The Gothic War (376-382) The Fall of Rome #2

are you ready to start your new online venture or creative endeavor make it happen with Squarespace the all-in-one platform to build an online presence and follow your dream but more on that at the end of the video by the summer of 375 your importance hung over the Black Sea for more than a hundred years the grayer tungee Goths one half of a sprawling confederation stretching from the danube to the caucasus had called the northern shore home archaeological evidence suggests that these people were farmers at heart ruled over by Germanic warlords with private armies like most of the tribes of Europe at the time they'd had their wandering days for centuries in fact they'd searched for their place in the world sometime during the second century AD on the abundant shores of the Black Sea home to Greek colonies for close to a thousand years they'd finally found it for a time the Goths waged wars and campaigns of conquest against their neighbors and against the rich and powerful Roman Empire to their south but now for the most part they were content to drink Roman wine and sink tales of old little did they know it but their world was about to come crashing down around them just like it had done so many times before and would do so again so many times in the future death came riding in on a horse [Music] bands of opportunistic riders had come into the area before for years in fact ambitious ilanic horsemen had come in off the steps to the north and the east to try their luck against the Gothic armies with varying degrees of success before them the Sarmatian horse and ironic speaking people it had been an ever-present fixture in Eastern Europe but now in that fortuitous summer of 375 a very different folk began to appear out of the plains to the north of the Black Sea a foe that over the century to come would sweep away all in its path remaking all of the tribes and cultures of Eastern Europe and absorbing what was left into their ever-growing Empire much to the misfortune of all of the inhabitants of Europe the Huns had arrived even amongst the people that they considered to be barbarians the Romans singled out this group as different for they seemed to have sprung out of the very earth itself like a nightmare catapulted from the depths of Hell ionic nobility practiced cranial defamation from birth turning their warriors as far as the Romans were concerned into hideous nightmare like all step riders the homes practiced horse archery though this is unlike any seen by the Romans before their recurve composite bows cutting-edge technology honed out on the wild pasture lands of Eurasia dwarfed those that came before in both size and power for the homes had illustrious heritage of their own according to one scholarly tradition and a great deal of archaeological evidence they were descended from the zhangmu a steppe Empire wants the bane of China and the reason for the building of the Great Wall of course the Romans had other ideas a me honest Marcellinus a former soldier and one of the last great Roman historians of the age writing just after their arrival at the borders of the Empire stays the following a race of men hitherto unknown had now arisen from a hidden nook of the earth like a tempest of snows from the high mountains and was seizing ho destroying everything in its way they exceeded every level of savagery and were aflame with an inhuman desire for plundering others property for the sixth century historian Jordana's such was the horror that they were by then regarded with the Huns must have descended from evil spirits springing fully formed from primordial swamps far to the east at the ends of the earth by 375 the Allens summation people former masters of the steps to the north and east of the great unggi Goths and either be driven off their lands or absorbed into the ever-expanding ionic confederation now stretching far out to the east to the unknown lands beyond the horizon where in reality the vast majority of the Huns probably still remained nevertheless despite their sedentary nature mostly subsisting from wheat barley and millet evidenced from substantial archaeological information graer tungee society was still heavily marshaled in nature though Arian Christianity had arrived on boats and trading wagons from the south over the preceding century even leading to the establishment of a bishopric and innumerable converse most Goths were still devout pagans who venerated the Germanic gods of their ancestors the Goths didn't exist in a vacuum and though they themselves were probably powerful warlords with private armies rolling over a varied subject population many of their subjects were pastoralists including both sarmatians and Allen's they'd learned a thing or two from their neighbors and from their time on the steppe becoming excellent cavalry men in the process more than a match for the Romans in an open fight thus in 375 under their ruler Berman Eric King of Kings said by later chroniclers to enjoy hegemony over all the lands from the Black Sea to the Baltic the grayer tungee went to war though he could likely call upon tens of thousands of battle-hardened warriors of his own upon engaging the hums it immediately became clear that a drastic change of tactics would be needed unlike conventional armies this was a fully mobile autonomous war machine individual bands exceptionally elite riders was circle around the slower gothic forts looking for any potential weak spots before exploiting them and closing in for the kill war was like hunting for these men and hunting was a past time that they had mastered from childhood and of course the Huns had a secret weapon gigantic long bows longer on the top than the bottom to maximize power and range expertly fired from horseback a man Eric put up as much resistance as he could but time and time again his warriors crumbled against the superior tactics of the homes finally after suffering a particularly crushing defeat a man Erick came upon a grave decision in Gothic society during a time of extreme duress great sacrifices were required to be made and these were the darkest of times throwing down his sword tearing off his breastplate a man Uruk portrayed as a great judge and lawgiver in later sources presented himself to the high priests of his people before being ritually sacrificed as an offering to the gods with a man Eric's funeral pyre still smoldering the last remaining warriors assembled if the great unggi thought that the gods might have delivered them then they were sorely mistaken and besides the hones they faced may very well have only been the vanguard of a much much larger Hort still preoccupied with events far to the east beyond the Volga when a man Eric's successor with Amir went out to face the approaching war Vance emboldened by the great sacrifice his liege lord almost immediately he was cut down in the fighting a new strategy was needed in place of a high king now arose to power two warlords the foremost military commanders of the tribe an atheist and Safra ruling nominally on behalf of Athena's young son in the wake of the increasingly devastating raids on their people and very likely discovering that these hunts were only the spearpoint of a far larger nation in flux they made the momentous decision to uproot their entire society after an interim of a hundred years or more the Goths were on the move along with everything they could carry away theists and Safra led the entire gray funky nation West estimates vary wildly on the actual numbers involved in the Exodus with historians suggesting anywhere between 200,000 and 20,000 people in all likelihood large numbers of subject peoples were probably left behind to be absorbed into the next warrior elite to come along yet nevertheless this was still a huge population movement which can still be seen in the archaeological record with the formerly expensive trade items and metalwork no longer being found from around this time [Music] moving hard and fast to the west when they finally reached the de Nestor River to their horror Allah theas and Safra were met by another force guarding one of the forts thankfully this was at least nominally a friendly army a significant army of two ving GI Goths their Western brethren under their high king ethanoic they too had begun to fall under the remit of hunnic incursions and now soft an audience with a great inky eye to decide what to do next before the two sides could come to terms however a torrent of black arrows began falling upon a fan Eric and his man it was the Huns riding hard and fast into the rear of the turban GI in search of slaves and plunder in the ensuing panic for lack of a better option the great inky I pushed on west and southwest away from the Huns and towards the Danube for better or for worse and faced with a near impossible situation they made the decision to try their luck once more against the most powerful state but Europe had ever known they headed towards the Empire but having GI meanwhile retreated back to their Heartland in the Carpathian Mountains there Athen Eric attempted to stem the Hunnic tight were constructing a fortified line against them possibly at the old Roman walls on the river alt ultimately however the plan came to naught the turbine GI being constantly harassed and raided by Hunnic outriders as they continued to work on the defenses his prestige already weakened by the Roman Emperor Valens incursions across the Danube in the previous decade which had seen widespread to structure and lands harried belief in a fan Erick seems to have gradually filtered away to be replaced by a new figurehead a man with a very different plan for this leader proposed a controversial a brilliant solution to the problem but of India would head to the Danube and ask the Romans for sanctuary for that man was frit again convert to Aryan Christianity and in 376 he led the vast majority of his people towards the border to try their luck with the Romans leaving death an Erik and just a handful of Fighters to hold out in the Carpathians later Roman sources tend to suggest that actual fighting may have broken out between the two factions perhaps at an even earlier point during the three 60s though whether this was the case or not it was fritter gern who eventually came out on top while stressing his own Christian faith and the potential loyalty of his people fritter gern sent messengers out surveillance to explain his dire situation valence currently embroiled in his own lengthy war with Persia had little choice but to allow the goths asylum in Thrace where they would be settled and be subject to military service gothic warriors already being a common sight throughout the Eastern Empire the voluntary submission of an immigrant group was very common during this time the swearing of oaths being supervised by the army it was similar to previous arrangements with sarmatians brought over by the Emperor Constantine earlier in the century in 334 [Music] ammonius Marcellinus comments that initially the arrangement caused more joy than fear [Music] in return the Goths would be treated the same as other Roman subjects an arrangement known as receptive service for settlement as it turned out neither happened perhaps the sheer numbers of Goths weren't anticipated perhaps there were genuine food shortages in the Eastern Empire as a result of the Persian War perhaps the Roman administrators were simply incompetent it's difficult to ascertain especially given the propagandistic nature of Roman sources though what we do know is that within a matter of mere months a colossal humanitarian crisis unfolded as the entirety of the Tov inghean gothic people handed over their weapons and crossed over the Roman border to seek the protection of the Eastern Empire much of the blame was later apportioned to the Roman governor left in charge of the situation by valence namely loop Aquinas as well as his subordinate Maximus unable to provide the Goths with enough food to survive and being placed in marginal living conditions with subpar land this once proud people were allegedly reduced to selling their children into slavery in return for dogs to eat the highest-ranking members of society to the lowest alike were apparently subjected to this for many commenters it was a standard deal made into corruption on a massive scale with Roman administrators apparently enriching themselves rather than feeding their new gothic subjects meanwhile on the Danube e'en frontier yet more Goths appeared the entire graph thunkian neisha led by SAFF rax andele theus they'd been fighting the homes for years and now followed the example of fritter ger in seeking asylum the Romans hadn't anticipated this turn of events rejecting Saffir axes request outright though the frontiersmen looking out at them across the river were likely filled with apprehension for this tribe was still fully armed and fed whether it was related to the arrival of the gray Otunga or not we can't tell but soon enough frit again along with the highest ranking to Vinci our leaders including a certain a l'viv were invited to a banquet by lupa kindness on paper there was nothing particularly unusual about Gothic leaders being invited to a banquet at the city of Marcy and Opel they were about to become officers in the army after all though in reality Romans had little respect for barbarian Kings always viewing them as far less than themselves they'd successfully cut off the heads of coalition's many times in the past and absorbed the rest in fact Marcellinus describes at least four different occasions over a two-decade period where similar banquets tactics were used only one of these was an unauthorised event the others all being the direct result of Imperial orders whether this order came directly from Valens or not he likely didn't see this as any different to those that had come before how wrong he was [Music] at some point during the night whether it was pre-planned or not we can't tell but loop Aquinas gave an order to his man Praetorians came marching into the room seized the Gothic leadership slaughtered their retainers in front of them yet somehow word got out of the treachery the mass brawl broke out another eventualities the Romans hadn't planned on was at a large group of Goths that accompanied their leaders and the brawl now threatened to break out into all-out war between the two sides somehow frit again managed to convince loop Aquinas but if he let him go he could calm the Goths down and avert further catastrophe pushed up against a wall loop Aquinas acceded to his demands instead of calming down the fighting however by morning the Goths were in full-scale revolt devolving into an orgy of violence and mayhem probably motivated in part by the need to find food before long downtrodden Thracian slaves began to join in with the uprising along with more and more Goths settled in the rest of the province already having armed themselves in secret perhaps smuggling swords across the border [Music] Loup Aquinas gathered up his forces and advanced on frit against position with his men sparking the first full-scale engagement of the war the Battle of Marcy and Opel the Romans were quickly overwhelmed and astonishingly their standards taken few besides Luke Aquinas escaped the fray that day thus providing a massive morale victory for frit again and the tough India little did either commander know it at the time but this conflict the first in the slow death of the Western Roman Empire would rage on for another five years tearing the balkans apart and remaking them in a new image the Gothic war were truly begun the total surprise defeat of loop Aquinas at Marciano pot left the Romans without a standing army in the region the Goths could now move about at will which they did roaming far and wide in the search of food and probably plunder as well threatening to disrupt the Via Appia the tributary from Duras in the adriatic to the eastern capital of Constantinople a highway that linked the eastern and western sides of the empire together the battle also sparked off an increasingly devastating chain of events for valence still far to the east facing off against the Persians at the regional capital of hadrian opal named for the famed warrior Emperor two centuries earlier was a force of Gothic auxiliaries under warriors named Sri das and Kali us we don't know when they entered imperial service or which tribe they belongs to but when they heard the news of the revolt rather than heads to the Persian front as ordered they abandoned their posts and joined frit again meanwhile at the border rejected by the Romans yet still harassed from behind by the Huns the entire great ngi nation simply crossed over the border though there were many Roman frontier castles they were manned by garrison soldiers used to reconnaissance missions not frontline attacks and anyway the Goths simply went round them and on into the empire finally by the spring of 377 whilst Valens desperately attempted to negotiate peace with the Persians a trickling of fresh roman troops arrived in the Balkans Valens is Western counterparts his nephew the young Emperor Gration dispatched his Frankish general Rick Amaris whereas Valens himself sent troops from Armenia under the generals to Jonas and pro futurists though relatively small in numbers both sides of the Empire being preoccupied by conflicts elsewhere the forces met up by the summer of 377 now faced with organized resistance the Goths quickly withdrew north of the heinous mountains Laden down with food supplies and plunder there was an oppressed peasant population there who had their own scores to settle and many joined the Goths or at least helped them for the time being either out of fear or resentment at the Romans advancing cautiously through the mountains both armies finally met at a place Marcellinus calls ad Solis the town by the Willows there in September 377 both sides suffered grim losses in a vicious battle that raged until nightfall at one point the Roman wing collapsed entirely under the Gothic onslaught but was reinforced by more men pushed into the breach at the last moment the war was now very much in full flow the Battle of the Willows had been costly for both sides though for now the Romans took the advantage having pushed the Goths out of lowland Thrace entirely for the first time since loop Aquinas is disgrace they had the initiative again yet still heavily outnumbered they had no choice but to hold themselves up in the naturally imposing defenses provided by the passes through the Hamish mountains there await reinforcements Marcion opal probably housed the most man but there were other garrison set up throughout the mountains - repeatedly the Goths tried to break through the Roman line but were driven back at every turn with grim losses mounting up for both sides before long however the Romans were about to come head-to-head with the very reason why the Goths had entered their lands in the first place for freeeee it again had enlisted allies Howe Nick and ilanic horsemen out of the steppes driven through the gap punched into the Danube e'en frontier by the great songi are in search of plunder and glory these hunts were autonomous of the main groups still far to the east and lent their much-needed support to the Goths in return for a share in the plunder realizing they had no hope against this new threat the Romans began to pull out to the south this time the Goths were far more furious than before ravaging and destroying everything they could find claiming loot and plunder and reaping their revenge on the Romans by early 378 an expensive piece Dale finally achieved with Persia Valens is forces began to arrive at Constantinople with the full night of the Eastern field army probably being ready by around May the city had been a hotbed of resistance against Valens at the start of his reign and its inhabitants probably weren't particularly happy to see him nevertheless as far as most people are concerned Imperial invincibility would soon be reestablished with the Western Emperor Gration promising to come personally with his best soldiers within a matter of months it was assumed that the vast bulk of the Goths would either be killed or resettled throughout the empire as slaves or indentured farmers the leaders and best soldiers being thrown to wild beasts in arenas from Britannia to Arabia for the enjoyment of the masses [Music] it soon became clear however that the Germanic tribes across the upper Danube and the Rhine region facing against the Western Empire at other ideas a large force of allamani under an ex-soldier aware of the dire situation in the east came back across the frontier after completing their service marching directly over the frozen Rhine with a large force of Lenti NZ's to Harry and plunder for Gracian only able to spare another small force of men Goths and Valens would have to wait for now at least Valens was on his own the Goths gave no hint of where they might attack from their foraging parties fanning out over the entire Balkans one of these parties was intercepted near Hadrian ople and wiped out in a daring night attack by Valens generals realising the sheer size of the Roman army now facing them thoughts to number somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 men the assembled gothic leaders called all their forces together so they weren't separated and picked off one by one by the Romans and they themselves began preparations for a set piece battle meanwhile at Adrianople valence seems to have received Intel that only 10,000 Goths approached just for it against Irving gia seemingly being unaware that sapphir axe and Olay theosis great hungee I had joined the force too at the same time on voice from the Western Empire arrived making much of Grayson's victories against the allamani and assuring that he was now on the way with the full might of the Western field army thus on the night of August 8th when Fritz again sent a Christian priest to the Roman camp as a peace envoy he was flatly rejected to more peace and voice from the Gothic army then arrived offering to retreat in return for giving fritter and the title king of the Goths suggesting that his assembled Nobles would be a swayed by a show of Roman power and then back down leading to a peaceful solution either motivated by jealousy of his Western compatriots as is sometimes implied or assuming that he outnumbered the Goths Valens had none of it preparing instead for an all-out attack as far as he was concerned this was now a face-saving campaign after the embarrassing events of the past two years the Goths simply had to be annihilated though Valens differed with a peace envoy potentially in the process of exchanging hostages and with Grayson's Frankish general Ric Amyris urging him to consider peace without warning to roman units attacked thus beginning the battle in a disorderly full-frontal roman attack for better or for worse there was no stopping the Battle of Adrianople map if you want to hear a yarn of Smarr Salinas's entire epic accounts of the Battle of Adrianople and check out a second channel voices of the past now the Goths had been busy during the night lighting gigantic pyres of flame which blew blinding smoke with the wind right into the eyes of the advancing Roman soldiers though nonetheless the elite legionaries made good progress smashing through the Gothic line and pushing the jeering warriors right back to their fortified baggage train women and children behind as per the standard formation of the time the Roman army deployed a mixture cavalry and infantry on each wing with heavy infantry in the center the mainstay of any Roman force as the Roman left-wing surged forwards however to try and envelop the Goths disaster struck a force of grating GI cavalry under Al atheists and saffron's supported a contingents of Allens and Huns struck out to smash into the approaching Roman army operating on bad intelligence valence simply didn't have the numbers to push them back and the left-wing who collapsed perhaps caught between the defenders of the wagon train and the onrushing cavalry it was the Roman center that then suffered a massive flanking movement completely surrounding and pressing in those unfortunate enough to stand in the shield wall already beleaguered by hours of marching in the hot Sun and further weakened by the massive fire set by the Goths and the chaos that ensued those who could broke and fled harried and pursued by outriders all the while though for many retreats simply wasn't an option dying where they stood no one knows bail and his final fate though outlandish story circulated he certainly lost his life in the chaos one of a very few Emperor's to die under the sorts of foreign foes rather than to the daggers of his own rivals to power this was perhaps the worst roman defeat since can a six hundred years before and certainly the greatest military disaster in more than three hundred years not only at a rolling emperor died on the battlefield a huge deal at the time but the death toll of his army is estimated at anywhere between 10 and 20 thousand career soldiers 16 elite regiments received such great losses that day that they were never reconstituted the Goths were now masters of the entire Balkans though the battle ensured their short-term survival in reality has secured little else in the rest of the Empire the Romans still very much in the driver's seat and Gration still on his way with another vast army from the western provinces at the Empire in the aftermath of Adrianople the Goths laid siege to the city but they were no experts at this type of warfare and before long they headed east with the entirety of Thrace to Roman some sources suggest that the Goths came within kilometres of Constantinople itself only being driven back by units of air of auxiliaries who apparently made a point of drinking the blood out of their enemies slit throats in order to intimidate their would-be attackers with Valens dead and the Goths still very much at large a new Eastern Emperor was needed and Gration picked just the right man for the job an aristocratic career soldier from Spain whose father had distinguished himself on the battlefield under Valens his father Valentinian in early 379 Theodosius was proclaimed as emperor of the east and almost immediately he went to war the last three years of the gothic war is curious in its severe lack of documentation whether they stems from Roman embarrassment of their inability to contain the Goths or from simple accident of history we can never know but by 380 after an unrecorded series of events Theodosius has reconstituted Eastern field army met the Goths in battle near the city of Thessaloniki in the northern Balkans though very few details remain Theodosius is new army perhaps made up of rookies put into the fields too early fell apart under yet another massive gothic victory the Goths continued their wanderings far and wide throughout the Balkans never again during the war with the Romans risk another set piece battle but grudgingly Theodosius handed control over to Grayson's generals perhaps forced to deal with internal issues in his capital in the aftermath of his failure it was they who finally pushed the Goths out of Thessaly in 381 curiously in that same year though much had changed in the world since we last heard of him the old gothic King fan Erik appears back in the historical record having survived his war with the Huns in the Carpathians this time he is an honored guest of Theodosius in Constantinople signing a treaty of friendship with the eastern Roman Empire where the military had failed Theodosius would now turn to the other great Roman Forte diplomacy in 382 a peace treaty was finally made with the Goths under much the same terms that frit again had sued for before the Battle of Adrianople some four years earlier he would be proclaimed king of the Goths and they would be allowed to stay within the borders of the Empire not as subjects but undersell for all eventually in return for military service what distinguished they steal from established Roman practice was that the Goths were given lands inside the Roman Empire itself in the provinces of Sevilla no easier and possibly Macedonia they were ruled under their own authority and were not dispersed like previous peoples before them this allowed them to stay together as a unified people with their own internal laws and cultural traditions to seal the agreement Theodosius through the Goths a massive feast it was an astonishing PR victory for the Romans if it could be spawned the right way which it was almost immediately from Arabia to the Scottish Borders by auratus such as the misty us though however much they wished it to be different the Romans had lost the war nevertheless in its aftermath the borders were once more secure in 386 another large group of Goths tried to get over the frontier they were massacred the survivors drafted into the Army on the Persian frontier the rest becoming tenant farmers in Asia Minor most Romans the lower estimates being 70 million of them from Spain to the Euphrates still hadn't seen a goth the status quo was maintained with both Emperor's still firmly in charge although the young Grayson's behavior increasingly becoming erratic the rich heartlands were all still intact with the only change being a gothic Kingdom now existing within its borders the miss deus was confident that the Goths would become assimilated over time using the example of the Galatians in Asia Minor in the 3rd century BC as we shall see he couldn't have been more wrong the Romans would never again treat with the Goths on their own terms and besides yet more nations and peoples now gazed greedily and hopefully at the Empire was shown to be not as impenetrable as previously thought [Music] [Music] this video is brought to you by Squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build an online presence and follow your dreams whether it's podcasting creative writing photography or an online shop whatever it is that you do creatively in your life you can make it more connected and visible to the world with Squarespace one of the best website designers in the world they offer great features such as integrated analytics so you know all of the important stats for your project email campaigns and mailing lists to keep your fans or customers up-to-date with what you're doing seamless integration with other social media and blogging platforms Podcast supports for helping you get started on the radio and access to a high-quality library of getty images if any of this sounds like something that you might be interested in and there's a whole load more over on their website head over to Squarespace calm for a free trial now and when you're ready to launch go to Squarespace comm forward slash history tone or simply use the offer code history time to get 10% off your first purchase of a websites or domain [Music]

Channel: History Time

Views: 448,664

Keywords: the fall of tome, the fall of rome, fall of rome, rome, roman history, roman, romans, empire, fritigern, battle of adrianople, adrianople, thrace, alaetheus, saphrax, valens, gratian, eastern roman empire, western roman empire, fall of the western roman empire

Id: m5dNOFPnaEo

Length: 43min 1sec (2581 seconds)

Published: Sat May 11 2019