Reader Question Day #37 – the Tervingi, authorial inspiration, and SOUL OF SORCERY

Writers are often asked where they get their ideas. There are as many answers to that question as there are writers, but today I’m going to tell you where I got the idea for SOUL OF SORCERY.

Short answer: the idea for SOUL OF SORCERY came from the Battle of Adrianople, which took place on August 9th, 378 AD.

Now here’s the longer answer.

In 376 AD, a band of Gothic barbarians the Romans called the Thervingi turned up at the borders of the Eastern Roman Empire. Unlike previous Gothic incursions, the Thervingi had not come to raid the Empire. Rather, they wanted to settle in the Empire. You see, this new group of Asiatic nomads called the Huns had begun conquering eastern Europe, The barbarian groups already living in eastern Europe found they could either submit to the Huns as their new rulers, or flee to the west. The Thervingi opted to flee to the west, and petitioned the Emperor for permission to settle inside the Roman Empire.

The Eastern Roman Emperor at the time, a man named Valens, thought this was an excellent idea. It had in fact been common for some time for the emperors to settle defeated barbarian groups inside the Empire. The defeated barbarians provided troops and taxes for the imperial army and treasury, and eventually lost their culture, becoming as Roman as their conquerors. All these Thervingi barbarians turning up on the Empire’s doorstep was a gift out of the blue, and Valens ordered his officials to settle the Thervingi in the Empire and give them lands south of the Danube River. Meanwhile, Valens turned his attention to what he really wanted to do – a war with the Sassanid Empire in the east.

There was a problem, though. There were a lot of Thervingi. Way, way more than had ever been settled in the Empire before. Very quickly there was not enough food to feed them all, and it did not help that Valens’ officials were both a.) corrupt, and b.) stupid. One of the Roman officials decided to solve the problem by assassinating the Thervingi leadership during an official banquet. The Thervingi leaders escaped, and the barbarians revolted. Very quickly they looted most of the countryside in the Roman Balkans, and other barbarian groups crossed the Danube to join them.

Valens’ lieutenants proved incapable of dealing with the barbarians, and lost several battles to the Thervingi. Finally Valens had to make peace with the Sassanids, gather most of the Eastern Roman army, and march to deal with the Thervingi himself. He arrived in Greece in the summer of 378 AD, and decided to wait for reinforcements from his nephew Gratian, who was currently Western Roman Emperor.

Except Valens was jealous of his nephew’s prestige (Gratian had won several victories over barbarians in the west), and decided to claim all the glory for himself. He marched out and caught the Thervingi outside of Adrianople on August 9th, 378 AD. Neither the Thervingi nor the Emperor wanted a battle. Valens wanted to cow the Thervingi back into submission. The Thervingi wanted their treaty with the Empire and lands for themselves within the Empire’s borders.

So Valens and the Thervingi negotiated for most of the day, while Valens’ exhausted troops stood in the August sun. The Thervingi had also set some of the surrounding fields on fire so the smoke blew into the irritated soldiers’ faces. Finally a unit of Roman troops lost patience and attacked the Thervingi, and a moment later the entire Roman force attacked the Thervingi. The Romans were better equipped and better disciplined, but the Thervingi infantry managed to hold them off, if only barely.

And then it all fell apart. The Thervingi cavalry had been away foraging for supplies, and they returned to find the Roman army assaulting the Thervingi infantry. The horsemen promptly charged into the fray and hit the Romans from behind. Exhausted and demoralized, the Roman army collapsed in a rout, and the Thervingi pursued and killed as many of the troops as they could manage. Valens himself was killed in the collapse, and his body was never found. (One account says he was wounded and taken to a cottage. The rampaging Thervingi burned down the cottage, never realizing they could have captured a Roman Emperor alive.)

By the next day Valens was dead and about two-thirds of the Eastern Roman army had been destroyed. It was the worst defeat the Empire had suffered in nearly a hundred and twenty years. The Thervingi could not follow up on their victory (they had no siege equipment, and so could not take fortified cities), but it still took the Empire another four years to subdue the Thervingi. And when they did, the Thervingi submitted on favorable terms – they kept a large chunk of the lands they had taken in the Balkans, and remained essentially an autonomous subject nation within the Empire’s borders. Thirty years later, these Thervingi would form the core of Alaric’s Visigoths, who would sack Rome itself in 410 AD, and found a kingdom in Spain that would last until the Muslim conquest in 710 AD.

So, if you’ve read SOUL OF SORCERY, you can see where I got the inspiration for the Tervingi and their predicament in the book. Granted, the real Thervingi and the fictional Tervingi are very different, and what happens to the Tervingi in SOUL OF SORCERY is not at all like what happened to the historical Thervingi. But the root of the idea for SOUL OF SORCERY – a barbarian tribe desperately trying to get away from terrible enemy – had its genesis there.

For additional reading, my favorite book on the Battle of Adrianople is THE DAY OF THE BARBARIANS by Alessandro Barbero, and my favorite book on the late Roman Empire is Peter Heather’s THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE: A NEW HISTORY OF ROME AND THE BARBARIANS.

-JM