The Day of the Barbarians, by Alessandro Barbero

This, my friends, was an excellent book.

It is a brief account of the Battle of Adrianople in 378 AD, where the Eastern Roman Emperor Valens and about two-thirds of his army were wiped out by Gothic refugees, who had fled into the Empire to take refugee from the onslaught of the Huns. This was a crushing physical and psychic blow to the late Roman Empire – to put it in modern terms, it would be roughly equivalent to a group of Mexican immigrants destroying two-thirds of the US Army and killing the President in the process.

Barbero’s book places the battle in context of the Empire’s long relationship with the barbarian tribes beyond the imperial frontiers. We think of barbarian hordes pillaging Rome, but the truth was more complex. The Empire used the barbarian tribes as a source of relatively cheap manpower, importing them en masse into the empire as settlers and soldiers. (The comparison to the United States and its immigration policy is obvious.) This policy worked extremely well into the graft and incompetence of the imperial officials pushed the Goths past the point of endurance, with fatal results.

The book is written very clearly, and provides vivid portraits of the principal characters in the Battle of Adrianople, especially the unfortunate (and hapless) Emperor Valens. Recommended.

-JM