Empires and Barbarians (98 page)

I
N THE MID-890S
, the latest nomad menace burst into the heart of Europe. Following in the footsteps of Huns and Avars, the Magyars shifted their centre of operations from the northern shores of the Black Sea to the Great Hungarian Plain. For the most part, the results were everything that past experience of nomad powers would lead you to expect:

[The Magyars] laid waste the whole of Italy, so that after they had killed many bishops the Italians tried to fight against them and twenty thousand men fell in one battle on one day. They came back by the same way by which they had come, and returned home after destroying a great part of Pannonia. They sent ambassadors treacherously to the Bavarians offering peace so that they could spy out the land. Which, alas!, first brought evil and loss not seen in all previous times to the Bavarian kingdom. For the Magyars came unexpectedly in force with a great army across the River Enns and invaded the kingdom of Bavaria with war, so that in a single day they laid waste by killing and destroying everything with fire and sword an area fifty miles long and fifty miles broad.
¹

The populations of the Great Hungarian Plain and surrounding regions, not least Great Moravia centred in Slovakia, were quickly subdued, and an orgy of equine-powered aggression saw Magyar raiding parties sweep through northern Italy and southern France with a ferocity not seen since the time of Attila, while full-scale Magyar armies defeated their East Frankish counterparts three times within the first decade of the tenth century.

But one element in the usual mix of nomad pastimes is missing from the Magyars’ European tour. Five hundred years before, the two
pulses of Hunnic movement westwards – first on to the northern shores of the Black Sea in the 370s, and then on to the Great Hungarian Plain a generation later – had thrown semi-subdued, largely Germanic-speaking clients of the Roman Empire across its frontiers in extremely large numbers. Two hundred years later, the arrival of the Avars west of the Carpathians would prompt the departure of the Lombards for Italy and a widespread dispersal of Slavic-speakers in every direction: south into the Balkans, west as far as the Elbe, north towards the Baltic, and even eastwards, it seems, into the Russian heartland. Destructive as it was in so many ways, the arrival of the Magyars generated no documented population movements whatsoever (apart, of course, from those of the Magyars themselves). Why not? The answer lies in the dynamic interaction between migration and development which had played itself out across the European landscape over the previous thousand years.

The absence of any secondary migration associated with the Magyars is all the more surprising because it is one of the central findings of this study that, contrary to some recent trends in scholarship on the period, migration must be taken seriously as a major theme of the first millennium. This trend has not eliminated migration entirely from accounts of first-millennium history, but certainly incorporates a powerful tendency to downplay its importance. In some quarters even the word itself is avoided wherever possible, because ‘migration’ is associated with the simplistic
deus ex machina
of the ‘invasion hypothesis’ model of explanation, which was so prevalent up until the early 1960s. In this view, migration meant the arrival of a large mixed group of humanity – a ‘complete’ population: men and women, old and young – who expelled the sitting tenants of a landscape and took it over, changing its material cultural profile more or less overnight. This model was massively overused, and trapped the developing discipline of archaeology into migrato-centric models that crippled creativity. Besides, as many archaeologists have since pointed out, the model
didn’t really explain anything anyway, because it never properly addressed the issue of
why
large groups of human beings might have behaved in such a fashion. This being so, it has been both reasonable and natural for subsequent archaeologists to concentrate upon other possible reasons for material cultural change. And these are legion. Everything from religious conversion to agricultural innovation and social development can have profound effects upon material cultural profiles. A highly suspicious attitude towards migration has also crossed the boundaries between disciplines. Some early medieval historians are now also so convinced that nothing like the old invasion hypothesis could ever have happened, that they are happy to suppose that historical sources must be misleading whenever they seem to be reporting possibly analogous phenomena.

A central aim of this study, however, has been to re-examine the evidence for first-millennium migration with a more open mind, and above all to reconsider it in the light of everything that can be learned about how migration works in the modern world. And from this point of view, one of its key conclusions is that the evidence for migration in the first millennium is both much more substantial and much more comprehensible than has sometimes been recognized in recent years. A deep-seated desire to avoid mentioning migration (a more successful version of Basil Fawlty and the war) has thus been wrenching discussion of some pivotal moments of first-millennium history away from the most likely reconstruction of events, and, in so doing, hampering analysis of the broader patterns of development that were under way.

It is an inescapable conclusion from all the comparative literature that a basic behavioural trait of
Homo sapiens sapiens
is consistently to use movement – migration (mentioned it again, but I think I got away with it . . .) – as a strategy for maximizing quality of life, not least for gaining access to richer food supplies and all other forms of wealth. The size of migration unit, balance of motivation, type of destination, and other detailed mechanisms will all vary according to circumstance, but the basic phenomenon is itself highly prevalent. In practice, two particular migration models have been retained in even the most minimizing of recent discussions: ‘elite replacement’ for larger-group movement, and ‘wave of advance’ for smaller migration units. Part of the attraction of both has been that they are safely different from the old invasion hypothesis. Elite replacement suggests both that not very many people in total were involved in the action, and that their
migratory activity didn’t really have that much effect. If you just replace one elite with another, what’s the big deal? The wave-of-advance model employs mixed migratory units – essentially families – but their colonization of landscapes is piecemeal, slow, by and large peaceful, and decidedly not deliberate – intention being one of the elements of the old invasion model which revisionists find most problematic. How much of first-millennium European migration can be successfully described by employing these models?

Some of it, certainly. Cheating only slightly in chronological terms, the classic, superbly documented example of elite replacement is the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. In the following twenty years or so, as
Doomsday Book
shows, an immigrant, basically Norman elite took over the agricultural assets of the English countryside, evicting or demoting the existing landholders. But the overwhelming majority of the indigenous population remained exactly where they had been before the Normans arrived. Likewise, at least some elements of Wielbark expansion in the first and second centuries
AD
and of its later Slavic counterpart, particularly the spread of Korchak-type farmers through the largely unoccupied central European uplands, probably had a wave-of-advance quality about them. Looking at the millennium as a whole, however, these models are both too simple and too narrow to describe the totality of recorded migratory action.

First, the models themselves need a substantial overhaul. They either collapse different situations into undifferentiated confusion, or are of such limited applicability as to be more or less useless – at least for first-millennium Europe. As currently construed, elite replacement fails to distinguish the particularity of a case such as the Norman Conquest, where the invading elite could fit easily into existing socio-economic structures, leaving them intact, and any broader effects on the total population remain correspondingly small, if not so minimal as those wanting to undermine the importance of migration might think.
²
But this kind of elite replacement applies only when the incoming elite was of broadly the same size as its indigenous counterpart, and I strongly suspect, even if I could never prove it, that, over the broad aeons of human history, this will have been true only in a minority of instances.

Certainly the first millennium
AD
throws up more examples of a different kind of case, where the intruding elite, if still a minority – and even quite a small one – compared to the totality of the indigenous population, was still too numerous to be accommodated by redistributing the available landed assets as currently organized. In these cases, existing estate structures had to be at least partially broken up and the labour force redistributed. As a result of this process, the entire balance between elite and non-elite elements of the population was restructured, and the overall cultural and other effects of the migration process were likely to be correspondingly large. This kind of elite migration could not but have huge socioeconomic consequences, and potentially also much greater cultural ones as the indigenous population came into intense contact with an intrusive elite, which was more numerous than its old indigenous counterpart. It was this intense contact, seen in Anglo-Saxon England and Frankish Gaul north of Paris from the fifth century, and perhaps to a lesser extent the Danelaw after 870, that generated substantial cultural, including linguistic, change, as the indigenous population was forced into modes of behaviour dictated by a new and relatively numerous foreign elite living cheek by jowl among them.
³

Different again were cases of only partial elite replacement, particularly common in more Mediterranean regions of the old Roman west in the fifth and sixth centuries. Here there was some economic restructuring to accommodate the intruders – Goths, Vandals, Burgundians and others – but considerable elements of the old Roman landowning elites survived. In the longer term, it was the immigrants in these cases who struggled to hold on to their existing culture, and long-term linguistic change moved in the other direction. That is not to say, however, that this – the most limited form of migration on display in the first millennium – had only negligible consequences for the areas affected. In the first instance, high politics were dominated by the intrusive elites at the expense of their indigenous counterparts, at least when it came to matters like royal succession, and the overall political effect was sufficient to initiate major structural change. The disappearance in the medium to longer term of large-scale, centrally organized taxation of agricultural production, and the consequent weakening of state structures in the post-Roman west, are best explained in terms of the militarization of elite life that followed the creation of those structures at the hands of intrusive new elites.

The wave-of-advance model requires an equally substantial theoretical overhaul. The basic problem with it, even with ostensibly relevant cases such as Slavic Korchak expansion in the fifth and sixth centuries, or Wielbark expansion in the first and second, is that the Europe of the first millennium
AD
retained few if any uncontested landscapes of the kind that may have existed when the first farmers had been operating four thousand years before. By the year 1000, there were still plenty of forests, and we take our leave of European history at a moment when a further wave of agricultural expansion was in the process of hacking great swathes through them. But farmers had been clearing the landscape for millennia by this date and many of the best spots had long since been claimed. In this kind of context, random, uncontested expansion, even by small groups, was rarely an option. Korchak-type family or extended family groups probably did spread in largely uncontested fashion, but they did so by moving in a thoroughly non-random fashion through less sought-after, more marginal habitats of upland central Europe. And even here, the total subsequent subjugation of landscapes to the Slavic cultural model, combined with the documented aggression of Slavic groups in other contexts, strongly suggests that a degree of coercion might still have been involved. The same was probably also true of earlier Wielbark groups. Early Wielbark expansion seems to have been carried forward by small social units, but adjacent northern Przeworsk communities certainly came into Wielbark cultural line as a result of their activities. This could have been voluntary, but I suspect that examples of small-scale migration from the Viking period give us a more likely model for what was going on.

Small-scale Scandinavian migration units began carving out territories for themselves in northern Scotland and the northern and western isles of Britain from pretty close to the start of the ninth century. In this case, the logistic problem of getting access to shipping imposed constraints that did not apply in the Korchak or Wielbark cases. Hence, as is documented in subsequent Scandinavian expansion into Iceland and Greenland, the migration units, even if small, did have to be organized by jarls or lesser landowners (
holds
) who had sufficient wealth to gain access to shipping. But whereas Iceland and Greenland were more or less unpopulated landscapes, northern Scotland and the isles were not, and, even if the migrating units were individually small, Scandinavian expansion into these territories was certainly aggressive. Older suggestions that the result was ethnic cleansing are outdated,
but the indigenous population was forcibly demoted to lesser status, and, over time, absorbed into the invaders’ cultural patterns. Small-scale migration need not, therefore, necessarily mean peaceful migration. As long as they confronted an indigenous population who did not have larger-scale, regionally based political structures, small migration units could still insert themselves successfully by aggressive means. Alongside a wave-of-advance model for small-scale migration that was random in direction and peaceful in nature, therefore, we need to add small-scale migration flows that were non-random or aggressive, or both. This kind of model is potentially highly applicable to the generally already-occupied landscape of first-millennium Europe, relevant not only to Wielbark, Korchak, and some Viking expansions, but also perhaps to the early stages of eastern Germanic expansion towards the Black Sea in the third century, of Elbe Germani into the
Agri Decumates
; or of Slavic groups north and east into Russia in the seventh to the ninth centuries.