Battle of Adrianople - Implications

Implications

According to the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, a third of the Roman army succeeded in retreating, but the losses were uncountable. Many officers, among them the general Sebastian, were killed in the worst Roman defeat since the Battle of Edessa, the high point of the Crisis of the Third Century. The battle was a devastating blow for the late Empire. In effect, the core army of the eastern Empire was destroyed, valuable administrators were killed, and all of the arms factories on the Danube were destroyed following the battle. The lack of reserves for the army led to a recruitment crisis, which accentuated the strategic and morale impact of the defeat; but it is also clear that Adrianople did not mark the end of the Roman Empire, because the imperial military power was only temporarily crippled.

The defeat at Adrianople changed the character of the Empire in that it signified that the barbarians, fighting for or against the Romans, had become powerful adversaries. The Goths, though partly tamed by Valens' successor Theodosius I (who accepted them once more as allies), were to remain as a distinct entity within its frontiers; sometimes allies; other times enemies. Roman losses could only be made good by co-opting barbarians into the army as Foederati under their own commanders; and, as so often, military power has ways of translating into political influence.

The long term implications of the battle of Adrianople have often been overstated, with many Twentieth Century writers repeating Sir Charles Oman's idea that the battle represented a turning point in military history, with heavy cavalry triumphing over Roman infantry and ushering in the age of the Medieval knight. This outdated idea was overturned by T.S Burns in a ground-breaking article in 1973. Burns shows that the Gothic army's cavalry arm was actually fairly small, that Valens would actually have had more cavalry and that while the role of Fritigern's cavalry was critical to his victory, the battle was a mainly infantry versus infantry affair. The Medieval knight was not to rise for several centuries after Adrianople. It is also often stated that the defeat at Adrianople led to changes in the composition of the late Roman Army and an increase in the use of cavalry. In fact, this process had been going on in the Roman Army long before AD 378, with cavalry increasing its role and status in the Army from at least the time of the Emperor Gallienus (AD 253 to 260).

The real significance of the battle was political and strategic: the Roman defeat left a large and hostile foreign force within the frontiers of the Eastern Roman Empire but surprisingly and finally, only the Western Roman Empire will suffer. This was a force that was to cause significant problems to the Empire for the next century and which would be a contributing factor to the eventual collapse of the Western Roman Empire.