Rome's Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric (Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity) (16 page)

The fact that the Nicene position was not universally accepted by several fourth-century emperors was a particular complication.
Constantius Ⅱ, for one, was a convinced supporter of homoean belief and attempted to enforce it as orthodoxy, even though he was defied by many bishops in the empire who supported the Nicene definition of the trinity. Ulfila was a member of the homoean party, and as a consequence of that fact, the earliest evangelism among the Goths brought Christianity in its homoean form. The
homoean tendencies of Gothic Christianity were heavily re-enforced by later events under Valens, a fervent homoean who diligently persecuted his Nicene opponents. When he agreed to let many Tervingi into the empire in 376, he may have made some form of conversion a prerequisite for admission, and he had certainly sponsored missions among them before 376.
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Valens, however, was the last emperor to support homoean doctrine and, upon his death, an overwhelming Nicene reaction meant that any doctrine with Arian tendencies would thereafter remain a reviled heresy.
Over the years, however, Gothic Christians remained committed to their homoean doctrine and its homoean liturgy. When, a hundred years after Ulfila’s first mission, a powerful Gothic kingdom
existed inside the Roman empire, Arianism functioned both as a defining symbol of Gothic identity, and as a major obstacle to peaceful coexistence between Gothic kings and the Nicene Romans over whom they ruled.

All the same, when his mission began, by 341 at the latest, Ulfila was simply adhering to the form of Christian doctrine endorsed as official orthodoxy by the emperor and those bishops whom he favoured.
Ulfila was meant to serve as bishop for all the Christians already in the land of the Goths, but we have no idea how many such Christians there might have been, nor how many of them were descendants of former captives from the Roman empire and how many were converts won beyond the frontier. Within a decade of Ulfila’s arrival in Gothic territory, however, the number of Christians must have grown large enough to worry Gothic leaders, who associated the new religion with imperial power and therefore found the loyalty of Gothic Christians somewhat suspect. We do not know what sparked it, or indeed which Gothic leaders were involved, but eight years after Ulfila’s arrival in Gothia a persecution of Gothic Christians began. An offhand remark by bishop Cyril of Jerusalem seems to imply that this persecution produced martyrs, though none are known by name.
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Ulfila and his followers were driven out of Gothic territory and into the empire, where they were granted lands in the province of
Moesia Secunda, possibly around the city of
Nicopolis.
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Constantius addressed Ulfila as a new Moses, for leading his people out of servitude in their trans-Danubian Egypt.
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Inside the empire, Ulfila became heavily involved in the ecclesiastical politics of Constantius’ reign and by the time of his death in 383 had been an influential theologian for many years.

Ulfila and his followers in Moesia may have maintained close connections with co-religionists beyond the Danube, but we cannot be sure because the evidence comes from the fifth-century church historian
Sozomen, who often misunderstands or oversimplifies fourth-century events. It would make good sense if Ulfila continued to be involved in diplomacy between emperors and Goths, yet in the 370s, the bishop of
Tomi on the Black Sea, and not Ulfila, probably had responsibility for all the Christians of
Scythia – both the Roman province of that name and the broader Gothic region beyond the frontier.
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Regardless of that, Ulfila’s greatest impact on Gothic history came through his invention of an alphabet in which the Gothic language could be written. He based this alphabet on the Greek, but included new letters which could represent sounds not found in Greek.
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Ulfila had only one purpose in creating this alphabet – to translate into Gothic the text of the Bible, so as to aid the work of evangelization.
He translated into Gothic the whole text of the Bible apart, we are told, from the books of Kings, ‘because these books contain the history of wars, while the Gothic people, being lovers of war, were in need of something to restrain their passion for fighting rather than to incite them to it’.
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This work of translation may well have involved not just Ulfila, but his followers as well, and was probably a product of their time
in Moesia, rather than the eight short years they had been able to spend in Gothia. Yet the work they did endured. In the Gothic kingdoms of the fifth and sixth centuries, this Gothic Bible was the basic text for the homoean liturgy, and fragments of the Gothic Bible have been transmitted to us from many different sources. Almost all of these remains come from the New Testament, while only small fragments of Old Testament texts still survive. These biblical texts, however, are the earliest substantial evidence we possess for the morphology and vocabulary of a Germanic language, and are thus of priceless value to modern philologists.

Whether or not Ulfila’s mission was a direct product of Constantine’s own missionary ambitions, it was clearly a result of the Constantinian peace with the Tervingi. We have no way to correlate the growth of Christianity in Gothia with the meagre scraps of Tervingian history that are known to us during the reigns of Constantius and Julian. But we can be sure that Christianity was indeed spreading throughout the region, as retrospective evidence makes clear. As we shall soon see, the aftermath of Valens’ Gothic wars in the 360s brought on a second, much heavier, persecution of Christians in Gothic territory, one that is much better documented in ecclesiastical and liturgical sources. Most of the known victims of this second persecution seem to have been Nicene
Goths, rather than homoeans. That would seem to imply that there were in fact two separate strands of missionary work beyond the lower Danube frontier in this period, however obscure their details may be to us.

Still more obscure than the rise of Tervingian Christianity is the Gothic world beyond the Tervingi. There is no contemporary evidence, and almost everything we know about the larger Gothic world of the middle fourth century – apart from the archaeological evidence for its social structures, which we looked at in the last chapter – comes from retrospective accounts written after the disaster of Adrianople.
Jordanes has much to say about this period, but it is almost all fiction that draws genuine figures from contemporary sources and inserts them into a spurious dynastic history of the sixth-century Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great.
The one thing we can be quite sure of is that beyond the fourth-century territory of the Tervingi there lay another Gothic realm, whose inhabitants were called Greuthungi. The Tervingi and Greuthungi have been interpreted as the linear ancestors of the later fifth-century
Visigoths and
Ostrogoths, and the long-standing division of the Goths into two sections under separate royal dynasties is a fixture of older literature (and still maintained by supporters of ethnogenesis-theory, with their insistence that royal dynasties transmit ethnic identity). In fact, the division between Visigoths and Ostrogoths is a product of fifth-century politics within the Roman and Hunnic empires, and the names are retrojection from the sixth-century text of Jordanes: they bear no demonstrable relationship to fourth-century divisions.
The Gothic groups that emerged in the fourth century, after Adrianople, and in the fifth century, after the collapse of the Hunnic empire, were of thoroughly mixed origin, with connections to several different Gothic polities of the fourth century. Of these, the Tervingian polity is moderately well attested, but our knowledge of the Greuthungi comes almost entirely from a few pages of Ammianus Marcellinus. He, in turn, only mentions the Greuthungi when he describes the destruction of their kingdom by the Huns and the death of their king
Ermanaric.

Ammianus actually knew very little about the Greuthungian kingdom. He tells us that Ermanaric ruled ‘lands rich and wide’ and was a ‘most warlike king and, on account of his many and various deeds, feared by the neighbouring peoples’.
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That, in full, is the only contemporary evidence for Ermanaric’s kingdom that exists.
Jordanes, however, expands that account into an elaborate list of peoples over whom Ermanaric held sway, drawing on traditions of classical ethnography and extending this fictional empire as far as northern Russia. Utter nonsense, Jordanes’ ‘empire of Ermanaric’ warrants none of the attention given it by otherwise serious scholars desperate for any scrap of information on the early Goths
. Apart from the single line of Ammianus, the extent of Ermanaric’s power must remain a mystery to us. After his kingdom collapsed in the face of a
Hunnic attack, we learn of several different groups of Greuthungi whom we cannot positively identify as having once been Ermanaric’s followers. That fact suggests that, just as different factions are known amongst the Tervingi in the face of Valens’ invasions of the 360s, so amongst the Greuthungi, Ermanaric was not the single source of power. The archaeological evidence we have looked at offers no help, and there is no material difference between the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov territories in which the Tervingi were dominant and those in which Ermanaric’s Greuthungi lived. We must, in other words, content ourselves with only a very imperfect sense of Gothic history between the victory of Constantine in 332 and that of Valens in 369, to which we can now turn.

As with so much of the history of the Roman frontier, Valens’ Gothic wars are tied up in the internal conflicts of the empire, and particularly the legacy left to him by his predecessors Constantius Ⅱ and Julian.
Julian, when we last saw him, had been appointed caesar by Constantius, in the hope that he would restore the Rhine frontier which had been so badly weakened by the usurpation of Magnentius. In 359, after many successes against Franks and Alamanni in the Rhineland, Julian was declared augustus by his troops.
Both he and
Constantius prepared
for civil war, the latter bringing his Persian campaigns to an abrupt end in order to deal with his upstart cousin. A full-blown conflict was only averted by Constantius’ timely death, of natural causes, in 361.
Julian immediately launched into a hugely ambitious program of reform, aimed both at reversing the Christianization of the Constantinian empire, and at fulfilling the dreams of his uncle and cousin and conquering
Persia. After initial successes that brought the army to the walls of the Persian capital at Ctesiphon, Julian’s campaign ended in shambles; he himself died of a wound received in a sudden ambush.
The army elected an ineffectual officer named
Jovian (r. 363–364) to get them out of Persia, which he did at the cost of a humiliating peace-treaty that ceded several important Mesopotamian towns to the Persians. Jovian, a heavy drinker, soon died of self-indulgence, and the army high command elected
Valentinian (r. 364–375) as emperor.
Valentinian, a
protector
like the historian Ammianus, in turn appointed his younger brother
Valens (r. 364–378) as his co-emperor.

The
brothers were Pannonian, from the region of Lake Balaton in modern Hungary, and therefore from a region proverbially backward, the punchline in many a late Roman joke. This cultural stereotype deeply affects their treatment in our narrative sources, which invariably depict them as loathsome and cruel, a judgement mitigated only by Valentinian’s undeniable prowess as a general. Ammianus, the cultured Greek from Syria, found them unspeakable: Valens was
subrusticum hominem
, a half-witted man, who would have been murdered by his soldiers, had fate not spared him to suffer greater disaster.
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Everything we know of Valens, in both Ammianus and the rich Greek historical tradition, is uniformly hostile.
Our own interpretations of his reign, like those of his contemporaries, remain coloured not just by such slanders, but by his ultimate fate: killed by the Goths, along with most of the eastern Roman army, on the field of Adrianople. It has recently been argued that Valens was by no means a disastrous emperor, and certainly not the incompetent he is so often made out to have been. He was, on the contrary, a more or less average late Roman commander who faced an impossible concatenation of circumstances that ultimately brought
him down.
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Though that assessment may be a tritle generous, there can be no question that both Valens and Valentinian faced formidable challenges upon their accession to the throne.

The prospect of civil war between Julian and Constantius, and the fact that Julian launched his Persian war immediately upon the death of Constantius, led to the customary upheavals along the frontiers. As in the 340s and 350s, these disturbances were worst along the Rhine, though the
Quadi, relieved of the pressure of their Sarmatian neighbours, required repeated campaigning by Valentinian to control. This demonstrates the structural dangers inherent in the standard imperial policy towards the barbarians.
Constantius’ settlement of affairs between the Danube and Tisza had bred resentment amongst the Quadi, who had suffered demeaning punitive raids at the same time as the Sarmatians were suppressed, but it had also so strengthened them that as soon as the opportunity presented itself – as it did with Julian’s departure and death – they were able to launch devastating attacks on the provinces of
Noricum and
Valeria. So confident had the Quadi become in the security of their position that some of their envoys dared to address Valentinian as an equal during the campaigning season of 375. His outrage at this effrontery
triggered the stroke which killed him, leaving the western provinces to his sons, one an untested youth named Gratian, the other,
Gratian’s half-brother
Valentinian Ⅱ, still only a toddler.
Since 365, when they had divided the empire and its field army between them, the elder Valentinian and Valens had declined to interfere in one another’s affairs. Valens made no effort to intervene in the West upon his brother’s premature death, just as Valentinian had left Valens to his fate in the long series of disturbances that had faced him in the decade after 365. The earliest of these was the usurpation of
Procopius, and it was from that venture that Valens’ Gothic campaigns ultimately stemmed.