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Flavius Valens was born in 328 at Cibalae in the Roman province of Pannonia Secunda, the younger son of Gratianus Funarius, a soldier of modest origins who had attained the rank of comes under the Constantinian dynasty. His elder brother was Flavius Valentinianus, later emperor as Valentinian I. Valens followed a military career in the imperial guards and field army during the reigns of Julian and Jovian. Ancient writers, above all Ammianus Marcellinus, described him as of medium height, dark-complexioned, and somewhat bow-legged, with a cast in one eye. They also credited him with personal frugality, a concern to restrain official abuses against provincials, and a character marked by suspicion and hesitation in decision.

After the sudden death of Jovian in February 364, the army at Nicaea chose Valentinian as emperor. Judging that the empire required two rulers, Valentinian raised his brother to the purple on 28 March 364 at the Hebdomon outside Constantinople and assigned him the eastern prefecture. Valens thus became Augustus of the East, with authority over Thrace, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, and the Persian frontier, and kept his court chiefly at Constantinople and Antioch. Early in the reign he faced the usurpation of Procopius, a kinsman of Julian, who seized Constantinople in 365. After initial alarm Valens defeated and executed Procopius in 366. He later campaigned on the Danube against the Goths, concluding a treaty in 369 that limited their trade and subsidies, and he intervened in Armenia and Caucasian Iberia against Sassanian Persia.

In religion Valens adhered to the Homoian form of Christianity associated with the council of Constantinople of 360. He generally favored Homoian bishops and at intervals applied pressure upon Nicene clergy. His relations with Basil of Caesarea were tense but did not end in Basil’s exile; other Nicene leaders suffered banishment. His policy was intermittent rather than a systematic persecution on the model of earlier emperors, and it fluctuated with political circumstance. He also undertook substantial public works, of which the most enduring is the great aqueduct in Constantinople that still bears his name.

The last years of the reign were dominated by the Gothic crisis. In 376 the Tervingi, hard pressed by the Huns, were permitted to cross the Danube and settle in Thrace as allied settlers. Corruption among Roman commanders, food shortages, and ill-treatment provoked a Gothic revolt. After years of inconclusive fighting Valens left Antioch in 378, declined to wait for the approaching army of his nephew Gratian, and engaged the Goths near Adrianople on 9 August 378. The eastern field army was destroyed. Valens died in the disaster; contemporary accounts differ as to whether he fell among the troops or was burned in a cottage where he had been carried wounded. His body was never identified. The defeat at Adrianople left the eastern provinces exposed and is widely regarded as a turning point in the later history of the Roman Empire.

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