Mursa > Osijek Osijek-Baranja Croatia

Magnentius prepares for the war with Constantius by stripping the borders of Gaul of their defenses and seeking aid from the Germans on the Rhine frontier.

…Mursa (modern Osijek, Croatia), where on September 28, 351 emperor and usurper meet in battle.

Constantius before the battle had set Flavius Philippus, his Eastern Praetorian prefect, to negotiate with Magnentius, requiring the usurper withdrawal to Gaul.

After this inconclusive mission, one of Magnentius’s commanders, Silvanus, and his men had deserted to Constantius.

Magnentius leads his troops into combat; Constantius leaves the battlefield to preach on the nearby tomb of a martyr.

Constantius' army is outnumbered, but after prolonged fighting his cavalry routs Magnentius' right wing, and soon his victory is complete.

The battle entails major losses on both sides, leaving the two strongest armies of the empire—those of Gaul and of the Danube—massacred, thus severely crippling the military strength of the Roman Empire and compromising its defense.

Known as the bloodiest battle of the century, it is also the first defeat of Roman legionaries by heavy cavalry.

Losses suffered by the victors (thirty thousand) exceed those of the routed force (twenty-four thousand), however.

Magnentius flees the field and retreats to northern Italy to regroup his forces.

The Ostrogoths, the eastern branch of the Goths, had settled and established a powerful state in Dacia, but little has been heard of the Ostrogoths for the past eighty years or so since their subjugation by the Huns in around 370.

The Huns had fiercely oppressed them, having uprooted them from their homes in the Ukraine, transferred them to Pannonia, and taken away their grain.

(However, a pocket had remained behind in the Crimea when the bulk of them moved to central Europe, and these Crimean Ostrogoths will preserve their identity through the Middle Ages.)

Their recorded history begins with their independence from the remains of the Hunnic Empire following the death of Attila the Hun in 453.

Allied with the former vassal and rival, the Gepids and the Ostrogoths led by Theodemir had broken the Hunnic power of Attila's sons in the Battle of Nedao in 454.

The Ostrogoths now enter into relations with the Empire, and are settled on lands in Pannonia on the middle Danube River as federates of the Romans.

During the greater part of the latter half of the fifth century, the East Goths will play in southeastern Europe nearly the same part that the West Goths had played in the century before.

They will be seen going to and from, in every conceivable relation of friendship and enmity with the Eastern Roman power, until, just as the West Goths had done before them, they pass from the East to the West.