Empires and Barbarians (27 page)

Steady settlement drift from a perhaps slightly expanding population had now become deliberate armed intrusion, for financial gain, into an alien political locale. And, again, the parallels with the history of the Boers are striking. Between the first settlement of 1652 and 1800, individual settler families drifted outwards from the Cape over the eight hundred kilometres separating it from the Orange River, which marked its original boundary, as population expanded (Louis Tregardt, for instance, had seventeen children by four wives). This, too, would fit a wave-of-advance model. Movement across the river in response to the negative political, economic and cultural impetus provided by the British was built on the back of this tradition of movement, but directed and accelerated into a quite different phenomenon. Migration units became larger, and, as we have seen, the population flow rapidly evolved into military predation when it was resisted. Likewise, too, in the case of the third-century Germani: their shift in destination with regard to the northern Pontus required careful planning. Individual Germanic families from the north drifting into the Black Sea region would have got precisely nowhere, assuming that they had it in mind to annex land. Establishing military hegemony in a new world required careful planning and a mass of population, even if this mass was organized in a number of separate expeditionary forces rather than the one ‘people’ envisaged by the old invasion hypothesis.

There is much about these second- and third-century migration flows that will always remain beyond our grasp. The available evidence does not allow us to explore precise trigger factors in detail, nor to ask which individuals were ready to participate, and why, when many of their neighbours stayed at home. But the evidence is good enough to establish that migration was a major factor in the reconstruction of the
frontiers of Roman Europe. ‘Development’ – processes of sociopolitical and economic transformation resulting in the new confederations of the late imperial period – was also central to the action. But an anti-migrationist reading of the evidence has to discount too much archaeological and historical evidence, and spectacularly fails to explain the cultural shift in the nature of Rome’s main partners across the Lower Danube and Black Sea frontiers. Further west, the migration element was less dramatic, but perfectly distinct nonetheless in the Alamannic occupation of the Agri Decumates and the arrival of substantial numbers of Burgundians on the River Main.

The evidence also establishes the interconnections here between migration and development. The two are not alternative lines of explanation, as they have sometimes been portrayed, but essentially intertwined in the unfolding of events, and on many levels. First, the process of development in Germanic society was itself a fundamental cause of the migration flows, both negatively – by making its internal workings so violently competitive that some may have sought safer homes elsewhere – and positively, in the sense that the new wealth of the immediate frontier zone encouraged groups from the outer periphery to move in and displace the sitting tenants. Contact with the Roman Empire was generating considerable but geographically disparate development in Germania, and, as in the modern world, marked differences in wealth acted as a spur to migration. Second, the mechanism by which this new wealth had largely been generated – being Rome’s preferred partner on a particular section of the frontier – also explains part of the seeming oddity of the resulting migration flow. These centuries saw nothing so simple as the old invasion hypothesis at work. Numerous separate expeditions, only some of which were substantial, carried the action forward. Large sections of the indigenous population at both the Baltic and the Black Sea ends remained in place after the migration process had worked itself out. We are not looking, then, at the transfer of an entire population unit from point A to point B, with added ethnic cleansing. But to gain access to the new wealth of the frontier zone by making Rome shift your group into preferred-partner status in place of another, you did sometimes have to assemble large military forces in order to overturn the existing political order. Unlike today, therefore, migration units had to be both large and heavily armed.

Third, the fact that ambitious kings who wanted to move from the
periphery into the frontier zone could not put together forces of sufficient size just from their military retinues explains the other peculiarity of the larger groups involved in the flow: the participation of women and children. The result was a migration flow that took the form neither of wave of advance nor of elite transfer. Small familial groups moving randomly over the landscape would have been mopped up piecemeal by the Carpi, Sarmatians or Rhine–Weser Germani, and kings with their warband-sized retinues could not have won the big battles that needed to be fought.

Aside from offering us an additional migration model that emphasizes the fundamental links between migration and development, the changes that took place in Germanic society in the early Roman era have another dimension: we can discern in them the first glimmers of the overarching process that would eventually even out the massive regional disparities in development characteristic of the European landscape at the beginning of the first millennium. Well beyond those regions that had fallen under direct Roman control, contact with the Empire on every level unleashed forces whose cumulative effect was to transform Germanic society. The result by the fourth century, as we have seen, was that much more substantial political structures had come to hold sway over a much larger population. These forces were felt most intensely close to the frontier, but they had some effects beyond, most obviously because some of the economic networks – those producing amber and slaves, for instance – extended long tendrils. Of still greater importance was the appearance of a richer inner periphery, surrounding the Roman Empire proper, which generated a tendency towards predatory migration into it from the regions beyond. Thus, much more than a thin client strip around Rome’s European frontiers now fell within range of wider-ranging processes of transformation that would eventually undermine the Mediterranean’s dominion. Even by the late Roman period, however, vast areas of east-central and eastern Europe remained unaffected. This would change when the new political order of client states created by the second-and third-century migration flows was thrown into tumult in the later fourth century. And if migration had so far played a secondary role to development that too was about to change. The era of the Huns had begun.

P
ROBABLY LATE IN THE
summer of 376, the majority of the Gothic Tervingi, the Empire’s main clients on the Lower Danube frontier for most of the fourth century, turned up on the northern banks of the river asking for asylum. They were led by Alavivus and Fritigern, who had broken away from the confederation’s overall ruler Athanaric. The equally Gothic Greuthungi, who had previously lived further from the frontier, east of the River Dniester, soon followed them. Both Tervingi and Greuthungi had been established south and east of the Carpathian Mountains for at least three generations, so it is not surprising that their sudden displacement towards the Danube was associated with a broader wave of regional unrest. After some thought, the east Roman Emperor Valens decided to admit the Tervingi into the Empire, offering them assistance across the Danube, but to exclude the Greuthungi. The latter, however, soon found an opportunity to cross the river without help or permission, and were quickly joined by other uninvited guests: Taifali plus some Huns and Alans in 377, more Alans in 378, and some of Rome’s Middle Danubian Sarmatian clients in 379. Long-established inner clients like the Tervingi, Taifali and Sarmatians, outer clients such as the Greuthungi and Alans, and previously unknown Hunnic intruders were battling it out for control of the zone north of Rome’s east European frontier, and the struggle had spilled over on to imperial territory.

About a generation after 376, the established order beyond Rome’s central European frontier – the Middle Danube basin west of the Carpathians – suffered an equally spectacular collapse. There were probably many smaller-scale participants as well, but four major groupings of barbarians figured in the action. A largely Gothic group, first of all, led by a certain Radagaisus, crossed the Alps into Italy in 405/6. These were followed at the end of 406 by a mixed force of
Vandals, Alans and Sueves, who crossed the Rhine into Gaul and cut a swathe of destruction through to Spain. Shortly afterwards, a mixed force of Huns and Sciri crossed into the east Roman Balkans, capturing the fortress of Castra Martis in the province of Dacia. Finally, Burgundians elbowed their way past their western neighbours, the Alamanni, to establish themselves on and over the River Rhine around Speyer and Worms. We don’t know when the Burgundians did this, exactly, but it was sometime between 406 and 413. In fourth-century terms, this again represented a mixture of established frontier clients (Sueves), groups who were occasionally part of Rome’s diplomatic web (Burgundians and Vandals), and complete outsiders to the Middle Danubian region (Alans).
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Nor, from a Roman perspective, was this sequential collapse of its eastern and central European frontiers the end of the misery. The Tervingi and Greuthungi who crossed the Danube in 376 had eventually made a kind of peace with the Roman state in 382, after six years of warfare which, famously, had seen them destroy the Emperor Valens and two-thirds of his field army on 9 August 378. Some of them – how many is a question we must return to – from 395 gathered round the leadership of Alaric and his successors. This force moved first around the Balkans, then into Italy – twice – and finally on to Gaul, where another agreement rooted them more firmly this time, in Aquitaine, from 418. From this settlement eventually emerged the Visigothic kingdom: a first-generation successor state to the western Roman Empire. A similar capacity for continued movement was shown by some of the groups bound up in the central European frontier collapse. Most famously, some of the Vandals and Alans who had ended up in Spain from 409 took ship, twenty years later, for North Africa, where they too eventually established an independent kingdom. And in the meantime the Burgundians too moved on, if in less dramatic fashion. After a heavy defeat at the hands of the Huns, many were resettled by the Roman state around Lake Geneva in the later 430s. From this settlement eventually emerged a third successor state to the old Roman west.

Some of the distances here are extraordinary. The extended trek of the Tervingi and Greuthungi from the north-west corner of the Black Sea to Aquitaine totalled about two and a half thousand kilometres, even just as the crow flies (and as the Goths didn’t). The Vandals went from Slovakia or thereabouts to Tunisia, via Spain and Morocco, not
far short of four thousand kilometres, and the Alans who accompanied them even further. Before 376, the River Don marked the western boundary of Alanic territory north of the Black Sea, and from there to Carthage it was a – perhaps literally – staggering five thousand kilometres.

In traditional accounts of the first millennium, these tumultuous events on Rome’s European frontiers and beyond were heralded as the beginning of the great Germanic
Völkerwanderung
: literally, ‘the movement of peoples’ (even if not all of those involved were Germanic-speakers). The Goths, Vandals, Burgundians and many others who feature in the two chapters that follow were thought of as complete populations of both genders and all ages who had long-standing group identities and deliberately moved in compact groups from one piece of territory to the next. In the process, they destroyed the power of the Roman state in western Europe, and in some accounts of the action this represented the dénouement of a struggle that had begun as long ago as 9
AD
when Arminius’ coalition destroyed Varus and his three legions in the Teutoburger Wald. And if this were not a big enough story, the events associated with Roman frontier collapse had, as we have seen, a still bigger role to play in understandings of the creation of Europe. The model they seemed to provide – of entire peoples on the move – was applied wholesale to European pre-history, which was all explained in terms of migration, invasion and ‘ethnic cleansing’. The frontier intrusions of the late Roman period thus provide a crucial test case. Were they undertaken by large population aggregates, mixed in age and gender, or were they not?

Several contemporary sources mention the arrival of the Goths on the Danube in 376. All share the same basic view that its ultimate cause was the emergence of a new force on the fringes of Europe: the mysterious Huns (of whom more in a moment). One even puts a figure on the number of refugee Goths gathered on the riverbank: two hundred thousand people of all ages and both genders. Fundamentally,
though, our understanding of what was happening depends on one Roman historian in particular: Ammianus Marcellinus. Only Ammianus provides any circumstantial detail at all about the Goths’ defeats and subsequent departure for the Roman frontier. He and he alone, for instance, tells us that at one point there were three separate concentrations of Goths on the Danube’s banks, and that non-Gothic groups were involved in the action too. Likewise, it is only Ammianus’ account that explains how the Greuthungi made their decision to move after the deaths of two kings and how the confederation of the Tervingi split as different factions advocated and won support for alternative responses to the Hunnic menace. Beyond these details, Ammianus, like the other sources, is entirely explicit on two points. First, the Goths came to the river in very large numbers. He never gives a total figure (in fact he says there were too many to count), but he does record that the Emperor Valens gave battle at Hadrianople on the intelligence that he was facing ten thousand opponents, which he understood to represent only part of the total Gothic military force loose in the Balkans at that point. Second, these warriors had come with their wives and children.
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