Battle of Adrianople (378)
| date | August 9, 378 |
|---|---|
| place | near Adrianople (today Edirne in Turkey ) |
| output | Victory of the Terwingen (Visigoths) |
| Parties to the conflict | |
|---|---|
| Commander | |
|
Valens † |
|
| Troop strength | |
| about 30,000 men | about 25,000 men |
| losses | |
|
approx. 20,000 (including Kaiser Valens) |
|
The Battle of Adrianople on August 9, 378 was the heaviest defeat of the Romans against Germanic warriors since the Varus Battle (9 AD) with around 20,000 dead . Adrianople is now Edirne , Turkey's most north-western city. In the battle in which Emperor Valens fell, the Eastern Roman army was defeated by the " Visigoths " (more precisely, it was the Terwingian Goths , who are not congruent with the later Visigoths) who were fleeing the Huns in the area of the Roman Empire were looking for a new settlement area, were accepted by the Romans, but finally rebelled against them (see also: Migration of Nations ).
prehistory
The invasion of the Huns in the year 375 in the eastern part of Europe and in western Asia led to extensive migrations of individual warrior groups. The Gothic Terwingen , who lived on the Black Sea , sought salvation in the face of the approaching Huns by fleeing to the southwest in the northern Balkan region of the Roman Empire in order to escape submission by the Huns. After a coup in the Visigothic ruling class, Fritigern , an Arian Christian, was appointed as the leader of the Terwingen.
Under his leadership, the Terwingen, who had fled the Huns, begged the crossing over the Danube and acceptance into the Roman Empire , and the emperor, who hoped to win them over as farmers and soldiers, consented. They were joined by the fled part of the Gothic Greutungen and Iranian Alans , which were otherwise subject to the Huns, and which provided particularly well-armed cavalry troops. The Roman Danube Fleet organized the transfer of the warriors and their families, according to Ammianus Marcellinus around 200,000 people. They were welcome soldiers who were supposed to support the Romans in defending the Danube border and in the planned war against the Persian Sassanids , and were therefore allowed to keep their weapons. In return, they were promised to provide them with food; However, this failed due to the corruption of the local commanders. The Goths therefore suffered from famine in the coming months and were harassed by Roman officials. This led to the fact that the Terwingen mutinied in 377, broke through the settlement borders intended for them and plundered the Roman Balkan provinces. Other mutineers joined them, as did other groups of warriors hoping for prey. Several smaller Roman associations were defeated. After the local imperial troops failed to suppress the rebellion militarily, the Eastern Roman Emperor Valens himself decided to act, broke off the planned Persian campaign and headed the Eastern Roman army to the Balkans in 378.
Course of the battle
On August 9th, 378, Valens and his army took Terwingen. The strength of both armies is not exactly known. Modern estimates for the Roman army vary between 24,000 or 26,000 and up to 30,000 or even 40,000 men. Often around 30,000 men are accepted (although Peter J. Heather assumes a lower strength). Most of them were comitatenses with combat experience , the backbone of the Eastern Roman army. The Terwingen certainly had more than 10,000 warriors, according to recent estimates perhaps around 25,000 men. Without waiting for the expected army of the Western Emperor Gratian , whose troops had initially fought against the Alemannic Lentiens in the Battle of Argentovaria and were therefore still a few days' march from Adrianople, Valens let his legions in full combat armor 18 kilometers on the early morning March to the Terwingen wagons, which they did not reach until noon. Valens and his advisors erroneously assumed that they were only dealing with around 10,000 Terwings and did not want to share the victory they believed to be certain with Gratian: There was rivalry between the two emperors, who were uncle and nephew, for priority in the empire. Presumably there were also fears that the Gothic army might soon split up again into individual groups that were difficult to fight, and therefore did not want to miss the opportunity to achieve a decisive victory.
Since neither enough water nor food had been taken with them, the Roman soldiers reached the battlefield after eight hours of marching in exhausted condition. Fritigern nevertheless asked for negotiations - Valens agreed. The impatient cavalry of the right wing under Cassio and Bacurius began, however, with an unauthorized reconnaissance attack, in which they lost the protection of their skirmishers ; now the battle was developing unplanned. Nevertheless, the imperial troops were able to advance and bring the Terwings into great distress, until unexpectedly the Greutung riders appeared on the battlefield and fell in the rear of the legionaries. The weak Roman cavalry was put to flight by the combined Greutung and Alan cavalry. The cavalry of the left wing rushed to the rescue (which had stayed behind because the Roman advance was not yet completed) was seized by the panicked escape of the cavalry of the right wing and partly fled without a fight. As a result, the flanks of the Roman infantry were defenseless before they were even fully in position.
The Terwingen, who had already afflicted the Roman legions by setting the grass in front of their wagon castle on fire, the Romans now attacked with lightning attacks from their cavalry (which also included the so-called "Three Peoples Confederation", consisting of Greutungen, Alans and refugees Huns) and Terwingian foot soldiers from three sides at the same time. After desperate resistance, panic finally broke out in the imperial army. Only a small number of the legionnaires were able to flee; almost all the others were killed on the battlefield. Emperor Valens, who personally tried to prevent the collapse of the Roman front, and two army masters were also killed in the battle; Flavius Victor and other high officers, however, managed to escape.
The city of Adrianople (today's Edirne ), in which both the imperial treasure and the imperial insignia were located, could be held thanks to a Roman citizen militia paid by the imperial widow Albia Domnica . Gratian had to watch helplessly as the victorious Terwingen devastated territory. The new Roman Emperor Theodosius I, raised by him in 379, was again defeated by the enemy in 380, but was finally able to reach an agreement with the Terwingen des Fritigern in 382 after a reorganization of the army and further battles from 380 onwards. He settled these as federates in the area of today's Bulgaria , whereby this (poorly documented) Gothic Treaty is considered by many scholars to be epoch-making due to the allegedly unusually favorable conditions that the Romans had to grant the Gothic Terwingen.
Aftermath
The foedus , which Emperor Theodosius had concluded with the Terwingen, is very controversial in detail. Apparently they were given territories in Thrace and Moesia , from which they were allowed to supply themselves, and they were also given extensive autonomy: The Terwingen Fritigern did not become Roman citizens, but had their own laws and their own political leadership. However, the area remained formally Roman territory, and the Terwings were obliged to help Rome as foederati to aid arms, where they fought as mercenaries under their own commanders, but under Roman commanders-in-chief ( comites foederatorum ). The Terwingi were thus the first barbarians who were allowed to settle down in the Roman Empire as an undivided ethnic-political unit. This order, which was advantageous for Terwingen and Romans, only lasted until 395, when Theodosius died and his successors did not extend the foedus .
The battle of Adrianople is traditionally regarded as the prelude to the migration of peoples in late antiquity . The defeat and its consequences marked the beginning of the decline of Roman power and the beginning of a series of Germanic invasions that would have led to the sack of Rome in 410, the capture of Carthage in 439 and finally the end of Western Rome in 476. From this point of view, Adrianople was a decisive defeat, the moment when the fortunes of war turned to the Teutons and the power of Rome was broken.
Contemporaries already saw this battle as a "catastrophe"; so the history of Ammianus Marcellinus ended with this very battle. However, the end of Ammianus' work also makes it clear that at the time the work was written (in the 1990s), Ammianus was once again looking more optimistically into the future.
In more recent research, the long-term consequences of the battle are sometimes put into perspective, since the Roman Empire was still able to act despite the initially extremely problematic military situation. In addition, it is particularly pointed out that it is problematic to construct a causal connection between the defeat of an Eastern Roman army and the fall of the Western Roman Empire almost 100 years later. The fact that the Eastern Roman army was able to win two bloody civil wars against Western Rome in the 16 years after the battle (with the Visigoths - the Terwingian foederati - doing good service to the Eastern Emperor) suggests that the long-term consequences of the battle are often overestimated. The still widespread assumption that Adrianople marked the beginning of the Migration Period and the fall of the Roman Empire , now that "the dam was broken", is at least a very questionable simplification.
However, the battle had a considerable aftereffect in the theological dispute between the supporters of Nicaea and the Arians : Even Arians, Valens fought here against Arian missionaries. His defeat was viewed as the just punishment for heresy by late ancient and medieval church historians when Arianism was persecuted as heresy.
Classification in military history
The battle of Adrianople is sometimes seen as the first great victory of armored riding over disciplined armored foot soldiers ( legionnaires ) in Europe and thus as the birth of the medieval armies of knights. However , this thesis is not convincing from the tactical course of the battle, as the Romans also had heavily armored cavalry ( cataphracti and clibinari ), which, however, were routed by the Terwingen of Fritigern, whereby the flanks of the Roman infantry against the attacks of the Greutungian and Alan Lancers were defenseless. The Roman infantry did not succumb to a superior fighting style of their opponents, but above all they became the victim of insufficient or faulty enemy reconnaissance, which had not foreseen the surprise attack of the Terwingen and drastically underestimated the number of enemies.
literature
- Alessandro Barbero: The Day of the Barbarians. The Battle That Led to the Fall of the Roman Empire. 2007, ISBN 0-8027-1571-0 (popular science).
- Dariusz Brodka: Some remarks on the course of the battle of Adrianople (August 9, 378). In: Millennium . Yearbook on culture and history of the first millennium AD Volume 6, 2009, pp. 265–280.
- Thomas S. Burns: Barbarians within the Gates of Rome. A Study of Roman Military Policy and the Barbarians (ca. 375-425). Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana 1994, ISBN 0-253-31288-4 (detailed study of military history).
- Peter J. Heather : The Fall of the Roman Empire. Macmillan, London 2005, ISBN 0-333-98914-7 , p. 167 ff. (Like Burns, especially interesting in terms of military history).
- Simon MacDowall: Adrianople AD 378. Osprey Publishing, Oxford 2001, ISBN 1-84176-147-8 (popular science).
- Martin Rink : The Battle of Adrianople, August 9, 378 - Beginning of the Great Migration? In: Back then. Journal for History and Culture , Issue 6/2009, pp. 54–61 (popular science).
Web links
Remarks
- ^ Dariusz Brodka: Some remarks on the course of the battle of Adrianople (August 9, 378). In: Millennium . Volume 6, 2009, pp. 265-280, here p. 267.
- ↑ See Alexander Demandt : Die Spätantike . 2nd edition, Munich 2007, p. 152, note 147.
- ^ Dariusz Brodka: Some remarks on the course of the battle of Adrianople (August 9, 378). In: Millennium . Volume 6, 2009, pp. 265-280, here pp. 267f.
- ^ The battle of Adrianople on August 9, 378 AD. In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft, Volume 6, 1891