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next time we meet Fritigern – in Ammianus, a more reliable source than Socrates – he is the leader of Tervingi opposed to Athanaric. We cannot know whether Fritigern opposed Athanaric because he was a Christian, or whether he became a Christian because he opposed Athanaric. But it seems quite clear that Athanaric was absolutely right to see the extension of Christianity among Gothic elites as a substantial threat to the political status quo in Gothia. How matters might have turned out in the long run is a moot point. Within four years of Saba’s martyrdom the stability of the whole Gothic world had been shattered by obscure but traumatic events that brought many Tervingi to the banks of the Danube, begging for admission to the empire, in the spring of 376.

Chapter 6 The Battle of Adrianople

The battle of adrianople wiped out two-thirds of the whole field army of the Roman East. It was the worst military disaster of the Roman imperial era, and one of the worst in Roman history. That it was inflicted by barbarians made it instantly controversial, as contemporaries struggled to understand the reasons for the loss. For them, little save divine displeasure could explain such a calamity, so debate centred on which god was angry and why. But from the perspective of the modern historian, the trail of events that led to Adrianople is dotted with human error at every step. The Goths who defeated the emperor Valens at Adrianople in 378 were not a horde of unstoppable invaders. They were, for the most part, the same Goths who had crossed the Danube just two years earlier, in 376, having done so with the full approval of the imperial government. The reception of barbarians into the empire was no unprecedented novelty, but a well-known procedure with centuries of success behind it. Of course, accidents can happen whenever large numbers of people move from one place to another. But the path to Adrianople was no accident. The orderly reception of the Goths broke down through mismanagement and thereafter the imperial government repeatedly exacerbated the problem in a toxic combination of venality and incompetence. And so the crisis marched inexorably onwards to the fatal 9th of August 378.

A modern narrative history is entirely at the mercy of the ancient sources that happen to survive, which condition both its depth and its detail. For the two years before Adrianople, our access to one particular stream of Gothic history grows tremendously larger. The Goths who entered the empire in 376 are better known to us than are any of their predecessors, or indeed any of their contemporaries who remained outside the empire. The pace and scale of our narrative can therefore change with the present chapter. Up till now, we have been able to look at Gothic history in only two ways: first, in a sort of static, analytical overview, based on the archaeological evidence; and second, in brief flashes of narrative when the Goths impinged heavily enough upon Roman imperial politics for our Graeco-Roman sources to leave a record of events. But beginning in 376, for the first time, we learn enough about both Roman and Gothic activity to write a detailed narrative history, one that permits some insight not just into what happened, but also into why and how it did so.

Huns, Alans and Goths

The sources do not reach this level of precision until the Goths arrive at the banks of the Danube in 376, and the train of events that brought them there is known in nothing like the same detail as are the two years that followed it. The basic source is Ammianus Marcellinus, supplemented only very rarely by the fragments of Eunapius or the later sources, like Zosimus, that drew on him. Ammianus gives us a satisfyingly linear account: the Huns, a mysterious and lethal new people, appear as if from nowhere, smash the only somewhat less savage Alans, and drive through the Greuthungian kingdom of Ermanaric, pressing a horde of Gothic refugees forward to the Danube where they clamour for entry into the empire. No one can deny the force of Ammianus’ account, but