Influence on Classical Cultures
The Visigoths had a long and complicated history in terms of their entanglements with the Roman Empire. Such entanglements included military engagements in which the two were sometimes allies and other times enemies, as well as land struggles and the competition for supremacy in certain land areas desirable to both parties. Overall, the Visigoths ended up growing and emerging as a culture at the expense of Rome, and their actions helped bring about the fall of the Roman Empire.
The first interactions between the Visigoths and the Roman Empire were due mostly to migratory movements and produced no direct conflict. As the Visigoths moved south from their Scandinavian point of origin, they settled in an area near the Black Sea commonly referred to as Dacia, pictured in Figure 1.1. Their increased presence there caused a noticeable withdrawal of Roman population and military influence. In the second half of the fourth century A.D., the Huns began to move westward, and their movement pushed smaller tribes like the Visigoths out of the European southeastern plains and westward toward the frontiers of the Roman Empire. The Visigoths in turn moved west, simply because they had been displaced from their homeland; the Romans saw the new peoples as invaders, and began devoting much time and effort to the resistance of Visigothic movement near the frontier. Jordanes wrote that the Visigoths, fearing for the safety of their own tribe against the ever-encroaching Huns, “sent ambassadors…to the Emperor Valens…to say that if he would give them part of Thrace or Moesia to keep, they would submit themselves to his laws and commands” (Jordanes, XXV 131). According to Jordanes, Valens gladly accepted this offer, and began to use the Visigoths as a deterring force and buffer zone against the invasive movements of other barbaric tribes such as the Huns. The Visigoths, now under the rule of Alaric I but residing in Roman territory, began to act “as [pawns] in Roman politics” (Grant and Kitzinger, 172).
In A.D. 378 came the first major military clash between the Visigoths and Roman forces, at the Battle of Adrianople. Most sources point to the Visigoths revolting against Roman rule in the area where they resided as the major cause of the battle. Jordanes specifies that this rebellion came after a famine, during which the Roman generals in charge of the region allowed greedy traders to demand young men as the price for food. Fritigern, a Visigoth chieftain, was tricked into a trap with his men at the home of the generals, however, he quickly encouraged his men to “[gain] the chance they had longed for—to be free to die in battle rather than to perish from hunger,” (Jordanes, XXVI 137) and the men turned the trick on the generals and killed both. Valens responded by immediately sending an army to confront the rebellion. At Adrianople (a map of which can be found in Figure 1.2), the Visigoths pulled off a surprising victory, which can be attributed in hindsight to their better discipline in infantry combat. The Roman defeat “left Valens’s forces so devastated that Rome would no longer be able to field its own army,” and Emperor Valens was killed in battle (Chavalas, 846). After the events at Adrianople, the Visigoths did not stir up trouble for the Romans, though they lived independently within the frontiers, and though Alaric I, their king, was obviously expanding the reach of his people, desiring that they become united with the Romans and thus find a permanent homeland.
The next period of military clashes between the Romans and the Visigoths began in A.D. 401, when Alaric I attempted to invade Italy, but was turned back by the Roman commander Stilicho. Alaric was turned back many a time in the next few years, but finally succeeded in invading the Italian peninsula in 408; he and his army moved throughout the peninsula, pillaging towns until they arrived at Rome in A.D. 409. That year saw the intermittent sieging of Rome, and finally in A.D. 410, Alaric and the Visigoth army sacked the city—this was the first time in over 800 years that the city had been taken by an enemy Alaric’s push for land ended later that year when he died of a fever in conquest of Sicily.
Another period of cooperation with the Empire ensued after the sack of Rome while the Visigoths meandered back towards where they came from without their king. In 451, the further advancement of Attila and his Hun army brought Emperor Valentinan and king Theodorid of the Visigoths back together for defensive purposes. In what Jordanes called a “complicated and confused” (Jordanes, XXXVII 194) struggle on the Catalunian Plains, the Romans and Visigoths beat back the Huns in the beginning, but when Theodorid was killed in battle, the Roman general Aëtius sent the Visigoths back to their home, afraid they would revel too much in the victory. He finished off the Huns himself.
From this point on, the Visigoths grew more and more independent, being granted their own independent federation on the Iberian Peninsula by Honorius at the end of the fifth century. They established what became a wholly independent state, and grew and colonized separately from the Roman Empire itself, which was by this time crumbling.
Figure 1.1, a map of Dacia, a region near the Black Sea
Figure 1.2, a map of the convergence of armies on Adrianople