Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  That said, the evidence is entirely compelling that pre-existing inequalities grew dramatically during the Roman period. We have met some of this already. The new military kings and their retinues, those at least who prospered, were one set of beneficiaries from the new wealth. Archaeologically, their rise is reflected in two ways: burial practice and settlement remains. There is no simple correlation between wealth of gravegoods and status in life. Really rich graves (called Fürstengräber, ‘princely burials’, in the germanophone literature) cluster chronologically with, broadly speaking, one group at the end of the first century and another at the end of the third: the so-called Lübsow and Leuna Hassleben types respectively. It is not credible, though, that a dominant social elite existed only at these limited moments, and it has been suggested that their appearance may mark periods of social stress, when new claims to high status were being made – claims by the individuals running the funeral, of course, rather than the dead persons themselves. Nonetheless, over the long term, changing burial practices certainly reflect the impact of new wealth. Before the last few centuries BC, Germanic funerary rites seem to have been pretty much identical for all, a little handmade pottery and the occasional personal item being all that the cremation burials of the period characteristically contained. In the Roman period, by contrast, not only are there the clusters of extremely rich princely burials, but also a substantial minority of the other burials started to contain increasing numbers of gravegoods, often including weapons with males and jewellery with women. Monumentalizing graves was another strategy for claiming status in some parts of Germanic Europe, particularly Poland, where groups of burials were marked out as special by piling up stones to create barrows, and individual graves by erecting standing stones (stelae). The Wielbark cemetery at Odry, for instance, turned up five hundred flat burials and twenty-nine barrows.23

  Settlement archaeology, too, generally reflects the kinds of change under way. At the top end of society, the elite dwellings inhabited by the kings and princes of the Alamanni have been quite extensively investigated. One of the best-known is the Runder Berg at Urach, within the territory of the Alamanni. Here in the late third or early fourth century a hill-top area, with maximum dimensions of 70 metres by 50, was surrounded by a stout timber rampart. Inside were a number of timber buildings, including what looks suspiciously like a substantial hall for feasting retainers and/or fellow kings. The lower slopes housed other buildings, including workshops for craftsmen and possibly dwellings for other servants, and the site as a whole has produced higher concentrations of imported Roman pottery and other elite items than the more run-of-the-mill rural sites. No large dwellings dating to the pre-Roman period have ever been thrown up within the bounds of Germania, but in the early centuries AD they started to become reasonably common. At a lower level of grandeur, at Feddersen Wierde again, one particular house within the village was marked out from all the others in the early second century. It was substantially larger and surrounded by a wooden palisade. The excavators interpreted it as the dwelling of a local headman. Similar examples of particularly large dwellings are known from a number of other sites as well, such as Haldern near Wesel and Kablow, thirty kilometres southeast of Berlin; all date to the Roman period. Within the particularly well-studied territories of the Alamanni, no less than sixty-two elite dwellings of one kind or another, dating to the fourth and fifth centuries, have been identified, of which ten have been excavated; and other similar sites, though less thoroughly studied, have turned up right across Germanic Europe, even as far east as the Gothic-dominated territories north of the Black Sea.24

  The general picture, then, is clear enough. Settlements and grave-goods show up an increasing social inequality, and it doesn’t take much thought to see how possession of military might allowed kings and, through them, their retainers to gain privileged access to a more than equal share of the new wealth. By the fourth century, as a direct result, we are faced with a Germanic world that was marked by more social stratification than its first-century counterpart and, in some places at least, greater structural stability in its political organization. It is, in fact, entirely natural that these two phenomena should have gone together. Class definition and state formation have long proved inseparable bedfellows when patterns in the evolution of human social organization have been subjected to comparative study. But how far-reaching had this inequality become by the fourth century, and how should we understand the new political entities that dominated the landscape? Were they ‘states’ in any meaningful sense of the word?

  Categorizing human societies and their political systems is a subject with a long and complex history stretching back to Aristotle and beyond. In the modern era, it received a whole new impetus from the significance that Marx and Engels ascribed to the state and its evolution. In classic Marxist analysis, the state is the sum and guarantor of the social, political and legal structures by which the dominant class in any given era perpetuates its control over the prime means of producing wealth at that time: whether we’re talking land in the ancient world, heavy industry in the recent past, or computer software and hardware now. This brute reality is always hidden behind some kind of ideological cloak whereby the elite tells everyone else that the state exists for the benefit of them all, but if you look hard enough, according to the Marxist perspective, it always turns out to be about maintaining the power of the privileged. More recent work has moved well beyond this kind of simple Marxist agenda, with a complex literature devoted to analysing early state forms along a spectrum of size and sophistication marked out by terms such as ‘tribe’, ‘simple chiefdom’, ‘complex chiefdom’ and ‘early state’. Rather than worrying too much about where to place the fourth-century Alamannic and Gothic confederations along this sliding scale, though, we can make better use of this literature in a more general way by identifying four key areas to investigate when seeking to understand the operations of any political system.25

  The first, straightforwardly, is scale. What magnitude of human population is being brought together by the political system under discussion? Second, what kind of governmental systems does it employ? Are there any bureaucrats or governmental functionaries, and what kind of powers do they deploy, using what technologies? The third area is the level of economic development and associated social stratification generally at play. Whether you accept the Marxist diagnosis of why this is so or not, it is simply the case that particular types of political system tend to be associated with particular types of economic organization. Large, centralized governmental systems cannot be supported by economies that do not produce an economic surplus of the appropriate size to pay for the existence of the functionaries not engaged in primary agricultural production.26 Fourth and finally, we must look hard at a society’s political relationships. How are rulers chosen and legitimized, and by what mechanisms do they create and sustain their authority? In particular, this area is concerned with the balance between force and consent, and the extent to which rulers need to give something to their subjects – whatever that might be – in return and in justification for the economic and other support that they themselves receive.27

  Investigating fourth-century Germania under any of these headings is not straightforward, given the nature of the available evidence. There is generally little of it, and what there is refers primarily to the Alamanni and the Gothic Tervingi, adding the further complication of how far we might legitimately generalize from these cases. But, at the very least, these entities document the limits of the possible among the fourth-century Germani, and there are enough points of conjunction between the two (and with what wider evidence there is) to suggest that it is not unreasonable to draw more general conclusions from their capacities and modes of operation.

  Power and the King

  On questions of scale, the evidence is far from ideal. But the Alamanni and the Tervingi certainly each had a military capacity – young men of military age – amounting to more than ten thousand individuals. Ammianus
tells us that Chnodomarius gathered an army of 35,000 for the battle of Strasbourg. Not all of these were Alamanni, and Roman reporting of barbarian numbers is always questionable, even if, as in this case, not obviously outrageous. But the Roman army numbered 12,000, and that figure – which is more secure – confirms an order of magnitude well over 10,000 for Chnodomarius’ force. The Romans still enjoyed a considerable tactical advantage over the Germani in the fourth century, not least because, as we have seen, the latter did not usually possess defensive armour, so that Chnodomarius would probably not have given battle without at least some superiority in numbers. The figures for the Tervingi are less straightforward, but on at least three occasions the confederation sent contingents of three thousand men to serve in Rome’s wars against Persia, and this is unlikely to have represented anything like one-third of its total military manpower. The Tervingi were also powerful enough to evade the hostile attentions of the Emperor Valens for the three years between 367 and 369, and I would read Ammianus to imply that, even after a split within the confederation, its larger fragment could put at least 10,000 fighting men in the field. All of this suggests that both Alamanni and Tervingi could field well over 10,000 warriors, and perhaps as many as 20,000. Estimates for the size of the overall population of these confederations depend, of course, upon what proportion of the total group you think likely to have borne arms. The minimum multiplier commonly used is something like four or five to one, implying total group sizes in the 50–100,000 range, but I think this is likely, if anything, to underestimate the total population that formed part of these confederations in some capacity or another.28

  Nor was any of our Roman sources sufficiently interested to provide a run-down of the governmental structures that made these confederations tick. As will pretty much always be the case throughout this study, therefore, their governmental capacity will have to be deduced largely from the kinds of administrative acts of which the system was capable. In some areas, the Alamanni and Tervingi show an impressive capacity. The least that can be said is that in the face of Roman power, both upheld some concept of their own territorial space. When they were in a position to avoid the most intrusive levels of Roman intervention in their territories, leaders of both the Alamanni and the Tervingi met Roman emperors in summit meetings on boats in the middle of the Rivers Rhine and Danube respectively, meetings which symbolically asserted that the river lines marked clear boundaries between themselves and the Empire. Whether their other boundaries, between themselves and their fellow Germani, were so well defined, in both perception and reality, is less clear but perfectly possible. The River Dniester, for instance, seems to have functioned as a marker between the Tervingi and an adjacent group of Goths, the Greuthungi, and there was enough hostility between the Alamanni and their Burgundian neighbours to suppose that both sides – as Ammianus reports – would have carefully defined their territories. According to him, they used some conveniently placed former Roman boundary markers to define the limits of their territories.29

  Within these territorial spaces, at least in response to Roman pressure again, Germanic leaderships were sometimes ambitious enough to impose a degree of cultural uniformity upon their populations. Roman cultural hegemony on the Danube in the fourth century, for instance, occasionally took the form of an interest in spreading Christianity to adjacent lands. On at least two occasions, when they were in a position to act, the leadership of the Tervingi resisted this with determination. In 348, Christian Roman missionaries were expelled and then a second time, after 369, Gothic Christians were actively persecuted to the point of execution, creating in the process a not insignificant number of martyrs. This suggests that the Gothic Tervingi’s sense of their own space, at least, had come to take a fairly active cultural as well as economic and military form.30

  The actions of various leaders, moreover, show us that certain institutional powers were in place. Particularly impressive, to my mind, is the evidence for a defined military obligation among the Tervingi. On three occasions, as we have seen, the confederation sent military contingents to Rome’s Persian wars. The individuals who went received some financial compensation from the Roman state, but overall the evidence suggests that this kind of service – on a frontier over fifteen hundred kilometres away, it should be remembered – was a generally resented imposition. Such service was certainly one of the terms of client status which the Goths’ leaders sought to strike out when they were in a position to. Nonetheless, the leadership of the Tervingi was able to make these contingents actually appear, which means that it could both identify individuals liable for military service and force them to show up. The Alamanni, likewise, provided contingents for Roman service on occasion, but we have few details and the distances involved were much smaller. Interestingly, the word generally in use in Germanic languages for ‘doing military service’ is a loan word from Latin, which perhaps suggests that this kind of transferred demand from the Roman state may have been responsible for generating a new kind of compulsory military service among those Germani forced to provide such contingents.31

  The leaderships of both Alamanni and Tervingi also had defined rights to basic economic support in the form, presumably, of taxation levied on agricultural production. Rights in this area were necessary to support the kings’ military retinues. By the fourth century, no king with a full-time professional retinue could afford to rely on purely voluntary donations of foodstuffs for their support, as had apparently been the practice in the first century. The extent of Roman imports, not least of wine amphorae found on elite sites in the fourth century, likewise suggests that kings were creaming off a proportion of basic production to exchange for Roman goods for their own consumption. Quite likely, though, Germanic leaders had at least one other major form of economic support. As we have seen, cross-border trade with the Roman Empire had become a substantial phenomenon by the fourth century. For their part, the Roman authorities certainly imposed customs dues on all this economic activity, and it is overwhelmingly likely that Germanic kings did too. We have no explicit evidence to this effect for the Alamanni or the Tervingi, but other Germanic kings of the frontier region were doing this as early as the first century, when the wealth of Vannius king of the Marcomanni was incontrovertibly associated with the presence of Roman merchants at his court, and it is extremely unlikely that their fourth-century counterparts would have failed to do the same. It is hard, otherwise, to explain why trade and its regulation should have figured so prominently in diplomatic negotiations between the leadership of the Tervingi and the eastern Roman Empire; and something made Chnodomarius wealthy enough to buy in mercenary support in addition to the other forces he lined up at Strasbourg.32

  Both confederations also had the right to impose labour services on at least parts of their population. Kings of the Alamanni could mobilize labour both for constructing their own defended elite sites, such as the Runder Berg, and when forced to pay off diplomatic obligations by providing labour for Roman state purposes, as in the treaties imposed on them by the Emperor Julian after Strasbourg. Among the Tervingi, likewise, the then judge attempted to fend off Hunnic aggression in the 370s by constructing a substantial set of fortifications – what Ammianus calls the ‘wall’ of Athanaric. This was most likely an attempt to renovate an old Roman fortified line on the River Alutanus, and in the end it came to naught. But the fact that such a project could even be attempted shows that the right to extract labour service was established, as does other physical evidence from the Gothic realms for elite sites similar to the Runder Berg.33 In the Roman world, and later in that of the largely Germanic-dominated successor states to the western Roman Empire, labour service was imposed usually only on the more servile element of the population, meaning that part of it which did not do military service. We have no evidence that this was also the case among the Alamanni and Tervingi, but it seems likely enough.

  In certain key areas, then, fourth-century Germanic leaders had well-developed rights. They could defin
e and extract – perhaps from different elements of their populations – military service, labour dues and a percentage of agricultural production. Almost certainly, too, although none of our sources is sufficiently interested to tell us about this, they had rights to be involved in what we would term legal-dispute settlement – in the case of their more important subjects anyway. No leader known in any other context, whose powers can be elaborated in any detail, lacked this kind of authority, so it is probably safe enough to ascribe it to the leadership of the Tervingi and Alamanni as well.34 As to how these various rights were actually administered, neither confederation ran, as far as we can see, to any kind of articulated bureaucracy. No source mentions bureaucrats in the fourth-century Germanic world, though kings certainly had their functionaries, and the rights were possibly exacted with little or no use of any formal literate administration. Writing of various kinds was known to the fourth-century Germani. Runes were in use, some Germani were able to operate successfully in Latin, and, in the mid-fourth century, Gothic was busily being turned into a written language – the first Germanic tongue to be so – for the purposes of Christian missionaries. There is no evidence, however, that any of these literacies was being applied to the exaction and disbursement of revenues in the form of agricultural produce.