In 376 CE Gothic groups pressed westward by the Huns appeared on the north bank of the lower Danube asking for admission to the Roman empire. The Tervingi were permitted to cross and settle as federates; the Greuthungi were refused and crossed anyway. The Roman officials responsible for provisioning them exploited the refugees severely — Ammianus records famine conditions and the sale of food at ruinous prices, including the reported exchange of children for dogmeat — and in 377 the Goths rose in revolt. The war culminated at Adrianople on 9 August 378, where the eastern field army was destroyed and the emperor Valens killed, with losses conventionally put at around two-thirds of the army present. Six further years of fighting and devastation across the Balkans ended in the treaty of 382, under which the Goths were settled inside the empire as a coherent group under their own leadership. The numbers who crossed are not recorded; Eunapius's 200,000 is rejected, and modern reconstructions are inferences from military logistics.
Tervingi and Greuthungi Goths, displaced by the Hunnic advance, crossed the Danube into the Roman empire and, after exploitation and starvation at the hands of Roman officials, revolted and devastated the Balkan provinces
Ammianus Marcellinus speaks only of innumerable multitudes. Modern reconstruction, principally Peter Heather's, works back from an estimated 10,000-20,000 warriors to a total group including women, children and dependants of perhaps 100,000; other historians argue for figures half that size. The number is a scholarly inference from army sizes, not a count.
Roman military losses at Adrianople are conventionally estimated at up to 40,000, about two-thirds of the field army present, from Ammianus's account. Civilian deaths among the Gothic refugees from starvation in 376–377, and among the Balkan provincial population during six years of warfare, are described by Ammianus but not quantified in any source.
Ammianus Marcellinus, a contemporary and a former officer, records the deliberate starvation and extortion of the Gothic refugees by Roman officials, including the taking of children in exchange for food, and the devastation of the Balkan provinces in the war that followed.
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