Battle of Adrianople: Goths annihilate the Eastern Roman army
- Date
- 9 August 378 CE
- Category
- Military & conflict
- Region
- Thrace (Adrianople, modern Edirne)
- Era
- Classical Antiquity
- Significance
On 9 August 378 CE, near Adrianople in Thrace (modern Edirne, Turkey), the eastern emperor Valens led the Roman field army against Gothic forces under Fritigern, a coalition of Therving and Greuthung Goths together with Alans and others who had crossed the Danube fleeing the Huns and then revolted against Roman mistreatment.
Misjudging the enemy's strength and attacking before his western co-emperor arrived, Valens suffered a catastrophic defeat; perhaps two-thirds of the eastern army was destroyed and Valens himself was killed, his body never recovered. The contemporary historian Ammianus Marcellinus compared the slaughter to Cannae. The defeat exposed Roman vulnerability to the peoples beyond the frontier, forced the settlement of Goths inside imperial territory as semi-autonomous federates, and is frequently treated as a milestone in the chain of events leading to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Adrianople signalled a lasting shift in the military balance between Rome and the Germanic peoples massing along its borders, and it foreshadowed the barbarian incursions of the following century.
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Empires active in 9 August 378 CE
- Sassanid Empire224 CE – 651 CE
- Kingdom of Funan50 CE – 550 CE
- Roman Empire27 BCE – 476 CE
- Byzantine Empire330 CE – 1453 CE
- Pyu City-States200 BCE – 1050 CE
- Teotihuacan100 BCE – 750 CE
Related military & conflict events
- Visigoths under Alaric sack Rome24 August 410 CE
- Battle of the Catalaunian Plains20 June 451 CE
- Shapur I captures Emperor Valerian at the Battle of Edessa260 CE
- Yellow Turban Rebellion weakens the Han184 CE
- Bar Kokhba revolt and the renaming of Judaea to Syria Palaestina132–135 CE
- Roman Empire reaches its greatest territorial extent under Trajan117 CE
Further reading
The wider story
Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire
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