Europe: A History (46 page)

Migrations and Settlement

In the early centuries of the first millennium, few parts of the Peninsula were inhabited by the peoples who would later settle there permanently in well-defined national ‘homelands’. Much of the population beyond the Roman frontier was on the move. Tribes and federations of tribes, large and small, conducted an unending search for better land. From time to time the pace of their wanderings would be quickened by dearth, or by the violent arrival of nomadic horsemen, in which case, having tarried for decades or even centuries in one location, they would suddenly move on to the next.

The irregular rhythms of migration depended on a complex equation involving climatic changes, food supply, demographic growth, local rivalries, distant crises. For the Romans watching anxiously on the frontier, they were entirely unpredictable. Pressures would accumulate imperceptibly, until some unforeseen event would snap the restraints. Long intervals of quiescence would alternate with short, intense surges. As always, the act of migration depended on the delicate balance between the forces of inertia, the ‘push’ of local difficulties, and the ‘pull’ of greener grass over the horizon. The critical cause of any particular displacement might lie far away on the steppes of central Asia; and a ‘shunting effect’ is clearly observable. Changes at one end of the chain of peoples could set off ripples along all the links of the chain. Like the last wagon of a train in the shunting yards, the last tribe on the western end of the chain could be propelled from its resting-place with great force.

In this regard, the Huns caused ripples in the West long before they themselves appeared. A Hunnic Empire had been destroyed by the Chinese c.36/35
BC.
Thereafter the Hunnic hordes, and the herds of cattle from which they lived, were based in what is now Turkestan. Their raiding parties could easily cover a couple of thousand miles a month. Mounted on swift Mongolian ponies and armed with bows and arrows, they could ride deep into Europe or the Far East and return in the course of a single summer. Like all the true nomads, they generated a huge motive force on the agricultural or semi-nomadic peoples with whom they came into contact. In the second century
AD
their base shifted to the north of the Caspian Sea; in the fourth century it was shifting towards what is now Ukraine. There, in 375, they encountered the Ostrogoths, a Germanic people who, exceptionally, had been moving in the opposite direction. The resultant clash pushed the Ostrogoths, and the neighbouring Visigoths, into the Roman Empire. Within fifty years another of the associated tribes, the Alans, appeared in what is now southern Portugal—almost 3,000 miles away. The Huns did not attack the Empire themselves until 441. The rate of migration, of course, was extremely slow. The Alans, who crossed the Dnieper c.375 and the Rhine in 406, and reached the Atlantic in the 420s, averaged perhaps 5 miles per year. The ‘sudden irruption’ of the Vandals, who shared part of the Alans’ journey (see below), maintained a mean speed of 2 km per week. Tribal columns weighed down with carts, livestock, and supplies could not hope to compete with the nomads.

Map 10. Europe: Migrations

Geographical considerations played a central role. The main obstacle to the free movement of peoples was not the imperial frontier but the mountains. All the tribes following the prehistoric trail across the Eurasian steppes, if they did not turn immediately south along the Black Sea shore, were automatically channelled to the north along the European plain. After that, there were only two possible southbound turns, through the Moravian or the Bavarian Gaps. To take the southerly route involved an early military confrontation with imperial forces on the Danube. To pass along the northerly route was to follow the line of least resistance, where inertia would carry the migrants direcdy to the Rhine. For these reasons, pressure steadily mounted on the Rhine barrier, until in the third and fourth centuries a veritable traffic jam of tribes was produced. The passage through the mountains into the Danube basin was impractical for the larger convoys. But it became the chosen route of the nomads; and the lush plains of Pannonia—later named ‘Hungaria’ after the Huns—formed their natural terminus. (See pp. 232, 296,316.) [
CSABA
]

Another obstacle lay with tribes that were blocking the path ahead. True enough, the Peninsula had many open spaces: the density of population was very low, even in the Empire. But much was wilderness. The dense forests, sandy heaths, and sodden valleys could neither be cultivated nor easily crossed; and the migrants had to compete for finite areas of cleared or cultivable land. It was difficult for the tribes to move without coming into contact, and potential conflict, with their predecessors on the trail. As a result, the bunching and mingling of tribes in some of the choicer locations of the European plain was inevitable. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that Celts, Germans, Slavs, and others did not overlap, and sometimes intermingle. The idea of exclusive national homelands is a modern fantasy.

The fluidity of migrant tribal groupings, and the chaotic nature of their movements, did not suit the purposes of those who tried to make sense of the migrations in later times. Chroniclers and historians were tempted to write in terms of discrete, permanent, and self-conscious tribes where no such entities had necessarily existed. It is far from certain, for example, whether the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who ended up in England were quite as distinct as the Venerable Bede portrayed them (see below). Yet once they were settled, all the peoples were keen to invent a unique pedigree for themselves. All have suffered, too, from the attentions of nationalist historians in our own day, who think nothing of projecting modern identities backwards into prehistory. In the absence of alternatives, it is difficult to know how one can describe the migrations except in terms of the traditional tribes. But some awareness of the drawbacks is necessary.

Such, then, was the setting for the massive historical process which, from the standpoint of the Empire, has been called ‘the Barbarian Invasions’ and which, from the parochial standpoint of Western Europe, has often been reduced to ‘the Germanic Invasions’. To the Germans it is known as the
Völkerwanderung
, the ‘Wandering of Peoples’—an apt term which could well be applied to its Germanic and non-Germanic participants alike. In reality, it engulfed the greater part of the
European Peninsula, East and West, and continued throughout the first millennium
AD
and beyond, until all the wanderers had found a permanent abode. Its main events are only known from Roman sources, since the illiterate wanderers left few records of their own. Yet here is the process from which most of the later national groupings must trace their origins. To parody a phrase from a later age, it could well be called the
Drang nach Westen
, the Drive to the West, the road to permanent settlement. Without it, any concept of ‘Europe’ or of ‘Europeans’
would be unrecognizable. Anthropological analysis suggests that three main types of population were involved: the settled inhabitants of the Empire, living in cities or on rural estates; the barbarian tribes, living from primitive arable or pastoral farming; and the true nomads. One must also add the sea raiders, who, like the nomads, lived largely from plunder, and who operated over huge distances in the northern seas.

From the technological standpoint, it is important to note that Iron Age agriculture was reaching the point where more was to be gained by tilling the same patch of ground than by constantly moving on. The barbarians were not simply seeking an adventure in the sun. They were looking for somewhere to put down roots.

From the ethnic standpoint, the peoples of the Peninsula possessed the most variegated connections. Subject to certain reservations, however, one can say that the Indo-European element already predominated by the first half of the first millennium. The majority of inhabitants of the Empire, though not Latins or Hellenes by origin, were thoroughly latinized in the West and hellenized in the East. With some notable exceptions, the barbarian migrants belonged to one of the other main Indo-European families (see Appendix III, pp. 1232–3).

Apart from the nomads, the non-Indo-Europeans would have included members of the Uralian-Finnic group; pockets of the original Iberian tribes of Spain; remnants of the pre-Latin population in the remoter parts of Italy; and unassim-ilated elements among the Illyrians, Dacians, and Thracians of the Balkans. The Jews had spread to all the major cities of the Mediterranean. The Uralian-Finnic group of peoples had already split into its component parts. The Finns, or
Suomalainen
had trekked across the subarctic taiga from their starting-point in Siberia. They occupied the lands between the end of the Baltic and the upper Volga, which would later become the heart of Russia. Ethnically, they were related both to the Huns and the Magyars and to several smaller units—the Cheremiss, Mordvins, Permians, Voguls, and Ostyaks—who stayed behind in the Ural region. More distantly, they were also related to the Altaic Group which includes Turks, Mongols, and Tartars. Their neighbours, the Lapps, were already engaged in their timeless peregrinations with the arctic reindeer. The Lapps called themselves ‘Sameh’; but, in the interests of confusion, the Nordic nations usually called them ‘Finns’. Hence the later Swedish province of Finnmark.

In the Caucasus, two other fragmented groups of peoples had few known connections. The north Caucasians are made up from the Abkhaz, Chechens, and Avars; the south Caucasians from the Laz, Mingrelians, and Georgians. In the 1920s an amateur linguist of Scottish origin, who assumed the russianized name of Nikolai Yakovelitch Marr (1864–1934), invented a theory which linked these Caucasian languages with Basque, Etruscan, and ancient Hebrew, thereby tying up all the loose ends of the European ethnic scene. Unfortunately, though patronized by the greatest of all Georgians, Marr’s theory has been comprehensively disproved.