Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  But this need not mean, it is worth stressing, that exaction was an essentially random process. How it might have worked on a regular but essentially paperless basis is illustrated by some of the earliest evidence for administration from Anglo-Saxon England. Here the seventh-century agricultural economy was harnessed by dividing the country up into largish revenue-producing districts, each of which had to contribute a given quantity of agricultural produce annually in the form of food renders. The system required an exhaustive surveying process at the beginning, to divide the countryside up; storage space for the goods, and some kind of tallying system to keep track of deliveries; but not that many officials and no great degree, if any, of literacy. It is, in fact, a straightforward mechanism for extracting revenues from a rural economy that is found in various contexts, and there is absolutely no reason to suppose that something of this kind was beyond the capacities of the Tervingi and Alamanni.35 Alamannic territory, as we have seen, was already divided into districts (Gaue, in German), and it is probable that one of their functions was fiscal. In the Alamannic case, of course, we are dealing with multiple kings, many of whom controlled their own cantons. Any revenue collection in this context, presumably, was in the first instance by and for these canton-level kings, although they may then have had to pass on a portion of their take to an overking.

  In Anglo-Saxon England and many other early medieval contexts where fiscal systems mainly produced food rather than some more negotiable form of wealth, what is known in the scholarly literature as ‘royal itineration’ was central to their operation. This meant that instead of running a fixed royal court, the king, his leading advisers and his professional retinue moved around the kingdom in a regular cycle, stopping at a series of designated points. These stopping points were also the local collection centres for the food renders, thus greatly reducing the inherent logistic problems of a tax regime based on bulky, heavy food rather than, say, comparatively light and mobile coinage. Instead of the food mountains going to the king, the king went to the mountains. We have no explicit evidence for itineration among fourth-century kings of the Germani, but since the consumption of food renders is so much easier on this basis, it must be a priori likely. It is perhaps a reflection of the intineration process that the Romans could not simply predict where a targeted Alamannic king might be, and an observable correlate of such systems is, obviously enough, the existence of many royal centres, which might also explain why there were quite so many such centres, seemingly, among the Alamanni. There were no more than about twenty-five cantons, implying a maximum of twenty-five kings, but sixty-two elite sites have been identified, and these are all hill forts, while the written sources mention others (so far unidentified) in the lowlands as well.36

  State and Society

  The consequences of all this economic development for the spread of social power among the Germani are difficult to estimate in their entirety, but two initial observations are straighforward. The overall population of Germanic Europe will have increased markedly over the Roman centuries, as agricultural production grew in intensity and the rest of the economy – at least moderately – diversified, but kings and warbands benefited disproportionately from the extra wealth. The difficulty comes when you try to get a sense of the consequent redistribution of social power. A whole host of evidence suggests, in fact, that the degree of overall change must not be overstated. Both literary and archaeological evidence indicate that other people, apart from kings and their retinues, still mattered in Germanic society of the fourth century.

  Some of the relevant evidence consists of narratives of Germanic politics in action. As the famous historian of Rome’s barbarians Edward Thompson observed, Ammianus’ descriptions imply that kings could not simply order warriors about, but had to ‘urge’ and ‘persuade’ them to follow their policies. Also, we have already encountered the Alamannic king who was overthrown by his own followers for not attaching himself to Chnodomarius’ banner. Ammianus explicitly states that this was the result of action by the ‘people’ – plebs, populus – of his canton. This could just about be referring to a restricted political world of royal retinues, although Ammianus’ wording implies not, but Strasbourg involved a military-political community that extended well beyond such limited social circles. The Alamannic army gathered there numbered reportedly thirty-five thousand, as we have seen, and certainly well over ten thousand fighting men. Royal retinues, even of chief kings, numbered just a few hundred. Ammianus refers to sixteen kings and princes assembled for Strasbourg, and even if for the sake of argument we allow each of them a retinue of two hundred (although most will, by definition, have been smaller since Chnodomarius was the most powerful king), that still only amounts to 3,200 fighting men. Military participation was clearly not limited just to kings and small specialist retinues. Nor, it seems, was some kind of elevated social status. Archaeologically, the increase in the quantity of material deposited with the Germanic dead, seen over the Roman period, was not confined to a very small number of rich Fürstengräber. Alongside these highly exceptional burials are found both large numbers of graves with absolutely nothing in them at all, and a fairly numerous category containing a moderate number of personal items: usually pottery and, as mentioned earlier, weapons of some kind for men and jewellery for women. The striking increase in weapons burials in the late Roman period, though not found right across Germania, does lend further weight to the idea that the period saw a substantial increase in the importance of the martial side of male life, consonant with the rise of the retinues, but the total number of such burials indicates that others, apart from kings and retinues, were also treading this path to retained or increased social prominence.37

  A large quantity of legal evidence from the sixth and seventh centuries suggests who these others may have been. These texts, or codes, composed in the successor states to the western Roman Empire, provide us with the first full description of the social categories operating in a Germanic-dominated society. Given the date of the texts’ composition, they all reflect Germanic societies that had been through a further stage of interaction with what remained of old Roman imperial economic, governmental and social institutions after the collapse of the western Roman Empire, so there is an obvious difficulty in trying to use them to elucidate the fourth-century Germani. But if anything – and this would be the general consensus, not just my own view – these later interactions will only have increased inequalities of wealth and status in the Germanic world, because the process of taking over former Roman territories led to further unequal acquisitions of wealth on the part of kings and their immediate supporters. That being so, this later legal evidence will tend to underestimate the sociopolitical importance of other social groups not immediately in royal service. It can be used as a guide, therefore, to the maximum level of inequality likely to have been prevalent in the fourth century.

  The descriptions of status groups found in these legal materials are strikingly uniform. Kings had a special status, obviously, and being in royal service usually increased status as well. In addition, the codes often referred to a noble class. All of these groups can reasonably be thought of as belonging to worlds analogous to those of the fourth-century kings and retinues. But all the codes (and we do have law codes from a large number of the successor kingdoms) also referred to a class, beneath the nobility, of freemen, who still had considerable rights and responsibilities. These freemen stood above two further classes: permanent freedmen and slaves. Characteristically, freemen did military service (as, in fact, often did freedmen, but not slaves); they could also give trustworthy testimony in cases of legal dispute; and their status was ringed about by safeguards to prevent slaves and freedmen from crossing the boundary without permission.38

  The importance of this free class was overemphasized in romanticizing nineteenth-century accounts of Germanic society. Nothing indicates, for instance, that they formed a numerical majority of the male population; and given their obviously privileged position, I w
ould be willing to bet quite a lot of money that they did not. Privileges are enjoyed by minorities, not majorities. Some not very good Ostrogothic and Lombard evidence might suggest that the freemen amounted to something like a quarter or a fifth of weapon-bearing males of these groups in the sixth century (and slaves are excluded from the equation because they did not bear arms). This of course makes freemen a still smaller percentage of the total population. But neither were they a figment of the law-writers’ imaginations. Freemen are encountered in practice right across the post-Roman west as an important group of social actors at the local level in the evidence of legal practice, and also in some of the narrative evidence for warfare between Germanic-dominated groupings and the east Roman state.39 If this was true of the successor states, when a further influx of Roman wealth had increased inequalities again, then it is overwhelmingly likely that freemen were still more important among the fourth-century Germani, before this later process unfolded. We should not imagine, in other words, that increased social stratification in the Roman period had reduced the sociopolitically important stratum of Germanic society to a tiny group of kings and retainers. A broader world of freemen maintained – or had developed – in the changing economic circumstances its range of social and economic privileges. They perhaps show up archaeologically as the owners of the big and prosperous longhouses found in some of the new villages of third- and fourth-century Germania, and as the occupants of the large number of endowed but not massively rich burials.

  This fairly complex account of social stratification among the fourth-century Germani has obvious implications for the final key area of analysis: the balance between constraint and consent in Germanic politics.

  Evidence for some degree of constraint is straightforward. Kings had warrior retinues. By use of these retinues, they had established a hereditary element to their position. The retinues could also be used more broadly as social enforcers, as we saw among the Tervingi when it came to persecuting Christians. There, in the incident described, the persecution policy went against the general wishes of the village community.40 The leadership of the Tervingi could also, as we have seen, levy military contingents to make the onerous and dangerous trek to fight in Rome’s Persian wars. And what could be a clearer sign that the rise of military kings was not always a consensual process than the weapons find at Ejsbøl Mose?

  But just as kings and retinues had not completely eclipsed a broader privileged (freeman?) class, so the political process also had – sometimes, at least – to take account of, and win the broad consent for, their policies from this larger privileged group within the total population. As we have seen, kings could even be overthrown if their policies proved unpopular. The Alamannic king who wouldn’t join Chnodomarius may possibly have been eliminated by his own retinue, but more likely by the broader freeman class of his canton; and similarly, the last member of the old ruling dynasty of the Tervingi, Athanaric, was overthrown in the midst of his fortification work when resistance to his ideas of how to combat the Hunnic menace overflowed into political dissent.41 Both events emphasize that there were marked limits to the powers of the new military kings.

  It is not possible to explore the subject in any great detail, but the sources do suggest a few of the mechanisms by which these limits were orchestrated and imposed. To start with, we should probably not draw too distinct a line between freemen and royal retinues. There is considerable evidence that Germanic society operated in age sets for both men and women, with rites of passage marking certain clear stages in an individual’s life, and each stage having its own rights and responsibilities. Older men, even high-status ones, were never buried with weapons, for instance, suggesting that there was an upper age limit to military obligation; and for women, the legal evidence indicates that within each status group child-bearing years were associated with maximum social worth. Pre-pubescent children, likewise, seem rarely to have been buried in cemeteries alongside adults, again suggesting that age and status went hand in hand.42 This is not something that the available source materials will allow us to explore very thoroughly, but it is far from unlikely that at least some males of freeman status customarily served, when younger, in the warrior retinues of kings.

  There may also have been other links between the worlds of freemen farmers and royal retinues of which we are not properly informed. Villages certainly provided kings and their retainers with economic support, but kings may well have been expected to hold regular feasts for a broader spectrum of the free class as well as for their immediate retinues. If such feasting remained habitual, then some genuinely reciprocal relations continued between kings and freemen into the fourth century. Again, in places these kinds of behaviour survived into later, still less equal Germanic-dominated successor states, which strengthens the likelihood that they were in evidence in the late Roman period. In early Anglo-Saxon England, itinerating kings were sometimes expected to give the benefit of their presence at more communal feasts, in return for the food supplies they were offered, and these events provided a context for many important social and political exchanges. Looking just at scale, for instance, Alamannic cantons were small enough that their kings can hardly have been isolated figures, cut off from the rest of the population, and I would suspect that feasting and other such interaction would have been unavoidable, and had probably long been a feature of the Germanic world, as they have been found to be in many potentially analogous contexts.43

  Assemblies, too, may have played an important limiting role. Germanic political units of the early Roman period customarily worked through councils, at which group policy was debated and decided. Tacitus’ works put a huge emphasis on this institution, and it was clearly much more than a figment of his ever fertile imagination. Particularly striking to my mind is the evidence – several separate occasions being recorded in our highly fragmentary records for the first and second centuries – of the fact that in order to punish a grouping for a revolt, or to prevent one from taking place, assemblies were either prohibited by the Roman authorities, or allowed to proceed only with Roman observers. The fourth-century evidence does not shed much light on the degree to which such assemblies continued, but there certainly seem to have been village gatherings; and the decision of the Gothic Tervingi to seek asylum in the Roman Empire in 376 emerged only after long debate, presumably at a much larger assembly of the socially important. The dispute-settlement procedures envisaged in the successor-state law codes also indicate that regular assemblies were necessary for legal purposes. For all these reasons, I would suppose that an assembly structure continued within the fourth-century confederations, acting as a further brake on the arbitrary powers of kings.44

  There is also no evidence that Germanic kings were able to deploy self-justificatory ideologies of sufficient strength to entrench an overarching domination. It has sometimes been suggested, for instance, that they surrounded themselves with a powerful aura of sacrality, which distinguished certain clans as marked out by the special favour of the gods and made resistance to their royal pretensions extremely difficult. But there is actually little evidence of this. None of the three main words used in Germanic languages for ‘king’ carry sacral connotations. They are all, as we have seen, deeply pragmatic: ‘ruler of a people’, ‘ruler of a warband’, ‘ruler of a confederation’. Germanic kings certainly drew on a concept of divine favour – heilag and its various derivatives in the different Germanic language branches – but it was a post de facto kind of concept, which identified itself through practice. If you won battles and therefore power, then you had shown yourself to be heilag, but there is no sign that claiming to be heilag automatically brought you to power, or prevented anybody else from mounting a challenge to your authority – often to devastating effect, as the narrative evidence again suggests. And if a usurper was successful, then he had proved that he was now heilag.

  The one context in which we find a heavy emphasis on the manifest destiny of one particular dynastic line for divinely ordained rul
e comes in the propaganda produced at the court of Theoderic, the Amal leader of the Ostrogoths in early sixth-century Italy and ruler of one of the first-generation successor states to the Roman west. Such a view of his dynasty is directly written up in the Variae of Cassiodorus and reflected indirectly in the Getica of Jordanes. But when this claim is measured against the actual history of the Amal dynasty, the results are highly instructive. The dynasty had won extensive power in the Gothic world only in the generation or so before Theoderic himself (as we shall see in more detail in Chapter 5), and as soon as it failed to produce suitable male heirs after his death, it was quickly disposed of. Theoderic proved himself to be heilag with a succession of stunning conquests, not least that of Italy itself, but that was not enough to protect the dynasty against incompetent heirs. All the propaganda, produced when Theoderic was trying to secure the succession for his under-age grandson,45 was precisely that – propaganda.