Federate Settlement of the Goths in Thrace

After Adrianople, the Eastern government faced arithmetic more than glory. The field army was shattered; Valens dead; Constantinople guarded by walls rather than mobile strength. The Goths could not storm the capital, but they could live off Thrace indefinitely. Theodosius I—emperor since 379—chose a tool that fit both weakness and necessity: negotiation [1][10].

Talks unfolded in the shadow of the Bosporus. Imperial envoys offered grain and land for service; Gothic leaders insisted on arms, autonomy, and the right to muster under their own chiefs. Neither side forgot the wagons. They were the reason the Goths had survived Adrianople and the reason the imperial treasury calculated costs in bushels as well as solidi. The resulting agreement—concluded in 382—settled the Goths as federates in Thrace [1][10].

A federate peace meant specific things. Rations issued from storehouses at Hadrianople and along the Hebrus. Dues remitted to chieftains, not to a Roman dux. Theodosius retained the right to summon Gothic contingents for campaigns; the Goths retained their internal command. Ammianus does not narrate the treaty itself—his history ends in 378—but later summaries and the logic of policy are clear: the empire embedded an armed, semi‑autonomous people within its borders because it lacked the force to disarm them [1][10].

To contemporaries walking the colonnades of Constantinople, the change was visible in small ways. Gothic guards stood beside bronze‑doored arsenals. Farmers near Philippopolis measured seed against the new levies. The color of authority—the imperial purple—remained, but the sound changed: Gothic war‑songs at muster, Latin orders in the drillyard, a duet rather than a solo.

This was not surrender. It was a bet that the empire could buy time, recruit strength, and direct federate arms outward when needed. The Notitia Dignitatum, compiled a generation later, would list duces and comites who, on parchment, commanded a seamless apparatus [8][9]. But in Thrace the apparatus had new joints—Gothic ones—and those joints would flex under strain.

Theodosius’ bargain solved the immediate crisis. Raids diminished; roads reopened between Thessalonica and Constantinople. Yet the price was permanent leverage in Gothic hands. When Theodosius died in 395, that leverage would be exercised by a man who understood both Roman need and Gothic power: Alaric [2][15].