Empires and Barbarians (8 page)

It is on the issue of what causes migration, however, that the modern world has most to teach those of us who grapple with the first millennium. On the level of the individual migrant, comparative analysis has moved far beyond drawing up lists of push-and-pull factors. There are two basic drivers behind migration: more voluntary economically motivated migration, and less voluntary political migration. But a hard and fast distinction between economic and political migration is usually impossible to maintain. Political reasons may come into a decision that appears economic, since political discrimination may underlie an unequal access to resources and jobs. The opposite is also true – that economic motives can be bound up in an apparently political decision to move, if not quite to the extent that a sequence of British Home Secretaries have sought to maintain. In any case, economic pressures can be as constraining as political ones. Is watching your family starve to death because you have no access to land or a job an economic or a political issue? These complexities mean that a potential migrant’s decision-making process now tends not to be analysed in terms of push-and-pull factors, but modelled as a matrix whose defining points are on one axis economic and political, and on the other voluntary and involuntary, with each individual’s motivation usually a complex combination of all four elements.
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In general terms, would-be migrants can be understood as facing a kind of investment choice. The decision to migrate involves various initial costs – of transport, of lost income while employment is sought, of the psychological stress of leaving the loved and familiar – which have to be weighed against possible longer-term gains available at the projected destination. Depending upon personal calculation, the individual might choose to leave or to stay, or to leave temporarily with a view to making enough of a gain to render a return life in the home country much more comfortable (another major cause of return migration).

All this is enlightening and challenging in pretty much equal measure, but at the macro level, migration studies have a still more profound lesson to offer. Not least because politics cannot be easily separated from economics anyway, economic factors remain one of
the fundamental triggers of migration. Disparities in levels of economic development between two areas, or in the availability of natural resources, have been shown repeatedly to make a migration flow between them likely, so long, of course, as the immigrant population also values the commodity which is more available at the point of destination. This is a fundamental conclusion of so-called ‘world systems theories’, which study relations between economically more developed centres and less developed peripheries, where some migration between the two often proves to be a major component of the relationship.
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This key observation tells us two things. First, a satisfactory study of migration in any era will require a combination of more general analysis (such as the basic economic contexts making migration likely) with the answers to a series of precise questions: who exactly participated in the flow of migration, why, and how exactly the process began and developed?
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Second, and even more important, it emphasizes that there is a profound connection between migration and patterns of economic development. Because of the legacy of the invasion hypothesis, it is traditional in first-millennium studies to draw a clear dividing line between internal engines of social transformation, such as economic and political development, and the external effects of migration. For a generation and more of archaeologists since the 1960s, internal transformation has been seen as locked in a death struggle with migration when it comes to explaining observable changes in the unearthed record of the past. Given this particular intellectual context, the most fundamental lesson to be drawn from migration studies is that such a clear dividing line is misconceived. Patterns of migration are caused above all by prevailing inequalities in patterns of development, and will vary with them, being both cause and effect of their further transformation. In this light, migration and internal transformation cease to be competing lines of explanation, but two sides of the same coin.

Old ways of thinking about the first millennium generated one Grand Narrative of how a more or less recognizable Europe emerged from the ancient world order of Mediterranean domination on the back of a thousand years of invasion and ethnic cleansing. New information and, not least, new understandings of both group identity and migration have effectively demolished that vision, and it is time to replace it with something new. It is this central challenge that
Empires
and Barbarians
will attempt to take up, arguing above all that migration and development need to be considered together, not kept apart as competing lines of explanation. They are interconnected phenomena, which only together can satisfactorily explain how Mediterranean domination of the barbarian north and east came to be broken, and a recognizable Europe emerged from the wreck of the ancient world order.

I
N THE SUMMER OF
357
AD
, a huge army of Germani, led by various kings of the Alamanni, collected itself on the western, Roman, side of the River Rhine near the modern city of Strasbourg. As Ammianus Marcellinus, in the most detailed narrative history to survive from the later Roman period (c.275 onwards), reports it:

All these warlike and savage tribes were led by Chnodomarius and Serapio, kings higher than all the rest in authority. And Chnodomarius, who was in fact the infamous instigator of the whole disturbance, rode before the left wing with a flame-coloured plume on his helmet . . . a doughty soldier and a skilful general beyond all the rest. But the right wing was led by Serapio . . . he was the son of Mederichus, Chnodomarius’ brother . . . who had for a long time been kept as a hostage in Gaul . . . These were then followed by the kings next in power, five in number, by ten princes [
regales
], with a long train of nobles [
optimates
], and 35,000 troops levied from various nations, partly for pay and partly under agreement to return the service.

Ammianus’ description beautifully captures the absence of unified kingship among the Germanic Alamanni who dominated the southern sector of Rome’s Rhine frontier in the late imperial period. On the basis of it, indeed, historians have sometimes argued that little had changed in the Germanic world since the first century
AD
, when Cornelius Tacitus wrote his famous gazetteer. One of the central points brought home by even the quickest read of Tacitus’
Germania
is just how fragmented, in political terms, the Germanic world was at that date. His work – and in this it is well supported by the slightly later, second-century,
Geography
of Ptolemy – records far too many primary political units to list by name: well over fifty. The best thing to do is place them on a map, which, even if the geographical placements are approximate, gives an excellent sense of first-century
Germanic political fragmentation (
Map 2
).
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A closer look suggests, however, that it is a mistake to suppose that, just because the Alamanni had plenty of kings in the fourth century, nothing important had changed since the first.

A first indication of the extent of the change emerges from a quick glance at a situation map for Germanic Europe in the mid-fourth century, which looks very different from its counterpart in the time of Tacitus (
Map 3
). The south-east has a completely different complexion, with the rise to dominance of various Gothic groups in, around and to the east of the Carpathian Mountains. In the west, too, much had changed. In place of the multiplicity of smaller units known to Tacitus and Ptolemy, four larger groupings dominated the landscape on and just behind Rome’s Rhine frontier: Alamanni and Franks on the frontier line, Saxons and Burgundians just behind. In trying to understand the workings of these fourth-century entities, we are, as usual, struggling against the general lack of interest in things ‘barbarian’ among Roman authors, but, thanks overwhelmingly to Ammianus, we have much more evidence for the Alamanni than for the rest. And, as Ammianus’ narrative makes clear, politics among the Alamanni were complex.

In the surviving books of his history, which cover the years 354 to 378 in considerable detail, Ammianus never offers us an analytical account of how politics worked among the Alamanni, or of the institutional structures that sustained rulers in power. What he does provide is a more or less connected narrative of a quarter-century of the Alamannic confederation, as it can best be called, in action, from which it emerges clearly that Germanic politics in this part of the Rhine frontier region had seen two fundamental transformations since the time of Tacitus.
First – and this much is uncontroversial – leadership within the different groups that made up the Alamanni, those headed by the various kings and princes who showed up for Strasbourg and who feature elsewhere in Ammianus’ narrative, was more solidly constructed than had been the case in the first century. Tacitus’ works – not only his
Germania
, but also the narratives of his
Annals
and
Histories
– give us a fair amount of information about pretty much the same regions of Germania in the first century. At that date, some Germanic groups, such as the Usipii and Tenchteri, functioned entirely happily without any kings at all: group policy, where necessary, being decided by an oligarchy of leading men (Latin,
principes
) discussing matters together in council. And even where royal authority was achieved by a single individual over a particular group, this was never accepted without resistance and usually proved transient, power not passing on to a designated son or heir. In the second decade of the first century
AD
, the two dominant monarchical figures of contemporary Germanic politics were Arminius among the Cherusci and Maroboduus among the Marcomanni. Arminius’ dominance was extremely brief. It was based on leading the famous revolt that had destroyed Varus’ three legions at the Teutoburger Wald in 9
AD
, but he was only one of several leading figures among the Cherusci. Victory gave him a brief pre-eminence, but it was always contested, not least by Segestes, a second leader of the Cherusci who even aided the Romans. Arminius’ power was already ebbing away, in fact, before his death in 19
AD
at the hands of a faction of his own countrymen. Maroboduus’ dominance had deeper roots, but was eventually undermined both by Rome and by internal rivals, so that in the time of Tacitus, at the turn of the second century, the Marcomanni were no longer ruled by Maroboduus’ heirs.
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Political life among the fourth-century Alamanni, by contrast, was all about kings (
reges
) and princes. The evidence we have suggests that the region called Alamannia by Ammianus was divided into a series of cantons or sub-regions (the Germanic for which was probably already
gau
), each of which (or all that we know of) was ruled by a
rex
or
regalis
. This royal power seems also to have been at least partly hereditary, if not necessarily in a simple pattern from father to son, then through royal clans. Chnodomarius and Serapio, the dominant leaders at Strasbourg, were uncle and nephew, and Serapio’s father Mederichus had been important enough to enjoy a lengthy spell as
hostage among the Romans, during which time he developed a penchant for the cult of the Egyptian god Serapis, which led to his son’s strikingly non-Germanic name. In Ammianus, we also come across a father and son, Vadomarius and Vithicabius, each of whom was king in turn. It is important not to generalize unwisely. Alamannic kings could be overthrown. One Gundomadus was killed by his own followers because he wouldn’t join the army that fought at Strasbourg. Likewise, some people other than kings remained important in Alamannic society. Ammianus, again, picks out the
optimates
who were present at the battle. Nonetheless, kings are a much bigger and more stable presence among the fourth-century Alamanni than they had been in the early Roman period.
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Second, the Alamannic confederation as a whole operated as a much more solid political entity than its first-century counterparts. This is a more controversial point because, as we have seen, the Alamanni did not function as a centralized entity, with a single, unchallenged ruler. There never was just a single king of the Alamanni at any point in the fourth century. And first-century Germania had itself been perfectly capable of throwing up larger confederations, incorporating a number of the small primary political units. For some scholars, therefore, the evidence does not suggest substantial change. But the supratribal confederations of the first century were either longer-lived (though not unchanging) and primarily religious in function, or else, where they were political, highly transient. Tacitus mentions three ‘cult leagues’ (groups of tribes who shared an attachment to a common religious cult in addition to their own individual ones): the Ingvaeones, nearest the sea, the Herminones of the interior and the Istvaeones of the west. We don’t know all that much about them, and I would not want to underestimate their overall importance to the early Germanic world, since Ptolemy knew of them too, meaning that they persisted on through the first century into the second. But the narratives of attempted and actual Roman conquests in the region demonstrate that the cult leagues never operated as the basis for political or military response to outside assault. Whatever their significance – and it might well have been substantial in other areas of life – the cult leagues were not political organizations of importance. When resistance to Rome or – at a slightly earlier period – attempted Germanic expansion into the Celtic-dominated world took a confederative political form, it was organized around dominant
individuals: Ariovistus in the time of Caesar, Arminius and Maroboduus at the time of projected Roman conquest of the area between the Rhine and the Elbe; or, later, the great revolt organized by the Batavian leader Julius Civilis. These leaders all knitted together – using a mixture of attraction, persuasion and intimidation – large confederations, which drew on a warrior base from across extensive reaches of the Germanic world; that is, from many of the small political units listed by Tacitus and, later, Ptolemy. In every instance, however, these confederations crashed with the defeat of their leaders, and are never heard of again. That of Maroboduus lasted a little longer than the others, but even that unravelled quickly after his death.
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