Battle of Adrianople

Two years of marching and skirmishing in Thrace had produced exhaustion but not decision. Valens, with the Eastern field army, faced a Gothic coalition whose center lay in a wagon‑laager protecting families and supplies. Gratian’s men were en route from the Danube, but the heat pressed, and messengers brought word that the Goths were foraging and vulnerable. Valens chose to move. He would end the Gothic War with a single blow [1][10].

The columns approached Adrianople (modern Edirne), the old Roman road dusting their sandals. Shields clattered as ranks dressed and the sun glared off bronze fittings. Ammianus, our near‑contemporary, names the date—August 9—and records the fatal haste: Valens, anxious for credit and misled about Gothic numbers, deployed without waiting for Gratian [1][10][14]. In the distance, the laager ringed the horizon with timber and wagons.

Negotiations flickered, then failed. Roman scouts had misread the Gothic order of battle. While the infantry formed, Gothic cavalry—absent from the first view—returned from a foraging sweep and formed on the flanks. When they charged, the sound came like a crack of storm: hooves drumming, horns blaring, the line flexing then tearing open. The Roman left, then center, collapsed under the weight of armored horse [1][10].

The rout was as devastating as the decision had been rash. Valens vanished in the melee—Ammianus reports conflicting tales of his end, one placing him in a farmhouse burned by the enemy—and roughly two‑thirds of the Eastern field army fell on the field [1][10][14]. Standards disappeared into the press. The purple of the imperial cloak could no longer command men whose officers lay dead around them.

Survivors limped toward Constantinople. The city, its sea‑walls facing the azure of the Propontis, bristled. Refugees and soldiers crowded the gates, while Gothic bands probed the suburbs. The shock was audible in chancelleries from Thessalonica to Antioch: an emperor dead, the comitatus wrecked, and the empire’s eastern heartland suddenly exposed.

Yet Constantinople held. Its walls and fleet denied the Goths their prize, and the laager—bound to families and carts—could not turn a victory into a siege. The Goths moved back into Thrace, burning granaries near Melanthias and raiding along the Via Egnatia, while the Eastern government counted spears and realized how few remained [1][10].