Empires and Barbarians (29 page)

Obviously enough, Socrates’ report cannot be seamlessly folded into Ammianus’ picture. The two historians have completely different understandings of when and how the confederation of the Tervingi split. And this, in the end, is the fundamental problem with Halsall’s line of argument. The title of Socrates’ work is accurate, in that most of his work concerns itself with the development of the Christian Church. Only occasionally and tangentially do other events intrude, and then never in very much detail, so that Socrates’ overall knowledge of the fourth-century Goths is much less than that of Ammianus. Furthermore, Socrates was writing in Constantinople in the mid-fifth century, so was not contemporary with the events he was describing. When it comes to politics and military matters, it would be unsound methodologically to correct the contemporary and very specific account of Ammianus on the strength of an isolated report by Socrates, unless there was some compelling reason to do so – which there is not. And in fact, while it is easy on closer inspection to understand Socrates’ as a confused version of Ammianus’ account of Gotho-Roman relations (some of the events are in the wrong order), the opposite is not true, since Ammianus includes much extra material that is not in Socrates’ text. Valens’ war against Athanaric, it is also worth noting, had ended in a stalemate that would arguably have strengthened the Gothic leader’s prestige, since he was invited to a summit meeting on the river with the Emperor and treated with great respect. The conflict would certainly have had much less of a destabilizing effect north of the Danube than the Emperor Constantine’s total victory over the Tervingi in the early 330s, when no Huns appeared.
¹¹
So neither of the critiques of Ammianus’ credibility are convincing, and we can reasonably proceed from the premise that large, mixed population groups of Goths were set on the move in the summer of 376 by the aggression of Hunnic outsiders.

That being so, how are we to relate the migratory phenomena Ammianus described to patterns of mass human movement observed in the more modern world? In one sense, the scale and character of the migration flows of 376 are not out of step with modern case studies. For, as Ammianus and all our sources unanimously report, the underlying cause of the Goths’ move to the river was political and negative. The Huns were undermining the stability of the entire north Pontic region, and the Goths were looking to remove themselves to a safer locale. As Ammianus puts it:

[The Goths] thought that Thrace offered them a convenient refuge, for two reasons: both because it has a very fertile soil, and because it is separated by the mighty flood of the Danube from the fields that were already exposed to the thunderbolts of a foreign war.
¹²

In Ammianus’ formulation, the Goths had two motives in mind: the attractions of Roman territory and a desire to escape the insecurity of life north of the Danube.

Taking the second motive first, it is, of course, politically generated migration – in other words, fear – that characteristically sets large, mixed groups of human beings on the move: 250,000 in one month of 1994 in Rwanda, and over a million in another. Given its strongly political motivation, the scale of Gothic migration in 376 is not a problem. Where the action does depart from modern analogies, however, is in the degree of organization shown by at least the three major concentrations of Goths. This is not to deny – quite the opposite, in fact – that much human flotsam and jetsam was at large north of the Danube, but in the midst of it all, the Romans were faced with three fairly coherent groupings: both parts of the now split Tervingi, and the Greuthungi. This is quite different from all modern analogies. Whether one is talking central Europe at the end of the Second World War or Rwanda and Kosovo more recently, floods of political refugees have been precisely that: many unorganized streams of people running for their lives. If the migrants then found themselves in camps, leadership structures and organization have
sometimes emerged, but the modern world has never thrown up an example of the kind of ordered evacuation described by Ammianus. Should we believe him?

Again, I think broadly that we should. The observable contrasts between the events of 376 and modern mass migrations do make sense in the light of some of the basic differences in context. Part of the explanation for the oddity of the action, for instance, lies in the nature of the Hunnic threat facing the Goths in 376. The Goths have generally been portrayed in modern accounts as panic-stricken refugees desperately fleeing masses of Huns who were hot on their trail. The primary authorities provide plenty of justification for this view, since they surround the Goths’ arrival on the Danube with an aura of panic and defeat. The historian Zosimus can stand for many others:

By wheeling, charging, retreating in good time and shooting from their horses, [the Huns] wrought immense slaughter. By doing this continually, they reduced the [Goths] to such a plight that the survivors left their homes which they surrendered to the Huns, and fleeing to the far bank of the Danube begged to be received by the emperor.
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Narrative details preserved by Ammianus, however, suggest a significantly different picture. The Huns first attacked the Alans, Iranian-speaking nomads, who lived to the east of the Goths beyond the River Don. Having joined some of the Alans to themselves, they then attacked the Greuthungi. After a considerable struggle and the death in battle of two Greuthungi leaders – Ermenaric and Vithimer – the group decided to retreat westwards. This brought them into the territory of the Tervingi confederation. Its leader Athanaric advanced to the River Dniester, alarmed no doubt in equal measure by reports of the Huns and the fact that a large body of alien Goths was now camped on his borders. A surprise Hunnic raid then forced him back towards the Carpathians, where he attempted to create a defensive line to protect his domains. From Ammianus’ geographically elusive description it is possible to deduce that this may have been improvised out of an abandoned line of Roman fortifications that had been used to protect old Roman Dacia north of the Danube, the
limes transalutanus
. But more Hunnic raids undermined the collective confidence of the Tervingi in Athanaric’s leadership, and caused the ‘majority’ of them both to abandon him and to seek refuge inside the Roman Empire. They were
joined in this enterprise by the still retreating Greuthungi, who seem to have adopted the asylum idea from the Tervingi.
¹⁴

How long had this all taken to unfold? The Huns’ attack on the Goths is usually written up as ‘sudden’, and, implicitly or explicitly, the events compressed into a timeframe of little more than a year. But some of the narrative details suggest otherwise. Of the two kings of the Greuthungi, Ermenaric resisted the Huns for ‘a long time’ (
diu
), and Vithimer ‘for some time’ (
aliquantisper
), a resistance which included ‘many engagements’ (
multas clades
). These are indefinite chronological indicators, but a ‘long’ resistance is more likely to be measured in years than months. Moreover, the Huns were still not breathing down the Goths’ necks even when the latter reached the Danube. They were able to sit patiently by the river, while an embassy was sent to the Emperor Valens to transmit the request for asylum in person. But Valens was about fifteen hundred kilometres away in Antioch, and, travelling by land, the embassy will have taken well over a month. None of this suggests that Huns were present in large numbers close to the Danube in 376, even if the Tervingi had just suffered from two substantial raids at their hands.

The point finds general confirmation in subsequent events, which show that many Huns were still operating well to the north-east of the Black Sea as late as 400
AD
. Most modern reconstructions have tended to picture them sweeping as far west as the Carpathians and even beyond, in 376 or immediately afterwards. In 395, however, when the Huns mounted a huge raid on the Roman Empire, their first on anything like such a scale, they went through the Caucasus Mountains, not across the Danube. This has been seen as a cunning plan, with the Huns dragging their horses thousands of kilometres around the northern shores of the Black Sea from Danubian bases – but this is absurd. Horses and men would have been exhausted even before the attack began. What this raid really shows is that, as late as 395, most of the Huns were still well to the east of the Carpathians, perhaps located in the region between the Volga and the Don (
Map 7
). This is confirmed by other reliable evidence, namely that more Goths (other than the Tervingi and Greuthungi of 376) and other non-Huns provided the main opposition to the Roman Empire across its Lower Danube frontier certainly as late as 386, ten years after the initial Gothic emigration, and quite probably beyond.
¹⁵
Although the Huns certainly started the revolution north of the Black Sea which manifested
itself in the arrival of the Goths on the Danube in 376, they did not themselves come so far west in large numbers at that point. In other words, the Tervingi were not facing an immediate deluge of Hunnic arrows and did have the opportunity to make a more measured response to the mayhem unfolding around them than is generally envisaged.
¹⁶

But if the Tervingi had the time to organize the kind of orderly evacuation Ammianus describes, is it plausible to suppose that they did? This would imply that they possessed a decision-making body of sufficient strength and coherence to formulate and push through such a plan, raising related issues about political capacity and about the strength of their group identity. That the leadership of the Tervingi could formulate ‘big’ decisions is clear enough from other evidence. As we saw in
Chapter 2
, the confederation managed to sustain coherent policies towards the Roman state, and, in particular, with regard to the degree of subjection that they, as clients, were willing to tolerate. This even stretched to the ambitious policy of organizing the persecution of Gothic Christians, because the new religion was associated with the Empire’s cultural domination. There is nothing implausible per se, then, in the idea that the Tervingi might have had sufficient strength of identity to respond as a group to the new threat posed by the Huns.

How exactly these decisions were taken, and by whom, depends on the spread of social power in Gothic society at this date. In particular, the degree of social stratification and the extent of the ‘gaps’ between strata would dictate who was involved – and in what ways – in the decision-making process. At the top of the social scale, leaders such as Athanaric, Alavivus and Fritigern – called ‘judges’ and ‘kings’ in our texts – would have been actively advocating particular policies, but, as emerged in
Chapter 2
, a broader (freeman?) group would have enjoyed some kind of collective veto on suggestions made by their superiors, and hence would have played at least a passive part in the process. Elements of Ammianus’ narrative do indicate that this was so. The discussion about the decision to enter the Roman Empire was drawn out. Ammianus’ comment is
diuque deliberans
: they were ‘considering for a long time’. And I strongly suspect it was a heated exchange, too. Likewise, once south of the Danube, the new leadership of the Tervingi is repeatedly found ‘urging’ and ‘persuading’ its rank and file towards specific lines of policy, not simply issuing orders.
¹⁷

This does not mean, of course, that the entire population of the zones dominated by the Tervingi was involved in the decision-making. The archaeological remains and historical sources both tell us that this was a culturally complex world. It had been created by the military power of Germanic-speaking immigrants, who remained its dominant force. But, despite the evacuations of the Carpi on to Roman soil around the year 300, substantial elements of the old indigenous populations – Dacian-speakers, Sarmatians and others – remained in place under Gothic domination. The hardest question of all to answer, in fact, is what was the relationship between the incoming Germanic-speaking elites brought there by the migration processes of the third century and the residual indigenous population? Largely because you cannot easily tell them apart in the archaeological evidence, the current assumption seems to be that the two groups quickly mingled in sociopolitical terms as well as geographically. But this is neither a necessary assumption, nor even likely. Given that identity is fundamentally subjective, located internally in the self-consciousness of individuals and their relationships with one another, then material cultural similarities are neither here nor there. The idea that material culture might reflect group identity has found some support from comparative studies, but all the reported cases have involved a specific item or two ascribed symbolic significance, not broad regional assemblages of artefacts. And to know for certain which particular items are significant, you need precise ethnographic information.
¹⁸
The fact that the remains of the Cernjachov system are broadly similar right across the board does not mean that there were not distinct group identities within it.

It is extremely important, moreover, not to forget the general historical context. The Goths and other third-century Germanic immigrants into the Black Sea region won their place by right of conquest, and had come to enjoy the riches of the frontier zone. Given that background, it is unlikely that differences in identity between themselves and those they subdued would have broken down quickly, even if there weren’t the same differences in physical characteristics that helped keep Boers and their new neighbours apart in an analogous situation after the Great Trek. Germanic identity, because of the conquest, meant higher status, and letting indigenous groups across that status divide potentially threatened the immigrant’s privileged position. We are, in short, looking at a quasi-colonial context, where the intrusive elite had real reason to protect their privileges against
indigenous groups who might wish to erode them. That the fourth-century Gothic world did indeed operate in this fashion is suggested by the way in which Roman prisoners captured in the previous century seem to have been treated. From among their number came Ulfila, and a Christian Church was clearly allowed to operate amongst the prisoners’ descendants over several generations. When Ulfila was expelled from Gothic territory in 347/8, furthermore, many of these descendants went with him, implying very strongly that they formed a distinct, and presumably inferior (or they would not have left), community within the Gothic realm.
¹⁹
This kind of subjugated autonomy is found, as we shall see in the next chapter, in other complex barbarian state formations of this era.