The first barbarian group to formally enter Roman territory—in 376, as refugees from the Huns—had been the Visigoths, or Tervingi, one of two main branches of the Goths, an East Germanic tribe, the Ostrogoths, or Greuthingi, being the other.

The Goths had remained in Dacia until 376, when one of their leaders, Fritigern, had appealed to the Roman emperor Valens to be allowed to settle with his people on the south bank of the Danube, where they hoped to find refuge from the Huns.

Valens permitted this, tolerating their presence on condition that they defend the Danube frontier.

However, a famine had broken out and Rome had been unwilling to supply them with either the food they had been promised or the land.

Open revolt had ensued, leading to six years of plundering and destruction throughout the Balkans, and in 378, the decisive moment of the Gothic War, the death of a Roman Emperor and the destruction of an entire Roman army in the Battle of Adrianople, which had shocked the Roman world and eventually forced the new emperor, Theodosius, to make peace with the rebels in 382 and permit them to settle within the imperial boundaries with a large degree of autonomy.

The new trend of settlement within the Empire will have far-reaching consequences that will result in the eventual fall of the Roman Empire.

Coexisting peacefully with the Romans, farming and trading agricultural products and enslaved people for luxury goods, the Visigoths break their eight-year peace with the Empire by allying with the Huns in 390 to ravage Thrace.