At first eminently successful, he drove the Austrians across the Danube, recapturing Nish, Vidin, Semendria and Belgrade; repulses were also inflicted on the Venetians and the Russians.
They were driven back for a time, but returned in the spring of 378 in greater force, with a contingent of Huns and Alans; and again, after some repulses, they penetrated to the neighbourhood of Adrianople.
The emperor returned, however, in 1858, and after several repulses succeeded in entering Ankober, where he behaved with great cruelty, murdering or mutilating all the inhabitants.
How the Roman bishopric rose in status till it became the papacy, how the individual popes - in spite of these and similar repulses - advanced steadily on their path, how they succeeded in founding their primacy within the Church, and in re-establishing and maintaining that primacy notwithstanding severe defeats and long periods in which their prestige sank to the vanishing point, is told elsewhere (see Papacy).
