Empires and Barbarians (32 page)

In 1995, having identified the Middle Danubian origins of most of the barbarian groups caught up in the crisis of 405–8 and established that Huns are first found there in large numbers soon afterwards, I argued that the collapse of Rome’s central European frontiers was best understood as as a rerun of 376, as it were, this time played out west rather than east of the Carpathians. Similarities in the nature of the migration units and the precise chronology of the Huns’ advance into Europe suggested to me that the crisis of 405–8 was caused by a number of Rome’s other barbarian neighbours having decided that they would prefer to take their chances in the Roman Empire rather than face the uncertainties of dealing with the Huns, echoing the choice made by the Gothic Tervingi and Greuthungi in 376. In other words, the crisis had fundamentally non-Roman origins and was caused by developments in Barbaricum.
⁴²

Two recent studies have taken an alternative approach, locating the key causes of the crisis inside the Roman world, in a combination of evolving Roman policies towards outsiders and the politically dislocating effects of the division of the Empire into eastern and western halves. In his
Barbarian Tides
, Walter Goffart considers it possible that Constantinople may have encouraged Radagaisus’ invasion of Italy so as to distract Stilicho from his immediate ambition to take back from the eastern Empire control of parts of the Balkans (Roman east Illyricum) which had traditionally belonged to the west but were currently being ruled by the east. More generally, however, he argues that changes to barbarian perceptions of Roman policy and to the actual power of the Roman state, rather than the Huns, were the prime cause of the crisis. On the one hand, the continued authorized survival on Roman soil of the Goths who crossed the Danube in 376 as semi-autonomous political communities decisively increased the range of ambitions at play in Barbaricum. It raised the prospect for other frontier groups that they might enter economically more developed imperial territory without having to give up their
group identity and cohesion. They were encouraged in this idea, the argument continues, because, at the same time, the west was – or was perceived to be – growing weaker. Both the actual and perceived weakness stemmed from the fact that, after the death of the Emperor Theodosius I in 395, a real separation grew up between the two halves of the Empire, ruled by different advisers in the names of Theodosius’ two minor sons, Arcadius in the east and Honorius in the west (ruled by Stilicho). This offered outside groups the prospect of being able to exploit imperial disunity to increase their chances of prosperity and survival on Roman soil.
⁴³

A related line of argument has been put forward by Guy Halsall, who contends that two usurping western emperors of the late fourth century, Magnus Maximus (383–7) and Eugenius (392–4), stripped the north-western Rhine frontier of Roman troops so as to deploy them for their – ultimately failed – civil wars with the eastern Emperor Theodosius. Western troop losses in these conflicts were heavy, especially at the battle of the Frigidus in 394, and after 395 when he was in effective control of the west, the generalissimo Stilicho did little to restore the situation north of the Roman Alps because he was much more interested in pursuing his quarrels with rivals in Constantinople for control of the entire Empire. By the early fifth century, therefore, defence on the Rhine was largely dependent upon the goodwill of local barbarian client kings; and this was only one aspect of a more general withdrawal of Roman state control which also manifested itself in the closing of the Trier mint after the fall of Eugenius in 394, and the transfer of the capital of the Gallic prefecture from Trier south to Arles. For Halsall, this withdrawal had a further effect of particular relevance to the crisis of 405–8. Coin flows to some sites in the Roman north-west were disrupted from the time of Eugenius onwards, and Halsall suggests that this extended into a decline or even interruption in the normal diplomatic payments that had been flowing across the frontier to the Empire’s semi-subdued clients for centuries. With their own political power structures thus threatened, these leaders instead moved their followers directly into Roman territory from 405 onwards, to seize the wealth that they needed to keep themselves in power. For both Goffart and Halsall, developments within the Empire thus prompted the Middle Danubian barbarians to move on to Roman soil, and the Huns then moved into the power vacuum they left behind.
⁴⁴

Some of the factors identified in these arguments certainly had a
major influence on how the crisis played itself out. There is a distinct strand of evidence that the advantageous terms granted to the Tervingi and Greuthungi in 382 were responsible for changing perceptions of what kind of deal it might be possible to negotiate from the Roman state. In the late 390s, the revolt in Asia Minor of some allied Gothic troops under a leader called Tribigild seems to have drawn initially upon resentments of other barbarians in Roman employ that they had not been granted such good terms. Synesius of Cyrene was already claiming in 399, likewise, that the treaty of 382 (specifically as modified in further negotiations between Alaric and Eutropius in 397) had led at least one other group of outsiders to ask for admission into the Empire on similar terms.
⁴⁵
Divisions between the eastern and western halves of the Empire hindered any coordinated Roman response. From autumn 405, Stilicho, effective ruler of the west, was, as we have seen, in dispute with Constantinople over the control of Illyricum, even threatening war over the issue. In these circumstances, there was no prospect of any eastern assistance for the west as its central European frontier began to collapse – not, at least, until after Stilicho fell from power in the summer of 408. Some military and financial assistance then followed, but by this stage the barbarians were well established on west Roman soil.
⁴⁶

But there is no evidence, in fact, that Constantinople encouraged Radagaisus’ attack on Italy, and divisions between east and west Rome help explain only the subsequent course of the crisis, specifically why no eastern assistance was forthcoming until 409, not why the barbarians crossed the frontier in the first place. Nor do the changing perceptions of the barbarians provide sufficient explanation. The Vandals, Alans and Sueves still crossed the Rhine on 31 December 406, despite the disasters that had befallen Radagaisus’ force the previous summer. It took a while, but Stilicho had eventually put together a Roman army large enough to confront Radagaisus, and the result was a total Roman victory. As we saw, Radagaisus himself was captured and executed, large numbers (reportedly twelve thousand) of the higher-status warriors were recruited as auxiliaries into the Roman army, and so many of their lesser and less fortunate peers were sold into slavery that the bottom fell out of the slave market.
⁴⁷
Quite clearly, then, no deal analogous to that offered the Goths in 382 was on the table in the Roman west in the first decade of the fifth century. The fact that the Vandals, Alans and Sueves decided nonetheless to
cross the Rhine suggests that some other factor was also at play in their thinking.

Whatever else it was, I’m pretty confident that Halsall’s proposed Roman withdrawal from the north-west does not provide the answer. For one thing, the evidence that there really was such an evacuation is not compelling, being largely an argument from silence. Many commentators date the transfer of the Gallic prefecture to Arles after 405, seeing it not as cause but as consequence of the Rhine invasion.
⁴⁸
Furthermore, there were enough Roman troops left in the north-west for yet another western usurper, Constantine III, to launch a putsch which took him from Britain in early 406 to the Alps and the brink of total rule of the west in 409. It was also the wrong barbarians who invaded, if interrupted diplomatic subsidies really had anything much to do with it (and we don’t actually know that the subsidies
were
interrupted: this too is an argument from silence). Roman diplomatic payments, as we know, went above all to the major barbarian groupings right on the frontier: namely, working our way round the frontiers of the western Empire – Franks, Alamanni, Marcomanni, Quadi and Sarmatians. The invasions of 405–8 did not for the most part draw on these frontier barbarians. The Sueves of the Rhine coalition probably fell into this category – if they really were Marcomanni and Quadi by another name – but all the others were either from the east, far beyond the western Empire’s diplomatic network (Radagaisus’ Goths and the Alans of the Rhine coalition), or from the regions behind the main frontier clientele (Burgundians and both groups of Vandals). Interrupted subsidy payments should have affected Franks and Alamanni most of all, but these groups conspicuously stayed put.
⁴⁹

This argument could be taken further, but there is yet another decisive problem in supposing a withdrawal of Roman power from the north-west to have triggered the frontier collapse of 405–8. The first of the invasions, the attack of Radagaisus (405/6), didn’t actually affect the north-west. It powered its way across the Alps into northern Italy, where it is not possible to argue there had been any reduction of central imperial power. In fact, any troop withdrawals from the northwest would only have strengthened imperial military capacity in Italy. If a reduction in Roman power in the north-west was the prime cause of the invasions of 405–8, why did the first invasion go in a different direction?

More revealing, in my view, is a closer look at the identity of the
barbarians caught up in the crisis. The available sources are not good enough to allow us to reconstruct a detailed situation map for the fourth-century Middle Danube, but we can sketch in the basic outlines: Marcomanni and Quadi north and west of the Danube bend, Sarmatians from different groups (Limigantes and Argaragantes) either side of the River Tisza. Further north were to be found Vandals and other Germanic groups, but they did not impinge directly on the frontier action in the fourth century.
⁵⁰
When this distribution is compared with the invaders who emerged from the region after 405, it becomes clear that the Middle Danube had already seen a huge political-cum-demographic convulsion
before
the outpourings across Rome’s central European frontiers.

Vandals first appeared on Stilicho’s radar a few years before 405–8, in the winter of 401/2, when their presence nearby posed something of a threat to the peace of Raetia, more or less Roman Switzerland. This neighbourhood had emphatically not been their home in the mid-fourth century, when they were to be found the best part of six hundred kilometres further north-west, in the northern Tisza region and Slovakia, right out on the fringes of the Middle Danubian plain and old Roman Dacia.
⁵¹
Their initial relocation to the fringes of Raetia, while nothing compared with subsequent marches to Spain and North Africa, was nonetheless a substantial move in itself.

That Radagaisus’ coalition, which certainly included some Goths, should have invaded Italy from west of the Carpathians reinforces the point. One or several of the many Gothic groups known from the fourth century were presumably drawn upon to make up the Gothic contingent in Radagaisus’ following. But no Goths inhabited land west of the Carpathians at that time. Likewise, the Alans: historical sources are entirely unambiguous that when they crossed the Rhine, they were the largest single component of the mixed invasion force. In other words, many Alans had come to occupy territory west of the Carpathians by about 405. But again, no Alans inhabited this region in the fourth century. Up to c.370, their westernmost stamping grounds were located around fifteen hundred kilometres further east, on the far side of the River Don.
⁵²
Different Alanic subgroups (their political structure seems to have encompassed many largely autonomous units) had begun to move west on the tails of the retreating Tervingi and Greuthungi from the mid-370s. One group of Alans, in alliance with some Huns, joined the Goths in the Roman Balkans in the autumn of
377 and even fought at Hadrianople. More Alans were encountered by the Emperor Gratian in the north-west Balkans in the summer of 378, who incorporated the same or yet more Alans into the western field army in 380.
⁵³
Things then quietened down, at least in our sources, but Alans on the move to the west were a major part of the first frontier crisis in the years after 376, and some continuation of this phenomenon is necessary to explain why there were so many Alans west of the Carpathians by 406. The observation is only reinforced by the fact that Uldin’s mixed power base, which also crossed into Dacia from somewhere on the fringes of the Middle Danube, consisted of Huns and Sciri.
⁵⁴
Neither of these groups shows up in the fourth century, even on the eastern fringes of the Middle Danube. The Burgundians and the Sueves, if the latter were indeed Marcomanni and Quadi, were hugely in the minority, therefore, in becoming involved in the crisis of 405–8 as long-established inhabitants of the Middle Danube and its environs.

Such a degree of population displacement was entirely abnormal in the hinterland of Rome’s frontiers. Group movements in the frontier region were usually controlled by the Romans extremely tightly. As we saw in
Chapter 3
, when members of just one Sarmatian subgroup, the Limigantes, returned in 359 to the sector of the Middle Danube frontier from which they had been expelled the previous year, Constantius II reacted decisively because of the propensity for disturbances beyond the frontier to spill over on to Roman territory.
⁵⁵
The arrival of so many newcomers in the Middle Danubian region immediately before the crisis of 405–8 completely dwarfs the amount of disruption faced by Constantius fifty years previously. Two substantial groups of Vandals, very large numbers of Alans, at least the Gothic element of Radagaisus’ coalition, and the Huns and Sciri of Uldin were all newcomers to the Middle Danube. So the frontier penetrations faced by the western Empire in 405–8 were the product of an equally large, if not actually bigger, crisis beyond the frontier itself. Something profound must have been going on there to cause all these groups to relocate themselves west of the Carpathians, even before they made their better-documented moves on to Roman soil.