More Horses: The Stirrup

^{Ornate Spanish stirrup. This simple device gave the horseman a firmer seat for using the bow, and, especially, the lance.}

The Goths had been a pain for the last few years, Valens thought. In 365, Count Procopius had hired an army of Gothic mercenaries and occupied Constantinople. He then declared himself to be emperor. That ended in 366 when the newly crowned Valens defeated Procopius and his Goths, but 10 years later, the Romans allowed the whole Gothic nation to enter the Empire as refugees. The Goths had repaid that generosity by pillaging all through the Balkans.

But now, in 378, Valens was going to solve the Gothic problem once and for all.

In the Gothic camp, there were equally hard feelings about the Romans.

The Goths had come to the Romans as refugees, fleeing terrible invaders from the east. Goths and Romans had been peaceful neighbors for 100 years, but, when they appeared on the border, the Romans let the Goths in only after they gave up their weapons. Roman officials sexually abused their women and children and reneged on their promises of food. The Goths had no choice but to go to war. In the last century, there were occasional border skirmishes, Romans sometimes intervened in Gothic affairs, and Goths occasionally fought in Roman wars, as in the recent revolt of Procopius against the emperor. But in general, the two peoples had been friendly. All that changed when the Romans took advantage of the Goths’ weaknesses.

In spite of the modern stereotype, the Goths were not howling barbarians.

They were all Christians, converted by an Arian Christian bishop who had translated the Bible into Gothic. They were about as well educated as the average Roman; many were literate and some were fluent in Latin and Greek as well as Gothic. Jordanes, a Gothic historian, is one of our main sources of information on this era.

The trouble started when a new people, the Huns, began moving west from central Asia. The Huns moved into the pastures of the Alans, an Iranian tribe that was one of the great powers of the western steppes. The Alans were horse archers, of course. But they also wore lamellar armor and used lances. Roman and Goths alike considered the Alans fierce warriors, but they had a major weakness. They were divided into jealous, independent clans that frequently warred with each other. The Huns had that problem in the past, but they had recently become united. The Huns conquered the Alans, probably a bit at a time. Many of the Alans surrendered and were incorporated into the Hunnish horde. Others fled to the Caucasus, where other Alans had settled generations before. Some clans rode north and merged with the Slavs. The rest moved west.

Many of those clans joined the kingdom of the Ostrogoths (the East Goths), the second great power of the western steppes. A few continued on into the fringes of the great European forest.

Those who joined the Ostrogoths did not escape the Huns. King Ermenrich of the Ostrogoths lost his life fighting the Huns. Like the Alans before them, many of the Ostrogoths were incorporated into the Hunnish kingdom. The rest elected a new king to replace Ermenrich and moved west. On the western bank of the Dnieper River their way west was blocked by the Antes, a Slavic people ruled by an Alanic nobility. Jordanes says the Antes defeated the Ostrogoths in their first encounter, but the Goths eventually conquered the Antes. Enraged by the Antes’ resistance, the Gothic king, Vithimir, crucified the king of the Antes with his sons and 70 Antes chiefs. Those chiefs were related to the Alans now in the Hunnish horde. With the Huns’ permission, the Alans attacked the Ostrogoths. Ammianus Marcellinus, a Roman soldier and historian, says, “Vithimir resisted the Halani for a time… But after many defeats which he sustained, he was overcome by force of arms and died in battle.”

What was left of the Ostrogoths elected Vithimir’s son king, and two chiefs, Alatheus and Sarfac, became regents. Sarfac had an Alanic name. In this turbulent period, Alans could be found fighting in every war in every side. The Ostrogoths continued west, where they met the Visigoths (West Goths), who for generations had been separated from their eastern cousins by the Antes.

The Ostrogoths told the Visigoths about the Huns, and both tribes prepared to resist the Huns on the bank of the Dniester. But although the two Gothic groups spoke the same language and had common traditions, they built two separate fortified camps.

The Huns chose to attack the Visigoths first. They were the stronger foe; the long succession of defeats had greatly reduced Ostrogothic strength. The Huns crossed the river in the dead of night and sneaked up on the Visigothic camp. The Visigoths were surprised and panicked. They dashed in disorder to the banks of the Danube – the frontier of the Roman Empire. The Ostrogoths did not wait for a Hunnish attack. They followed their western kinsmen.

Valens allowed the Visigoths to enter the Empire if they gave up their weapons. The border guards, however, proved easy to bribe with gold or sex, so many Visigoths kept their weapons. There were few boats, so crossing the Danube took some time, and, when they were finally in the Empire, the Visigoths found that the food they had been promised did not exist. Famine was their first experience as refugees in Rome. The Ostrogoths got tired of waiting for the Visigoths to cross the river. They moved to another spot on the river and crossed without asking permission. Once inside the Empire, fear of starvation replaced fear of the Huns. The Goths began pillaging the farms of the Balkans. Two Roman leaders, Lupicinus and Maximus, tried to end the Gothic trouble by inviting King Fridigern and a number of Visigothic nobles to a feast. The plan was to get them drunk and assassinate them, but some over‑eager Romans attacked Fridigern’s bodyguards in a separate room. The king heard the noise, united his men and they fought their way out of the Roman camp. Eventually, Roman numbers and discipline began to wear down the Goths. Fridigern, from a camp fortified by forming a circle of wagons, offered to negotiate. Valens led his army up to the Gothic camp.

Valens sent an envoy, with a small escort, to the Gothic camp for last‑minute negotiations. But as they were walking up to the wagon ring, a Roman thought he saw a threatening movement and he shot an arrow at the Goths. The Visigoths replied with a storm of arrows. The Roman escort fled, disorganizing the Roman infantry as they ran through the Roman lines. At that moment, a swarm of Ostrogothic and Alanic horsemen emerged from the woods, led by Aletheus and Sarfac, the two regents for the Ostrogoths’ boy king. They hit the cavalry of the Roman right wing, drove it from the field and continued on to attack the left wing cavalry, which, well in advance of the Roman infantry, was vainly trying to break into the Visigothic wagon fort. The left wing cavalry, too, was quickly crushed by the armored Gothic and Alanic lancers. The warriors from the steppes seemed glued to their saddles, and their lance thrusts were able to pierce any Roman armor.

The Ostrogothic and Alanic horsemen then attacked the Roman infantry from all sides. Roman infantry seldom worried about enemy cavalry, especially cavalry lancers. Lancers, precariously balanced on a running horse, could not easily thrust hard enough to wound an armored legionary, nor could javelin‑armed riders throw as well as a foot soldier standing on firm ground. But these horsemen were different; their feet were firmly planted in metal rings suspended from their saddles. When a stirrup‑equipped lancer charged, the strength and momentum of his 1,000‑pound horse was concentrated in his lance point. The Ostrogoths and Alans pushed the Romans into a compressed mass, packed so tightly they couldn’t use their weapons. Then Fridigen and his Visigoths charged out of their wagon ring. Most of the Romans were killed, including Valens. It was the worst Roman defeat since Hannibal annihilated two combined consular armies at Cannae in 216 B.C.

Adrianople was a decisive battle for two reasons. First, it resulted in the Goths staying in the Roman Empire, living under their own kings and armed with their own weapons – wandering armies completely independent of the emperor – a situation that eventually led to the Visigoths sacking Rome itself.

Second, it introduced the stirrup to central and western Europe. The stirrup made possible the heavily armed cavalry lancers – the knights and men‑at‑arms who were to be the decisive element in most European wars for the next thousand years.

Many histories say the stirrup was not in use in Europe until the 8th century. About the only justification for that statement is that cavalry was not used much in western Europe before that time. The “barbarian” tribes that destroyed the western Roman Empire – the Goths, Alans, Vandals, Heruls, and Huns –

were horsemen, but the bulk of the European population, whether Celts, Germans, or Slavs, fought as infantry. It was the many attacks by the highly mobile Moors and Vikings that forced the Franks to organize cavalry.

R. Ewart Oakeshott, in his The Archaeology of Weapons, cites literary and pictorial evidence that stirrups were used in the East as early as the 4th century B.C. Engravings on a Scythian vase from that time show a saddle equipped with stirrups, evidence that some Scythians were using stirrups. Most Scythians, being primarily horse archers, didn’t feel the need for this equipment, but that was later to lead to their defeat by the Sarmatians. Sculptures in a Buddhist stupa in India dating from the 2nd century B.C. show riders using stirrups. The Sarmatians, whose tribes included the Alans, moved west about the beginning of the Christian era. They wore heavy armor and used lances as well as bows, and all of them had stirrups. They replaced the Scythians as masters of the western steppes. The Goths, Visi and Ostro, learned to use stirrups from them, as did the Vandals, Gepids, Heruls, and all the other “East German” tribes that had trickled down into eastern Europe from Scandinavia. Of course, the Huns, who drove all those other nations into the Roman Empire, also used stirrups.

The Huns stayed in Hungary long after the end of Attila’s empire and became the eastern Roman Empire’s best cavalry.