Empires and Barbarians (10 page)

What transpired between the first and fourth centuries, then, was broadly this: a class of military leaders developed a new kind of military muscle, and used it to put greater distance, in terms of social power, between themselves and everyone else. It doesn’t take more than a moment’s reflection to realize that this could never have been an entirely consensual process, since a small elite was busy asserting its dominance over everybody else. And this, of course, provides one possible context for the events that culminated in the weapons deposition at Ejsbøl Mose. What the archaeologists found there was the weaponry of an entire military retinue. And since the weapons themselves had been so thoroughly destroyed, it’s a pretty safe bet that this fate was shared by the men who had wielded them. In
establishing their social dominance, the new military kings were playing for high stakes, and Ejsbøl Mose serves as a reminder that for every group that succeeded, another, or several others, failed. Two possible scenarios for this failure immediately suggest themselves. The warrior group unintentionally immortalized there may have been destroyed by another, rival warrior band, or by a group of ordinary, less military Germani, who didn’t appreciate the kind of dominance that the warriors’ leader had in mind. In Hollywood terms, we might be thinking
Godfather
– the ancient lake having been used by a dominant king to send to any rivals the message that they were likely to end up sleeping with the (in this case freshwater) fishes; or
Magnificent Seven
– a band of peasants having found enough military effectiveness to rid themselves of at least one predatory warband. There’s no way to be sure, although the fury of the destruction might suggest Yul Brynner rather than Al Pacino, since in some later instances we know of, victorious warband leaders tended to absorb the troops of a defeated rival to increase their own power.
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But this is a detail. The fundamental point is that the rise of the military kings can only have come about through a periodically violent process whereby rivalries both between different warband leaders and between that class of leader and those they sought to dominate, slowly worked themselves out.

But this is only part of the story. The kind of military retinue destroyed at Ejsbøl Mose, or employed by Chnodomarius, was a high-maintenance item. Not producing their own foodstuffs, professional warriors required feeding, and all the evidence evocative of Germanic warbands at play – mostly deriving, admittedly, from later heroic poetry, but bolstered by hints in Ammianus and anthropological parallels from better-documented but analogous contexts – suggests that we are talking about feeding literally on a heroic scale: lots of roasted meat and alcohol as brought to the big screen recently in Hollywood’s
Beowulf
. Military equipment was also not cheap. Admittedly, there is no sign of any body armour in the Ejsbøl Mose finds, and that was the single most expensive item of personal military hardware in the ancient and medieval worlds. Ammianus comments,
for instance, that Chnodomarius was easily distinguishable on the battlefield because of his armour, suggesting that even in the fourth century it was not generally being worn by Germanic warriors. Nonetheless, swords were possessed by maybe one-third of the Ejsbøl Mose force. Most of the rest of a warrior’s distinguishing equipment was also made by highly skilled craftsmen from expensive raw materials.
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In other words, the retinues that made the new military kings such a powerful feature of the fourth-century Germanic landscape could not come into being without two preconditions. First, there had to be surpluses of foodstuffs and/or other forms of negotiable wealth being produced by the economy around them, and second, the kings had to be able to turn these surpluses, or a significant portion of them, to their own purposes.

This straightforward observation draws real historical bite from the fact that, up to the birth of Christ, substantial food surpluses and other forms of negotiable wealth were in short supply right across Germanic Europe. The place to start unravelling this story is agricultural production. The economy of Germanic Europe – as indeed that of Roman and every other kind of Europe in the first millennium – was fundamentally agricultural. There are, however, more and less productive types of agricultural economy. Archaeological research undertaken since the Second World War has demonstrated that Germanic Europe went through its own agricultural revolution during the four hundred years when the Roman Empire was its closest western and southern neighbour.

At the start of the period, agricultural practice east of the Rhine was generally ‘extensive’: ‘extensive’, that is, as opposed to ‘intensive’. This meant that a relatively large area was required to support a given population unit, because yields were low. It was entirely characteristic of this kind of farming regime that settlements tended to be small, widely dispersed, and to last for no more than a generation or two on any one site. Essentially, the populations of Germanic Europe did not, or did not have to, maintain the fertility of their fields so as to maximize crop production in any given year, or keep the same field in use over anything but the short to medium term. Once yields began to decline below a level that they found acceptable, they would move on to a new area. The evidence underpinning this interpretation comes in many and varied forms.

In large parts of central-northern Europe, the boundaries of the
then widely prevalent ‘Celtic field’ system are still visible in the form of stone walls constructed out of debris cleared from the fields in the course of cultivating them. The fields are extremely large, reflecting the sheer amount of land that was required to keep a single family in business. Known settlement patterns confirm the point. Before 1945, few Germanic settlements belonging to the first two centuries
AD
had been identified; the early Germani were largely studied, in archaeological terms, from their cemeteries. That situation has now been reversed, with the ratio of settlements to cemeteries standing at 7:1 and growing fast, but the reason for the earlier imbalance has also become evident. All of the settlements now known from these early centuries were small and short-lived. Knowing that any settlement had only a limited life expectancy, in no instance did the inhabitants invest much time or effort in their construction. Therefore, the settlements were both large in overall number and were originally difficult to find. The little direct evidence of prevailing agricultural techniques that happens to survive confirms the point. The well-excavated Germanic-period cemetery at Odry in modern Poland, for instance, was established right on top of an old ‘Celtic field’. From underneath one of the excavated barrows emerged evidence of the ploughing and fertilization regimes employed. Both were rudimentary. Ploughing took the form of narrow, criss-crossed scrapings. This means that the soil was not being turned over, and hence that weeds and crop residues were not rotting back into the soil to restore its vital nutrients, particularly nitrogen. The only form of additional fertilization in evidence was some ash. Employing these kinds of techniques, arable fertility could not long be maintained.
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Conclusive evidence that something changed dramatically in Germanic agricultural practice over the course of the Roman period has emerged since the 1950s, starting in the muddy fields of coastal areas of modern Holland and Germany. By this time, when Ejsbøl Mose was being excavated to such good purpose, archaeological interest was turning generally to settlement, and techniques had advanced to such an extent that really useful results could be obtained. The first major excavations of early Germanic settlements focused on the characteristic manmade mounds of these coastal areas – called
terpen
in Dutch and
Wierde
in German – formed by many years of sequential settlement on the same, originally low-lying, site. Over the years rotted refuse, house timbers and other human debris caused the ground level of the settled
area to rise. This made these sites an obvious target for archaeological excavation, but local farmers had also long realized that the mounds were piled high with fertile topsoil, so many had been fully or partially grubbed out before the archaeologists got there.

The most detailed work was done at a site that has become celebrated in the field, if little known outside it: Feddersen Wierde. Careful stratigraphic excavation over the best part of a decade, from 1955 to 1963, allowed the full evolution of the settlement to be established. It began in the middle of the first century
AD
, when five families established themselves there. They comprised a total of maybe fifty people at maximum and practised a mixed agriculture, with much effort put into the rearing of cattle. From the number of animal stalls constructed in the first phase, the five initial families possessed about a hundred cows. But this was only the beginning. The settlement prospered over the next three centuries, reaching its maximum extent in the later third century
AD
, by which time it numbered as many as three hundred inhabitants who, between them, possessed upwards of four hundred and fifty cows. Many detailed studies have been done of myriad aspects of daily life there, but, for our purposes, the key point is the settlement’s size and longevity. What these indirectly reflect is a revolution in agricultural practice. Under the old extensive agricultural regimes of the early Germanic world, this many people living in such close proximity for over three hundred years would have been inconceivable. Production could never have been that intense, nor fertility maintained for so long. Feddersen Wierde was only possible because its population had adopted a much more intensive agricultural regime, which allowed them to maximize the fertility of their fields to a much greater extent, and permitted a much greater concentration of population to thrive over many generations. The full details of the revolution are beyond reconstruction, but it certainly involved using the manure from all the cattle in a more integrated fashion to maintain the fertility of arable fields.
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It would be rash to generalize from this one example, nor is there any reason to suppose that Feddersen Wierde – based on a greater integration of pastoral and arable agriculture – provides the only possible model of Germanic agricultural intensification. A substantial number of other excavations of Roman-period settlements have made it clear, however, that it was by no means an isolated example of rural development. Nearly as famous as Feddersen Wierde is Wijster, also
in north-western Germania. There, originally a single family began to farm in the middle of the first century
BC
. Grubbing-out by modern farmers meant that large parts of this site were too damaged to excavate properly, but by the fourth century the one family farm had grown into an extensive settlement housing between at least fifty and sixty families, who were busy exploiting the easily worked sandy soils overlooking the mouth of the nearby River Drenthe. Other large settlements of the Roman period excavated in this area beyond the Rhine frontier include Hodde, Vorbasse, Ginderup, Mariesminde and Norre Fjand.

Elsewhere, the picture is not so comprehensive, nor is the precise mode of agricultural intensification so well understood, but enough is known to document the fact that Germanic rural development was a general phenomenon of the Roman period. In what is now central Germany, and the eastern and south-eastern reaches of ancient Germania beyond the Carpathians, the evolving settlement pattern is known in much less detail, and there is no reason, of course, why agricultural practice had to have changed everywhere at the same time. Nonetheless, enough big settlements are known from all these regions – Barhorst, fifty kilometres west of Berlin with thirty families, for instance, or, in the far south-east, the many large settlements of the Goth-dominated Cernjachov system of the fourth century – to show that more intensive agricultural regimes had evolved right across Germanic-dominated Europe in the course of the Roman centuries. Some isolated finds of agricultural equipment indicate the same, iron ploughshares and coulters showing that the soil was being more effectively turned over by the fourth century. The greater size and longevity of settlements, combined with all the evidence for more effective ploughing equipment, document a major transformation of agricultural practice in Germanic Europe in the early centuries
AD
, even if its techniques remained considerably less specialized than on the other, Roman side of the frontier.
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Two observations follow. First, the massive increase in food production that this revolution in agricultural production must have generated goes a long way towards explaining how the new military kings could support their retinues. Before it unfolded, it must be doubtful that there was enough surplus food in the undeveloped Germanic agricultural economy to support permanent specialist warriors on the fourth-century scale. Second, and this is a much broader
point, the vast increase in food production also implies that the population of Germanic Europe increased exponentially during the same period. There is no way to put a figure on the increase, but, as the demographers teach us, one of the key limits on the size of any human population is always the availability of food. The Germanic agricultural revolution, with its vast increase in food supplies, meant that the population must have grown accordingly. Demographic expansion also shows up in other evidence. In Germanic cemeteries occupied throughout the Roman period and excavated with due attention to stratigraphy, larger numbers of people are found interred in those areas in use in the third and fourth centuries compared with the preceding two hundred years. Pollen studies, likewise, provide an alternative view of the same development. Over the first four centuries
AD
, the proportion of pollen produced by cereal crops increased at the expense of grass and tree pollen, a further indication of agricultural intensification.
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