Empires and Barbarians (24 page)

The extent to which groups of Germanic immigrants incorporated women and children at different stages of the expansionary process still requires detailed study. But one striking contribution of the Wielbark system to the Cernjachov was precisely in the field of female costume (at least, female burial costume). As noted earlier, in both, women’s clothes were held with two brooches (
fibulae
) of similar style, one on each shoulder, and the same styles of necklaces and belts appear too. This mode of dress is not found among Dacian-speaking groups of the Carpathians before the third century. It is hard to believe that such a striking transfer could have occurred without substantial numbers of women – and therefore children too – having trodden the road south. The point is confirmed by the fact that the Goths, at least, among these migrants maintained their Germanic language over several generations from the mid-third to the later fourth century. If, as with the Scandinavian intrusion into Russia in the ninth and particularly the tenth centuries, we were looking at a phenomenon accomplished largely by small groups of armed men, as this latter example clearly was, then we would expect, as happened in Viking Russia, that the immigrants would quickly take on the language of their indigenous hosts. But as Ulfila’s Gothic Bible so spectacularly demonstrates, this was not the case following the third-century migrations. Ulfila was working among the Gothic Tervingi in the mid-fourth century, up to a hundred years after the immigrations to the Black Sea began, and
the immigrants’ language remained at that point unambiguously Germanic.
⁴²
Without Gothic mothers to teach the language to their children, this could never have happened.

The evidence for the other migration flows is more sparse. Even for the Marcomannic War era, however, there is a limited amount of evidence that some of the migrant groups included women and children. It comes, fortunately, from Dio rather than from the
Historia Augusta
, and is therefore that much more credible. The blocked attempted move of the Marcomanni and Quadi into the land of the Semnones, for instance, specifically included the people as a whole (Greek,
pandemei
). Even more explicit, the Hasding Vandals negotiated at one point to leave their women and children in the safe keeping of a local Roman commander, while they attempted to take control of lands which had previously belonged to a free Dacian group called the Costoboci. This latter piece of evidence, in particular, makes it impossible to believe that the action of the Marcomannic War was carried forward entirely by young men on the make.
⁴³

The historical evidence for the third-century west, unfortunately, is entirely non-explicit on this front, leading one recent commentator to assert that it is ‘commonsense’ that the action there was carried forward by small male warbands. But some early female and child burials from the
Agri Decumates
incorporate intrusive Elbe–Germanic materials, and I would be cautious about making such assertions. It is not clear either that warbands would have been able to exert a sufficient level of force, or, even early on, that we shouldn’t be reading any appearance of the label ‘Alamanni’ as itself significant of a confederative political entity. More positively, the Burgundians showed a similar capacity to the Goths to hold on to the particularities of their language over the long term. The evidence for the east Germanic nature of their dialect is unequivocal, but actually dates from the very end of the fifth century, from the independent Burgundian kingdom that emerged in the Rhône valley out of the process of west Roman imperial collapse. Hence the Burgundians managed to retain their distinctive dialect despite two hundred years of living in the west. Like the linguistic patterns of the Gothic Tervingi, this is inconceivable without at least some ‘complete’ social groups, involving women and children, having made their way to the Main from east of the Oder.
⁴⁴
It is only reasonable to be more guarded when responding to the general dearth of migration descriptions from the third-century west.
To say that it is ‘commonsense’ to think in terms only of warbands, however, is as much an assertion as always applying the invasion hypothesis, especially given the clear evidence from the contemporary east of more diverse patterns of migratory activity. In their different ways, the Vandal, Burgundian and Gothic evidence all give us excellent reason to think that second- and third-century groups of migrant Germani sometimes included women and children. That being so, I would hesitate to assert the contrary in the case of the Alamanni.

As to the total number of migrants involved, it is impossible to say. We have few figures for this, and anyway could make only a wild guess at the size of the various indigenous populations affected by the Marcomannic War and third-century Germanic expansions. But it is precisely when faced with this kind of evidential impasse that the qualitative definition of mass migration used in comparative studies becomes helpful. The ‘shock to the political systems’ at the receiving end of each of the migration flows could hardly be clearer. Especially in the third century, the Roman Empire abandoned Transylvanian Dacia, many of the Carpi were pushed out of long-established homes into the Empire, and whatever remained of them, together with the independent Sarmatian kingdoms and Greek cities of the north Pontic littoral, were all eventually subdued into a new political system created by incoming Germanic-speaking immigrants. The domination of this region by Germanic-speakers, so evident from c.300
AD
, was the result of an armed migration flow certainly to be numbered in thousands, and very probably tens of thousands. Using a qualitative rather than a numerical type of definition now commonly adopted in migration studies, this was straightforwardly a ‘mass’ migration. So too, of course, in the west. The arrival of Alamanni and Burgundians, the evacuation of the
Agri Decumates
, the overturning of the domination of Rhine–Weser groups, and even the earlier emigration of the Naristi, cannot be thought of as anything other than serious events for the areas affected.
⁴⁵

They were also significant for the migrants themselves, amongst whom were generated in the course of migration both new political structures and even some entirely new groupings. Roman sources naturally concentrate on the violence that spilled over on to Roman soil: sackings of cities, raids over the Black Sea and displacements of groups like the Carpi. But even once the old indigenous groups had been overcome, another, periodically violent, process was let loose, as
the various immigrants set about establishing a new political order among themselves. Roman sources from around the year 300 refer in passing to competition between the immigrant groups now established in Dacia.
⁴⁶
One of the fruits of this process was probably the confederation of the Tervingi in which, as we saw in the last chapter, a series of kings were subordinate to a ruling ‘judge’. I suspect that these kings were the descendants of originally separate migrant groups who came, by whatever means and for whatever reasons, to accept the domination of the Tervingi ruling dynasty. Jordanes’ simple picture of the transfer of a whole people from the Baltic to the Black Sea entirely fails to capture these different levels of complexity.

There is, of course, much we will never know about these second-and third-century migrations. They clearly were flows of population, not the single pulses envisaged by the invasion-hypothesis model, and some of the action, especially in the early phases, was probably carried forward by warbands. But much larger forces than this were required for the more ambitious activities that were also a documented part of the process, such as permanent land annexations and fighting the bigger battles against the Roman Empire. The fact that the migrations also in some cases led to such substantial transfers of linguistic and material cultural patterns indicates that some of these larger groups consisted not just of men, but of women and children too. In part, then, the action does show some characteristics reminiscent of the old invasion hypothesis, especially in the extension of the domination of Germanic-speakers over the Black Sea region. Their armed arrival also eventually caused the exodus of not insignificant numbers of the indigenous population. Not as simple as the old invasion hypothesis, and not as antiseptic as an elite transfer, the Germanic takeover of the Black Sea region hovers somewhere between the two. It could perhaps be seen as a modified invasion-hypothesis model, where the migrants came in a flow that built momentum over time rather than in a block, where much of the indigenous population remained in place, but where large and mixed groups of migrants asserted themselves vigorously as the new political masters of the landscape.

This much, however, is only an interim conclusion. We need to ask further questions if we are going to arrive at any real understanding of the action. Why did these migration flows occur when they did, and why did they all tend in the direction of the Roman frontier? The conclusion that they consisted on occasion of mixed population groups
raises another question of huge importance. Some modern migration flows do consist of large mixed groups, when political motives predominate. But these take the form of unorganized floods of refugees, without political leadership or direction. Before the evidence for large, mixed and, above all,
organized
migrant groups can be accepted, it is also necessary to counter the ‘commonsense’ objection that expansionary activity was usually undertaken just by all-male warbands. Is there a cogent reason why some of the Germanic migration flows should have included women and children alongside armed men when it came to asserting their domination over a new landscape?

The direction of the migration flow – broadly towards the Roman frontier, but with a much more dramatic outcome in the east in terms of how much territory the migrants took over – begins to make sense if we think about it in the light of two factors that play a central role in all modern migration flows: ‘fields of information’ and the general context created by political structures. The field of information operating in the west doesn’t require much comment because the Alamanni were moving over such a short distance into the
Agri Decumates
. We can take for granted that they knew or could quickly come to know about their destination. But the epic treks of the eastern Germani need much more explanation. How much did the migrants actually know about the northern Pontus?

The most direct route from the Wielbark and Przeworsk areas of central and northern Poland to the Black Sea ran around the outer arc of the Carpathians, making use of the Upper Vistula and Dniester valleys. As we have seen, a ribbon of Wielbark cemeteries of the right date suggests that this was the route taken. Not only is this one of central-eastern Europe’s natural thoroughfares, but traffic along it had been particularly busy in the few centuries either side of the birth of Christ, when it was being exploited as one of the two main axes of the Amber Route uniting the Mediterranean world with the amber-producing shores of the Baltic Sea. As mentioned earlier, the solidified gum of submerged trees was highly prized for jewellery in the Mediterranean world, and one of the chief exports out of Germania. Substantial numbers of merchants were thus regularly treading the Goths’
main migration route during this era, and some Wielbark populations were actually involved in the trade, constructing and maintaining a complex series of wooden bridges and causeways close to the Baltic.
⁴⁷
Late second- and third-century Germanic-speaking migrants from north-central Europe could thus draw on substantial reservoirs of information about lands south and east of the Carpathians, and possible routes towards them. Thanks to the amber trade, they knew the route well and had some understanding of the societies and contexts that lay at the other end. I strongly suspect, though, that a closer analysis of the archaeological evidence would show that this east Germanic migration flow initially operated in a channelled fashion, the migrants clustering at only a relatively few destinations within the north Pontic zone, until the full regional situation became better known to them.

Once in the Black Sea region, further fields of information quickly came into play. The migrants soon learned of the attractive possibilities for gain presented by raiding the economically more developed Roman Empire, and the different routes by which such raids might be mounted. Some of these may have been partly known already, since Gothic troops were serving with Roman armies against Persia even before the attack on Histria in 238. An inscription dated thirty years before that attack records the presence of what were probably Gothic soldiers in the Roman army of Arabia. But before they arrived, the immigrants can have had no knowledge of the geography of the eastern Mediterranean and its hinterland, or that the rich coastlands of northern Asia Minor lay just across the Black Sea. That information soon became available. From the mid-250s they were mounting sea-borne raids across the Black Sea, and there is no doubt where the necessary intelligence came from. Historical sources are explicit that the maritime expertise of the populations of the Greek cities on the northern shores of the Black Sea provided ships and sailors for these expeditions. It is no stretch to suppose they were also the source of the information that lucrative raiding possibilities awaited anyone who could find some way to cross the two hundred kilometres and more of open sea that separate the northern and southern shores of the Pontus.
⁴⁸

But if the choices of third-century migrants were being influenced by information flowing along the Amber Route, they were also shaped, perhaps more decisively, by the political structures of the world around them. In the modern world, migration flows are interfered with by
states who attempt to channel, encourage, or limit them by means of passports, border controls and immigration policies. Ancient state structures were much less sophisticated, but the Roman Empire did operate immigration policies when it came to group admissions, and its broader effect on the Germanic migration flows of the third century is obvious.