Valens hurried up from the East and met the Goths on the plains of Hadrianople with an inferior force mostly composed of barbarians in the service of Rome (378). The result, in the words of Ammianus, was “the most disastrous defeat encountered by the Romans since Cannae” 594 years before.10 The Gothic cavalry prevailed over the Roman infantry, and from that day till the fourteenth century the strategy and tactics of cavalry dominated the declining art of war.
