Editing Battle of Adrianople (section)

==Aftermath==
According to the historian [[Ammianus Marcellinus]], the Goths immediately marched to the city of Adrianople and [[Siege of Adrianople (378)|attempted to take it]]; Ammianus gives a detailed account of their failure. Ammianus refers to a great number of Roman soldiers who had not been let into the city and who fought the besieging Goths below the walls. A third of the Roman army succeeded in retreating, but the losses were uncountable. Many officers, among them the general Sebastianus, were killed in the worst Roman defeat since the [[Battle of Edessa]], the low point of the [[Crisis of the Third Century]]. The battle was a crushing blow for the late Empire, resulting in the destruction of the [[East Roman army]]'s core, the deaths of valuable administrators, and the destruction of nearly all armories on the [[Danubian provinces]] following the battle. The lack of reserves for the army worsened the recruitment crisis. Despite the losses, the Battle of Adrianople did not mark the end of the Roman Empire because the imperial military power was only temporarily crippled.

The defeat at Adrianople signified that the barbarians, fighting for or against the Romans, had become powerful adversaries. The Goths, though partly tamed by Valens' successor [[Theodosius I]] (who accepted them once more as [[Foederati|allied tribes]]), were never expelled, exterminated, or assimilated; they remained as a distinct entity within its frontiers, for a few years allies, later semi or fully independent or often hostile.

The long-term implications of the Battle of Adrianople for the art of war are disputed. [[Charles Oman]] in 1885 wrote that the battle represented a turning point in military history, with heavy cavalry triumphing over Roman infantry and ushering in the age of the [[Middle Ages|medieval]] [[knight]].<ref>Charles Oman, ''Art of War in the Middle Ages'', [[Cornell University Press]], 1960, {{ISBN|0-8014-9062-6}}</ref> T. S. Burns disputed this in a 1973 book, writing that the Gothic army's cavalry arm was fairly small, that Valens would actually have had more cavalry, and that while the role of Fritigern's cavalry was critical to his victory, the battle was a mainly infantry versus infantry affair. The medieval knight was not to rise for several centuries after Adrianople.<ref>T. S. Burns, ‘The Battle of Adrianople, a reconsideration’, Historia, xxii (1973), pp. 336–45</ref>