Rome's Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric (Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity) (6 page)

Three major barbarian collectivities appear along the imperial frontier in the third century: the
Alamanni, the Goths, and the
Franks. Though previously unknown to the Roman world, all three groups went on to be permanent features of late imperial politics. Of the three, the Alamanni are in many ways the easiest to understand. In the course of the third century, many smaller groups of barbarians along the Upper Rhine came to be described collectively as Alamanni, and to take occasional collective action. In the fourth century, they appear as a loose confederacy of different kings who could unite for major campaigns against the Romans under one of their number. This sort of coordinated action never lasted for very long, but the Alamanni were nonetheless conscious of sharing a closer comradeship than they did with other barbarians who were not Alamanni. Roughly the same process is detectable in the case of the Franks. Both they and the Alamanni had come together as large but loosely connected polities, whose consciousness of a basic kinship was a response to the simultaneous lure and threat of Rome. It is very likely that the same sort of pressures account for the
rise of the Goths.

In the regions where Goths are first attested in the third century – north of the lower Danube and the Black Sea, east of the Carpathians and the Roman province of
Dacia – centrally organized and powerful barbarian groupings are unknown until the Goths themselves appear on the scene. Instead, a variety of
Sarmatian and other groups formed small communities at the edges of the Roman provinces, and were generally managed in the same way that the empire managed any other barbarians, with periodic subsidy and periodic military punishment. This was how
Trajan had dealt with the
Roxolani and
Costoboci – two of the region’s minor barbarian groups – before, during, and after
his
Dacian wars. Yet it is quite clear that the barbarians of the lower Danube and the Ukrainian steppe were not, in the first and second centuries, perceived as a threat on the same scale as were those of the middle Danube or upper Rhine. Instead, these regions became really important to imperial strategy only in the course of the third century – exactly when we first begin to hear of Goths. Why should the chronology of barbarian history on the lower Danube differ so much from that of other European frontiers? The answer must lie in large part with the relative pace of provincialization in the region
.

The Balkan and Danubian provinces were among the last to be added to the Roman empire. Even after
Augustus had fixed a line of communication along the Danube to connect eastern and western empires, the mountainous Balkan interior developed only slowly for generations. The series of forts along the frontier was not backed up by the same development of urbanism and road networks as in Gaul, which meant that models of provincial behaviour were not diffused as quickly in the Balkans as they were in frontier provinces further west in the empire. Indeed, it was not until after
107 – when Trajan created the province of
Dacia across the Danube in Transylvania and the Carpathians – that the provincialization of the land south of the Danube began in earnest. The existence of the new Dacian province acted on the people of its periphery in the same way that Roman Gaul affected barbarian Germania – it was a spur to the rise of more structured social organization beyond its borders. Archaeological evidence from the lower Danubian regions is not as abundant as it is for the Rhineland and Upper Danube, but we know that the growth of a provincial Roman culture in Dacia followed the same rhythms as those documented with such precision in Gaul. That is to say, by the end of the second century and within two generations of the conquest, a recognizably Roman provincial culture had developed in a long arc across what is now modern Romania. The reigns of Septimius Severus (r. 193–211) and his immediate successors represent the height of Roman material culture in Dacia.
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It is thus no coincidence that the culture of the steppe lands
east of Dacia began to grow more complex in the third century, nor that barbarian confederacies capable of threatening Roman provinces grew up shortly thereafter: this is exactly what had happened in the case of the Franks along the lower Rhine, and with the Alamanni on the upper Rhine and upper Danube. In other words, even though the absolute chronology of change along the lower Danube differs from that further west, it obeys the same relative pace of change: two or three generations after Roman provincial culture began to develop inside the frontier, new and more sophisticated barbarian polities appeared along the periphery, prompted by both the example of Roman provincial life and the threat of the Roman army. The rise of the Goths should be understood within this interpretative framework, as a product of the provincialization of Dacia and the lower Danube provinces
.

That, however, leaves open the question of
migration. Even readers with a very casual interest in ancient history will have heard of ‘the barbarian invasions’ or ‘the Germanic migrations’ and will probably remember that Rome fell because of them. Popular histories are filled with maps that use arrows to plot barbarian migrations from the distant north and east to the doorstep of the Roman empire and beyond. The Goths always feature prominently on such maps and usually come with a very long arrow attached to their migration. Even among scholars, who nowadays tend to downplay the significance of invasions in explaining why Rome fell, the Goths are often taken to be a paradigm of barbarian migration. As we shall see in the
next chapter
, the evidence for a Gothic migration out of northern Europe to the fringes of the empire is quite weak. It rests mainly on the evidence of a single ancient source, the
Getica
of Jordanes, around which complicated structures of scholarly hypothesis have been built. For centuries, the idea of a deep Gothic antiquity has been essential to many different visions of the European past. All modern discussion of the Goths, including the present book, is a product of this long historiographical tradition. To maintain, as here, that Gothic history effectively begins at the imperial frontier in the third century may be in keeping with all the ancient evidence, but it is also controversial
. To understand why an interpretation that closely reflects the ancient evidence should be out of step with much modern
hypothesis, we need to examine the
role that the Goths have played in the intellectual history of modern Europe. Only by doing so can we see how little our present-day disputes over the Gothic past have to do with third-, fourth-, and fifth-century evidence, and how much they have to do with the political developments of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and earlier twentieth centuries
.

Gothic history, as it appears in every modern account, is a story of
migration. Traditionally, it begins in Scandinavia, moves to the southern shores of the Baltic around the mouth of the Vistula river, and then onwards to the Black Sea. Depending upon what study one reads, one can find it stated that written sources, archaeology, and linguistic evidence all demonstrate that just such a migration took place, if not out of Scandinavia then at least out of Poland. In fact, there is just a single source for this extended story of Gothic migration, the
Getica
of Jordanes, written in the middle of the sixth century A.D., hundreds of years after the events it purports to record. Other sources, literary and archaeological, have been brought in to corroborate, correct or supplement Jordanes’ narrative, but his story of Gothic migration underpins nearly every modern treatment of the Goths, consciously or not. And yet Jordanes, as we shall see, is not merely unreliable, he is deeply misleading. To understand why his satisfyingly linear, but ultimately implausible, account is still so pervasive, we have to understand why the idea of Gothic roots stretching back into the deepest mists of prehistory has played so important a role in conceptualizing the
northern European past. As we shall see, for the past 500 years the Goths have played an indispensable part in imagining a northern European history untouched by the Graeco-Roman world.

In 1425, the Italian humanist
Poggio Bracciolini discovered the only known medieval manuscript of
Tacitus’
Germania
. That discovery, and still more the first printing of the text at Venice around 1470, were watersheds in the search for a northern, non-Roman, and ultimately Gothic, past. The
Germania
is a short treatise on the peoples and customs of the region that the Romans called Germany – which is to say the whole vast tract of central Europe beyond the Rhine and Danube rivers which was in many ways a mystery to the Romans. Probably written in A.D. 98 and based in part on earlier sources, the
Germania
uses its description of the primitive Germans as a mirror that can reflect the failings of decadent, civilized Rome. Short as it is, the
Germania
provided early modern thinkers and historians with a lot of food for thought. It opens with a section of ethnography in which Tacitus asserts that the Germans were not immigrants to their lands, but rather pure and uncontaminated by intermarriage with others. This is followed by a long description of German customs, and then by a survey of the different tribes of Germania.

For fifteenth- and sixteenth-century scholars – and for many others since then –
the modern Germans (or
Deutschen
, as they are called in their own language) were the direct lineal descendants of Tacitus’
Germani
. And so, for humanists in German-speaking countries, Tacitus’
Germania
offered a hitherto undreamed of prospect – a window onto Germanic antiquity for its own sake, rather than as a mere adjunct to the Graeco-Roman past. In the fifteenth century, the Germanic past could only be conceived as a somewhat shady analogue to Roman history, but the discovery of Tacitus – who after all reported that the Germans were a pure race – legitimated the search for separate, unmixed German origins and led back to other texts that could provide insight into a specially German past. German humanists used Tacitus, medieval
authors like Jordanes, Gregory of Tours or Einhard, and stray references in the classical sources as the basis for extrapolation and invention, which allowed them to posit a Germanic past that was older than, and therefore could not depend upon, a Roman past.

The
Reformation sharpened discussions of the ancient Germans, as the German Protestant reaction against the contemporary Roman Catholic church seeped into discussion of ancient German resistance to the Roman empire. Thereafter, the increasing domestic impact of European colonialism and imperialism also served to change perceptions of northern European antiquity, largely because it encouraged new ideas about the ranking of civilizations into hierarchies. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans began for the first time to have regular dealings with Asian and (especially) New World cultures which were understood as primitive according to European norms. In the same way that the myth of the ‘noble savage’ seemed to be validated by the imagined purity of New World primitives, unbesmirched by European decadence, so too were the ancient Germans fitted into a myth of primitive nobility and moral virtue. That Tacitus had used his
Germani
for precisely this purpose was no end of help, and it was easy enough for moralists and polemicists to take the step from the primitive virtues of the
Germani
to the modern virtues of the
Deutschen
. However, it was only with the rise of
Romanticism towards the end of the eighteenth century that the study of Germanic antiquity began to ask the questions that still condition scholarly debates today.

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, Romanticism became the reigning intellectual paradigm for German-speaking thinkers and artists. Romantic ideas about the intrinsic qualities of individuals and whole peoples helped to articulate a sense of belonging and identity in German-speaking lands where – unlike France, Spain, or Britain – no modern nation-state had developed. For that reason, Romantic ideology was an inextricable part of German nationalism throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In one of history’s most fertile
accidents, the rigorous and professional study of the past developed in the German-speaking world at precisely this time. The idea that history is a professional scholarly discipline, with a set of analytical methods appropriate to it, goes back to Germany in the early nineteenth century, and is particularly associated with
Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), who insisted on rooting statements about the past in documents and popularized the radical new approach to teaching through seminars. As this innovative Rankean model of scholarship was adopted throughout Europe, and as history became a professional discipline in universities across the continent, so too did Romantic ideas about the past – ideas that were closely connected to German nationalism – filter into the wider world of nineteenth-century scholarship. In other words, German Romanticism helped to shape basic concepts about how the historical past should be studied during the very years when history was becoming the formal academic discipline it remains to this day.

The most important figure in this historical Romanticism was Johann
Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). For Herder, the
Volk
– the people – was the focal point of all history. The
Volk
was not a constructed or merely political entity, but rather an organic whole with an eternal core identity expressed in language, art, literature and characteristic institutions. All these were expressions of the
Volksgeist
, the unique spirit of the
Volk
. The
Volksgeist
could not be changed by conquest or by borrowings from other cultures, because it was essentially pure and immutable. Herder’s emphasis on language as a marker of the identity of the
Volk
had a particular importance for the subject of this book.
At the same time that language was taking a leading place among the many attributes of the
Volk
, so too was a new scientific philology – what we would now call historical linguistics – being developed.
Of particular importance was the discovery that many living spoken languages were related both to one another and to other languages that had once existed but were now no longer spoken. The idea of language families that could be plotted in a sort of genealogical table fitted in perfectly with the nineteenth-century search for national origins. Close linguistic community – as,
for instance, the various members of the
Germanic language family – could be invoked as evidence for deeper sorts of political or ideological community. When retrojected into the distant past, evidence for linguistic community could be used as evidence of politically conscious community action in the past.