Rome's Gothic Wars_ From the Third Century to Alaric - Michael Kulikowski [50]
It is, in other words, fundamentally wrong to follow the many modern historians who call the Gothic realm of the fourth century ‘polyethnic’. It was polyethnic only in the sense that no culture is totally autonomous and free from the admixture of disparate cultural strands. The Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture emerged within two generations of the Goths first appearing in contemporary written sources. Its origins are nearly contemporary with the decade in which, according to the literary sources, Goths come to dominate the lower Danube and the northwestern Black Sea region. As we saw in the last chapter, nothing in the material evidence suggests that ‘the Goths’ came from somewhere else and imposed themselves on a polyethnic coalition; nothing contemporary tells us that Goths ‘came’ from anywhere at all. Instead, in the crucible of Roman frontier politics, people of very different backgrounds came together under leaders who were defined as Goths in their constant interaction with the Roman empire. The relative clarity of that relationship with the empire led to a stable political system just beyond the frontier in which the material culture we call Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov developed. That culture, its agricultural base and its nomadic hinterland, were the foundations on which different Gothic polities grew up and solidified in the course of the fourth century. Some of those polities are deeply obscure, glimpsed only as shadows in our sources. Others, closer to the frontier, were more heavily implicated in the life of Rome’s provinces and are therefore quite well known to us. The history of these Gothic groups, and the Tervingi in particular, will occupy us in the next chapter.
Chapter 5 Goths and Romans, 332–376
As the last chapter suggested, the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture was the material expression of Gothic hegemony in the lower Danube region. That is to say, it was the product of a relative political stability that the imperial support for Gothic hegemony ensured. But the same stability held inherent dangers for the Roman empire. Constantine’s defeat of king Ariaric in 332, and the subsequent thirty years of peace between the empire and the Tervingi, did nothing to retard the growth of Tervingian military power. Thus when a Roman emperor next came to fight a major Gothic war, as Valens did in the later 360s, he confronted an opponent whose power would have surprised Constantine. More shocking still was the Gothic victory at Adrianople which, in 378, wiped out the larger part of the eastern Roman army. For us, it would be very satisfying to know just how Gothic power grew so great in this period. Unfortunately, we know remarkably little about the history of the Tervingian region in the three decades of peace that followed Constantine’s victory – not even whether we should talk about a Tervingian kingdom or kingdoms – and still less about more distant Gothic groups.
As we have already seen, it is impossible to be sure whether Ariaric was the only Tervingian king involved in the campaigns of 332, and how or whether he was related to later Tervingian rulers. The evidence for the mid fourth century is just as uncertain. In the year 364/365, we hear of more than one Gothic king sending troops to support an unsuccessful claimant to the imperial throne.[88] But in the later 360s and early 370s, our main narrative sources