Empires and Barbarians (59 page)

Against this backdrop, the increasing tendency of local Roman aristocrats to do deals with the various immigrants as the fifth century progressed can only be considered, like aristocratic unwillingness to pay high taxes, a very secondary phenomenon in the story of Roman collapse. Again, it is important to put these deals in context. The local aristocrats involved in them were all essentially landowners, whose estates, the fundamental source of their wealth, were for the most part situated in one locality. These physical assets could not be moved. So if that locality started to fall within the expanding sphere of influence
of one of the immigrant groups, the relevant landowners had little choice. They had either to come to some accommodation with the immigrants’ leadership, if they could, or risk losing the land that was the source of all their wealth and status. Such accommodations were not automatic. In lowland Britain, as we have seen, the old Roman landowning class completely failed to survive the Anglo-Saxon takeover.
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Attempts to make the end of the western Empire into a largely peaceful process, carried forward by the withdrawal of the local elite from continued participation in central state structures, are unconvincing. On the contrary, all the various political processes of the fifth century were implemented by violence. Those elites were caught in the middle, with little choice but to make accommodations with the new powers in their lands, whether they wanted to or not, and if they could. A key distinction sometimes missed here is that between the central Roman state and local Roman landowner. Looking at just the latter, it is possible to document many stories of accommodation. These occurred, however, only after, and because, immigrant groups had fought their way across the frontier, and so stripped the western Empire of its tax base that it no longer had sufficient revenues to keep worthwhile armies in the field, leaving provincial landowners completely exposed.

When it comes to the immigrants of the late fourth and fifth centuries, there is again real substance to some of the revisionist arguments. Most of these groups were new political entities, not ‘peoples’. Ostrogoths and Visigoths, the Franks of Clovis, the Vandal and Alan alliance, and the Sueves of Spain: all were new entities forged on the march. A new political order was created among Anglo-Saxons, likewise, during their takeover of Britain. Of all the kingdom-forming groups who established successor states to the western Roman Empire, it is only the Burgundians for whom we lack explicit evidence of a major sociopolitical reconfiguration on the move, and even this may be due to a lack of information rather than any smooth continuity in their fifth-century history, which was pretty chequered.
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But if the immigrant groups weren’t ‘peoples’, neither does it fit
the evidence to take an equally simple, if opposite, point of view and write them off as small-scale will-o’-the-wisp entities of little historical significance. Many were substantial. The few plausible figures we have, confirmed by their capacity to stand up to major Roman field armies, all suggest that the largest groups were able to put into the field forces numbering over ten thousand fighting men and sometimes over twenty thousand, especially after the amalgamation processes of the fifth century had run their course. The group identities operating within these large assemblages were not as straightforward as old nationalist orthodoxies imagined. Not even all the fighting men enjoyed the same status. At least in the larger alliances, there were two distinct status groups among warriors, and quite probably a third, of non-militarized slaves, besides. How many slaves there might have been is impossible to know, but we can’t just assume that they were few in number. Some of the kingdom-forming groups even crossed major cultural boundaries, the long-time alliance of Germanic Vandals and originally Iranian-speaking nomadic Alans being the classic case in point. What exactly happened when Vandal met Alan in the Middle Danube in the run-up to 31 December 406 is extraordinary to contemplate.
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But to conclude from these undoubted truths that the new group identities meant little is mistaken. Full participation was not allowed to all group members, as the existence of lower-status warriors and slaves within the new group identities makes clear. Neither of these lesser-status groups had as much invested in the identity of the group as its higher-status warriors. But neither was full participation the preserve of just a few individuals. Royal families came and went much too easily for us to characterize group identity as short-term loyalty to a particular dynasty. Even after deposing their last Amal ruler, the Ostrogoths retained their identity. I would argue that the prime carriers of, and beneficiaries from, the group identities being negotiated and renegotiated during this period were precisely the higher-status warrior groups. Some indications suggest that these may have comprised something like a fifth to a third of all armed males. And even if subject to periodic renegotiation – essentially political, perhaps, rather than cultural – nothing suggests that the kinds of group identities these men constructed were easy to destroy. Among the larger groups, the Ostrogoths did not, as has recently been argued, easily fade away into the Italian landscape after 493; while, amongst the smaller, Heruli and
Rugi both showed considerable capacity to survive, in their different ways, even major defeats. Though not ‘peoples’ in the classic sense of the word, then, the immigrant groups were substantial not only in size but in structural resilience. Here again, the degree of violence characteristic of the era had an important role to play.
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When social scientists started thinking about group identity, they generally assumed that human population groups became politically and culturally distinct from one another as a result of physical separation. One major advance since the Second World War is the insight that active group identities are regularly generated out of precisely the opposite scenario: intense contact in the form of competition.

Developing a group identity is often about becoming part of an entity strong enough to protect a particular set of interests. And you don’t have to look very far in the events of the later fourth and the fifth century to find violence – the epitome of competitive contact – brokering the renegotiations of identity that produced the new kingdom-forming barbarian alliances. Some of the new identities (particularly those of the Visigoths and the Vandal–Alan coalition) were formed by migrants who needed to operate on Roman soil in larger groupings so as to preserve their independence against traditional imperial policies designed to dismantle threatening concentrations of outsiders. Others were born out of the collapse of Attila’s Empire which again generated fierce competition, this time among the many armed groups gathered by the Huns on the Middle Danubian plain. And yet a third was generated among groups looking to take over the landed assets of the collapsing western Empire. The Visigoths and Vandal–Alan coalition were well placed to play this more profitable game, having united originally so as to survive, but new groups formed to participate in the same land-grabbing exercise – particularly the Ostrogoths, Franks and Lombards. On a smaller scale, the Anglo-Saxons moving into lowland Britain also fall into this category.

All of these new group identities were born in violence, and even if recently renegotiated they were reasonably durable, at least among the higher-status warriors who were the prime beneficiaries of the ambitions they had been formed to pursue. That does not mean, of course, that every member of the group, even those higher-status warriors, was equally committed to the new identities, or that they were indestructible. Neither of these is true of any modern group identity, either. But those forged in the later fourth and the fifth
century were real political phenomena, not mere ideologies or dynastic fantasy.
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The migrations undertaken by these groups were correspondingly substantial. As we have seen, some of the historical evidence for large, mixed population groups taking to the road with massive wagon trains is much too weighty to be dismissed. Ammianus on the Goths of 376, in particular, is too well informed and demonstrably capable of describing a variety of barbarian activities for us to dismiss his account as migration topos. As the revised notions of group identity would suggest, the large kingdom-forming concentrations of population did not move from point A to point B untouched by the process. They recruited extra manpower as they went, which they slotted in, as appropriate, to the various positions available within the group: in Germanic-dominated groups, it would seem, either as higher-status free warrior, freed lower-status warrior or non-militarized slave. But accepting this does not license us to dismiss their migrations as relatively small-scale phenomena. While certainly different from migration units you find today, large mixed population groups do make sense in their own context, given the general level of development of contemporary non-Roman society and the kinds of enterprise being undertaken.

Three principal types of migration emerge from the narrative. The first comprises those mixed groups of outsiders who moved across the imperial frontier because of the direct or indirect threat posed to their existing territories by the build-up of Hunnic power. The Tervingi and Greuthungi of 376 fall into this category, as do, in my view, the Goths of Radagaisus who invaded Italy in 405/6; and the Vandals, Alans and Sueves who moved over the Rhine shortly afterwards. The many different strands within these two pulses of migration eventually reorganized themselves into two large confederations: the Visigoths and the Vandal–Alan coalition, as noted earlier. These could each field something in the region of ten to twenty thousand warriors, and both had women and children along besides, not to mention slaves. The motivation for all these groups was essentially political and negative – fear of the Huns – but they were also busy calculating, increasingly from direct experience, what it would take for them to carve out a profitable niche within Roman territory. The constituent groups behind the Visigothic alliance, moving from Ukraine to southern France via the Balkans and Italy, the others from central Europe (or from much
further east in the case of the Alans) to North Africa via Spain, also provide the most spectacular examples of long-distance movement. Their treks took the form of discrete jumps, with considerable pauses in between, rather than one continuous movement, because migration was part of a developing survival strategy. The chronological gaps also reflect the distances involved in these treks, since information had to be acquired at each jumping-off point about the new options that were opening up. The Vandals – from modern Hungary or thereabouts – can have had little sense of how to get to North Africa from Spain when they first set out, or even perhaps that you could.
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The second category consists of those groups, many again involving women and children, who moved out of the Middle Danubian heartlands of the Hunnic Empire in the chaos following Attila’s death. Again, some of these were substantial. The Amal-led Goths from Pannonia comprised over ten thousand fighting men, besides women and children. The Sueves, Heruli and Rugi who made their way into the army of Italy or joined the Amal bandwagon certainly mustered at least a few thousand warriors each, and of these the Heruli and Rugi, at least, were again moving with women and children.
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These groups’ motivation was, again, partly political and negative: fear of the other parties involved in the competition unleashed by Hunnic collapse. At the same time, there was a powerful element of opportunism. The Amal-led Goths took calculated decisions first to throw themselves into east Roman territory, and second, having united with the Thracian Goths, to move on to Italy. In both cases, their decisions were based not only on the limitations and difficulties of their current situation but also at least as much on the greater degree of prosperity potentially available at the projected destinations. This category is distinguished from the first not only by a greater element of opportunism, but also by the distances involved. The long march of Theoderic’s Goths from Hungary to Thessalonica, to Constantinople, to Albania and then on to Italy is impressive, but it was not quite of the same order as the epic trek of the Vandals, or the trials and tribulations of the Visigoths.

Frankish and Anglo-Saxon migration into north-eastern Gaul and lowland Britain, respectively, took a third and different form, although there were some significant variations between the two. Distances were shorter; and the characteristic migration unit within the flows, smaller. The archaeological evidence suggests that the most intensive
Frankish settlement happened in areas of Roman Gaul within a radius of only a hundred kilometres or so from the limits of their previous holdings. Anglo-Saxon groups obviously had to cross the Channel and/or the North Sea, but this too was a relatively short hop. The range of motivations in play was also different. The North Sea may at this time have been eroding some continental coastlands, making some long-cultivated areas unusable.

For the most part, however, the motivations behind Frankish and Anglo-Saxon settlement were positive and predatory. Both followed the elimination of effective Roman state power at their respective destinations; for both, previously, the Empire’s armies, fleets and fortifications had made it impossible for them to do anything more than raid. Both flows were filling power vacuums in fairly adjacent landscapes, attracted by the relative prosperity of the target area’s more developed economy and the fact that landed wealth was easier to access there. Franks and Anglo-Saxons had no need to operate in migration units on anything like the scale of those in the other categories, therefore, although it does seem likely, since conquest and settlement were simultaneous in Britain, that the Anglo-Saxon migration groups were larger than their Frankish counterparts. Both migration flows certainly also included women and children as well as warriors. These positively motivated expansions, carried mostly by smaller units over shorter distances, stand in marked contrast to the more spectacular, longer-distance moves made by larger concentrations of population whose motivations were much more mixed.
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