These events took place in 376 A.D., and marked the first time that the Roman Empire had effectively lost control of her borders; from that time on, the eastern frontier was ineffectually guarded, allowing a stream of violent, undesirable invaders to enter the empire unimpeded from the east.
The late afternoon of August 9, 378 A.D. was brutally hot in the fields around Adrianople in southeastern Europe. Today a prosperous Turkish city (Edirne) near the Greek and Bulgarian borders, Adrianople on that day almost 1,700 years ago was the site of one of the greatest and most decisive battles in all of human history, a conflict that ran its course quickly in the hot, parched countryside, and left tens of thousands of men — most of them the flower of the Eastern Roman imperial military, including the Roman emperor himself — dead on the field, while the comparatively small army of Goths and Alans rode triumphantly over the terrain, giving no quarter to the wounded and dying, slaying officer and foot soldier alike. By late day, the field belonged to the carrion fowl and blowflies, already commencing their grim work among the heaps of corpses.
On that occasion, known to history as the Battle of Adrianople, which is usually considered to be the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire, tens of thousands of Romans and their allies were hewn down, crippling the once-invincible Roman military and guaranteeing the supremacy of the Goths in the eastern portions of the empire ever after. Within a generation, the Goths, emboldened and battle-hardened, would arrive at the gates of the Eternal City itself, and become the first foreign power in eight centuries to sack Rome.
And all of it began because of an immigration crisis.
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