ships—against the Danubian frontier. Once more the province of Lower
Moesia bore the brunt of their attack. The land army of the Teutons,
in which lay their main strength, first made an unsuccessful attempt to
take Tomi and Marcianople, then swept like a flood over the interior
of the country, wasting and plundering as they went. Meanwhile the
fleet, which was manned chiefly by Heruli, sailed past Byzantium and
Cyzicus into the Aegean, and appeared before Thessalonica. Part of it
remained there and blockaded the city; the remainder made a great
plundering expedition which bears eloquent testimony to the seamanship
and daring of these Teutons, along the coasts of Macedonia, Greece, and
Asia Minor, extending even as far as Crete and Cyprus.
This was the situation when the Emperor Claudius reached the scene of war. At his approach the besiegers of the hard-pressed Thessalonica had hastily drawn off northwards and effected a junction with their kinsmen in Upper Moesia. The. hostile forces met near Naissus. In the desperate struggle which ensued the Teutons suffered a crushing defeat. What remained of their army was in part cut to pieces in the pursuit, in part driven into the inhospitable recesses of the Balkans, where the survivors surrendered. They were partly enrolled in the Roman army, partly, in pursuance of a policy initiated by the Emperor Marcus, settled as coloni in the devastated frontier districts.
Thus the danger was averted from the Empire, and the desire of its restless neighbours beyond the Danube to make expeditions on the great scale was damped for nearly a hundred years. No doubt the inroads and piratical voyages of smaller Gothic war-bands continued; indeed, in the next fourteen years (270-284), there was fighting with bands of this kind under Quintillus, Aurelian, Tacitus, and Probus, but all these incursions were easily repelled by the imperial government, which gained strength under Aurelian and Probus. Just at this time, too, there broke out a severe internal struggle between the Teutons of the Euxine and those of the Danube. The first aid called in by the Goths against the Tervingi was that of the Bastarnae, but the outcome of the struggle was that the Bastarnae were defeated and compelled to abandon the territory which they had held so tenaciously for more than five hundred years. The expelled Bastarnae, said to have numbered 100,000 men, were taken under his protection by the Emperor Probus and settled in Thrace. After that the Tervingi, supported by the Taifali, made war on the allied Gepidae and Vandals, while the East Goths fought with their eastern neighbours the Urugundi, who on their defeat were taken under the protection of the Alani.[1] We can see that the whole of the eastern Germanic world was in a state of wild uproar.
On the middle Danube there had been no fighting worth mention
- ↑ Mamert. genethl. Maxim. 17 (p. 114 Baehrens) where the impossible Alamanni is doubtless to be corrected to Alani; the Burgundii are of course the Urugundi. Cf. L. Schmidt, Gesch. der Wandalen, p. 14.
