Page:Readings in European History Vol 1.djvu/76

' 4O Readings in European History them a portion of Thrace or Moesia south of the Danube in which to settle. They promised to obey his laws and commands and, in order still further to gain his confidence, they engaged to become Christians if only the emperor would send to them teachers who knew their language. When Valens heard this he readily agreed to a plan which he might himself have proposed. He received the Goths into Moesia and erected them, so to speak, into a sort of rampart to protect his empire against the other tribes. Now, since Valens was infected with the heresy of the Arians and had closed all the churches which belonged to our party [i.e. the orthodox], he sent the Goths preachers of his own infection. These missionaries poured out for the newcomers, who were inexperienced and ignorant, the poison of their own false faith. So the West Goths were made Arians rather than Christians by Emperor Valens. Moreover, in their enthusiasm they converted their kinsmen, the East Goths and the Gepidae, and taught them to respect this heresy. They invited all nations of their own tongue everywhere to adopt the creed of this sect. jordanes' We have seen how, according to Ammianus Marcel- thedeathof linus, the forces of the emperor maltreated the poor Valens. Goths and drove them to revolt. When news of this reached the emperor Valens at Antioch, he hastened with an army into Thrace. Here it came to a miserable battle in which the Goths conquered. The emperor fled to a peasant's hut not far from Adrianople. The Goths, according to the custom of the raging enemy, set fire to the buildings, having no idea that there was an emperor hidden in the little hut, and so he was consumed in his kingly pomp. 1 This was in accordance with God's 1 Zosimus, a pagan historian, probably of the fifth century, also reports that Valens perished in a hamlet which had been set on fire by the enemy. Jordanes' tone in speaking of the death of Valens is but one of the many indications of the bitterness of feeling with which the Catholic Christians viewed the Arians.