Empires and Barbarians (60 page)

All of these migrants represented minorities in the new kingdoms they created. In those generated by longer-distance migration, the minorities were tiny. The Ostrogoths weighed in at some tens of thousands, but no more than a probably generous maximum of one hundred thousand, though this might be an underestimate if slave numbers were substantial.
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The population of late Roman Italy is normally reckoned at a few million. If we estimate it for the sake of argument at five million, then the immigrant Ostrogoths would have amounted to no more than 2 per cent of the total. You could fiddle endlessly with these figures, but the basic ratio won’t change very much. Ostrogothic
immigration generated only a fractional increase in the total population of post-Roman Italy. The same was true of the Vandal–Alan coalition and the Burgundians, both of whom (the latter certainly) seem to have been second-rank powers compared to the Ostrogothic kingdom. From the perspective of the Italian, North African and Gallic populations, these migrations would have been experienced not even as elite replacements but as partial elite replacements. Within the kingdoms the newcomers created, many of the indigenous landowners of Roman descent remained in place, along with much of their Roman culture and even some Roman governmental institutions. The Visigothic kingdom of Gaul and Spain also falls into this category, although its origins were different. On being settled initially in just the Garonne valley in 418, the Goths must have represented a greater addition to the local population, even if still a minority. Within the larger kingdom created by Euric’s campaigns, which stretched from the Loire to Gibraltar, Gothic immigrants probably represented an even smaller minority than the Amal-led Goths in Italy.

The Franks in northern, especially north-eastern, Gaul, and especially the Anglo-Saxons in what became England, represented a bigger influx of population in percentage terms, though they were still very much a minority. Even so, it is hard to get their numbers much above 10 per cent of the total population in the areas affected, and, in some places it may have been considerably less. Here, the new landowning elites that had emerged by the second half of the sixth century, and especially in Gaul, may again have included some genetic descendants of the old indigenous Gallo-Roman and Romano-British populations. But this must not obscure the point that north-eastern Gaul and lowland Britain represent an entirely different case from Italy, North Africa, Spain and the rest of Gaul. In the old Roman north-west, the elite class and its cultural norms were completely remade between 400 and 600
AD
, and the landed assets upon which elite status was based completely reallocated, as the old villa estates were broken up into different-sized parcels. If the migrations involving Goths, Vandals and Burgundians were experienced at the receiving end as no more than comparatively unrevolutionary partial elite replacements, those of the Franks in north-eastern Gaul and the Anglo-Saxons in lowland Britain represented mass migration with profound social, political and cultural consequences for the areas concerned. If we take these different types of case together with the complete elite
replacement represented by the Norman Conquest, there are actually three types of situation that need to be differentiated: partial elite replacement, elite replacement that doesn’t disturb major socioeconomic structures, and the mass migration of Franks and Anglo-Saxons.

But even if discussion were to be confined just to the cases of partial elite replacement, there remain levels on which the population movements of the late fourth to the early sixth century would still have to be considered, both individually and in aggregate, as mass migrations. To start with, there is the fact that, between them, the migrants destroyed the long-standing Roman imperial edifice, or at least the western half of it. The Empire was always hampered by its economic, political and administrative limitations, but there is not the slightest evidence that it would have ceased to exist in the fifth century without the new centrifugal forces generated by the arrival within its borders of large, armed immigrant groups. Collectively the immigrants must be ‘credited’, if that is the correct word, with administering a huge political shock to the Roman world, or at least to the central state, even if some Roman landowners and even some more local and regional Roman institutions were left intact after the state’s collapse. This state was a powerful organism that had shaped life within its borders for five hundred years on every level from culture and religion to law and landownership. The point is easily overlooked, because the Roman Empire was large and ramshackle, operating with frankly pathetic communications and bureaucratic technologies, which meant that it could not run its localities with anything approaching close day-to-day control. Nevertheless, its structures had long set the macro conditions within which particular social, economic and cultural patterns evolved. A comprehensive listing would require another book, but the existence of the Pax Romana and state-generated transport systems dictated particular patterns of economic interaction, its legal structures defined property ownership and hence social status, its career structures – demanding a sophisticated elite literacy – underpinned an entire education system, and so on. Even religious institutions were largely dictated by the state. As Christianity matured into a mass religion in the fourth and fifth centuries, its authority structures became closely intertwined with those of the Empire. Given all this, the consequences of imperial extinction could not but be profound, setting local society and culture in western Europe off in quite new directions, some of which we will explore briefly in the second half of
this chapter.
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In the qualitative sense used in migration studies, the overall impact of Hunnic-era migration qualifies in all respects as mass migration.

The impact of the Franks in northern Gaul and of the Anglo-Saxons in lowland Britain also counts as mass migration, in the same qualitative terms but at a more local level. Reallocating the landed resources of these regions from scratch among intrusive elites caused many more cultural, economic and political transformations, which again qualify for the ‘mass’ label. Within the other successor kingdoms which saw only partial elite replacement, the local shock experienced was much less, but there was still some transfer of economic assets. Scholars of earlier generations were pretty much unanimous that this took the form – as in Britain and northern Gaul – of landed property passing from its previous Roman owners to at least some of the immigrants. This is another dimension of the barbarian issue that has come in for substantial revision in the last scholarly generation, again as part of the general tendency to downplay the significance of the fall of the Roman west. In this case, the revisionist view argues that, initially at least, incoming barbarians were rewarded not with landed estates taken from their former Roman owners, but with a share of the tax revenues raised from these estates – a type of exchange that would have generated much less friction than actual land seizures.
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There is no space here for a full discussion of the technical evidence relating to this issue, but in my view the revisionist case remains substantially unproven. There were important local variations, and adjusting the tax regime was probably one measure that sometimes came into play. Nonetheless, I am confident that a transfer of landed assets – as the most recent restatement of the revisionist position partly concedes – was at the heart of paying off the newly dominant immigrant element in all the major successor kingdoms.

That is not to say that every member of each immigrant group received the same degree of remuneration, or even, necessarily anything at all.
Doomsday Book
, to draw again on the better-documented Norman analogy, shows that William’s more important supporters received much bigger payouts than their lesser peers, and that there were many rank-and-file Norman soldiers who received no land at all. As this parallel emphasizes, in general terms immigrants will surely have been rewarded in proportion to their pre-existing importance
within their groups. But even if the big rewards were given at first only to the most aristocratic among them, they will in turn have had their own chief supporters to reward (just as the tenants-in-chief did after 1066). Among the immigrant groups of the late fourth and the fifth century direct landed rewards from the king may well not have gone further down the social scale than leading members of the higher-grade (free?) warrior class, though its lesser members and even some or all of the lower-status warriors are likely, on the Norman Conquest model, to have received something from the higher-status warriors to whom they were attached.
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The detailed evidence also suggests that land transfers within the kingdoms created by partial elite transfer were restricted to specific localities.

While the Vandal–Alan takeover of the richest provinces of Roman North Africa (Proconsularis, Byzacena and Numidia) represented a substantial shock for the political systems of the entire region, any deeper socioeconomic shock was geographically much more limited. After the conquest, Geiseric expelled some of the larger Roman landowners of the region and appropriated their estates to reward his important followers. This disruption at the local level, however, was confined to the province of Proconsularis. In Byzacena and Numidia, indigenous landowners seem to have been left in place; and any shock there was, limited to the operation of the new kingdom’s central political systems. Much of the land in Proconsularis was owned by absentee Italo-Roman senatorial families, so this was probably a good place to find land at minimum cost in terms of political hostility provoked. Strategically, too, Proconsularis faced towards Sicily and Italy, from where any significant Roman counterattack was likely to come.
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The Amal-led Ostrogothic takeover of Italy was as much of a political shock as the Vandal–Alan takeover of North Africa, but perhaps less of a social one, since on the whole Theoderic pursued a more conciliatory policy towards the Roman landowners of his new kingdom, although this should not just be taken for granted. At one point during the conquest, he threatened Romans who did not support him with the loss of their lands. After the conquest, though, he devoted much of his reign to establishing good relations with them, and many preserved their elite status under his rule. Like Geiseric, Theoderic – it seems – endowed his important followers with
substantial landed estates, together with rights to annual donatives, but this process of enrichment seems to have been accomplished without the kind of expropriations seen in Proconsularis.

Gothic settlement was clustered in three particular areas of the Italian peninsula (Picenum and Samnium on the Adriatic coast and between Ravenna and Rome, in Liguria on the north-west of the north Italian plain, and in the Veneto in the east), and what appears mainly to have been transferred was the ownership of landed estates, quite likely from public as much as from private sources. The tenant farmers who had customarily done the work may well have been left in place. As far as we can tell, these transfers caused no massive socioeconomic dislocation. The size of Theoderic’s Italian kingdom perhaps made it easier to find the requisite portfolio of estates, in fact, than would have been the case in a smaller one. Nonetheless, the immigrant Gothic military elites did form a new, politically dominant force. Some Roman elites participated in court politics, but, to judge by our narrative sources, the migrant Gothic contingent remained dominant in such crucial political areas as royal succession and war-making. The Ostrogothic seizure of Italy seems to have had only a limited socioeconomic impact, then, even if its political effects were much larger.
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In the Visigothic and Burgundian kingdoms the position was similar, but with one important variation. Laws issued in the Burgundian kingdom indicate that affected Roman landowners had to hand over two-thirds of their estates, whereas the corresponding figure in the Visigothic kingdom was one-third. Again there is much about this evidence that requires careful discussion – too much to engage in here – but one especially relevant factor is that, at its fullest extent from the mid-470s, the Visigothic kingdom ran from the banks of the Loire to the Straits of Gibraltar. It was many times larger, in other words, than the Burgundian kingdom centred on the Rhône valley. If you stop to think about it, it is hardly surprising that more expropriation was required to satisfy the incoming outsiders in a smaller kingdom, where there was a more restricted range of landed assets available. That variation aside, however, the evidence suggests that broadly comparable patterns prevailed everywhere outside of Britain and north-eastern Gaul. In all the successor kingdoms created by partial elite replacement, the immigrants generated a dramatic enough political shock as the given territory passed under new management, but the indigenous
population would have experienced these immigrations as ‘mass’ only in distinct and limited areas, where substantial amounts of land passed into migrant hands: Proconsularis, for instance, and the three clusters of settlement in the Ostrogothic kingdom. For the Visigothic and Burgundian kingdoms, the best we can do is guess as to the areas of densest settlement on the basis of place names and/or archaeological evidence.
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From the perspective of the immigrants themselves, moreover, sanitary terms like elite transfer, partial or otherwise, entirely fail to capture the nature of the action. Even where they were ultimately successful in establishing themselves in conditions of prosperity, there is no mistaking the scale of dislocation and trauma that preceded settlement. Between 406 and 439 the Vandal–Alan coalition moved in two stages, first from the Great Hungarian Plain to southern Spain (2,500 kilometres), then a further 1,800 kilometres south and west, before their eventual capture of Carthage, the latter involving crossing the Straits of Gibraltar. The Alans amongst them, of course, had made an earlier, westerly, trek of 2,000 kilometres sometime between c.370 and 406, from east of the River Don to the Great Hungarian Plain. These distances are huge and would have been punishing for the groups’ weaker members – the old, the young and the sick – especially since they tended to be covered in great leaps: the Don to Hungary, Hungary to Spain, and – if perhaps less of an ordeal – Spain to North Africa. Each of these leaps was a traumatic event that would have caused substantial loss just in itself. In aggregate, such journeys may even have distorted age profiles within the groups, killing off old and young in disproportionate numbers. Among modern political migrants forced to move long distances, exhaustion combines with the propensity for disease generated by overcrowding to make the experience a deadly one. Close to 10 per cent, or a staggering hundred thouand, of the refugees from Rwanda in 1994 succumbed en route to cholera and dysentery. Most of our first-millennium migrants were making more calculated moves and were probably better prepared, but modern comparisons warn us not to underestimate the degree of loss inherent in movement alone.