Moving forward to the early second century AD; Trajan fought
and defeated the Dacians (101-106 AD), following an earlier campaign by
Domitian, and raised a column about it in 109AD. This was the last expansion of
the Empire, and proved a war too far. Immediately north of the Dacians were the
Goths, who had moved upriver on the Vistula and found themselves at the
Carpathians. They expanded into the northern parts of Dacia. By around 250AD
this had become a threat to Rome, and its new emperor, Decius, led an army into
Dacia to repel the Goths.
It didn’t work. Decius was killed in the marshes on the north
bank of the Danube. The Goths went on to raid various parts of the empire, even
crossing into Asia Minor and abducting Roman citizens in Cappadocia as slaves.
Rome had removed a buffer state when they’d have been better advised to
strengthen it.
Amongst the captives from Cappadocia were Christians, and
whilst they had started as slaves of the Goths, their offspring gradually
became Goths (while still able to speak Greek and Latin). About a hundred years
after being abducted, one of those new Goths, Wulfilaz, turned up in
Constantinople. His name is recorded variously as Ulphilas or Wulfila, and he
was a Christian priest. We will catch up with him later on.
When Constantine took control of the eastern empire, he
established a treaty (foedus) with
the Danubian Goths, the group later known as the Visigoths. This was something
very much to their advantage; the right to trade with Roman Moesia at any point
along the Danube; the ability to absorb all and any young men the Goths could
spare into the Roman Army, where they would spend twenty years as a soldier; if
they came back it would be as men in
their late 30s or above, and if they chose not to return there was the offer of
a cash sum, Roman citizenship and the ability to marry a Roman citizen
girlfriend and settle as a burgher of the town. The third advantage of the foedus was a regular ‘gift’ of high
quality Roman pottery and metalware, of which the king would keep some and give
the rest to his higher nobles and so on down the line, securing loyalty in this
way.
This pact served both Romans and Goths well. The Romans had
to pay for the ‘gifts’ (i.e. bribes) to the Goths, but that was a lot cheaper
than fighting them. The real damage was to Roman egotism. The bribes also
provided a structure of chieftain generosity and reciprocal service typical of
a Germanic war band.
Wulfilaz appeared in Constantinople in 340, and was allowed
to create a translation of the Bible into Gothic, using a mix of Latin and
Greek letters with some Gothic runes. By his own admission, he omitted the Book
of Kings in the Old Testament because the Goths were warlike enough without
encouragement. He returned to Gothland under the protection of Fritigern, but
later took a community of Gothic Christians back within the empire in about AD347/8
under the protection of Constantius II; who was an Arian, and so Wulfilaz’s
group adopted Arianism, which was legitimised at the Church Council of Rimini;
it was probably close to the Christianity they’d practised in Cappadocia when
it was still underground.
The Goths ran into difficulty because they were drawn into a
dispute over who should be eastern emperor; Valens, the brother of Valentinian,
who had been picked by his brother, who had been appointed and acclaimed by the
army, rubberstamped by an obliging Senate, was unpopular with Procopius, a
cousin of the former emperor Justin. Somehow Procopius persuaded the Gothic
leadership that he was the rightful emperor.
Procopius (also
claimed as Valens, but probably too young to be him)
In the Germanic system of royal inheritance, Procopius might
have succeeded, because that system established a royal pedigree, and anyone
within the royal lineage could seek to be king. The principal targets were
stability and legitimacy. It was obviously necessary to avoid children, the
ill, mad and illegitimate inheriting, and (as was later shown) women were best
placed as ‘peaceweavers’. The next one down the age range was usually best, so
brothers and cousins often inherited ahead of sons, particularly ones of dubious
mental health, which is why Hamlet was sidelined for Claudius in the myth
Shakespeare took from Saxo Grammaticus.
Procopius put his case to the Tervingi Goths, under their
leader Athanaric, in terms they used and understood, but which was never used
by the Romans once the Julio-Claudians had exterminated themselves.
It would have been smart for Valens to have told the Goths
to do what their foedus required and
rewarded their renewed loyalty, but he was exceptionally dumb, so he punished
them, ending the open trading along the Danube, cutting it to one place, and
closing the army to Gothic recruits, thereby trapping youths of fighting age in
Gothland kicking their heels resentfully. By doing this he impoverished the
Gothic farmers and built up a reservoir of young men who blamed their rulers.
By ending the bribes, Valens was able to cut taxes in the Eastern Empire, the
first emperor to do so in a century, and was praised for it by the orator
Themistius, although he may not have known about it, since Themistius spoke
Greek by no Latin and Valens the reverse, so they probably smiled politely at
each other as the Empire destroyed itself.
The struggles of Christian Goths and the adverse reaction of
the ‘pagan’ Athanaric towards Rome is seen in the martyrdom of Sabbaz (St Saba)
in AD374 by drowning. Within two years, this 38 year old Arian Goth had been
made a Roman saint, another cause of war with the Arian emperor Valens. An
official hagiography The Passion of St
Saba has been discussed by Peter Heather in his book The Goths in the Fourth Century (1991). No doubt such murders by Athanaric
eased the decision of Fritigern’s Goths to emigrate to the Roman Empire in
AD376, less than two years later, at just the moment that Bishop Basil of
Caesarea in Moesia. We can see some similar push factors to the murders by ISIS
of Christians and Yazidis in recent times in Syria and Iraq.
Unknown to Valens, the Huns had parked themselves to the
north of Gothland, having found a way across the Pripet Marshes at the mouth of
the Volga. The Goths had a new power to crawl to, so some of them, under Athanaric,
asserted that they no longer needed the Romans, now they could get what they
wanted by offering services to the Huns. Other Goths – those nearer to the
Danube, possibly no further than 30 miles from the river – thought if they
offered themselves as even more dogged than before in devotion to Rome, they
might receive their old favoured position once more.
Those southern Goths were led by Fritigern, and they sought
refuge within the Roman Empire. It
sounded reasonable, but it was the beginning of the end.
They petitioned Valens to let them enter the empire, and
this was permitted. The numbers – perhaps 50,000 – were rather more than had
been intended, These were however not all men of fighting age, and included
women, children, the elderly and the sick. In that respect, they resembled the
sort of migrants fleeing conflict seen in the movements of 2014.
Valens allowed them to be placed in transit camps, where
they were ripped off and half-starved for some time by the local governors,
Lupicinus and Maximus, who sold them food at high prices, claiming there was a
famine. They led their menfolk out to acquire illegally what they could not
legitimately obtain. They hoped to get to Adrianople (modern Edirne on the
Turkish-Greek border), where some Goths had already settled (echoed by modern
migrants desire to get to Britain or Germany because they have relatives
there). But Valens had already killed their relatives in the city. With some
irony, as I write, the Turks are stopping astern migrants at Edirne from
entering Greece.
On 9 August 378, Valens led Roman troops against the local
Goths and lost, possibly burning to death in an agricultural worker’s hut as he
fled the battlefield. Fritigern lived on for some time, and over time, the
successful Goths were settled in Thrace and many of the young men joined the
Roman army, helping Theodosius I win the Battle of the Frigidus on 8 September
394; by doing so, they showed the Western Imperial Army could be beaten, as the
army of Valens had been.
Most of those who followed Alaric in the early fifth century
were born within the empire and were therefore full Roman citizens. We have no
evidence to say that any of those ‘Visigoths’ spoke a word of anything except
Latin and Greek. They had been absorbed and transmitted their energy to the
Romans.
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