by Dan Carlin
Maybe.
The period often cited as the crisis era in both Romano-Germanic relations and the eventual dissolution of the Western Roman Empire is thought to have been sparked by the arrival of an outside people into the story in 376 CE—the year the ferocious and still somewhat mysterious Huns broke like a storm on Europe.
It’s hard to say what really happened in the dark depths of the “barbarian” interior, where great wars might have been fought between tribes and tribal confederacies, but no one knows of them because they were never recorded. The traditional story—which originated with ancient sources and was taken as gospel by most until recently—was that the Huns, a fierce tribe of nomadic steppe horse peoples, had broken into the European side of Eurasia and were driving all before them. Whole tribes were supposedly fleeing from them in utter desperation and smashing into one another in a chain reaction.
The Ostrogoths, we are told, fled from the Huns in panic toward the west, where they then collided with the Visigoths. Together, these Germanic tribes were driven against Rome’s Danubian frontier, where they begged to be allowed in, creating a vast humanitarian crisis.
Some more modern theories, however, suggest that the Huns may not have been involved in a vast military offensive at all, but that lots of small-scale raids and attacks had made the home areas of the Gothic peoples unsafe and insecure.
Regardless of the reasons, the Roman emperor in the East was confronted with a difficult situation.* A crisis can also be an opportunity, however, and the emperor Valens (r. 364–378 CE), who may not have had a lot of great options in this situation, at least saw a potential upside in possibly adding a bunch of tough Visigothic soldiers into his armies. He agreed to allow the tribes to cross the Danube River frontier and settle within the presumed safety of the boundaries of the empire if they gave up their arms. It wasn’t an unreasonable request—having more than a hundred thousand armed Germanic tribespeople inside your borders is not without its potential dangers.*
The refugees expected salvation; instead, as the historian Arther Ferrill writes, “late in 376”—in the dead of winter—“the river crossing began. The Visigoths, perhaps 200,000 strong, were starving, and insensitive grasping Roman officials exploited them unmercifully. To avoid starvation, the Visigoths traded their children into Roman slavery for dog’s meat at the rate of one child per dog.”
Perhaps not all Romans treated the newcomers so viciously, but, as Ferrill notes, “the crossing of the Danube was badly mishandled.” That’s one way to describe the functional equivalent of pouring gasoline onto a situation that the panic and desperation caused by the Hunnic attacks had already made potentially explosive.
Beaten down, hungry, freezing, and disorganized though they were, the Visigoths were still a formidable and strong people. Eventually, the combustible situation ignited, and the warriors went on a rampage, taking what they needed from the region for the next eighteen months in what became known as the Gothic War (376–382 CE).*
By the time the Romans and Goths met in a real full-scale field battle, it was 378 CE, and the Eastern Roman emperor was at the head of a Roman army in modern-day European Turkey. He had to broker peace with his bitter foes the Sasanian Persians to make the army available, but Gothic depredations had the public up in arms; in this era when emperors could come and go rapidly, the truth was that an emperor who allowed the Gothic problem to continue for too long might end up fighting his own rebellious people instead of the barbarians.
Even though it’s natural to think of these “Goths”* as “Germans,” it’s hard to know what they really were by this time. These tribes had been absorbing other tribes and groups and individuals for so long since they’d left their Scandinavian homeland,* and were now residing in so many areas populated by non-Germanic types, that these “Goths” must have been a mix of ethnicities by this time. They probably retained core elements that bound them together, such as a Germanic tongue and shared origin myths, and they certainly had many people who fit the traditional Germanic physical stereotypes, but, like other Germanic tribes who moved into non-Germanic regions, they picked up adventurers, freed slaves, Huns, Slavs, Alan warriors, and even disaffected Roman citizens along their route. That’s the sort of heterogeneous “Gothic” force that lined up against the Romans at the Battle of Adrianople in 378 CE.*
Adrianople (also called Hadrianopolis) has always been considered one of history’s pivotal battles. If this is true, it’s only because of the outcome. Had the Romans prevailed, it would likely be chalked up as just another Roman triumph over the barbarians. But the Romans didn’t triumph, Adrianople was a disaster (for them), and this made the battle extremely important.
The Roman army of this era may have been a shadow of its former self,* but it was still effective, especially against tribal peoples. But multiple errors in command, intelligence, and diplomacy put the troops in a bad situation and ensured that there would be fewer of them at the battle than could have been assembled if things had gone to plan. The Roman soldiers arrived at the battlefield tired after an estimated eight-mile march in rough terrain. It was very hot, and the Goths set fire to the surrounding grass to make things worse.
After their arrival, the Roman troops faced a massive circle of wagons perched on a hill, which the Goths had arranged as a defensive structure. Inside this makeshift battlefield fortification were the Gothic warriors and their families.
The battle seems to have started spontaneously when some Roman units began advancing to assault the wagon circle before so ordered. Initially, it looked like a typical Roman victory, with the tribesmen being pushed backward and the circle of wagons about to be stormed.
And then disaster struck.
Gothic* cavalry that had been away when the battle began returned to the Gothic camp as the fighting was raging, and charged into the already engaged Roman left flank “like a thunderbolt near the mountains.”* This Roman flank was rolled up, the troops in the center crowded so closely together that they became encumbered by their shields, weapons, and fellow comrades, and after what seems to have been a rather spirited Roman resistance, the Gothic forces eventually prevailed. The ancient sources say that two-thirds of the Roman force died—probably between fifteen and twenty thousand* men in an era when raising an army of fifteen thousand was a major feat. The emperor Valens himself was killed somewhere on or around the battlefield. (His body was never found.)
Adrianople was not a large battle by the standards of Rome at its height, but at this point in its history, the losses were extremely hard to make up. Roman citizens in this era had long had professional troops to do their fighting for them and couldn’t just be drafted out of the civilian ranks into the army and pitted against savage, experienced warriors. The money to hire professionals was in short supply, and when warriors were hired, they tended to be Germanic tribesmen.
Roger Collins says of the post-Adrianople era: “Between the years 395–476, Roman armies virtually disappear from the literary sources relating to both the eastern and western halves of the Empire.” He points out that while there was still plenty of military activity going on it involved mercenary and barbarian allied troops, not Romans. After Adrianople, things got only worse for the empire. The Romans were plagued with a multitude of huge problems, chief of which may have been the power struggles among would-be emperors for control of the western empire. They also had social problems, tax base problems, military recruitment problems, and a host of other issues. All of this might have been survivable in less perilous times. But the arrival of the Huns and the resulting agitation of many Germanic peoples seems to have had the same effect geopolitically as plunging a stick into a beehive. The number of tribes causing problems for the post-Adrianople Romans—the Vandals, the Alemanni, Burgundians, Lombards, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Frisians, Saxons, Franks, to name a few—was huge. And their strength swelled with the addition of Roman slaves, “discontents and fortune-seekers.” The Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus wrote that the number
s were also increased by miners escaping the harsh conditions of the state’s gold mines and by people oppressed by the burden of imperial taxation. So social discontent within the Roman Empire may have been merging with and found an outlet in barbarian activities.* Call it a perfect storm, or Murphy’s law, or just the end of a centuries-long winning streak, but the problems facing fifth-century Rome in the West were monumental and came at a time when their armies were far weaker than in bygone days and their leadership of a much lower caliber.
One way to cut down on the sheer number of problems the Romans faced was to double-down on the practice of making contracts/treaties with tribes. This is what the Romans eventually did with the tribes they fought at Adrianople. More than in the past, though, the deals involved settling the tribal peoples on Roman land and allowing them to maintain a separate political identity while they defended the territory for Rome.
Some have described this as a sort of feudalistic relationship that would become a feature of the Middle Ages. In 418, for example, the emperor Honorius settled the Goths in Aquitaine, and in 435, the emperor Valentinian III gave Roman lands in North Africa to the Vandal tribe. The Visigoths were ensconced in Spain, and the Franks in much of modern-day France. Without realizing it, the Roman decision makers were parceling out the empire to the people who would eventually run these regions when the central authority fell apart—in effect creating their own successor states. As the historian Roger Collins writes: “What is genuinely striking . . . is the haphazard, almost accidental nature of the process. From 410 onwards, successive Western imperial regimes just gave way or lost practical authority over more and more of the territory of the former Empire. The Western Empire delegated itself out of existence.”
Central authority in the West fell apart over the course of the fifth century. The Visigoths—whom Rome had allowed into the empire and who had beaten them at Adrianople—ended up sacking Rome itself in 410. This was the first sacking of the Eternal City by an alien power since another tribal people, most likely Celts, had done it eight hundred years earlier.
But unlike the Assyrian city of Nineveh, which was down for the count after being knocked out, Rome rose from the canvas for a few more rounds. It survived the sacking of 410 only to be sacked again in 455, this time, it is said, much more brutally by the Germanic Vandals. It was a German military leader of the Roman foederati* who all but dismissed the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire in 476.
This is the point where the old histories would say the “Dark Ages” began in the areas where the Roman civilizational tide had receded. This was truer in some of those areas than others. Italy, for example, was less deeply affected and seems to have recovered more quickly than areas that were more on the Roman periphery. The areas to the north of Italy, though, which included much of the old western empire, were on the equivalent of impulse power.* Elements of the Catholic Church (monasteries for example), local groups, and warlords or petty kings tried to manage a soft landing from modernity as best they could, but it wouldn’t be long before some of the places that had once done their business in coinage—coinage that had a Roman emperor’s image on it—reverted to a barter economy.
But was the decay and decline of infrastructure and the replacement of coinage by barter a sign of civilization moving backward? Or is that simply evidence of our modern bias?
The anthropologist Peter Wells writes of a “continuity of occupation” in several major cities that had been part of the Western Roman Empire even through to the Middle Ages. He says that several cities, which included Rome itself, seem not to have contracted in size or decreased in population “even though the traditions of Roman architecture and road building and maintenance of aqueducts and sewers effectively ceased with the end of the official Roman administration.”
Wells cautions against the automatic assumption that Roman traditions were superior to local cultural traditions. He cites the example of the Roman city that is now London. At the end of the first century CE it was a “stunning center of the Roman Empire on its northern edge, with the monumental architecture, a thriving commercial center, and a military base characteristic of the greatest of Roman cities.” When the Western Roman Empire fell apart, “much of the formerly urban area seems to have reverted to a non-urban character.”
But to call these changes a decline, he says, is to adopt a conservative Roman attitude toward change. Wells writes, “As evidence accumulates in London, it is becoming clear that the site was not abandoned, as earlier researchers had thought. Life went on in place. . . . It was just different.”
For several centuries, Germanic tribal successor states would fight among themselves, as well as with and against the Eastern Roman Empire.* Over time, one of these Germanic successor states—that of the Franks—began to accumulate power and territory that set it apart from the others, and the Catholic Church,* in search of some military protection in a world with no Roman army in the West, began to form a mutually supporting relationship with this group of formerly fearsome tribal “barbarians.” (The Germans still call the nation of France Frankreich—the empire of the Franks.)*
The Franks had been one of many tribal groups to be given foederati status by the Romans; in turn, they simply became the political authority in their region when Rome fragmented in the West. There were in fact several branches of the Franks—centered in modern-day France and western Germany—but they were eventually brought under the rule of one king, Clovis I (c. 466–511 CE). Clovis seems to have been an even mix of Viking warlord, Mafia don, and outlaw motorcycle gang leader. The sources portray him as a guy who tells somebody to look for something on the ground and then splits the guy’s head open with a battle-ax when he bends over to comply.*
In an enormously important political event, Clovis converted from paganism to Christianity in 496.* Now this rising European power of Franks was in many ways allied to the Western Church. As the traditional story goes, the church smoothed the rough edges off these Franks, helping them to transition in a few generations from violent barbarians to pious medieval Christians. But a case can also be made that the Franks added something to Western Christianity, too—more muscle power with a barbaric edge, perhaps.
Whatever the truth of it, both the Franks and the church thrived in the relationship, and Clovis—a man who is sometimes hailed as the first king of what eventually became France—marks the start of the Merovingian dynasty. This was followed by a later dynasty—the Carolingian—which, under some key rulers, and using extreme violence, managed to unite a very large chunk of territory, much of which formerly was the Roman West. The transformative figure among the Carolingians was Charles I (known as “the Great”)—a.k.a. Charlemagne.* His rule as king of the Franks would last a monumental forty-six years—he isn’t called “the Father of Europe” for nothing.
As a historical figure, Charlemagne seems a wonderful synthesis of the “Dark Age” Germanic barbarian stereotype and the pious Middle Ages Christian ruler stereotype. He was intelligent yet illiterate, but the sources say that he dearly wished to learn to read, and continually tried. He was physically imposing compared with his contemporaries, and had light hair and sported the classic Germanic mustache the Romans thought a barbaric adornment.* In 768, Charlemagne was crowned king of the Franks and began a long career of adding territory to their already sizable realm. By 800, the Frankish kingdom controlled what is now modern-day France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy all the way south to Rome, most of Germany, and Austria. For the first time since the fall of Rome in the West three centuries previously, much of its former territory was united under one ruler.
On Christmas Day 800, something weird happened with Charlemagne and the pope in Rome in front of a lot of people. The event is traditionally one of history’s “great” moments, but there’s a great deal about this event that is unclear. It had a huge effect on subsequent history, though. Supposedly, Charlemagne went innocently to mass at Saint Peter’s Basilica to pray, and while kneeling at
the altar the pope suddenly slipped a crown on the great king’s head and proclaimed him Imperator Romanorum.* Historians have debated ever since whether the claim that Charlemagne was unaware of the pope’s intention to do this should be believed. But all of a sudden Europe had its first emperor since the Roman Empire in the West had fallen apart.*
There were a whole host of things going on with this move, a lot of it aimed at the Byzantines in the East (the part of the “Roman Empire” that had continued to exist . . . but whether it should be allowed to claim such a mantle was part of the issue). The branding and marketing questions connected with this new empire are fascinating.*
As the historian Alessandro Barbero writes, “On the whole, the symbolism of power adopted by the Carolingians after 800 always referred back to that of the empire of Rome. Charles had himself portrayed on coins with the laurel crown and purple cloak and his seal carried the wording that was to remain an extraordinarily effective political slogan for centuries: renovatio Romani imperii.”* That is, “the renewal of the Roman Empire.” If you were the people who still called themselves “the Roman Empire” off in Byzantium/Constantinople, this had to be galling.
But, in a way, this new empire was renewing some elements of what Rome had formerly been. This period, which is sometimes called the Carolingian Renaissance, offers perhaps an example of a more centralized government in the West, if not restoring the full civilizational, organizational, and bureaucratic power from Rome’s heyday, at least ramping it up after the “Dark Age” lows. Levels of literacy* improved, architecture became more elaborate, wealth increased, and writing became more important again. There were concerted attempts to recover lost knowledge from antiquity and to recopy old written works to preserve the past.