Empires and Barbarians (15 page)

Overall, an excellent case can be made that the new opportunities for trading with the much wealthier Roman Empire, which suddenly opened up around the birth of Christ with the expansion of Rome’s European frontiers northwards, played a major role in stimulating the evident economic development of Germania in the early centuries
AD
.
According to Caesar in the mid-first century
BC
, the Germani of his day had little interest in trading with Roman merchants, and only allowed them into their territories at all in the hope that they could sell them captured war booty. If that had really been the case in the middle of the first century
BC
, the situation evolved rapidly. By the end of the first century
AD
, trade was so common across the Rhine frontier that Roman silver
denarii
were being used as a medium of exchange by the Germanic tribes on the east side of the river. It is likely enough, indeed, that much of the silver found in Germania in Roman times – in the form, for instance, of intricate
fibulae
– represents the reworking of metal from such coins, many of which remained in circulation right down to the fourth century. And while (for reasons we will return to in a moment) it is not the case that every frontier grouping was trading so heavily with the Empire as to be using Roman coins, this certainly happened periodically, throughout the Empire’s existence. As a phenomenon, it shows up in the presence of relatively dense concentrations of low-value Roman coins from particular periods in areas fairly close to the frontier, such as those of the fourth century found along some of the old Roman roads east of the Rhine which still existed in the
Agri Decumates
– a triangle of territory between the Upper Rhine and Upper Danube – then under Alamannic control; or, further east along the Danube, within regions bordering the Roman province of Moesia Superior.
⁵²

Equally striking is the fact that throughout the Roman period the Empire’s immediate neighbours were interested in obtaining trading privileges with the imperial merchants, privileges which Rome usually kept under tight control. Even when the fourth-century Gothic Tervingi wanted to sever most of their ties with the Empire, it was part of the resulting agreement that two designated trade centres continued to operate. A huge amount of archaeological evidence confirms the impression given by the literary sources. Roman goods of all kinds have been found in large quantities in most of the major excavations conducted on Germanic sites from the first four centuries
AD
.

There are distinct chronological and geographical patterns to the finds. The first two centuries
AD
, for instance, saw a huge explosion in the quantity of Roman goods present within Germania in many areas of the immediate frontier zone, up to about a hundred kilometres from the defended line, both on settlement sites and deposited in graves. Fine pottery (
terra sigillata
), bronze ornaments and glass have
all been unearthed in substantial amounts, alongside the Roman coins we have already mentioned. In the first- and second-century levels of the site of Westrich, for instance, which is far from untypical, Roman manufactures account for about a third each of the excavated pottery and metalwork. But while common in some places, this pattern does not apply to the regions of the northern Rhine frontier, between the Rhine and the Weser, where Roman materials of this date are much less plentiful. Moving beyond the immediate frontier zone to the area up to the River Elbe, the pattern is again slightly different. Here Roman goods are present in large quantities, but they tend to concentrate in particular areas. The region of the River Saale in modern Thuringia, for instance, has produced one striking concentration. Others have been identified around the tributaries of the Upper Elbe in Bohemia (heartland of the Czech Republic), and south of the Lower Elbe and the Middle and Lower Weser (both in Lower Saxony). The other identified concentration is along the North Sea coast. Moving still further away from the frontier, Roman goods are present only in smaller quantities, but there are still a few identifiable concentrations such as Jakuszowice in southern Poland, the Gudme/Lundeburg complex in Scandinavia, and in eastern Denmark.
⁵³
In general terms, there is more than enough material to show that the Germanic economy was mobilized in the early centuries
AD
in part to pay for large quantities of attractive Roman imports. But how are we to explain these concentrations?

Part of the answer lies in logistics. The fact that a wagon of wheat doubled in price for every fifty Roman miles travelled emphasizes how difficult and expensive land transport was in pre-modern times. Hence relatively low-value items – such as pottery, bronze and glass – were only ever likely to move comparatively short distances unless water transport or some other mitigating factor intervened. The fact that even spreads of Roman goods have been unearthed only within the immediate frontier zone, then, is not surprising. Transport may also explain some more particular phenomena. The possibility of water shipment probably allowed relatively distant places like Feddersen Wierde to be involved in supplying the Roman army of the frontier, and as the coin distributions suggest, the old Roman road networks of the Agri Decumates perhaps still facilitated trade in the fourth century, even after the area had fallen under Alamannic control. Logistics, however, will not explain everything.

A second line of explanation requires us to look more closely at the mechanics of trade in the Germanic world, and the role played in Germanic society by the Roman goods received in return. If Caesar is to be believed, there was originally some Germanic resistance to trade with the Empire. But this was quickly and entirely overcome to a point where possession of Roman goods came to be associated with high social status. Analyses of the types of goods found together in richer burials have demonstrated a powerful correlation from the late first century
AD
between the presence of large numbers of everyday items of local manufacture, clearly expensive items of local manufacture (such as weapons and jewellery), and Roman imports. Thus Roman imports quickly came to be part and parcel of demonstrating social pre-eminence. Again, this is not surprising. Roman imports were exotic and had to be paid for by giving something in return to a Roman merchant. They were bound, therefore, to possess a certain cachet. It is also a further dimension of the phenomenon we have already observed. As in modern globalization, the benefits of ancient Germanic economic development were not enjoyed evenly, but concentrated in the hands of kings and their retainers; so, as one might expect, more Roman imports ended up in their hands.

This point is worth dwelling on, because while it might again seem entirely natural from a modern perspective, it is also telling us something important about how the new exchange networks operated. As soon as you stop to think about it, such an outcome can only be reflecting the fact that kings and their entourage were organizing the profits accruing from economic development for their own benefit. On one level, possession of military muscle enabled kings to exact a percentage of the new agricultural surplus now being generated. They could then use this not only to feed their retinues but also to trade on to the Roman world, getting precious metal coins, or wine and olive oil, or whatever else they desired, in return.

But military muscle was also crucial to securing the lion’s share of the profits from some of the other new trade flows. Think about the slave trade. Slaves do not volunteer. Someone was rounding them up in Germanic society to sell them on to the Roman traders, and this will not have been a peaceful process. This line of thought also suggests, incidentally, a further possible context for the massacred retinue unearthed at Ejsbøl Mose. If they were a slave-trading outfit, you can quite see why such methodical fury was vented upon them.
And even the amber trade was no gentle process of wandering along the Baltic shore picking up whatever had washed up overnight. One of the most startling finds to emerge from northern Poland in recent years has been a series of wooden causeways, many kilometres long, establishing a network of routes across boggy territory near the Baltic Sea. Carbon-14 and dendrochronology have established that these were laid down around the birth of Christ and then maintained for the best part of two hundred years. They have been interpreted, surely correctly, as servicing the northern end of the Amber Route. But all this took a huge effort. In other words, it must have been enormously worth someone’s while to go to this much trouble. In return for their effort, they were clearly receiving a substantial cut of the profits from the trade, presumably in the forms of tolls of one kind or another. Interestingly, ‘toll’ in Germanic languages is another loan word from Latin, suggesting that the concept did not exist among the Germani before the Empire became their immediate neighbour. And, of course, where taking this kind of percentage from a trade flow was so obviously profitable, others would have been interested in a share of the action. Here again, military strength counted. You could employ it to force those of lesser status to do the physical work of building and maintaining the causeways, and also to prevent any other armed group from taking over what was clearly such a nice little earner.
⁵⁴

Contrary to the bland neo-classical platitudes of 1980s-style trickle-down theories, economic development is not always or not straightforwardly, at least, a good thing. Increasing wealth in Germanic society during the Roman period set off major and in some cases seriously violent struggles for its disproportionate control. In some developing areas of the economy, the adverse effects were perhaps not so bad. It is notoriously hard to tax agricultural production, and higher outputs were anyway dependent upon having plenty of labour available, at least for arable agriculture, so that the demands of kings and their warbands, some of whom may anyway have been recruited from the wealthier farmers, perhaps did not impinge too heavily. Other aspects of economic development, however, were much nastier for those caught up on the wrong side: slaves obviously, but I wonder too about iron-mining since, in the Roman world at least, being condemned to the mines was a form of capital punishment. And even at the top end of society, the struggle to control the new wealth could have serious consequences. Ejsbøl Mose is one of over thirty weapons deposits
known from the bogs of northern Europe, most of which were laid down between 200 and 400
AD
– explicit testimony to the level of violence set loose in the Germanic world for control of all this burgeoning wealth. Moreover, there is no reason to suppose that these struggles were limited to just those areas that happened to have convenient bogs and lakes available for disposing of the defeated. Tacitus refers to a first-century votive ritual which involved hanging the dead and their weaponry from trees. Weapons deposits of this kind would not survive to be excavated by archaeologists, and I am inclined to think that accident of survival is the reason for the direct evidence of violent competition being confined to areas around the North Sea, rather than that the proximity of water made the Germani of this area particularly quarrelsome.
⁵⁵

It is not a new idea to discuss trade with the Roman Empire when trying to understand the transformation of Germanic society in the early centuries
AD
. But, as has reasonably been pointed out, trade on its own never looked like a powerful enough explanatory mechanism, since large quantities of Roman goods have not turned up everywhere. The case for the importance of such trade becomes much more convincing, however, when you factor in not just the new wealth flows themselves, but the consequent struggles for their control. It was this knock-on effect, rather than the mere existence of the new wealth, that had the really transformative effect. Various groups within the Germanic world responded dynamically to the fact that the new wealth existed by seizing control of its profits, and, in doing so, helped remake the sociopolitical structures of the world around them.

This extra dimension of argument belongs alongside those which in the area of post-colonial studies have attracted the general label ‘agency’. The point here is that earlier analyses (‘colonial’ rather than ‘post-colonial’ ones, as it were) tended to explore the effects that more developed societies have upon less developed ones in too passive a fashion. The fundamental point of ‘agency’ (although much ink has been spilled over more precise definitions) is to stress that indigenous groups respond to outside stimuli by taking hold of certain possibilities (and not others) for their own reasons and according to their own priorities. In this instance, we see exposure to the economic opportunities presented by contact with Rome taking a number of forms, and being seized on in different ways by different groups. Some learned to expand agricultural production, some exported iron or
amber, and still others set up slave-trading operations. Not only did the consequent increase in inequality provide the economic basis for larger political confederations by the fourth century, but this is also reflected in the patchy distribution of Roman goods observable in the archaeological record. The particular concentrations of goods in the intermediate zone up to the Elbe were presumably created by Germanic groups able to dominate some specific new flow of wealth out of the Roman Empire, which they used to pay for the items found by archaeologists. The beneficiaries of the slave trade of the ninth and tenth centuries, for instance, are certainly visible archaeologically through the fruits of their trade, as well as being identified in the historical texts (not true of the Roman era), so it is not unreasonable to apply the same principle to the Germani around the Roman Empire.
⁵⁶
But even adding in a dynamic indigenous response to the existence of the new wealth flows doesn’t come close, in my view, to establishing the full extent of Rome’s role in the transformation of the Germanic world. For that, we also need to explore how the Empire set about maintaining long-term stability along its frontiers.