Empires and Barbarians (16 page)

In 1967 some gravel-digging in the River Rhine itself, close to the old Roman city of Civitas Nemetum (modern Speyer), led to the discovery of loot from a Roman villa. Careful excavation over the next sixteen years reconstructed the full story. The finds were there because late in the third century some Alamannic raiders had been trying to get their booty back home across the Rhine when their boats were ambushed and sunk by Roman river patrol ships. Called
lusoriae
, the latter were light, oar-driven warships equipped with rams and a well armed crew. An everyday kind of frontier story, except for what the raiders were trying to get home. They had with them an extraordinary seven hundred kilograms’ worth of booty packed into three or four carts which they were rafting across to the east bank of the Rhine. On close inspection, the loot proved to be the entire contents of probably a single Roman villa, and the raiders were interested in every piece of metalwork they could find. The only items missing from the hoard were rich solid silverware and high-value personal jewellery. Either the lord and lady of the house got away before the attack, or else the very
high-value loot was transported separately. In the carts, however, was a vast mound of silver-plate from the dining room, the entire equipment from the kitchen (including 51 cauldrons, 25 bowls and basins and 20 iron ladles), enough agricultural implements – everything from pruning hooks to anvils – to run a substantial farm, some votive objects from the villa’s shrine, and 39 good-quality silver coins.
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The nature of this extraordinary hoard makes clear the depth of the problem facing the Empire in one dimension of frontier relations. We naturally think of barbarian raiders being interested in gold and silver, and plenty of rich plundered objects have turned up over the years from various hoards of the Roman era. But the total range of desirable goods was massively wider. Because the economy of the Germanic world was so much less developed than its Roman counterpart, all of these goods were directly useful to the raiders, or could be sold on to someone else, whether Alamannic farmer or housewife, or even to an Alamannic smith for reworking. This is just about the most vivid illustration of the kind of booty your average raider targeted ever to be unearthed, but historical sources make it clear that banditry, perhaps often on a smaller scale than this amazingly comprehensive house-clearing exercise, was endemic all along Rome’s frontiers.

The fact that the legions’ advance had halted at different moments in the first century, broadly along the line of the Rivers Rhine and Danube, did not mean, therefore, that lands beyond the frontier could be left to their own devices. On the contrary, there was a huge propensity for cross-border raiding, the natural result of two very different levels of economic development sitting side by side. Nor, as has sometimes been argued, did the Empire go suddenly from attack to defence. Frontier security demanded a much more proactive response, and throughout most of its history Rome maintained a general military superiority all along its European frontiers, backed up by aggressive diplomacy. These policies turned its closest neighbours effectively into client states.
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The methods used remained pretty constant throughout the life of the Empire, and had profound effects upon patterns of sociopolitical development within the Germanic world. For an excellent case study from the fourth century, we can turn to Ammianus’ account of the response of the Emperor Constantius II to trouble on the Middle Danube in the years 358/9. Constantius’ first step, like every emperor before him, was to establish military superiority. Starting just after the
spring equinox, when the opposition thought they were still safe, he threw a pontoon bridge over the Danube and came upon the Sarmatians unexpectedly. The results were nasty:

The greater number, since fear clogged their steps, were cut down; if speed saved any from death, they hid in the obscure mountain gorges and saw their country perishing by the sword.

In the following weeks, the campaign was quickly extended to the neighbouring Quadi and all the other frontier groups of the region. The Emperor then used this military superiority to dictate what he hoped would be a lasting diplomatic settlement. One by one, the groups and their leaders came, or were forced to come, to hear the Emperor’s judgement.

Not all groups were treated in the same way. To some Constantius =showed favour. One prince of the Sarmatians, Zizais, had mastered the script:

On seeing the emperor, he threw aside his weapons and fell flat on his breast as if lying lifeless. And since the use of his voice failed him from fear at the very time when he should have made his plea, he excited all the greater compassion; but, after several attempts, interrupted by sobbing, he was able to set forth only a little of what he tried to ask.

Barbarians were expected to show subservience to the divinely ordained might of Rome, as Zizais was perfectly well aware, and as the iconography of barbarians on Roman coins and monuments emphasized. Barbarians were always presented lying down in submission at the bottom of any pictorial scene, often literally under an emperor’s feet (Plate 7). The Sarmatian’s approach may well have been calculated, therefore, and it produced the desired result. Constantius decided to restore the political independence of Zizais’ followers, who had been held as junior partners in an unequal coalition, and raised the prince himself to the status of independent king. Rearranging the political alliance systems currently in operation on this part of the frontier after the fashion that best suited Rome’s interests was, in fact, was one of Constantius’ chief preoccupations. This meant breaking up over-large and therefore – from a Roman perspective – potentially dangerous alliances. Where Zizais gained, others lost. Araharius, a king of the Quadi, was denuded, despite his protests, of the services of his
Sarmatian underking Usafer, who, like Zizais, was restored to independence. Sometimes the interference could be much more violent. Another tactic, which occurs three times in the twenty-four years covered by Ammianus’ narrative, was to invite potentially problematic frontier dynasts to dinner and then either murder or kidnap them.
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Aside from political restructuring, various other measures were enacted: securing economic returns for the Empire on the military effort it had just expended, combined with strictures to enforce the new settlement once the legions had withdrawn. Some measures were standard, such as extracting drafts of young men from the groups submitting to him to serve as military recruits. This, as we have seen, was one of several ways in which young Germani had entered Roman armies throughout the Empire’s existence. Hostages were also extracted from each of group, usually young men of high status. They were not treated as prisoners, exactly, once on Roman soil, but were sometimes executed when agreements broke down. Any Roman captives were also returned to imperial soil. In other respects, the details of agreements differed. According to the amount of blame the emperor decided to allocate to any particular group for the original trouble, it might have to supply labour, raw materials and food; or it might, on the other hand, be granted privileged trading status. Diplomatic subsidies were, in addition, a standard feature of Rome’s diplomatic armoury. In the past, some historians have doubted this, supposing payments to barbarian leaders to be a sign of Rome’s military weakness in the late period. This is mistaken. We would call such subsidies ‘foreign aid’, and they were utilized throughout Rome’s history, even after major Roman victories. After he crushed the Alamanni at Strasbourg, for instance, Julian granted the defeated kings annual subsidies. The reason is simple. Subsidies helped keep in power the kings with whom Rome had just made its agreements. As such, they were an excellent investment.
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Apart from all this diplomatic detail, one further preoccupation emerges from Constantius’ intervention. The Empire did not want the immediate hinterland of its frontier to become too crowded, for two reasons. First, this would mean that there were too many groups with an opportunity to raid Roman territory. Second, as the establishment and reorganization of all the over- and underkingships shows, frontier groups were always in political competition with one another, and their jockeying for position stood more chance of spilling over into
violence on Roman soil when there were more groups playing the game. In this instance, Constantius and his advisers eventually decided that a key part of the new settlement was to make one group of Sarmatians, the Limigantes (again, a coalition), move away from the immediate frontier zone. This was not something the Limigantes wished to do, so further military intimidation was required and duly delivered. After two of their subgroups, the Amicenses and Picenses, had been brutalized, the rest surrendered and agreed to depart. The region seemed set for peace – but not quite yet. A year later, in 359, some of the Limigantes returned, saying that they would prefer to move into the Empire itself, as tax-paying tributaries, rather than continue to occupy their assigned lands so far from the frontier.

What happened next is rather mysterious. Ammianus blames it all on the Limigantes’ bad faith, but then he would. An agreement in principle seems to have been reached. The Sarmatians were to be allowed across the river and to enter the imperial presence, Constantius having returned to the region with his army. Then, at the crucial moment, something went wrong. Instead of surrendering, the Sarmatians attacked the Emperor, or so Ammianus says, and the Romans responded:

So eagerly did our forces rush forth in their desire to . . . vent their wrath on the treacherous foe, that they butchered everything in their way, trampling under foot without mercy the living, as well as those dying or dead; and before their hands were sated with slaughter of the savages, the dead lay piled in heaps.

Perhaps the Limigantes did act in bad faith, or Constantius maybe wanted to put down a clear marker that his orders had to be obeyed – or, just as likely, the tragedy resulted from mistrust and confusion. But throughout its history, the Empire did on occasions use the acquisition of outside population groups as one technique for managing the frontier. While the consequent gain to the Empire in terms of taxpayers and potential soldiers was part of the calculation, so too was a concern to prevent potentially dangerous overcrowding.
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This portfolio of methods was applied very generally. Occasional major military interventions made it possible to construct region-wide diplomatic settlements, which broke up dangerous coalitions, identified and rewarded friends and punished enemies, while a mixture of stick and carrot – the fear engendered by punishing campaigns and
hostage-taking combined with targeted foreign aid and trading privileges – was used to make sure that the new settlement held beyond the short term. The methods were effective, but not, of course, perfect. From a Roman perspective, their success can be measured in terms of the life expectancy of the settlements. By my reckoning, the average fourth-century diplomatic settlement on the Rhine and Danube frontiers lasted about twenty to twenty-five years – one generation, in other words – per major military intervention. This was probably a fair return on the amount of force expended, and about as much as could reasonably be expected. It is important to understand, however, that the whole system was sustained by occasional but decisive Roman campaigning. The frontier groups were part of a Roman world system, but terms and conditions were not arrived at by free, mutual agreement. Rome consistently used military force to maintain its preponderance.

The methods of Roman diplomacy are fascinating in themselves and have their own scholarly literature. They also advanced the transformation of Germanic society. To understand why this was so, we must again reckon with populations on the far side of the Roman frontier as active agents in the story. Roman diplomacy certainly had some important direct effects, but that is not the whole story. Groups and individuals within Germania responded in a variety of ways to the stimuli applied by the totality of Roman foreign policy over four centuries, and this response is just as important as the original imperial interference.

The transformative potential of one aspect of Roman diplomacy has received due attention over the years: annual subsidies. These could take the form not just of cash or bullion, but also of highly valued Roman commodities, such as intricate jewellery or richly woven cloths. In the Byzantine era, foodstuffs unavailable in the target economy were sometimes used, and this may have been the case in earlier eras. The point of the subsidies, as we have seen, was to reinforce the power of a reasonably compliant frontier king, so that he would have a real stake in maintaining peace on the frontier. Subsidies tended to strengthen existing monarchies. But it is important to realize that, like the amber or slave trades, diplomatic subsidies represented a major flow of new wealth into the Germanic world, and, as was also the case with the profits of trade, the appearance of new wealth
sparked off competition among potential recipients. Losing their subsidy may have been one element in the Limigantes’ unwillingness to be resettled further away from the frontier, an extra downside in being demoted (in Rome’s eyes) from overkingdom to underkingdom status. Certainly, any diminution in the size or quality of the annual gifts could cause crisis, as it did when Valentinian unilaterally reduced those of the Alamanni in 364, and we have specific examples of groups moving into the frontier region precisely to overwhelm the current recipients of any subsidies and receive them in their place. Competition for the control of the flow of subsidies thus multiplied its transformative effect, and meant that Rome was sometimes left awarding gifts to the victors in struggles beyond its capacity to control.
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But subsidies were only part of an overall Roman diplomatic strategy whose other aspects also had powerful effects. Take, for instance, the periodic military interventions, which seem to have averaged out in the fourth century at about one substantial campaign per generation in each sector of the frontier. These interventions classically took the form of burning down everything you could find until the local kings came into the imperial presence to make their submission, when all the diplomatic manoeuvring and subsidy reallocation would begin. The economic effects of these burnt-earth interventions are worth careful consideration. We have no precise information from the fourth century, of course, but an interesting analogy is provided by medieval estate records from areas subject to similar levels of terrorism. Those of the Archbishop of York’s lands, subject to cross-border raiding from Scotland in the fourteenth century, for instance, show that it took revenues – a decent proxy for ‘output’ – a full generation to recover. This was because raiders, alongside grabbing moveable goods that might be easily replaced, also targeted the capital items of agriculture such as ploughing animals (approximating, in the medieval context, to tractors), which were very expensive, not to mention housing and other major items. The costs of replacing all this meant that revenues were reduced for twenty or more years.