Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/50

Rh 36 V A L V A L transported to Asia as hostages. The conditions, how ever, were not strictly enforced, and the whole affair was treacherously mismanaged by the imperial generals, who for their own profit forced the new settlers to buy food at famine prices. Accordingly the enraged Goths, under their chief Frithigern, streamed across the Balkans into Thrace and the country round Adrianople, plundering, burning, and slaughtering as they went. They were driven back for a time, but returned in the spring of 378 in greater force, with Huns and Alans to fight with them against the empire ; and again, after one or two repulses, they pene trated to the neighbourhood of Adrianople. Valens, who had now returned to Constantinople, left the capital in May 378 with a strong and well-officered army. Without awaiting the arrival of his nephew Gratian, emperor of the West, who had just won a great victory over one of the barbarous tribes of Germany in Alsace, Valens attacked the enemy at once, although his troops had to go into action heated and fatigued by a long march on a sultry August day. The battle was decided mainly by the cavalry of the Alans and Sarmatians, the Roman infantry being outnumbered, outmanoeuvred, and finally so hemmed in that the men could scarcely draw their swords. The slaughter went on for hours, till the imperial army was destroyed. Valens either perished on the field or, as some said, in a cottage fired by the enemy. From the battle of Adrianople the Goths permanently established themselves south of the Danube. Ammianus Marcellinus, a contemporary writer, is our chief authority for the reigns of Valens and Valentinian. See also Gibbon s sketch of the period in the 26th and 27th chapters of his Decline and Fall and Hodgkin s Italy and her Invaders. VALENTINE, or VALENTINUS, the name of a consider able number of saints, 1 three of whom may be particularized. 1. VALENTINUS, presbyter and martyr, according to the authorized Roman legend (see lesson for second nocturn, 14th February, in the diocese of Tortosa), was arrested and thrown into chains at the instance of the emperor Claudius (Gothicus), and handed over to Calphurnius, who employed one Asterius to try to win him back to idolatry. Valentine miraculously healed the blind daughter of Asterius, who accordingly believed and was baptized, with all his house. The saint after long imprisonment was beaten with clubs and finally beheaded on the Flaminian Way (14th Feb ruary). 2. VALENTINUS of Interamna (Terni), bishop and martyr, miraculously healed Chaeremon, the deformed son of Craton, a Greek rhetorician living in Rome, who along with various other prominent persons was accordingly converted. This Valentine, who also is commemorated on 14th February, is invoked, especially in Italy and Germany (St Velten), in cases of epilepsy and cognate disorders. 3. VALENTINUS, who is spoken of as the apostle of Rhaetia, and venerated in Passau as its first bishop, flourished during the first half of the fifth century. For the peculiar observances that used to be connected with St Valentine s Eve and Day in England, Scotland, and also (it is said) in some parts of France, and to which allusion is so frequently made by English writers from Shakespeare onwards, such works as Brand s Popular Antiquities, Hone s Every -Day Book, or Chambers s Book of Days may be consulted. Their appropriateness to the spring season is, in a general way, perhaps, obvious enough ; and, as for the name, it has been suggested that there is at least a similarity in sound between Valentine and galcntin (Fr. dim. from galant). VALENTINIAN L, emperor of the West from 364 to 375. He had been an officer of the guard under Julian and Jovian, and had risen high in the imperial service. With a fine robust frame, he possessed great courage and great military capacity. He was chosen emperor in his forty-third year by the officers of the army at Nicsea in Bithynia early in 364, and shortly afterwards named his brother VALENS (q.v.} colleague with him in the empire. 1 The Heiligenlexicon of Stadler-Ginal enumerates fifty-two. The two brothers, after passing through the chief cities of the neighbouring district, arranged the partition of the empire at Naissus (Nissa) in Upper Mcesia. As emperor of the West, Valentinian took Italy, Illyricum, Spain, the Gauls, Britain, and Africa, leaving to Valens the eastern half of the Balkan Peninsula, Greece, Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor as far as Persia. During the short reign of Valentinian there were wars in Africa, in Germany, and in Britain, and Rome came into collision with barbarian peoples of whom we now hear for the first time, Burgundians, Saxons, Alemanni. The emperor s chief work was guard ing the frontiers and establishing military positions. Milan was at first his headquarters for settling the affairs of northern Italy ; next year (365) he was at Paris, and then at Rheims, to direct the operations of his generals against the Alemanni. This people were driven back to the Ger man bank of the Rhine, and checked for a while by a chain of military posts and fortresses, though at the close of 367 they swooped down on Moguntiacum (Mainz) and plundered the city. In that same year Valentinian was at Amiens, and there, before his assembled troops, he gave the title of Augustus to his son Gratian, eight years of age. The next three years he spent at Treves, organizing the defence of the Rhine frontier against the Alemanni and Saxons, and personally superintending the construction of numerous forts. Treves was, in fact, his headquarters dur ing most of his reign. His general administration seems to have been thoroughly honest and able, in some respects beneficent. If he was hard and exacting in the matter of taxes, he spent them in the defence and improvement of his dominions, not in idle show or luxury. Though him self a plain and almost illiterate soldier, he was a founder of schools, and he also provided medical attendance for the poor of Rome, by appointing a physician for each of the fourteen districts of the city. He was a Christian, an orthodox Catholic, and in his life perfectly pure ; but he permitted absolute religious freedom to all his subjects. Against all abuses, both civil and ecclesiastical, he steadily set his face, even against the increasing wealth and worldli- ness of the clergy. Valentinian was in many ways a good and able ruler at a particularly difficult time. The great blot on his memory is his cruelty, which at times was frightful, and showed itself in its full fierceness in the punishment of persons accused of witchcraft, soothsaying, or magical practices. In 374 the Quadi, a German tribe in what is now Moravia and Hungary, resenting the erec tion of Roman forts to the north of the Danube in what they considered to be their own territory, crossed the river and laid waste the province of Pannonia, Valentinian s native land. The emperor in the April of the following year entered Illyricum with a powerful army, and gave audience to an embassy from the Quadi at Bregetio on the Danube, somewhere near Pressburg. Their defence threw him into a paroxysm of rage, in which he suddenly fell down, apparently in a fit of apoplexy, and died in a few hours. His two sons, Gratian and Valentinian II., were jointly his successors. VALENTINIAN II., an infant of four years of age, with his half-brother Gratian, a lad of about seventeen, became the emperors of the West on the death of their father, Valentinian I., in 375. They made Milan their home; and the empire was nominally divided between them, Gratian taking the trans-Alpine provinces, whilst Italy, Illyricum in part, and Africa were to be under the rule of Valen tinian II., or rather of his mother, Justina. Justina was an Arian, and the imperial court at Milan pitted itself against the Catholics, under the famous Ambrose, bishop of that city. But so great was his popularity that the court was decidedly worsted in the contest, and the em peror s authority materially shaken. In 387 Maximus,