A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

should be allowed into the empire while the Greuthingi were to be kept out and
patrol boats were to be stationed along the river so that they could not cross. The
Tervingi appear to have asked for land in Thrace (the modern Bulgaria and
European Turkey) to the south of where they were massed on the Danube.
Valens agreed to this, a sign perhaps that he was already losing the initiative.
Things began to go wrong as soon as the migration began, sometime late in
the autumn. The numbers may have been far greater than Valens realised: one
estimate is that the Tervingi totalled some 200,000, a massive group to keep fed
and under control. Certainly the reception was not well planned. Ammianus
Marcellinus tells how the refugees swarmed across the Danube in boats, rafts
and even hollowed-out tree trunks, with many drowning as they attempted to
swim across. Those that did reach shore were met by unscrupulous Roman
commanders who bartered dogs, as food, in return for taking the younger men as
slaves for themselves. Disorder began to spread and the local Roman
commander of Thrace, Lupicinius, penned the Goths into a camp near the town
of Marcianople, the regional headquarters for the border area. When he clumsily
tried to separate Fritigern and the other Goth leaders from their men, a major
revolt broke out. Desperate to keep order, he now had to withdraw the troops
policing the Danube, and the Geuthingi too poured across the river. The
Geuthingi and Tervingi made contact, and Lupicinius’ small force was overrun
The Goths, desperately in need of supplies, now swept over the Haemus
mountains towards the city of Adrianople, where a Gothic contingent in the
Roman garrison mutinied and joined them. Although the Goths were unable to
take walled cities, they rampaged over the open plain of Thrace. ‘All places were
ablaze with slaughter and great fires; babies were torn from the very breasts of
their mothers and slain, matrons and widows whose husbands had been killed
before their eyes were carried off, boys of tender or adult age were dragged away
over the dead bodies of their parents’, wrote Ammianus Marcellinus. 6
Archaeologists have been able to date the destruction of luxurious Roman villas
along the slopes of the Haemus mountains to this time.
Valens was now seriously worried. We know of a desperate mission by his
court orator, Themistius, to Rome to ask Gratian to supply troops, while Valens
sent some of his own men westwards from Armenia. These arrived in Thrace in
the summer of 377 and had some success in pushing the Goths back across the
Haemus mountains and holding them in battle at Ad Salices, ‘the place by the
willows’. It was a temporary respite. The Goths were now back in touch with the
border tribes, and they even seem to have recruited some Huns with the promise