Empires and Barbarians (64 page)

The fact that Merovingian Frankish expansion did not extend into any of the areas affected by Germanic culture collapse was not an accident. Like its Roman counterpart, Frankish expansion was accomplished by military annexation, whose potential benefits had always to be weighed against its many costs. Battles had to be fought, and these were many and fierce even if the historical evidence is not good enough for us to reconstruct them in detail. Sometimes, though, you get lucky. The nature of the Frankish takeover of the Alamannic kingdom, for instance, shows up beautifully in the evidence of widespread and dramatic destruction from the old hillfort sites, which, as we saw in
Chapter 2
, had emerged in the late Roman period as the centres from which the authority of kings was exercised. About the year 500, when historical sources tell us Clovis won his great victory, they – or all that have been investigated – were taken by storm, and, more generally, huge material-cultural discontinuities show up right across Alamannia. Not only were the hillforts abandoned, but new burial rites appear in the cemeteries, and in some places entirely new cemeteries came into use. The degree of investment of human and other resources required for such an aggressive takeover would only be made when its rewards were going to be commensurately large.
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The collapse of long-standing patterns of central European, largely Germanic material culture in the fifth and sixth centuries meant that, east of the Elbe, there were no similarly coherent political structures to confront, and no relatively developed economies with accumulations of movable wealth to ransack. In the centuries either side of the birth of Christ, the Roman Empire had expanded to the limit of that era’s profitable warfare, and in the sixth century the Merovingians did the same. The one area of old Germanic Europe that maintained the old cultural patterns and didn’t fall under Frankish domination was southern Scandinavia: the Jutland peninsula, the south-western Baltic islands and the southern coast of what are now Norway and Sweden. But Merovingian power was exercised in neighbouring Saxony only in the form of hegemony rather than outright conquest, and this probably insulated Scandinivia from any wider Frankish ambition. This one partial exception doesn’t negate the general point, though. Only those areas of Rome’s inner and outer periphery where continuity of development had been maintained were worth the effort of Frankish
conquest. In this sense, the new trajectories of development from the late Roman period played an important role in defining the limits of the new supraregional power of the post-Roman world.
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So far so good. But what exactly had happened in those other areas of Germania that saw such a dramatic disruption to well-established material cultural patterns?

Thinking about this phenomenon, it is important to be absolutely clear about its nature. As the Polish archaeologist Kazimierz Godlowski above all demonstrated, culture collapse involved the disappearance, in the fifth and sixth centuries, of long-standing patterns of material-cultural development over vast tracts of central Europe. These patterns often ran back at least to the start of the millennium and sometimes beyond. But when discontinuity hit, it manifested itself in virtually every area of life reflected in the material-cultural remains: everything from the enduring economic links with the Mediterranean world that generated regular flows of Roman imports, to established craft traditions in pottery and metalwork. Technologically, pottery production simplified dramatically, the use of the wheel was abandoned. This was matched by a marked diminution in the range of pot forms and even in the overall quantities being produced. Metallurgical production similarly declined in scale – the range of ornaments being produced (or at least deposited) shrank almost to zero. Settlements also became much smaller.
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Essentially, the archaeological record shows striking simplification in every category by which the activities of the populations of the region are customarily analysed, compared and dated in the Roman period, and it all adds up to a massive change in lifestyles.

What human history underlay these striking archaeological discontinuities?

According to the interpretation championed by Godlowski, traditional cultural patterns vanished because the population producing them had itself largely disappeared. Where we have relevant literary sources, material-cultural collapse is geographically and chronologically coincident with the known movements of Germanic-speakers on to Roman soil. The Cernjachov and Przeworsk systems collapsed at the same time as Goths, Vandals and their other constituent populations were being displaced by the rise of Hunnic power in central Europe (
Chapter 5
), while the thinning-out of Germanic material culture along the Elbe in the fifth century has long been associated with the transfer of Angles, Saxons and others to Britain, and the southern movement
of Lombard groups into the Middle Danubian region. These flows both continued into the sixth century, as we have seen, not least in response to the extension of Frankish imperial power eastwards, which led a large number of Saxons to join the Lombards in their trek into Italy.
⁵¹

The chronological links are much too tight to be accidental, but the total departure of Germanic populations is not the only possible, nor even the most likely, explanation of this extraordinary phenomenon. Since archaeological cultures must be understood as systems, the disappearance of established cultural forms can a priori have a number of causes. In this case, as other commentators since Godlowski have stressed, what we are dealing with is the disappearance of ornamental metalwork, weaponry and specialized wheel-made pottery, and these were largely produced for a Germanic social elite. The absence of such items from the observable spectrum of archaeological remains could reflect, therefore, the disappearance from these lands only of the political and militarized class for whom they were manufactured. A numerous – possibly very numerous – but archaeologically invisible peasantry, users of a much simpler material culture, might have been left behind.
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In theory, therefore, it is possible to explain culture collapse by positing anything from a total evacuation of the landscape at one extreme of the spectrum, to what you might term elite departure at the other. Where within this range does the evidence suggest the human history behind Germanic culture collapse fell?

We will need to return to some of the evidence in more detail in the next chapter, when we look at the Slavic populations who eventually took control of these de-Germanized areas of central and eastern Europe. For the moment, a few more general observations can be made. First, Germanic culture collapse surely does not reflect a total evacuation of the affected landscapes. As we have seen in the case of the Goths north of the Black Sea, there is good reason to suppose that many groups among the indigenous population, who had become subordinated to Gothic intruders in the third century, did not form part of the later Gothic migration units that moved on into the Roman Empire from 376. Nor, again in general terms, do the numbers of Germanic migrants moving into the Empire in the late Roman period seem anything like large enough to have created large empty landscapes.

It is obviously not possible to say exactly how many people were
caught up in the migratory activity generated by the rise and fall of the Hunnic Empire and the new opportunities for expansion that then became open to Rome’s nearer neighbours as it lost the capacity to maintain frontier security. One negative thought experiment, however, is worth running with. This involves considering how many migrants are known to have emerged from the areas that suffered culture collapse. There are reasonable indications, for instance, that both Visigoths and Ostrogoths could field around, or a few more than, twenty thousand fighting men. The armies of the Vandals, Alans and Sueves were between them probably just as large, certainly in 406 before they suffered such heavy losses in Spain, while Burgundian manpower, if probably smaller, was not minimal. We have little conception of how many Middle Danubian refugees were recruited into the army of Italy or east Rome’s Balkans military establishment; but to judge by the numbers given for the Heruli, the many different groups we hear of will between them have amounted to at least another 10,000-plus warriors, and quite possibly double that. Migrant Anglo-Saxon numbers are perhaps the most controversial of all, with guesses ranging from 20,000 to 200,000.
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If for the moment we take a maximum view of this evidence – for reasons that will become apparent – it would suggest that the largest possible figure you could reasonably calculate for the number of Germanic warriors who departed from the zones suffering culture collapse was something over 100,000 men, but certainly not 200,000. There is much guesswork here, but it is not a vastly inflated figure, and this order of military magnitude really is required to explain how the immigrants were able, between them, to bring down a west Roman state that determinedly resisted their intrusions. I suspect, anyway, that 100,000 is not making sufficient allowance for how many immigrant warriors died in the course of the action. Nonetheless, something over one hundred thousand does give us a ballpark figure to work with. How many people in total were on the move depends on how consistently women and children accompanied these warriors, and on the very murky subject of how many slaves came along for the ride. Here again, let’s take a maximum view – and in any case, despite some recent attempts to deny it, there is both a decent amount of evidence that most of the larger groups were mixed in age and gender, and also, further reason to accept that this was so. As we have seen, traditional accounts multiplied the numbers of fighting men by five to
get total population figures for mixed groups, but something nearer to four may be more correct. On the other hand, none of this makes any allowance for slaves. Putting all this together, a reasonable maximum estimate might put the total exodus from the areas which suffered culture collapse at something around or perhaps a bit over half a million souls.
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The reason for bothering with such calculations is that we do know the size of the territory affected. Germanic culture collapse affected an area defined broadly by the Rivers Elbe and Vistula in the north and the Iron Gates and the Lower Don in the south. At a rough calculation, this weighs in at close to a million square kilometres. For the migrations of the late Roman period to have emptied this area, population densities across it would have to have been in the region of 0.5 per square kilometre. This is an impossibly low figure. Even allowing for the fact that agricultural regimes were not intensive, it is simply impossible for the departure of half a million people to have emptied such a huge area. The figures are only guesstimates, but one recent study has suggested (and reasonably so) that just what it calls the Pontic-Danubian region (
Map 15
) must have contained between three and four million people in antiquity, and the population of just the Great Hungarian Plain has been put at something like three hundred thousand in the early medieval period. For all that every number cited in the last two paragraphs is an approximation, we can nonetheless safely discount the possibility that culture collapse in central and south-eastern Europe was caused by the complete evacuation of its population.
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In general terms, then, Germanic culture collapse was caused by the disappearance only of particular elite groups from the affected areas. But this conclusion needs to be tempered with two further observations. First, for all the transformations of the preceding centuries, Germanic society of the fourth century was not dominated by a very small elite. New distributions of social power did emerge between the first and fourth centuries, but the elite of the Germanic world still represented a larger percentage of the population than the tiny landowning class, say, that had dominated in the Roman world. As we saw in
Chapter 2
, and as the events of the so-called
Völkerwanderung
confirm, we must think in terms of social and political power (and group identities) shared between fairly broad oligarchies of freemen, numbering between a fifth and a third of the warrior population. Nor
was participation in the migrations, at least among the larger groups like the Goths and Lombards, limited just to this dominant oligarchy. At least two social strata of warriors – possibly to be equated with the free and freed classes documented in early medieval law codes – are observable in these intrusive groups, not just a single body of elite soldiery, and sometimes they brought slaves with them as well, not to mention families.
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Elite departure was thus not a very small-scale phenomenon.

Second, as we shall see in the next chapter, the evidence indicates that population levels did nosedive dramatically in some particular localities. Once again, this suggests that Germanic migration may not have been entirely negligible in demographic terms, and the two points may well be linked. Because the Germanic elites were not so tiny in the first place, and had some dependent social groups (slaves and freedmen) attached to them, then when a concentrated group of migrants left
a particular area
, this may well have created empty districts.
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Not only did prevailing patterns of development dictate the working-out of the migratory processes of the late fourth and the fifth century, therefore, but the reverse was also true – the migrations affected patterns of development. One major consequence of this interaction, as we have seen, was the emergence of an unprecedented type of imperial power for western Eurasia, based on north European resources. Because, however, the Roman Empire came to an end in a process that saw substantial armed and organized groups from the periphery relocate themselves in the heart of its former territories, the process of imperial collapse was matched by parallel transformations in large parts of this periphery. Culture collapse caused by the departure of the still fairly broadly based elite of Germanic Europe changed totally the socioeconomic and hence political organization in the old periphery of the Empire, and marks a second major break with the ancient world order – a break quite as important as the rise of the Franks’ northern European Empire. It was to have enormous consequences for the emergence of Slavic Europe, as we shall see in
Chapter 8
, but this process was also profoundly shaped by the third major reconfiguration of the old world order that unfolded in these middle centuries of the first millennium.