Empires and Barbarians (45 page)

The play of motivations behind Lombard expansion looks very similar. As far as we can tell, their move into the Middle Danube was not made in response to any kind of threat, but inspired by the region’s attractions. The Middle Danube had long formed part of the inner periphery around the Roman Empire, and over the first four centuries
AD
had steadily built up levels of wealth and development far beyond anything to be found at the mouth of the Elbe. The apogee of Attila hugely accentuated this imbalance. The amount of gold stashed away in Middle Danubian burials of the Hunnic period is without precedent in the Germanic world. And this can only be a fraction of the total amount, much of which was stored, presumably, in the treasuries of the kings who now ruled in the region. Even if we lack explicit evidence, it’s much more than a guess that Lombard migration had in mind a share of this booty, still being reinforced by the smaller diplomatic subsidies that continued to be paid by Constantinople after Attila’s death. But acquiring any part of this wealth required, as usual, the application of main force to alter existing political configurations – in other words, the Heruli needed to be defeated. While Lombard expansion may have started with warband-size groupings seeping south, both the Lombards and other immigrants caught up in the flow had to reform themselves into a more cohesive group, at the latest by the time they left Rugiland, whence they proceeded to destroy the kingdom of the Heruli.
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Even where largely economic, and hence voluntary, these kinds of migration always had a political dimension.
Did the migrants pack sufficient military punch to succeed in the enterprise they were about to undertake or did they not?

Some other bouts of migration, by contrast, were pretty much entirely political. The Sciri, Rugi, Heruli and Huns all faced, at different moments, a powerfully negative and thoroughly political impetus pushing them out of their existing territories: defeats, respectively, at the hands of the Amal-led Goths, Odovacar and the Lombards, and, in the case of the Huns, the steady erosion of an original position of advantage until their situation became unsustainable. In each case, military defeat destroyed the group’s ability to maintain its independence, even if its victims responded to disaster in a variety of ways. Whereas the Rugi and Heruli (or large numbers of them) moved en masse to different areas, the Sciri seem to have broken down into small groups and negotiated their future piecemeal. The
Life of St Severinus
refers to a small group of Sciri, not a major force, on its way to Italy. It was remarkable only for the fact that Odovacar was a member of the party.
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The post-Attilan history of the Huns may have combined both types of activity. As we have noted, the mid-460s saw both small groups of Hunnic manpower and two larger concentrations, under the surviving sons of Attila, seek asylum in the east Roman Empire. Economic factors contributed to their choice of direction, but not to the fact that they were on the move in the first place.

The pay and other rewards still available to Roman soldiers were presumably the main reason why so many Sciri and others eventually headed south of the Alps. Larger concentrations of Rugi, Heruli and Huns, likewise (sometimes in more than one group), were forced in the aftermath of defeat either to leave the Middle Danube region or establish dependent relationships with other powers. The nature of these relationships is not made clear in the sources, but again influenced their choice of direction. The Heruli found Gepid hegemony so burdensome that they moved on to a Byzantine allegiance, until the civil war over succession further divided them, leading some back to the Gepids. These refugees were clearly expected to fight for their hosts (whether east Roman or Gepid) and were happy enough, it seems, to do that much, suggesting that this can’t have been at the root of the Heruli’s problem with the Gepids. The refugees may have been expected to provide some kind of economic tribute as well, therefore, but perhaps not as much as they had previously paid to the
Huns. The Rugi, perhaps, procured better terms from Theoderic the Amal. Although they swapped sides to Odovacar at one point during the conquest of Italy, they quickly returned to him, and seem to have been content to be part of the Ostrogothic kingdom until 540, a record suggestive of greater contentment than the Heruli enjoyed.
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Unfortunately, we don’t know what terms Dengizich and Hernac, the sons of Attila, sought from Constantinople. Their move on to east Roman territory was preceded by a demand that the Emperor Leo grant them access to markets. The Huns’ declining political hegemony had presumably had economic consequences by the mid-460s, in terms of lost tribute as different subject peoples established their independence, and this erosion of position eventually made accommodation with Constantinople an attractive option. For one of the sons but not the other, the move led to disaster. It is unclear why. The Byzantines presumably perceived a threat in the forces of Dengizich that they did not perceive in Hernac’s. It is noticeable, however, that Hernac appears to have been content with only a very limited territory on Roman soil, right on the frontier in the north of the Dobruja, so perhaps Dengizich was too demanding.
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For all these groups, however, defeat had major consequences. It turned them into political refugees, and forced them to accept sometimes burdensome terms from senior partners. At the very least, it cost them any revenues that had previously accrued to them as the dominant local force, as well as, at least in the case of those Heruli attached to the Gepids, extra tribute that they now had to pay to their ‘hosts’. They were also expected to perform military service. Even though it is impossible to study motivation in detail, the intertwining of economic and political factors in the motivations of all our migrants is clear, with economics having the edge, as you might expect, among the more voluntary migrants, and politics among the involuntary. But because even the voluntary had of necessity to remake political circumstances to their benefit in order to enjoy the wealth they were targeting, they had to operate in large and cohesive groupings. If the size and nature of these migrant groups was not in line with modern examples, the complex nature of their motivation was.

Other aspects of the migration process observable across the span of the Hunnic era recall modern exemplars more closely. The degree to which migration was adopted as a strategy in this era by population groups who already had an established propensity for mobility is
striking. The Amal-led Goths who eventually moved on to Italy had, at some point in the recent past, moved from east to west of the Carpathians, then south into the east Roman Balkans, where they remained highly mobile. There the group covered another fifteen hundred kilometres and more, as Theoderic the Amal twisted and turned geographically and politically in his attempt to supplant the Thracian Goths as imperial allies. Although we have much less specific information, the same was seemingly true of the Lombard groups who ended up in the Middle Danube. We have little grasp of the chronology, but somehow they got there from the northern Elbe, almost certainly via a number of intermediary moves – or pauses in a flow, perhaps – that had led to an immediate jumping-off point in Bohemia. The point equally applies to the main losers in the fallout from the Hunnic Empire: the Huns themselves, together with the Rugi, Sciri and Heruli. Again, even if the details are not recoverable in every case, all of these groups first made their way to the Middle Danubian region at some point in the late fourth or early fifth century, and their departures followed within two or, in the case of the Heruli, at most three generations. For the populations of all these groups, migration had become an entrenched strategy, a reflex stored in the collective memory that might be drawn upon in appropriate circumstances; for them it was a possible response to a much wider range of stimuli than to groups without an established history of migration.

The importance of fields of information in influencing the directions of these migrations is also apparent. Information clearly played a critical role in shaping the individual moves of the Amal-led Goths. Theoderic the Amal’s ten-year spell as a hostage in Constantinople finished when he was eighteen, in 472 or thereabouts. This was precisely the right moment for him to return with news both of the much greater wealth accruing to the Thracian Goths as a result of their court connections, and of the fact that these Goths were currently in rebellion against the Emperor Leo because he had assassinated their patron Aspar. That within the year the Amal-led Goths had moved south to attempt to supplant them as Constantinople’s favoured Gothic allies can’t be coincidence. That Theoderic’s Goths had sufficient geographic and political knowledge to understand, later on, that Italy represented another possible destination is equally apparent, but perhaps requires less explanation. Their old home in Pannonia lay on the fringes of the eastern Alpine passes that gave access to northern Italy,
and Odovacar, its ruler, was the son of an ancient enemy of the Amal dynasty. As early as 479, a full decade before his forces moved there en masse, Theoderic was already suggesting to Constantinople’s ambassador Adamantius, as they negotiated outside Dyrrhachium, that he might lead some of his troops to Italy on a joint expedition to overthrow him.
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Most of the other migrations stimulated by the collapse of Hunnic power operated within discernibly active fields of information too. It is no surprise, for instance, that groups of Lombards settled in adjacent Bohemia should have realized that Odovacar’s destruction of the kingdom of the Rugi had created a power vacuum into which they might now move. The Sciri, likewise, had formed part of Attila’s army that had raided Italy in 451, and like Theoderic’s Goths were settled close to the routes that led into it. The Heruli who accepted Gepid hegemony and then that of Byzantium remained, of course, within the region where they had been established for at least fifty years, so it is safe to assume that they too understood the implications of the moves they decided to make. This leaves two more interesting cases: the Rugi and the wider Herulic diaspora. Somehow or other, the Rugi knew where to find Theoderic after their kingdom had been destroyed by Odovacar in 487. But Theoderic’s career in the east Roman Empire had been spectacularly successful, culminating in a consulship in 484, so it is perhaps no wonder that his not too distant neighbours should have had accurate knowledge of his whereabouts within the Balkans. More arresting is the case of those Heruli who made their way to Scandinavia. In Procopius’ account it is unclear whether they had any idea of where they were going when they first headed north in the aftermath of defeat. You would think not, except for the fact that those Heruli who remained by the Danube were able to find them again, twenty odd years later, when they needed a prince of the royal clan, despite the eighteen hundred or so kilometres that now separated them. The Heruli who moved north perhaps already had contacts or knowledge that suggested Scandinavia as a possible destination, information shared by those who remained close to the Danube. Alternatively, the two groups may have maintained some contact in the meantime. A case in point is the Scandinavian king, Rodulf of the Rani, who later sought refuge at Theoderic’s court in Italy. Vignettes like this make it apparent that you underestimate the circulation of knowledge beyond the old Roman
limes
at your peril.
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Knowledge could translate into actual movement, however, only where large-scale transfers of population were a practical possibility. Often the ancient sources give us little relevant information, but some migrations were shaped by transport logistics. Like their Gothic predecessors under Alaric from the 390s, the Amal-led Goths travelled with a massive wagon train. The two thousand Gothic wagons captured by the east Romans in 479 were probably not even its full complement. The ambush occurred before Theoderic integrated the Thracian Goths into his command, so that the wagon train of the united Goths (together with the Rugi) who set off for Italy will have been an even more imposing sight. In single file, two thousand wagons will have stretched over perhaps fifteen kilometres. With this monster at their heels, the Amal-led Goths were naturally limited to the Roman road network in the mountainous Balkans. We happen to know that their initial trek in 473 made use of both of the available branches of the great military road from Naissus to Thessalonica; in their later retreat west from the outskirts of Constantinople in 478/9 they plodded along the Via Egnatia. Presumably all their intervening and subsequent moves, likewise, followed the main Roman arteries of communication. It seems extremely unlikely, moreover, that only the Goths made use of wagon trains for transporting possessions and non-combatants. In fact, there are enough references to suggest that they were the characteristic mode of transport of all these migrant groups.
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Perhaps above all, as modern examples would lead us to expect, the ‘shape’ of existing political structures is firmly imprinted upon the action. It was the rising power of the Huns that caused such a gathering of militarily powerful groups in the Middle Danube region in the first place, as they were either brought there by the Huns or were seeking – in vain – to escape their attentions. Nor, without the Huns’ constraining influence, could so many militarized groups have existed in such close proximity to one another, as the violent competition sparked off among them by Attila’s death underlines. The continuing survival of the east Roman Empire as a cohesive state was likewise central to the action. It prompted, for instance, the decision of the Amal-led Goths to head south into its Balkan territories. This landscape was not naturally rich – not nearly as agriculturally productive, for instance, as the old province of Pannonia which the Goths had left behind. The rugged Balkans were an attractive destination, though, because they were close enough to Constantinople to allow
the Goths to exert pressure on the authorities there, and hence to try to make them hand over some of the wealth they accrued in tax revenues from their much richer territories of Egypt and the Near East. These Goths’ ultimate choice of destination was also dictated by political structures. If the western Roman Empire had not ceased in the meantime to exist, they could have had no hope of establishing an independent kingdom in the Italian peninsula, nor would the eastern Emperor Zeno have encouraged Theoderic in the enterprise. Similarly with the Lombards: they could not have moved into the Middle Danube in force, had the Hunnic Empire continued to exist.