What if the Romans had won at Adrianople?
In 378 Emperor Valens attacked the Goths without waiting for reinforcements and died with most of his army. What if he had waited?
What actually happened
In 376 large groups of Goths, driven west by the Huns, asked to cross the Danube into the Roman Empire. Valens let the Tervingi under Fritigern in; the Greuthungi crossed anyway. Corrupt Roman officers exploited the starving refugees, and the Goths rose in revolt, defeating a Roman force near Marcianople and plundering Thrace.
In the summer of 378 Valens marched from the east with his field army. His nephew Gratian, emperor in the west, had just beaten the Alamanni and was coming to help. Scouts reported the Goths at perhaps 10,000 men. On 9 August 378, near Adrianople (Edirne), Valens attacked without waiting, partly, Ammianus suggests, because he did not want to share the glory.
The Goths were drawn up behind their circle of wagons. While envoys went back and forth, Roman units began the fight without orders, and the Greuthungi cavalry, who had been out foraging, returned and struck the Roman flank. The left wing collapsed and the army was surrounded. Perhaps two-thirds of the eastern field army died, along with Valens; his body was never found.
The turning point
Several things had to go wrong at once: a bad estimate of Gothic numbers, a decision not to wait a few days for Gratian, failed negotiations, a premature attack and the timely return of the Gothic cavalry. Ammianus, who ended his history with this battle, records that some officers, including Richomeres, urged Valens to wait. Had the two imperial armies joined, the Goths would have faced a much larger force.
The battle's importance is itself debated. Older historians saw it as the birth of medieval cavalry warfare, a view now rejected. Peter Heather and others see it as a real turning point because it destroyed an irreplaceable army and forced Rome to accept a whole people inside its borders on their own terms; others stress that later choices, such as Theodosius's treaty of 382, mattered as much.
The world that might have been
In Crown & Plough the alternative reads: Valens waited two more days for Gratian's western army; before the armies of two emperors Fritigern's laager broke, and the surviving Goths scattered to become frontier peasants and auxiliaries. No one will ever speak the name Alaric. In that world the game removes the scripted sack of Rome, the fall of the West, the rise of Theodosius and the division of the empire.
Beyond the game, a victory at Adrianople would not have solved Rome's deeper problems. The Huns were still pushing peoples west, the Rhine frontier would still be crossed (in reality in 406), and the western empire's finances and politics were fragile. But a Rome that kept its eastern field army and settled the Goths piecemeal, as it had settled defeated barbarians for centuries, would have been far better placed to meet those crises.
Whether that means a Western Empire surviving into the Middle Ages is speculative. The game takes the bold view as a long-term consequence; many historians would expect at least a slower, different transformation of the West.
Ripples through time
Two earlier turning points shape the odds here: a victorious Julian in Persia makes a Roman win more likely, and an empire left divided after 274 makes it less likely.
This is the Roman era's biggest carry-over. If Valens wins and you continue into the Age of Vikings and Coronations, the 800 map has a Western Roman Empire in Italy, from Milan and Genoa to Naples and Apulia, ruled by a Valentinian dynasty with the Pope as its vassal, and no Frankish king is crowned emperor in Rome.
- Shaped by What if Julian the Apostate had returned from Persia?, What if the Gallic Empire and Palmyra had survived?
- Carries into the next era Age of Vikings and Coronations
Play this turning point
Start in the Roman Empire era; there is no dedicated scenario. The turning point needs both Rome and a Gothic realm. Fight the Goths as a Roman landholder, or serve a lord loyal to Valens, to raise the odds; serving Fritigern's Goths keeps history.
History is heavily weighted here, so a single commoner's contribution is small; a ruler of a large Roman realm can shift it noticeably.
Questions and answers
Why did Valens not wait for Gratian?
Ammianus says scouts underestimated the Goths and that courtiers urged Valens to win the victory alone; others advised waiting. Jealousy of Gratian's recent success is the explanation most often cited.
Did Adrianople cause the fall of Rome?
Not by itself. It destroyed much of the eastern field army and led to the Goths settling inside the empire as a semi-independent people, which shaped the next century. The western empire fell in 476 after many further crises.
Where was the Battle of Adrianople?
Near Adrianople in Thrace, today Edirne in European Turkey, on 9 August 378.
What happens in Crown & Plough if the Romans win?
The Goths are broken and settled, Alaric never appears, and if you carry your house into the 800 era a Western Roman Empire still rules Italy.
Sources and further reading
Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae, book 31. Modern accounts: Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire and Goths and Romans; Noel Lenski, Failure of Empire; Adrian Goldsworthy, The Fall of the West.
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