Empires and Barbarians (99 page)

What also emerges from the evidence is that too clear a line cannot be drawn between wave-of-advance and larger-scale migration. Just because an expansion began with small-scale migration units, does not mean that it stayed that way. The best-documented case here is provided by the Vikings. Initial Scandinavian raiding and settling, in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, were all carried forward by small groups. The earliest recorded violence involved the crews of three ships – perhaps a hundred men – and there is no reason to think that the settlements around Scotland and the isles need have been carried forward by groups much larger than this. But, as resistance and profits both built up, and the desire eventually formed to settle more fertile areas of the British Isles, where larger political structures in the form of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms barred the way, more important Scandinavian leaders became involved in the action, and larger coalitions formed among the migrants. This reached its climax during the Great Army period from 865, when coalitions formed with the idea of carving out settlement areas first in Anglo-Saxon England and then in northern Francia. If the early raids were undertaken by groups of no more than a hundred strong, the series of Great Armies each comprised much more like five to ten thousand men. The water-borne nature of the action in the Viking era always needs to be kept in mind because it imposed logistic problems that did not apply in other cases, but the evolution from raiding parties to great armies nonetheless provides a
well-documented model of how – on the back of evident and growing military and financial success – originally small-scale expansion might eventually suck in much larger numbers of participants. The evidence is not so good for some of the earlier expansions, and these were not affected by the problems of water transport. Nonetheless, the expanding momentum of Viking-era migration provides a helpful model for understanding a series of other first-millennium migratory phenomena, not least the second- and third-century Gothic, and fourth- and fifth-century Lombard expansions, which again, it seems, started small, but grew in scale until forces large enough to fight major battles against Roman armies and regional competitors (such as the Carpi), came to be involved. Anglo-Saxon expansion into former Roman Britain can also be partly understood with such a model in mind, and it is potentially applicable to the third-century Alamanni.

Even without venturing into really contentious areas, therefore, the full range of first-millennium evidence suggests some major revisions to now-standard migration models. But in addition to small-scale migration, elite replacements, and migration flows of increasing momentum, first-millennium sources do periodically report large, mixed groups of human beings on the move: 10,000 warriors and more, accompanied by dependent women and children. Not only do such reports arouse suspicion because they seem uncomfortably close to the old invasion hypothesis, but this particular type of migration unit does not figure in modern migratory patterns, where large, mixed groups of migrants are seen only when the motivation is political and negative – when populations are fleeing oppression, pogrom and massacre, as in Rwanda in the early 1990s. This is not what is reported in first-millennium sources, which describe both a more positive motivation and a greater degree of organization among groups intruding themselves in predatory fashion into other people’s territory. Can we believe what the sources seem to be telling us? Should we retain large, mixed and organized groups of humanity as part of the overall picture of first-millennium migration?

Even when employing the most up-to-date methods – DNA or steady-state isotope analysis – the kind of evidence that archaeological
investigation brings to this debate is at best only a blunt tool. It remains hotly disputed whether much usable DNA will ever be recovered from human remains of first-millennium vintage laid down in the damp and cold of northern Europe. And too much has happened in demographic terms since the first millennium for the percentage distributions of modern DNA patterns to give much clear insight into the relative proportions of their progenitors 1,500 years ago, except perhaps in the highly exceptional case of Iceland, where there was no human population before the Viking era.
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Steady-state isotopes, likewise, only reveal where someone came to dental maturity. The children of two immigrants will have fully indigenous teeth, and this kind of analysis will always carry an in-built tendency to underestimate the importance of migration. Arguments based on more traditional types of archaeological investigation – the transfer to new regions of items or customs originally characteristic of another – are also unlikely to be any more conclusive.

The reasons are straightforward. By the birth of Christ, most of Europe had been settled and farmed, after a fashion, for millennia. And since even the most aggressive and dominant of immigrants usually still had a use for indigenous populations as agricultural labour, migration did not tend to empty entire landscapes. Furthermore, as all comparative study has emphasized (and modern experience shows), when migrants move into an occupied landscape, the result – in material and non-material cultural terms – is always an interaction. There are only a relatively few items in any particular group’s material cultural profile that are so loaded with meaning that they will be held on to, for good or ill, in the longer term. Everything else is open to change under the stimulus of new circumstances, so you can hardly expect migration to involve the complete transfer of an entire material culture from point A to point B in normal first-millennium European conditions. There will always be some elements of continuity in the material cultural profile of any region subject to migration, and this makes it entirely possible, if you are so inclined, to explain any observable change in terms of internal evolution. Goods and ideas can move without being attached to people, and if what you observe archaeologically is no more than a limited transfer of either, it will always be possible to explain it in terms of something other than population displacement. But the fact that it will always be
possible
to do this does not mean that it will necessarily be
correct
to do so, and
the inherent ambiguity of archaeological evidence is sometimes misinterpreted. Ambiguity means exactly that. If the archaeological evidence for any possible case of migration is ambiguous – which it usually will be – then it certainly does not prove that migration played a major role in any observable material cultural change – but neither does it disprove it. What all this actually amounts to is that archaeological evidence alone cannot decide the issue. It is important to insist on this point because there has been a tendency in some recent work to argue that ambiguous archaeological evidence essentially disproves migration, when it absolutely does not. Overall, of course, this forces us back on to the historical evidence. How good a case can be made from historical sources for the importance of large, organized and diverse groups of invaders on the move in the first millennium?

The answer has to be complex. There are some clear instances where a migration topos, a misleading invasion narrative, has been imposed on more complex events. Jordanes’ account of Gothic expansion into the northern Black Sea region in the late second and third centuries is a classic case in point, as is the picture of the fourth- and fifth-century Lombard past to be found in Carolingian-era sources and beyond. But in other cases, the historical evidence in favour of distinct pulses of large-scale migration involving 10,000-plus warriors and a substantial number of dependants is infinitely stronger: the Tervingi and Greuthungi who asked for asylum inside the Roman Empire in 376, for instance, or the movement of Theoderic the Amal’s Ostrogoths to Italy in 488/9. In both these cases, attempts have been made to undermine the credibility of our main informants, respectively Ammi-anus and Procopius, but they lack conviction. Ammianus described many different barbarian groups on the move on Roman soil in the course of his historical narrative and only on this one occasion does he refer to very large mixed groups of men, women and children. The idea that he was infected by some kind of migration topos in this instance, but not elsewhere, takes a lot of believing. Likewise Procopius: he is not in fact the only source to describe Theoderic’s Ostrogoths on the march to Italy as a ‘people’ in a quasi-invasion-hypothesis sense of the term (a large, mixed grouping of men, women and children). One contemporary commentator even described them as such in person to Theoderic and other actual participants gathered at his court. You wouldn’t want to hang anyone in a court of law on this kind of evidence, but its credibility is pretty much as good as
anything else we get from the first millennium. To reject it on the basis of a supposed migration topos is arbitrary.
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Not quite in the same category of solidity, but still well within the usual limits of first-millennium plausibility, likewise, is a range of evidence indicating that moves of a similar nature were made by large, organized Vandal and Alanic groups on to Roman soil from 406, and by Radagaisus’ Goths in 405.
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And while more argument is certainly again required, by far the likeliest reconstruction of Alaric the Visigoth’s career indicates that it was founded on mobilizing the Tervingi and Greuthungi of 376, settled in the Balkans by treaty in 382, into a series of further moves from 395 onwards. These are all instances of large, mixed-group movement that pass muster on all the normal rules of first-millennium evidence. There are also enough of them to require us not to dismiss too quickly a series of other cases, where the evidence is a notch or two weaker: in particular the population movements associated with the rise and fall of the Hunnic Empire, which saw the gathering-in of armed, largely Germanic groups, and their subsequent departures from the Great Hungarian Plain as competition built up among them in the era of Hunnic collapse. Here the evidence for large group migration is either partial (the cases of the Rugi or Heruli), or implicit rather than explicit (those of the Sciri, Sueves, and Alans). Although we can find some convincing cases where the action has been mistakenly cast in the form of an invasion-hypothesis-type population movement, therefore, there are many others where there is no good reason to think that this has happened. And, in fact, even the Goths and Lombards are worth a closer look.

In both instances, we are dealing with highly retrospective miscastings of the action. Jordanes was writing about events that happened three hundred years before his own lifetime, and the Lombard authors in the ninth century and beyond about migratory activity that was then four to five hundred years in the past. On one level, it is easy to see why mistakes might have crept in, but there is more to say here than just that. For in neither case was it complete fantasy to be thinking in terms of migration of some kind. The totality of the evidence for both the second- and third-century Goths and the fourth-and fifth-century Lombards does indicate that substantial population displacement played a major role in these eras of their respective pasts.

The evidence is better for the Goths. Here we have contemporary accounts locating Goths in northern Poland in the first and second
centuries, but north of the Black Sea from the mid-third. There was also a major material cultural revolution north of the Black Sea in the third century, in the course of which a whole series of customs and items became prominent in the region, which had not previously been part of its characteristic profiles. Some of the more distinctive among the new features, moreover, had been well-established aspects of life and death in first- and second-century Poland. These archaeological indications cannot prove that Gothic migration took place from the Baltic to the Black Sea regions, but, taken in conjunction with the contemporary historical evidence, they amount to a very serious argument to that effect. And while that historical evidence clearly indicates, as we have seen, that, even if there were many separate groups involved in the action rather than one ‘people’, and that some of them were perhaps originally numerically challenged, this did not remain the case throughout the migratory process. The third-century Goths provide, in fact, an excellent case of a migration flow of increasing momentum, which didn’t really stop until the Gothic Tervingi had displaced the Carpi as the dominant grouping between the Danube and the Carpathians in the decades either side of the year 300. Though much less detailed, the Lombard evidence is similar.

Lombards are well attested in the Lower Elbe region, just south of modern Denmark, in the first and second centuries
AD
. In this case, there are no contemporary historical indications at all of any major population displacements from this region in the Roman period, and what archaeological evidence there is might suggest only a series of relatively small ones, like the first Gothic flows towards the Black Sea. Yet again, however, Lombards were present on the Upper Elbe in sufficient numbers by the 490s to move in and destroy the hegemony of the Heruli in the western half of the Great Hungarian Plain through main force. Whatever its earlier forms, therefore, Lombard expansion towards the Danube, like that of the Goths towards the Black Sea, eventually took the form of much larger pulses of population. Neither Jordanes nor our Lombard sources invented the concept of large-scale migration from nothing, therefore, even if they miscast its form. And, just to push their rehabilitation one stage further, subsequent Gothic and Lombard migrations, occurring between these initial flows and our sources’ composition, had taken the form of large, composite group moves, both in the direction of Italy: the Ostrogoths in 488/9 and the Lombards some eighty years later.
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When examined more closely, therefore, neither Jordanes nor the Lombard sources give us reason to deny the reality of the large-group migrations recorded in other sources. That said, it is very important to recognize that even our
echt
examples of large-group first-millennium migration do not conform exactly to the old invasion-hypothesis model. Not even the largest groups were whole ‘peoples’ moving from one locality to another untouched by the process. They could both shed population and gain it. This was presumably even more true of drawn-out migration flows, such as the second- and third-century Goths and fourth- and fifth-century Lombards, but the pattern is only explicitly documented for some of the large-group moves. Decisions to move on such a scale were never lightly, and often caused splits. The Tervingi who crossed into the Empire in 376 left behind them north of the Danube a significant minority of the old group’s membership who adhered to the old leadership. Theoderic the Amal’s father caused another split when he moved the then Pannonian Goths into the Roman Balkans in 473, and Theoderic himself left behind at least some elite Goths who were absorbed into the military-political hierarchies of the east Roman state. When it comes to gathering recruits, the Lombards were joined by a mixed group of 20,000 Saxons for their move to Italy, together with descendants of much of the flotsam and jetsam left over by the post-Attilan struggles for power in the Middle Danube. Theoderic the Amal, likewise, added a body of Rugi to the Gothic following built up over two generations by his uncle and himself. Similarly, the relationship between the two Vandal groups and the Alans who crossed the Rhine together became much tighter in the face of Roman counterattack in Spain, so that, by the time they invaded North Africa in 429, the survivors, united behind the Hasding monarchy, were much more of a cohesive political unit than the loose alliance they had been twenty-three years before. As much recent work has emphasized, there was as much of the snowball to these migratory movements as the billiard ball.