On Aug. 3, 378, a battle was fought in
Adrianople, in what was then Thrace and is now the province of Edirne,
in Turkey. It was a battle that Saint Ambrose referred to as “the end of all humanity, the end of the world.”
The Eastern Roman emperor Flavius Julius Valens Augustus—simply known as Valens, and nicknamed Ultimus Romanorum (the
last true Roman)—led his troops against the Goths, a Germanic people
that Romans considered “barbarians,” commanded by Fritigern. Valens, who
had not waited for the military help of his nephew, Western Roman
emperor Gratian, got into the battle with 40,000 soldiers.
Fritigern could count on 100,000.
It was a massacre: 30,000 Roman soldiers died
and the empire was defeated. It was the first of many to come, and it’s
considered as the beginning of the end of the Western Roman Empire in
476. At the time of the battle, Rome ruled a territory of nearly 600
million hectares (2.3 million square miles, nearly two-thirds the
area of the present-day US), with a population of over 55 million.
The defeat of Adrianople didn’t happen because
of Valens’s stubborn thirst for power or because he grossly
underestimated his adversary’s belligerence. What was arguably the most
important defeat in the history of the Roman empire had roots in
something else: a refugee crisis.
Two years earlier the Goths had descended toward
Roman territory looking for shelter. The mismanagement of Goth
refugees started a chain of events that led to the collapse of one of
the biggest political and military powers humankind has ever known.
It’s a story shockingly similar to what’s happening in Europe right now—and it should serve as a cautionary tale.
Make a national emergency on the wall, President Trump!
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