Empires and Barbarians (11 page)

This major increase in agricultural output not only explains how retinues were fed, but must also have been one basic source of the new wealth in Germanic society of this period, visible most obviously in the form of the retinues’ expensive military equipment. Food surpluses could be exchanged for other desirable items. But while perhaps of central importance, agriculture was not the only source of new wealth. Evidence has emerged in recent years to show that, over the first four centuries, the overall economic wealth of Germanic Europe was being increased dramatically by a marked diversification of production and an associated increase in the exchange of a whole series of other goods besides food.

The evidence for both metal production and its subsequent working is highly suggestive of a similar pattern of expansion in that sector of the economy. In particular, two major centres of production in the territory of modern Poland – in the
Mountains and in southern Mazovia – are between them estimated to have produced upwards of 8,000,000 kilograms of raw iron in the Roman period, with exploitation increasing dramatically in the later centuries. For metal-working, the evidence is more fragmentary, but equally suggestive. When they were first excavated, it was thought that the sixty swords from Ejsbøl Mose represented the greatest find of Roman swords ever discovered in one cache. More detailed analysis has shown, however, that, though based on Roman models, the swords were actually copies
forged in Germanic Europe. By c.300
AD
, therefore, at least one centre was turning out standardized military equipment on a reasonably large scale, whereas the Germanic swords known from earlier eras were all individual products.
¹⁸

Evidence for the working of precious metals is equally striking. A hoard of exquisite gold and silver vessels was found at Pietroasa in Romania in the later nineteenth century. Much of it dates to the fifth century, but at least one of the silver dishes was produced in the fourth century and outside the Roman Empire, in Germanic Europe. Moulds for making these kinds of item have been discovered in fourth-century Germanic contexts, and the general level of personal adornments made from precious metals increases over the Roman period. By the fourth century, intricately worked silver
fibulae
– safety-pins – by which the Germani customarily fastened their clothes, had become reasonably common, and the remains of workshops for producing them have been found at at least one royal seat among the Alamanni. In the first two centuries
AD
,
fibulae
had usually been made of bronze or iron. From the mid-third century, Germanic pottery began to change its modes of production. In the third and fourth centuries, Germanic potters for the first time – if not everywhere, and not at the same moment – started to use the wheel to form their wares. This development was combined with much improved kiln technology, allowing the pots to be fired at far higher temperatures, and led to a considerably higher quality of pottery becoming widely available across Germanic Europe. Switching to wheel-made pottery not only generates a higher-quality product but is closely associated with larger-scale, more commercial production. In some areas the transformation was total. In the Goth-dominated Cernjachov world north of the Black Sea in the fourth century, wheel-made tablewares, largely indistinguishable from their provincial Roman counterparts, became the norm (although cooking pots were still made by hand). Among the contemporary Alamanni, by contrast, several local experiments in wheel-made wares never managed to achieve either longevity or widespread distribution – in face, perhaps, of stiffer and nearer Roman competition than their Gothic counterparts. But before the late Roman era, all high-quality wheel-made wares found in Germanic contexts were, without exception, Roman imports, so even this much economic development represents a major transformation.
¹⁹

Metalworking and pottery production are obviously major areas of
the non-agricultural economy, producing both more expensive and cheaper, more widely consumed items. Increasingly professional production methods are visible in other sectors of the later Germanic economy as well, some of them again entirely new. One of the most dramatic is glass production. Before the fourth century, all the glass found in non-Roman Europe was Roman, imported across the frontier. But sometime after 300
AD
, a glass production centre opened at Komarov in the hinterland of the Carpathians. Its products came to be distributed widely across central and eastern Europe (
Map 3
). The various contexts in which the glass has been found indicate that it was an elite item, often used as a mark of status. Though hardly a major employer, its production would certainly have represented a highly valuable addition to someone’s economy. An equally fascinating, though entirely different, example has turned up in an excavated village within the lands dominated by Goths in the fourth century. At Birlad-Valea Seaca in modern Romania, investigators found no less than sixteen huts devoted to the production of one item characteristically found in graves of this period: combs constructed from deer antler. Hairstyles were used by some Germanic groups to express political affiliations, and also to express status. The most famous example is the so-called Suebic knot described by Tacitus and beautifully preserved on one early Germanic skull (Plate 4). In this context, it is hardly surprising that combs were a significant personal possession. Within the huts, parts of combs in every stage of production were discovered, shedding light on the whole process. In this case, it would seem, an entire settlement was devoted to the production of one key item.
²⁰

Not only agricultural production, then, but other areas of the economy of Germanic Europe had begun to blossom – in relative terms – by the late Roman period. Right across the region, the early centuries
AD
witnessed an explosion of development and wealth generation. And like globalization now, at least as important a historical phenomenon as the new wealth itself was the much less comfortable fact that it was not being shared remotely equally. Development in the Germanic world generated clear winners but also clear losers, and it is at this point that military kings, their retainers, and economic development converge still more closely. Many of the items being produced, not just the food, were being consumed by the new military kings and their armed retinues. The iron was necessary for steel weaponry, obviously,
but some at least of the glass, precious metal objects and even the higher-quality pottery was aimed in their direction. All of these items have turned up in burials, which careful analysis can show to have belonged to the Germanic social elite of the late Roman period.
²¹
Just how big a social and political revolution had been set in motion?

Romantic nineteenth-century conceptions of early Germanic society, framed at the height of nationalist fervour, propounded the notion of early German
Freiheit
, ‘freedom’: the idea that Germania before the birth of Christ was a world of free and equal noble savages, with no intermediate nobility but with kings who were directly answerable to assemblies of freemen. This was mistaken. Even in the time of Tacitus, Germanic societies had slaves, though the slaves ran their own farms and handed over part of the produce rather than living under closer domination as unfree labour on someone else’s estate. And although the material remains of the Germanic world in the last few centuries
BC
show no obvious distinctions of status, this does not mean that there weren’t any. Even in a materially simple culture – and in the third century
BC
about the greatest sign of social distinction available among the Germani of north-central Europe was to keep your clothes on with a slightly fancier safety-pin – differences of status can still make a huge difference to quality of life. If higher status translated merely into eating more, doing less hard manual labour and having a better chance of passing on your genes successfully, it was nonetheless extremely real, even if it could not be expressed in the possession of much in the way of fancy material goods. I doubt very much, in fact, that the status distinctions we find in Tacitus were new to the Germanic world of the first century
AD
, even if they can’t be measured easily in archaeologically visible material items over the preceding centuries.
²²

That said, the evidence is entirely compelling that pre-existing inequalities grew dramatically during the Roman period. We have met some of this already. The new military kings and their retinues, those
at least who prospered, were one set of beneficiaries from the new wealth. Archaeologically, their rise is reflected in two ways: burial practice and settlement remains. There is no simple correlation between wealth of gravegoods and status in life. Really rich graves (called
Fürstengräber
, ‘princely burials’, in the germanophone literature) cluster chronologically with, broadly speaking, one group at the end of the first century and another at the end of the third: the so-called Lübsow and Leuna Hassleben types respectively. It is not credible, though, that a dominant social elite existed only at these limited moments, and it has been suggested that their appearance may mark periods of social stress, when new claims to high status were being made – claims by the individuals running the funeral, of course, rather than the dead persons themselves. Nonetheless, over the long term, changing burial practices certainly reflect the impact of new wealth. Before the last few centuries
BC
, Germanic funerary rites seem to have been pretty much identical for all, a little handmade pottery and the occasional personal item being all that the cremation burials of the period characteristically contained. In the Roman period, by contrast, not only are there the clusters of extremely rich princely burials, but also a substantial minority of the other burials started to contain increasing numbers of gravegoods, often including weapons with males and jewellery with women. Monumentalizing graves was another strategy for claiming status in some parts of Germanic Europe, particularly Poland, where groups of burials were marked out as special by piling up stones to create barrows, and individual graves by erecting standing stones (
stelae
). The Wielbark cemetery at Odry, for instance, turned up five hundred flat burials and twenty-nine barrows.
²³

Settlement archaeology, too, generally reflects the kinds of change under way. At the top end of society, the elite dwellings inhabited by the kings and princes of the Alamanni have been quite extensively investigated. One of the best-known is the Runder Berg at Urach, within the territory of the Alamanni. Here in the late third or early fourth century a hill-top area, with maximum dimensions of 70 metres by 50, was surrounded by a stout timber rampart. Inside were a number of timber buildings, including what looks suspiciously like a substantial hall for feasting retainers and/or fellow kings. The lower slopes housed other buildings, including workshops for craftsmen and possibly dwellings for other servants, and the site as a whole has produced higher concentrations of imported Roman pottery and other
elite items than the more run-of-the-mill rural sites. No large dwellings dating to the pre-Roman period have ever been thrown up within the bounds of Germania, but in the early centuries
AD
they started to become reasonably common. At a lower level of grandeur, at Feddersen Wierde again, one particular house within the village was marked out from all the others in the early second century. It was substantially larger and surrounded by a wooden palisade. The excavators interpreted it as the dwelling of a local headman. Similar examples of particularly large dwellings are known from a number of other sites as well, such as Haldern near Wesel and Kablow, thirty kilometres southeast of Berlin; all date to the Roman period. Within the particularly well-studied territories of the Alamanni, no less than sixty-two elite dwellings of one kind or another, dating to the fourth and fifth centuries, have been identified, of which ten have been excavated; and other similar sites, though less thoroughly studied, have turned up right across Germanic Europe, even as far east as the Gothic-dominated territories north of the Black Sea.
²⁴

The general picture, then, is clear enough. Settlements and grave-goods show up an increasing social inequality, and it doesn’t take much thought to see how possession of military might allowed kings and, through them, their retainers to gain privileged access to a more than equal share of the new wealth. By the fourth century, as a direct result, we are faced with a Germanic world that was marked by more social stratification than its first-century counterpart and, in some places at least, greater structural stability in its political organization. It is, in fact, entirely natural that these two phenomena should have gone together. Class definition and state formation have long proved inseparable bedfellows when patterns in the evolution of human social organization have been subjected to comparative study. But how far-reaching had this inequality become by the fourth century, and how should we understand the new political entities that dominated the landscape? Were they ‘states’ in any meaningful sense of the word?