Gothic chieftains seek to gain more influence in the province of Gothia, but as they work to assert their power in relation to the empire, an unexpected threat appears from the steppes to the east: the Huns.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to A history of Romania.

Season 1, Episode 20: Cries from the other shore

I’ve moved into the new apartment and am now settled in. Thanks for your patience, everyone, now let’s get back to the story.

Last episode, we followed Constantine as he founded a new capital for the empire: Constantinople on the western coast of the Bosphorus. The location of the city near the Danubian frontier allowed the emperor to quickly respond to threats from that direction, but it also put the capital at risk. To reinforce the Danubian defenses, he pushed his armies beyond the river, defeated the Goths, and reconquered the province of Dacia created by Trajan two centuries earlier. The tribes north of the Carpathian Mountains became vassals of the empire, while those to the south were integrated into a new province called Gothia that acted as a buffer. We talked about the Goths at length last episode, but we didn’t have enough time to discuss the descendants of the Romans and of the Dacians living in the region, so let’s do that now.

As you know, the empire abandoned the province of Dacia in 271, allowing the surrounding Dacian tribes to move onto its territory and subjugate the Romans who had stayed behind. We don’t have exact numbers, but from what we can infer from historical and archeological sources, it seems that the Dacians were outnumbered by the Romans who had remained. These former provincials maintained the same beliefs and values they had grown up with, continued to practice the customs of their ancestors, and had frequent contacts with the empire, which helped them maintain their culture. We don’t know whether their children and grandchildren still referred to themselves as Romans, so, to be safe, I’ll call their descendants “Romanized people,” because this term describes what differentiated them from surrounding tribes: their Roman culture.

These Romanized people lived next to the Dacian tribes that had subjugated them and, through everyday contact and trade, they influenced their conquerors. You see, Roman culture had a certain prestige and an inescapable draw; the tribes beyond the frontiers had sought to emulate the ways of the empire for centuries. This could mean using lamps or knives made in imperial workshops, wearing Roman-style tunics or necklaces, drinking wine imported from south of the border, using imperial coins, or seeking Roman honours and titles.

Now that the Dacians were direct neighbours with former provincial subjects – and were in fact outnumbered by them – they slowly began to adopt Roman ways. They sought out goods brought back by their neighbours from their trading trips to the empire; many learned to speak Latin through daily interactions; some were drawn to the Christian religion that seemed to be spreading all around; and many married Roman descendants and built lives together. This process of Romanization was certainly gradual and varied from settlement to settlement, but by the early 4^th century, the Dacians were increasingly abandoning their ancestors’ ways of life and adopting more Roman customs. Indeed, the Dacian language and culture would no longer be spoken or practiced after a century or so, as the Dacians integrated these Romanized communities, lost their identity as a group, and adopted a new one as individuals.

And so, besides the Goths who had migrated around the Carpathian Mountains, there were numerous villages of Roman descendants, Dacians adopting Roman ways, and families resulting from Roman and Dacian unions. These communities lived side by side for two generations before Constantine brought his armies north of the Danube in 332. For the next 30 years after that, the empire’s presence in the region not only cemented Roman culture amongst those who embodied it, but also spread it to others who had not yet adopted it.

After Constantine died, his three sons divided the empire between themselves; each tried to be sole ruler like their father, and civil war ensued. In the end, one son did defeat the others, but he realized he couldn’t efficiently run the empire by himself; a single leader couldn’t be on the Rhine, the Danube, and the Tigris simultaneously, all while dealing with pretenders and the bureaucracy. Out of necessity, this victorious son appointed a relative to rule the western half of the empire from Milan while he took the eastern half and ran it from Constantinople.

The Danube frontier was calm during this period in the middle of the 4^th century; so calm, in fact, that successive emperors felt they could withdraw resources from it and use them elsewhere, whether it was to repulse a raid on the Rhine or put down a rebel in Gaul or repel a Persian invasion in the East. With every crisis, fewer and fewer Roman soldiers walked the walls of Gothia, and the task fell more and more on Gothic warriors. The bureaucrats of Gothia also received fewer funds, and the administration suffered. A concrete example of this is the stone bridge at Sucidava which Constantine had built as a permanent link between the two shores of the Danube. Yearly floods and ice flows damaged its structure, and there weren’t enough funds to maintain or repair it. By the 360s, parts of the structure had collapsed and rendered it unusable. Neglect had cost the Romans the only permanent bridge over the Danube.

The province of Gothia was still connected to the empire’s markets and people did still cross the river, but imperial soldiers and bureaucrats were concentrated in the cities on the bank of the Danube; on the plains to the north, the province’s administration fell almost entirely on Gothic chieftains. Though they were still bound to the empire by their treaty as foederati, the Goths realized that their influence had grown immensely and that the empire couldn’t afford to antagonize them. Maybe it was time to renegotiate the treaty to get a better deal.

A perfect opportunity to do arose in 365, when news arrived that a usurper had declared himself emperor in Constantinople. The Gothic nobles gathered and decided to support this rebel, since he would certainly reward them for their help once he was on the throne. The chieftains assembled their warriors, but before they could link up with the usurper’s forces, he was defeated by the sitting emperor of the East, Valens. The Goths were now in a tough spot. Valens would surely seek to punish them for supporting his enemy. A fight seemed inevitable and, with their warriors already gathered, the Gothic chieftains decided to strike first. In 366, they crossed the Danube and invaded Thrace, plundering villas and farms. Valens was quick to respond; he pointed his army towards the invaders, defeated them in battle, and forced them back across the river that very same year.

But the emperor wasn’t happy with simply repulsing the Gothic attack; these barbarians had broken their treaty, supported his rival, and pillaged Roman lands; they needed to know that he would not tolerate such insubordination. So, Valens spent the next three summers campaigning north of the Danube. The Goths mostly avoided battle and hid in the Carpathian Mountains, knowing that the imperial forces were superior. But in 369, the Romans managed to force the Goths to do battle – and won. Negotiations followed and a deal was soon reached: the two sides would cease hostilities, the empire would no longer provide subsidies to the Goths, the Goths would no longer defend the empire’s frontiers, and trade between them would be limited to two settlements. The treaty suited Valens just fine, as tensions were escalating with the Persians and he needed to disentangle himself from the Danube. As for the Gothic leader Athanaric, he did lose his subsidies, but he also got rid of direct Roman authority on his territory; there were still several Roman cities on the north bank of the Danube, but, in the interior, imperial soldiers and agents were gone, and Athanaric could focus on strengthening his position and removing all Roman influence from his realm, starting with Christianity.

As we’ve seen last episode, the Gothic aristocracy was hostile to Christianity since they saw it as a threat to their own culture. They’d expelled a few prominent missionaries – the most important of which was Ulfilas, the bishop of Gothia appointed by the emperor – but it seemed like they just couldn’t stop their people from converting.

We can glimpse the situation at this time from a letter telling the story of Sabbas, a Christian Goth. The letter recounts how, right after the end of the war in 369, a Gothic chieftain tried to slow down the spread of Christianity in his territory. He ordered his warriors to go around villages and force people to eat meat that had been sacrificed according to traditional Gothic custom. When warriors came to Sabbas’ village, there were several non-Christians who were sympathetic to the Christians, and they secretly gave them meat that hadn’t been sacrificed. But Sabbas didn’t want to quietly outsmart the authorities; he made it known that he wouldn’t eat the sacrificial meat. The only reason the warriors didn’t abuse him was that his fellow villagers convinced them that Sabbas was just a poor, rambling man not worth their time.

A few years later, in 372, another purge was enacted, and now Sabbas made a show of celebrating Easter, a holiday which marks Jesus’ resurrection. This time, the warriors were less lenient; they beat him and then gave him sacrificial meat to recant his religion. But Sabbas really wanted to be a martyr, and he not only refused, but suggested that they should kill him. The Gothic chieftain who had initiated the persecution thought that was a great idea and sentenced him to death by drowning. As he was being escorted to a river, Sabbas kept talking about the righteousness of God. His guards thought he was a complete fool and contemplated just letting him go. They didn’t want to kill this guy, and how would their boss find out anyways? But Sabbas insisted that they carry out their orders and, finally, the warriors weighed him down with a branch and drowned him. We know this whole story because Christian priests in nearby villages sent Sabbas’ remains to the bishop of Thessaloniki in Greece, along with a letter recounting the episode.

This account reveals quite a few things. There seems to have been a wide gulf between the Gothic chieftains that held power and the village elders that administered the communities of the region on a daily basis. Gothic villagers seem to have had no issue with Christians openly practicing their religion; in fact, they sought to protect them, since they had formed close relationships with them and didn’t want to see their neighbours assaulted or killed, and also didn’t want their community to lose a productive member. What’s more striking is that even the warriors sent to enforce the purges were unenthusiastic about their mission and, at times, didn’t follow orders.

Yet the Gothic aristocracy was fervent in its persecutions; they focused on the most vocal Christians who sought to convert others, as they threatened their own power. We often define ourselves as much by what we are as by what we are not; by rejecting Christianity and holding steadfast to their traditional beliefs, the Gothic elite was projecting that they were independent from the empire. Yet the fact that there were several of these purges and that there were still priests in the area after them shows how ineffective these actions actually were. Christianity had no shortage of converts.

As the Gothic elite was trying to eradicate Christianity beyond the Danube, breathless messengers arrived from the borderlands north of the Black Sea, telling of a devastating invasion that had already ravaged swaths of Gothic territory. Survivors recounted how clouds of dust on the horizon heralded the imminent approach of a raiding party. The warriors of the village barely had time to assemble before enemy horsemen closed in. Their arrows hit with frightening precision, and their mobility allowed them to fire from all sides. Even if the Gothic warriors managed to get close, these raiders would simply gallop away, just out of reach, and keep firing. Once the rain of arrows ceased, the horsemen plunged into hand-to-hand combat and lassoed their battered opponents. Resistance was quickly annihilated, and the raiders then enslaved villagers, raped women, stole anything of value, and set fire to buildings. Survivors limped away petrified, their settlement no more than smoldering ruins. The Goths had just encountered the Huns.

The Huns were nomads, relying on their animals for food, clothing, and everyday materials, and we don’t know why they left their homeland deep in the Eurasian steppes. It may be that poor summers, severe winters, or devastating diseases killed off a portion of their animals and forced them to find better pastures, or they may have faced pressure from other nomadic peoples further East. Whatever the reason, they were now encroaching on Gothic territory, and their arrival demanded a response.

Athanaric, the leader who had fought the Romans a few years back, saw only one option: face the Huns in battle and stop them. In 375, shortly after the first Hunnic raids, he led his army eastwards to meet this new enemy. We have no details of the ensuing campaign, but what we do know is that Athanaric’s forces were staunchly defeated, and they retreated into the Carpathian Mountains away from the plains. This striking failure got many Gothic nobles thinking: “If our greatest leader can’t stop them, what chance do we have?”

A rival of Athanaric named Fritigern proposed a solution: seek refuge in the Roman empire. You see, Fritigern was one of the few Gothic nobles who had converted to Christianity and who was friendly to the empire. So, the following year in 376, he took the tribes loyal to him and marched them to the Danube frontier. Imperial guards saw eighty thousand men, women, and children gathered on the other shore. A Roman contemporary wrote that “a great crowd standing on the opposite riverbank stretched out their hands with cries and lamentations, begging to be allowed to cross.” Fritigern sent ambassadors to emperor Valens to discuss a deal. It would take more than a month to receive a reply, as the emperor was over seventeen hundred kilometres away in the East. As they awaited a response, the Goths had to pitch camp on the shore and hope that a cloud of dust would not appear on the horizon.

The Romans saw the Goths – and indeed all peoples beyond the frontier – as barbarians. Since the time of Virgil, the empire thought of itself as the very definition of civilization, with cities, monuments, proper religion, education, culture, and law. On the other side of the frontier were savages who were violent, dishonest, fickle, and arrogant, and who lived in primitive communities without rational government. The only thing preventing the barbarians from destroying civilization was Rome’s armies. I have used the term “barbarian” to refer to the peoples beyond the border – Dacians, Goths, and others – but I’ve done so only in cases when I was telling the story from the Roman perspective to give you a better idea of their mentality. When the story was told from the Dacian or Gothic side, that term wasn’t used – and we, too, shouldn’t think of the peoples beyond the frontiers as barbarians: they were rational people just like any other group, and their customs, beliefs, and ways of life were part of a coherent worldview and culture which were just as valid as those of the Romans.

Emperor Valens, however, hated the idea of letting the Goths into his sacred Roman empire. But the Persians threatened the eastern frontier, and the Danube defenses weren’t strong enough to hold back eighty thousand people. Plus, these Goths who were friendly to the empire could act as a buffer on the border and send recruits to the army. It was basically the same arrangement the Romans and Goths had had in the now defunct province of Gothia, except that it was on this side of the Danube. So, reluctantly, Valens granted Fritigern’s request; the Goths would receive land in the empire on the condition that they all convert to Christianity and provide men to the imperial army.

Once the decision was made, the Roman Danubian fleet ferried groups of Goths across the river for several days and nights. Some boats were overcrowded and capsized, leading refugees to drown. Terrified at the arrival of the Huns, many Goths made canoes from hollowed-out logs and took to the water themselves, while others swam frantically. The Roman commander in the area, Lupicinus, put the Goths in a hastily-assembled camp south of the Danube. As he awaited instructions from the emperor, the conditions in the camp deteriorated; latrines overflowed and people grew hungry, as grain shipments were small and infrequent. Some Goths paid huge sums for food on the black market, while desperate individuals sold their children into slavery to buy dogmeat: Roman guards set the rate at one wild dog for one child, which speaks to the Goths’ desperation and to how the Romans viewed them as less than human.

Enduring hunger, disease, abuse, and humiliation every day, many Goths lost faith in the imperial authorities, and some of their young men grew restless. Seven months after the crossing, the emperor was still in the East, and the empire still didn’t have a proper plan for settling the Goths. Lupicinus decided to take care of them himself. He ordered the refugees to march eighty kilometres south to the city of Marcianopolis under heavy guard. While the refugees set up their tents below its imposing walls, Lupicinus invited Fritigern and his closest advisers to dine inside the city. At the table, the Roman commander ordered his men to kill the Gothic leaders, and all were murdered – except Fritigern, who managed to escape. He ran to his people outside the walls and, when he reached them, they revolted and turned against their Roman guards.

Meanwhile, the troops that Lupicinus had used to escort the Goths to Marcianopolis had been drawn from the Danubian defenses and, with the line weakened, another group of Goths was able to cross the river unopposed. They headed straight for their brethren, joined them in their revolt, and turned to pillaging the local villas and villages to feed themselves, stealing any animals and grain they could find.

Fritigern was in a delicate position. He knew he couldn’t defeat the empire’s armies, and since he had no siege equipment, he couldn’t access the grain supplies stored in the fortified cities nearby; his people had to split off into smaller groups and keep moving, since any one area was quickly pillaged of its resources. If the revolt dragged on, the Romans would certainly defeat them, impose a crippling treaty, enslave many among them, and maybe even throw them over the river. Fritigern needed to come to an understanding with Valens as quickly as possible to secure land for his people in exchange for military service, as had been originally agreed. The emperor was on his way, but his progress was slow, as he first had to make peace with the Persians. As such, Valens reached the Balkans a full year after the start of the rebellion. The emperor stayed near Constantinople and was waiting for reinforcements before engaging in battle, but Fritigern didn’t have the luxury of time.

In August of 378, the Gothic leader marched his forces towards Constantinople to pressure Valens to talk; in response, the emperor moved his army to the fortified city of Adrianople to block their advance. Fritigern didn’t actually want to fight. Even if he did win a battle, it would only be a temporary victory until the Romans could assemble another army. Most likely, his forces would lose against experienced imperial soldiers, leading to unconditional surrender. So, Fritigern sent envoys to Valens offering peace in exchange for land in the empire, and carrying a private letter which assured the emperor that he wanted to end things peacefully. Valens dismissed the embassy; his scouts had reported that the Gothic force was much smaller than his own, so he moved his army opposite the enemy camp. One battle and this whole affair would be settled.

But as his army lined up in front of the Goths, Valens saw that the opposing force was actually about as large as his own; his scouts had only seen a part of it. Losing confidence, he agreed to talks in exchange for hostages. As their leaders were set to talk, Roman soldiers stared at Gothic warriors in the scorching August sun; at some point, an imperial unit attacked without orders, and general fighting immediately broke out. In the midst of battle, a Gothic cavalry unit surprised their Roman counterparts and drove them from the left flank, leaving the imperial infantry exposed. Gothic warriors then pushed forward and slowly surrounded the Romans.

For hours, imperial soldiers retreated bit by bit in the heat and dust, stepping over the corpses of their comrades, as more and more of them fell to Gothic arms, unable to organize a proper defense. Out of thirty thousand Roman soldiers, twenty thousand died that day. The battle near Adrianople was the worst defeat the empire had suffered since Germanic tribes annihilated three legions in the Teutoburg forest nearly four centuries ago. Valens himself was fighting with his troops. He was hit by an arrow and retreated with his bodyguard to a farmhouse. A group of Goths pursued them and, not knowing that the emperor of the Romans was inside, they set fire to the building. Valens couldn’t escape in time and suffocated in the blaze. His body was never recovered.

Following this catastrophic defeat in 378, the emperor of the West appointed a young general named Theodosius as eastern emperor and ordered him to crush the Goths and avenge Valens’ death. Despite his best efforts over the next four years, Theodosius just couldn’t replenish the massive losses the army had suffered. In the meantime, the Goths continued to raid the countryside, and the chaos was slowly enveloping an ever-larger region. Unable to defeat his enemies, Theodosius turned to negotiation. In 382, he agreed to give land south of the Danube to the Goths in exchange for them providing troops to the Roman army. It was exactly the same deal that Fritigern had requested six years earlier, and whose rejection by Lupicinus had led to so much pain and death.

Meanwhile, north of the Danube, Athanaric had continued to resist the Hun advance – unsuccessfully. He moved into the arc of the Carpathian Mountains, but the Huns followed him and defeated him repeatedly. Disillusioned with his leadership, his chieftains exiled him, and Athanaric was forced to travel to Constantinople as a supplicant in 381. Theodosius gladly received him, but the great Gothic war chief passed away just two weeks later.

Unwilling to continue the fight, some Gothic chieftains fled to the empire as Fritigern had done, but most came to terms with the invaders. There was a strong incentive to collaborate, as gaining the support of the Huns was a sure way to avoid destruction and to expand your own power at the expense of your local rivals.

At the same time, the Romanized population that had been subject to the Goths fought, fled, or collaborated in their own fashion. For instance, archeological evidence indicates that the Romanized population in the old provincial capital of Sarmizegetusa used its amphitheatre as a fortress. They barricaded the entrance with stones and earth and brought their coins and valuables in with them. Unfortunately, they didn’t last long against the Huns. The old Roman cities of the province of Dacia, with tall buildings and marble monuments, stood in stark contrast to the surrounding countryside, and they were some of the first targets of the Hunnic raiding parties. Many people chose to flee before they arrived.

And so, more than a century after the empire retreated from Dacia, Romanized communities abandoned the cities to hide in forests and mountains, or seek the protection of Gothic chieftains who had struck deals with the Huns.

In two weeks, we’ll see the Huns go from thundering invaders to permanent occupiers, and turn their attention from the disunited tribes of Europe to the fabulously rich empire south of the Danube.