on 9 august 378 a roman emperor marched in person against the goths, lost the battle, and nothing more was ever heard of his body. this is not a figure of speech: there was no funeral, no tomb, no remains to bury.
valens ruled the eastern half of the empire. two years earlier, tens of thousands of goths fleeing the huns had crowded the northern bank of the danube asking permission to cross and take refuge on roman soil. valens granted it, and not out of generosity: they were hands for the fields and recruits for the army. what failed was the logistics, and it failed in the worst way imaginable.
the officers charged with feeding them cheated them instead. ammianus marcellinus —a soldier of that era, writing with the bitterness of a man who saw the system from inside— records that they went as far as selling them dog meat in exchange for handing over their own children as slaves. the goths rose in arms, and had been ranging across thrace for two years when the emperor decided to settle the matter himself.
rome did not lose that day for being weaker. it lost for being in a hurry.
in the summer of 378 the two armies were hunting each other near adrianople. gratian, valens’ nephew and emperor of the west, was on his way with reinforcements after defeating the alamanni. valens chose not to wait. according to ammianus he resented sharing the glory with his nephew, and his scouts reported the goths to be far fewer than they actually were. he ordered the attack, and his men marched for hours under the august sun without food or water, reaching the field already exhausted.
a truce was still being negotiated when the fighting broke out. the gothic cavalry, returning from raiding the surrounding country, fell on the roman flanks and pressed them into the centre. ammianus describes the result with a detail nobody forgets: the legionaries were packed so tightly against one another that they could not raise their arms to use their swords. two thirds of the eastern army were destroyed, along with thirty-five tribunes and much of the high command. ammianus himself writes that rome had seen no such butchery since cannae.
valens disappeared in the slaughter. ammianus records two versions and both end the same way, without a body: in one he falls to an arrow among the rank and file, unrecognised by anyone; in the other, wounded, his men carry him to a nearby farmhouse which the goths burn without knowing the emperor was inside.
it is worth saying what has since been made of this battle. for a long time it was presented as the moment cavalry replaced infantry and the middle ages began — a reading current scholarship has dismantled: barbero and heather agree that adrianople was a catastrophic tactical defeat, not a military revolution. what did change was the political map. four years later theodosius made peace and let the goths settle inside the frontier, under their own leaders and with their own weapons. an entire people came to live on roman soil without ceasing to be itself. of valens, meanwhile, there was not even a body to bury.
