the Hunnish watch-fires blazing in the north and to hear the discordant battle-cry of the Asiatics sounding in their ears, were relieved from their terrible anxiety. To have to part with their gallant sons was hard: to have to part with their old and trusty broadswords was harder, but life was sweet. There was the Moesian shore and safety under the shadow of Rome, and here were the sloops ready to carry them across to the Promised Land. Night and day, for several days, the sloops were crossing and re-crossing, till at length 200,000 Gothic warriors, with their wives, and children, and aged parents, stood on the soil of the Empire. They stood there, not unarmed. Already they had made their first experience of the gigantic corruption of the Imperial service. Lupicinus and Maximus, and the officers under them, avaricious and lustful men, while superintending the transport of the Goths, were thinking all the time how to fill their villas with precious spoil and beautiful captives, rather than how to obey the orders of the Emperor. While they were intent on the golden torques, the linen robes, the costly-fringed carpets of the Goths, they allowed the broadswords and the hunting-knives to pass unquestioned. Already before the disembarkation was well over, a bitter sense of wrong, and consciousness of power to avenge that wrong, were brooding in thousands of Gothic hearts.

We may perhaps say of the reception by Valens of the Gothic fugitives, as of Elizabeth’s reception of Mary Queen of Scots, that either the request for asylum should have been refused, or, if granted, it should have been granted generously. There was abundance of room doubtless in the solitary spaces of Moesia for 200,000 sturdy cultivators, and if they had been wisely and fairly treated they might have formed a stout barrier against all other barbarian invaders. Who can say? The Roman Empire might be standing yet.

But now, in addition to the grievance of their treasures stolen, came the far sorer grievance of food withheld. The promised rations, perhaps partly from incompetence as well as from bad faith, were not forthcoming. With such money as they still possessed the unhappy Goths offered to buy food: Lupicinus and Maximus bought up dogs from all the districts round and sold their flesh to the starving immigrants in return for slaves, among whom were some of the sons of the noblest of the Goths, driven to barter even their children for life. Such wickedness as this, thank God, does not often miss its reward even in this world.

A few months, however, elapsed before the storm of vengeance burst forth. Let us take advantage of that short interval to describe the characters of the rulers of the Roman State.

Roman Emperors.

West, Valentinian I, 364-375.

East, Valens, 364-378.

For eleven years (364-375) after the death of Julian ‘the Apostate’ and his short-lived successor Jovian, Valentinian’s strong hand was at the Empire’s helm. A blunt, untutored soldier, with a strange dash of cruelty in his nature, he was nevertheless a good ruler for those times. He held an even balance between the warring Christian sects, insisting on toleration all round; he was careful not to oppress his subjects by too heavy taxation; he defended them from the barbarians, and he repressed the licentiousness which was sapping the energies of the Empire. The worst thing that he did for his country was associating his brother Valens in the throne, giving him the rule over the East. Both in person and character Valens presented a striking contrast to his brother. Valentinian was strong and well-shaped, with a bright complexion and clear blue eye: everything about him told of energy and decision. Valens, torpid and procrastinating, with muddy complexion, lack-lustre eye, bent legs and protuberant belly, neither looked nor spoke like an Emperor of Rome. And over against Valentinian’s inflexible and universal religious tolerance had to be set the somewhat bitter Arianism of Valens.

West, Gratian, 375-383. Valentinian II, 375-392.

A year before the Hunnish irruption into Europe Valentinian died, leaving his brother Valens Emperor of the East, and his two sons, Gratian and Valentinian II, Emperors of the West, the former at Trier, the latter at Milan. Gratian was a lad full of noble promise, but only sixteen years of age; Valentinian II was a child of four, under the regency of his mother, Justina. Decidedly the Imperial partnership was weak, ill-adapted for the strain of a great crisis, and what made it yet weaker was that it was not united. The dull soul of the sluggish Valens was jealous of his brilliant nephew, who was already showing military aptitudes and earning the devotion of his troops. Justina also, who was the second wife of the deceased Emperor, looked probably with no friendly eye on the growing reputation of her step-son. The Concordia Augustorum⁠[48]⁠, which was so often celebrated on the Imperial medals, was not strong in the year 376.

The banquet at Marcianople. 377.

We return to the affairs of the betrayed and hunger-stricken Goths. There was as yet no open insurrection, but Alavivus and Fritigern were marching about in Moesia in a way which seemed to indicate independence and growing suspicion; and, moreover, some of the bands of their Ostrogothic cousins had taken advantage of the disorder of the times, and the occupied attention of the Imperial soldiery, to cross the Danube on rafts and pitch their camp not far from Fritigern’s. Before long Alavivus and Fritigern appeared at the gates of Marcianople (the modern Shumla), an important city at the intersection of two great cross-roads, and commanding a pass through the Balkans. The two Visigothic chiefs were still ostensibly captains of the Emperor’s foederati, and Lupicinus, Count of Thrace, bade them to a banquet. The barbarians who followed them had flocked into the city to purchase provisions. A dispute arose between them and the citizens which led to bloodshed, and the news of the disturbance reached Lupicinus when he was reclining at the luxurious banquet, flushed with wine and scarcely keeping his heavy eyes open by gazing at the performers of a pantomime. Languidly he ordered the tall young Gothic nobles who were keeping guard over their chief at the door of the praetorium to be hewn down by the far more numerous Roman soldiery. The groans of the dying, and the battle-shout of those who were yet fighting for their lives, penetrated the innermost chambers of the palace, and aroused Fritigern from the pleasures of the dainty repast. If his host sought to soothe him by alleging that it was only a drunken brawl that was going on outside,

He drew his sword and stalked down through the banquet hall, exclaiming that if there was a tumult among the Goths he alone could quell it. The pretext, or the naked sword, secured him a safe passage through the trembling ranks of the banqueters. He was received with a shout of joy by his surviving companions. They mounted their horses and rode out of the gates of the city; and now, openly declaring war against the Empire, began to plunder and to burn the rich farmsteads in the neighbourhood of Marcianople. Lupicinus marched forth to meet them at the ninth milestone from the city; but his troops, hastily collected, were badly led. The Goths, in their fury and despair, beat down their enemies. All the tribunes (commissioned officers) and the larger part of the rank and file were stretched in death upon the plain. The base Lupicinus, whose cruelty and avarice had caused the disaster, escaped from this battle-field, but before long both he and his colleague in guilt, Maximus, fell victims to the righteous vengeance of the Goths⁠[49]⁠.

That day, that fatal day of the banquet at Marcianople, ‘took away,’ says the Gothic historian, ‘the hunger of the Goths and the security of the Romans; and the former now began, not as strangers and foreigners, but as citizens and lords, to issue their orders to the cultivators of the soil, and to hold all the northern regions [from the Balkans] to the Danube in their own right.’

377-378. Gothic War.

377. Battle of Ad Salices.

The war thus commenced lasted, with varying success, through the years 377 and 378. The Emperor Valens, during the whole of the former year, remained at Antioch, but sent two officers of high rank, but of no great military skill, to conduct the campaign in his stead. On the whole, however, the fortune of war must have been unfavourable to the Goths (who evidently fought with more fury than science), since the chief battle of this year was fought at a place called Ad Salices (the Willows), as far north as the region now known as the Dobrudscha. Our chief historian⁠[50] (himself long an officer of rank in the Imperial army) gives a striking description of the Gothic warriors, encamped in the centre of a rampart of waggons, and revelling in the abundance of the booty which they had carried off from the wasted plains of Thrace. All night the two armies lay encamped near to one another in sleepless suspense. With the dawn of day the barbarians made an attempt to reach some higher ground, from whence they might rush down on the enemy; but this manœuvre was checked by a well-executed counter-movement of the legions. As both armies halted and gazed at one another with scowling faces, the Romans raised their martial song (itself borrowed from other barbarians), which was known as the barritus, and which, beginning in a low bass key, rose, as it were, by steps to a shrill and exultant treble. The barbarians answered by the old war-songs (discordant in Roman ears, but in which our Saxon forefathers would probably have found familiar music), wherein they sang the praises of their glorious ancestors, sprung from the seed of gods, and dear to Odin.

Then the battle was joined, and the marshy willow-intersected plain was seen covered with every phase of human agony; but all was din and confusion, and if any well-concerted plan was formed or executed on either side, it does not appear in the pages of the historian. The battle was a drawn one; but apparently the Romans were left in possession of the field, for their dead were buried, while the bodies of the Goths were left to be devoured by vultures. Years after, the husbandman, ploughing in that fatal plain, marvelled at the mighty bones of the barbarians which his plough-share upturned.

Advance of Gratian.

In this battle good service had been rendered by some troops which Gratian had sent from Gaul to the assistance of his uncle. The young Emperor had had his own hard battles to fight with the barbarians who dwelt on the northern shore of the Lake of Constance, but having subdued them he marched eastwards in 378 as far as Sirmium on the Save, from which place he sent a message to Valens that he was ready to co-operate with him in an attack on the Goths, whose invasion seemed to imperil the very existence of the eastern portion of the Empire.

378. Valens at Hadrianople.

But Valens, who had by this time quitted Antioch for Constantinople, was jealous of his young nephew’s fame, and in no humour to add one needless leaf of laurel to his crown. He had pitched his camp near Hadrianople, and there received the messengers of Gratian, who earnestly besought him to wait for their master’s arrival. So Victor advised, a Slavonic barbarian by birth, but master of the Imperial cavalry, and a careful and cautious general. So, however, did not advise his other chief general Sebastian, who was elated by some recent victories that he had won over the barbarians: and his rash counsels found too sure an echo in the jealous heart of Valens. It was decided to fight at once and end the Gothic war by the unaided forces of the East.

Negotiations between Fritigern and Valens.

But Fritigern on his side had allies whose arrival he was expecting. The Ostrogothic chiefs, Alatheus and Saphrax, were on their march to join him, and he would fain postpone the battle till they arrived. He therefore sent a Christian priest on an embassy to Valens, offering to make peace if he and his followers might be allowed to occupy Thrace as subjects of the Empire. Nothing came of these negotiations; nothing was meant to come of them; but time was gained for Alatheus and Saphrax to accomplish another day’s march towards the army of Fritigern.

Battle of Hadrianople, 9 Aug. 378.

On the 9th August, 378, a day long and fatally memorable in the annals of the Empire, the legions of Valens moved forth from their entrenched camp under the walls of Hadrianople, and after a march of eight miles under the hot sun of August came in sight of the barbarian vanguard, behind which stretched the circling line of the waggons that guarded the Gothic host.

Yet another embassy did the artful Fritigern (perhaps not over-confident of victory) send into the Roman camp. There were discussions as to the dignity and powers of the messengers: the Goth was willing to send one of his noblest chiefs if the Roman would do the same as a pledge of his safety. Richomer, Count of the Domestics, Gratian’s representative, expressed his willingness to go as a hostage into the barbarian camp, but scarcely had he reached it when, behold! fresh standards were seen upon the surrounding hills. The long-waited for troops of Alatheus and Saphrax had arrived, and not pausing in their headlong career fell like a thunderbolt on the Roman flank.

The soldiers of the Empire, hot, thirsty, wearied out with hours of waiting under the blaze of an August sun, and only half understanding that the negotiations were ended and the battle begun, fought at a terrible disadvantage, but fought not ill. The infantry on the left wing seem even to have pushed back their enemies and penetrated to the Gothic waggons. But they were for some reason not covered as usual by a force of cavalry, and they were jammed into a too narrow space of ground where they could not use their spears with effect, yet presented a terribly easy mark to the Gothic arrows. They fell in dense masses as they had stood. Then the whole weight of the enemy’s attack was directed against the centre and right. When the evening began to close in, the utterly routed Roman soldiers were rushing in disorderly flight from the fatal field. The night, dark and moonless, may have protected some, but more met their death rushing blindly over a rugged and unknown country.

Fate of Valens.

Meanwhile, Valens had sought shelter with a little knot of soldiers (the two regiments of Lancearii and Mattiarii), who still remained unmoved amidst the surging sea of ruin. When their ranks too were broken, and when some of his bravest officers had fallen around him, he joined the common soldiers in their headlong flight. Struck by a Gothic arrow he fell to the ground, but was carried off by some of the eunuchs and life-guardsmen who still accompanied him, to a peasant’s cottage hard by. The Goths, ignorant of his rank, but eager to strip the gaily-clothed guardsmen, surrounded the cottage and attempted in vain to burst in the doors. Then mounting to the roof they tried to smoke out the imprisoned inmates, but succeeding beyond their desires, set fire to the cottage, and Emperor, eunuchs, and life-guards perished in the flames. Only one of the body-guard escaped, who climbed out through one of the blazing windows and fell into the hands of the barbarians. He told them when it was too late what a prize they had missed in their cruel eagerness, nothing less than the Emperor of Rome.

Ecclesiastical historians for generations delighted to point the moral of the story of Valens, that he who had seduced the whole Gothic nation into the heresy of Arius, and thus caused them to suffer the punishment of everlasting fire, was himself by those very Goths burned alive on the terrible 9th of August.