All of our ongoing discussion about immigration, especially illegal immigration, tied to the recent debate about refugees, has me thinking about the battle of Adrianople. What? You don’t know about Adrianople? Well, today it’s a city of about 160,000 of Turkey, but located on the European side of the nation, close to both Greece and Bulgaria. It’s peaceful there….but it didn’t use to be. It’s been the location for over a 15 different major battles; not surprising since it is on the major thoroughfare from Europe to India. The battle, though, that I believe speaks to our times occurred near the end of the full Roman Empire in 378.
Decades before, Emperor Constantine had reunited the splintering Roman Empire in 324. He established a new capital for the Empire, enlarging the ancient city Byzantium and renaming it after himself. When he died in 337 AD, the empire was relatively secure. 41 years later, things were definitely not secure.
During those forty years, new powerful people groups had begun to move from the East, most notably the Huns. As they moved westward, the Germanic tribes felt that pressure from the Huns and so, began looking to cross the Rhine and Danube rivers, the historic borders of the Roman Empire. Closest to the capital city of Constantinople, the Visigoths, successfully made the move into the Empire. Realize, there is a longer, more intricate discussion that could be of use here about how the Romans, back during the time of Octavian, had made the serious error of not expanding eastward themselves, thus making it so that in the 370s, the Visigoths would simply be Romans. However, we don’t have time for that now.
In 376, the Visigoths moved across the river as immigrants within the Roman Empire. But, they certainly weren’t Romans, and there really shouldn’t have been any assumption that they would become so quickly. In history of the Romans, they certainly had assimilated many other peoples, starting first on the Italian peninsula itself, then taking people from the Iberian peninsula, the Grecian peninsula, the Etruscans and the might Gauls in the lands to their northwest of the Alps. Peoples around the Mediterranean Sea, including the old Carthaginians, the Egyptians, the Jews and the old Persians had all become Romans….though the peoples further from Rome itself largely maintained their own character and languages.
Those assimilations though took decades to finally take hold. The Roman Emperor in 376, Valens made a grave error…or perhaps was simply arrogantly looking down at these immigrants. In any case, he nor the Roman citizens living near the Visigoths thought much of the people. And here lies our first lesson. From all accounts, the Romans treated the immigrants horribly. Both regular citizens living nearby and leaders of the army who were supposed to be watching/protecting the immigrants did all in their power to abuse the newcomers. There were reports of excessive interest charged for loans, including the taking of children in payment for services rendered. By 378, the leader of the Visigoths, Fritigern had had enough, and an aggressive revolt began.
As a nation of immigrants, it is critical to not miss this lesson. Regardless of how they got here, the supposed 14 million illegal immigrants in the country could pose a risk were they to continue to be treated harshly. Worse, perhaps, is that it should not be our character to treat others poorly; of course, I know….I know we haven’t always acted our best towards others “not like us.” But, we can learn the lesson from Adrianople to realize that we have a vested reason that compels us to treat these people as what they really now are…new citizens. Let’s invest the time to fully incorporate them into the society, while at the same time blocking off access to any other illegal immigrants.
But there is a more sobering lesson to learn…and it comes on the battlefield itself. Valens, after having stirred up these tribal people–and make no mistake the Visigoths were as battle hardened as any other tribal people–simple never respected the fighting ability of his opponents. Valens pressed his Roman army to move into battle before all of his troops had arrived. Having fought against the Visigoths the previous decade, and won, Valens was certain of the ability of the Roman army.
He was wrong. The battle was a disaster for Rome, and many historians believe that this loss was the signal to other Germanic tribes to also move west. In the end, the core of the Roman army in the east had been decimated. Valens was dead, his body never recovered. The Visigoths took control of the Balkans that they wouldn’t lose for years. Constantinople would remain in Roman hands, and ultimately the Eastern Empire would be preserved, but the rest of the West now lay open to other Germanic tribes. The defeat was received by contemporaries as the worst possible disaster. The Christian leader Ambrose called it “the end of all humanity, the end of the world.” In a slightly less hyperbolic way, Ammianus Marcellinus, himself a Roman officer, wrote “No battle in our history except Cannae [Hannibal Barca’s great victory in 216 BC from the Punic Wars] involved such a massacre.”
What’s our lesson? Well, lose the arrogance in the approach to what immigrants mean, especially when one considers how the various refugees are treated both now and back in 378. While there doesn’t seem to be any sense of “coming for battle” with today’s situation, the lesson is that change for the worse can easily transform a group of people. But, at the same time, the United States, and Europe, also cannot approach this current situation as if the tens of thousands of refugees are of no consequence. Their being here (in the terms of the illegal immigrants) or in Europe (the refugees) is very significant and our approach to them should not act as if they could be easily handled.
We will see, over the next year or more, what it means for there to be millions of illegal immigrants here in the USA, and thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of refugees from the Middle East in Europe. Perhaps there will be no connection at all to this disaster from antiquity…but as usual, history has lessons for us. I can only hope that leaders will pay attention to those lessons.