When Emperor Valens was informed by a messenger in ad 376 that the Danube River, the eastern frontier of the Western Roman Empire, was being threatened by swarms of Goths, it must have come as a shock. This was not a normal invading force, but a whole nation on the move–refugees with their families and possessions piled into wagons. These fearsome warriors were themselves under attack, fleeing pell-mell from the dreaded Huns, who had erupted out of Central Asia into the fertile lands of Eastern Europe. The mighty Ostrogothic domain–lying between the Dnieper and Don rivers, and stretching from the Black Sea to the Baltic–had been swept aside, and in their retreat the Ostrogoths had bumped into the Visigoths. This mass of Goths was now piling up against the Danube, and since there were hardly enough legionaries available to restrain them, the refugees were permitted to cross into the Western Empire.

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Despite the Western Roman Empire's weakness, memories of past glories made the Roman authorities arrogant, and instead of welcoming the newcomers as a valuable source of vigorous manpower, they treated the still-powerful Goths badly. A quarrel between a group of Roman soldiers and some Visigoth warriors sparked a revolt, and for the next two years the Goths rampaged through Rome's Balkan provinces. Attempts to pacify them came to nothing. In 378 Valens raised an army to put down the uprising and marched out at its head. On August 9, however, the emperor and two-thirds of his army were killed outside Adrianople, in a battle that heralded the eclipse of the traditional foot soldier under the thundering hooves of Gothic cavalry.

Hardly had the crisis of Adrianople passed when the new emperor, Theodosius II, was welcomed into office with reports of savage horsemen ravaging the heart of the territory south of the Black Sea. These were some of the most prosperous lands within the empire and made tempting targets for the Huns, who had appeared from east of the Caucasus and were wreaking havoc among the Romans and their neighbors, the Persians. What had been nothing more than a looting expedition finally withdrew, unmolested and weighed down with prisoners and plunder.

For the Romans, the hit-and-run tactics of the Hunnic armies, all of them mounted, was a shock. They seemed to appear everywhere at once thanks to their unparalleled speed of movement. Such mobility gave rise to reports of enormous numbers of these horsemen, usually exaggerated. By ad 400, the ranks of the Huns north of the Black Sea had swelled to such proportions that they began to overflow into the spacious plains of Pannonia (now Hungary) in a torrent of violence and warfare. The various Germanic tribes living there were swept aside, either absorbed into the Hunnic empire as vassals, as were the Gepids, or falling back against the imperial Roman borders. One group, the Vandals, tried to invade Italy, but after being barred by Roman armies they moved on to the west. Sweeping through Iberia, they were finally able to cross the Strait of Gibraltar. By 431 some of Rome's richest provinces in Africa were virtually independent, and the Vandals' chieftain, Gaiseric, had captured Carthage and set up a kingdom for himself. From there he would launch piratical raids against Mediterranean shipping, seizing Sicily in 440 and finally sacking Rome itself in 455. Other major groups, the Franks and Burgundians, drove into Gaul, where they were allowed to settle by Roman authorities who had no way of ejecting them.

Foreseeing the Hunnic threat and entering Roman territory ahead of the other Germanic tribes were the Visigoths, under their King Alaric. He swept into Italy, and in 410 he entered the ancient capital of Rome itself, exposing the Western Roman Empire as a spent force, teetering on its feet as it waited for the knockout blow that would end its 1,000-year mastery over the Western world.

Prior to the raid that followed the Battle of Adrianople, the Romans had had little direct contact with the Huns. Ironically, Hunnic mercenaries had fought in the Roman armies that tried to resist the Gothic invasions. These in turn were brought about by pressure from the expanding Hunnic empire. In 408 a small raiding party of Huns swept through Thrace on a pillaging expedition, and although they soon withdrew, the threat was all too apparent. The walls of Constantinople were strengthened. At the same time, the Roman army was evolving into a very different form from the army that had been so severely mauled at Adrianople 30 years earlier. The foot soldier as the key military arm was being increasingly supplemented by mounted troops to counter the new enemies of the 5th century.

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