Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  The evidence for age sets, feasting obligations, councils and limited royal ideologies is all very fragmentary, and can only hint at the realities of political life among the Germani. The bottom line, however, is clear enough. While a new elite exploited the economic development of the Roman period to entrench its social prominence, and, in the process, made it possible to build, at least in some areas of Germanic Europe, the larger and more stable political units of the fourth century, we mustn’t overstate its powers. A broader social group outside the nexus of kings and retinues remained important, both socially and economically, and had to be involved in the political process. Not least, it continued to outnumber the royal retinues massively, so that its support remained crucial to larger military enterprises. And in any case, as we have seen, freemen and warrior retinues may well have been interconnected in a variety of ways.

  More generally, this broader social group must also have given some kind of consent to the creation of the new and much larger confederations of the late Roman period. Ammianus provides an illustration of this in his account of the attempt of one Alamannic king to distance himself from the confederation before Strasbourg, which led to his own demise. The same is suggested by the fact that not all of the old political associations of the first century were destroyed in creating the new ones of the third and fourth. We have explicit evidence only for the Franks, into which confederation late Roman sources indicate that some of the old units – specifically the Chatti, Batavi, Bructeri and Ampsivarii – had been incorporated. This process, obviously, was never as simple as the old units voting to join a new regional association, since some new units were created as well, the Salii already being mentioned by Ammianus; but nor was there total discontinuity either.46

  Looked at against the comparative literature, the fourth-century confederations fall somewhere in the nexus between ‘early states’ and ‘complex chiefdoms’. According to the normal criteria employed, they were too large and too stable, and encompassed too substantial a degree of marked social differentiation, to be categorized as either ‘tribes’ or ‘simple chiefdoms’. And, looked at closely, the differences between early states and complex chiefdoms are essentially ones of degree, where the former have slightly more organization, stability, power and so forth than the latter. The shortage of evidence about the fourth-century confederations makes it extremely difficult to make more precise judgements, and what evidence there is sometimes prompts contrasting conclusions. The extent of their governmental capacities and, especially among the Tervingi, the establishment of dynastic power look quite state-like, for instance, but the lack of specialized royal functionaries and of any evidence for the survival of a relatively broad (freeman?) social elite suggests a complex chiefdom. This is not, however, an issue to become overly fixated on. The important point is that economic and social transformation had generated a new confederative element in Germanic society, or at least in some of those parts of it closest to the Roman frontier, which was capable of combining, for certain functions anyway, many tens of thousands of people. Politically, these new structures built on the past, incorporating sometimes pre-existing social units, but their powers and solidity represented a decisive break with the Germanic past.

  One big question, however, remains unaddressed. What kick-started the economic transformations that underlay the confederations, and how precisely did economic development feed through into new political structures?

  THE ROMAN CONNECTION

  In 30 AD or thereabouts, a Roman merchant called Gargilius Secundus purchased a cow from a man called Stelus, a non-Roman who lived near the modern Dutch town of Franeker across the River Rhine. A record of this transaction, which cost 115 silver nummi and was witnessed by two Roman centurions, just happens to survive. One modern commentator has called it ‘banal’, and so it was: small-scale and entirely unremarkable. If it happened once on Rome’s European frontier, it happened a thousand times. The reason for thinking so is straightforward. Especially in the early period, but also later on, large numbers of Roman soldiers were stationed right on the imperial frontier. They represented a huge source of economic demand. In the first century AD some 22,000 Roman soldiers, a mixture of legionaries and auxiliaries, were established on the territory of only 14,000 or so indigenous Cananifates in the northern Rhine region alone. The latter could not possibly supply the soldiers’ demands for foodstuffs, forage, and natural materials such as wood for construction and cooking, or leather. A legion of 5,000 men required approximately 7,500 kilos of grain and 450 kilos of fodder per day, or 225 and 13.5 tonnes, respectively, per month. Some of the soldiers’ needs were supplied directly from the imperial centre, but this was cumbersome and logistically problematic. Where they could, the imperial authorities preferred to pay cash and let local suppliers meet the troops’ demands.47

  Trade and Control

  Throughout the Roman period, therefore, the frontier zone of the Empire had a huge requirement for primary agricultural products of all kinds and there is every reason to suppose that non-Roman suppliers played a major role in meeting it. This was still the case in the fourth century, where the pages Ammianus devotes to the Alamanni again make interesting reading. After his victory at Strasbourg, the Emperor Julian was in a position to impose virtually whatever terms he wanted on the defeated Alamannic kings. All the treaties differed in detail, but they had in common demands for foodstuffs, for raw materials such as wood for construction purposes, for wagons and for physical labour to carry out rebuilding projects. On the back of his victory, Julian could simply requisition these items, but even in less favourable circumstances they were still required by the Roman army, and presumably had to be paid for. Whether paying or not, the Roman army was a constant source of economic demand for any neighbouring Germani.

  None of the items mentioned in Julian’s treaties is archaeologically visible. You can’t identify – because they couldn’t survive – traces of Germanic-grown wheat, Germanic-felled timber, leather cured by the Germani, or items constructed by Germanic labour. They were all, however, real enough, and show up in more indirect fashion in the huge expansion of agricultural production that we have observed in Germanic Europe in the Roman period. Some of this extra food was consumed by the new kings and their retinues, and some by Germania’s own expanding population, but a further – perhaps even the original – stimulus to production was provided by the Roman army. For one thing, there is close chronological coincidence between the arrival of Roman demand on the fringes of Germania and the rural intensification. The earliest of the new villages, such as Feddersen Wierde and Wijster, also grew up in regions from which it was relatively easy to ship agricultural products by water to the mouth of the Rhine and then upstream to the river’s military installations. As much recent literature has rightly emphasized, and as has been shown to be the case along all of Rome’s borders, the frontier acted in some ways more as a zone of contact than, as you might initially expect, a line of demarcation dividing the Empire from its immediate neighbours.48

  In the case of the Germani, Rome may have acted as a source not only of extra economic demand, but also possibly for some of the ideas and technology that made agricultural intensification possible. At Wijster and Feddersen Wierde, higher yields seem to have resulted from a more systematic integration of arable and pastoral agriculture, using animal manure to sustain the fertility of the wheat fields. More generally, it involved the adoption of more sophisticated ploughing techniques and equipment. Where and how, exactly, these ideas spread remains to be studied, but both the more efficient ploughs and the better-integrated farming regimes were well known in Roman and La Tène Europe, much of which the Empire swallowed up in the first century BC (Chapter 1), long before they spread into Germania, and these areas may have inspired the Germanic agricultural revolution.

  Other goods produced in Germania were also in demand in the Roman world. The occasional loan word and literary reference identify some specific products. Goose feathers for stu
ffing pillows and particular kinds of red hair dye were two such items. Much more important than any of these, though, was the demand certainly for two, and probably three, other raw materials. The one that is not so certain is iron. There is no specific evidence that pig iron was shipped in large quantities south and west across the frontier from Germanic Europe. But the vast quantities of iron produced at the two main Polish sites far outstripped any amount that can have been required for local use. Possibly, this iron was being circulated within just the Germanic world, but it is entirely conceivable that it was also being processed to satisfy Roman demand. Of the other two materials, there is no doubt. The first is amber: solidified sap from submerged trees washed up on the Baltic Sea coast. Amber is one of few loan words taken over from Germanic languages into Latin, and we know that the Romans took a huge interest in this product for making jewellery. In the time of Nero, a senatorial mission even went north to investigate its origins, and the amber route from the Baltic – in both its main branches, one striking south to the middle Danube at the legionary fortress of Carnuntum, the other going east of the Carpathians to arrive at the Black Sea ports (Map 2) – was well known to Roman authors.49

  At least as important, though less discussed in our sources, was the demand for Germanic manpower. This took two main forms. First, recruits were always needed for the Roman army. The so-called barbarization of the Roman army used to be one of the main reasons given for the decline of the Empire. The point is at best partly mistaken. From the time of Augustus, at least half of the total army – all its auxiliary formations – was always composed of non-Romans, a substantial number of whom were recruited from the Germanic world. All that happened in the late Empire was a recategorization of military units, which saw the distinction between citizen legionaries and non-citizen auxiliaries partly collapse. Nothing suggests, either, that there were more Germani in percentage terms serving in the Roman army in the fourth century than before, or that the army was any less reliable for their presence – it is normally considered likely, anyway, that legionary recruiters had, in practice, been ignoring for some time the requirement that only citizens should be drafted. Throughout the Roman period, therefore, there was a huge demand for Germanic recruits, and many turn up in the epigraphic record. From narrative sources we know that these men were recruited in two ways. Some were individual volunteers, deciding to follow a potentially lucrative career path in the Roman army. Many others, however, had no choice. Again Ammianus is explicit. A forced draft of recruits was part of most of the peace treaties he records between the Empire and different barbarian groups. Not only did you have to supply labour and foodstuffs to buy your way back into the Empire’s good graces after a defeat, but you also had to give over a portion of your young men for service in the Roman army.50

  Manpower from Germania also entered the Empire in another form: slaves. We have no detailed account of the operation of the slave trade in the Roman era, such as we get from Arab authors for its counterpart of the ninth and tenth centuries (Chapter 10). So there is no information on the identity of the main traders, on the areas from which they tended to take victims, and on whether, as later, there were any major slave markets inside Germania, where slaves could be traded on to middle-men or directly to Roman merchants. But the slave trade was a constant phenomenon of the Roman era, and there is one powerful testimony to its importance. Germanic languages have as one of their basic word-stems for trade and merchants a series of terms deriving from the Latin mango. But in Latin mango meant not a merchant in general, but very precisely a slave trader. The Roman merchants first and perhaps most often encountered by Europe’s Germanic-speaking populations, therefore, were probably traders in human flesh.51

  Overall, an excellent case can be made that the new opportunities for trading with the much wealthier Roman Empire, which suddenly opened up around the birth of Christ with the expansion of Rome’s European frontiers northwards, played a major role in stimulating the evident economic development of Germania in the early centuries AD. According to Caesar in the mid-first century BC, the Germani of his day had little interest in trading with Roman merchants, and only allowed them into their territories at all in the hope that they could sell them captured war booty. If that had really been the case in the middle of the first century BC, the situation evolved rapidly. By the end of the first century AD, trade was so common across the Rhine frontier that Roman silver denarii were being used as a medium of exchange by the Germanic tribes on the east side of the river. It is likely enough, indeed, that much of the silver found in Germania in Roman times – in the form, for instance, of intricate fibulae – represents the reworking of metal from such coins, many of which remained in circulation right down to the fourth century. And while (for reasons we will return to in a moment) it is not the case that every frontier grouping was trading so heavily with the Empire as to be using Roman coins, this certainly happened periodically, throughout the Empire’s existence. As a phenomenon, it shows up in the presence of relatively dense concentrations of low-value Roman coins from particular periods in areas fairly close to the frontier, such as those of the fourth century found along some of the old Roman roads east of the Rhine which still existed in the Agri Decumates – a triangle of territory between the Upper Rhine and Upper Danube – then under Alamannic control; or, further east along the Danube, within regions bordering the Roman province of Moesia Superior.52

  Equally striking is the fact that throughout the Roman period the Empire’s immediate neighbours were interested in obtaining trading privileges with the imperial merchants, privileges which Rome usually kept under tight control. Even when the fourth-century Gothic Tervingi wanted to sever most of their ties with the Empire, it was part of the resulting agreement that two designated trade centres continued to operate. A huge amount of archaeological evidence confirms the impression given by the literary sources. Roman goods of all kinds have been found in large quantities in most of the major excavations conducted on Germanic sites from the first four centuries AD.

  There are distinct chronological and geographical patterns to the finds. The first two centuries AD, for instance, saw a huge explosion in the quantity of Roman goods present within Germania in many areas of the immediate frontier zone, up to about a hundred kilometres from the defended line, both on settlement sites and deposited in graves. Fine pottery (terra sigillata), bronze ornaments and glass have all been unearthed in substantial amounts, alongside the Roman coins we have already mentioned. In the first- and second-century levels of the site of Westrich, for instance, which is far from untypical, Roman manufactures account for about a third each of the excavated pottery and metalwork. But while common in some places, this pattern does not apply to the regions of the northern Rhine frontier, between the Rhine and the Weser, where Roman materials of this date are much less plentiful. Moving beyond the immediate frontier zone to the area up to the River Elbe, the pattern is again slightly different. Here Roman goods are present in large quantities, but they tend to concentrate in particular areas. The region of the River Saale in modern Thuringia, for instance, has produced one striking concentration. Others have been identified around the tributaries of the Upper Elbe in Bohemia (heartland of the Czech Republic), and south of the Lower Elbe and the Middle and Lower Weser (both in Lower Saxony). The other identified concentration is along the North Sea coast. Moving still further away from the frontier, Roman goods are present only in smaller quantities, but there are still a few identifiable concentrations such as Jakuszowice in southern Poland, the Gudme/Lundeburg complex in Scandinavia, and in eastern Denmark.53 In general terms, there is more than enough material to show that the Germanic economy was mobilized in the early centuries AD in part to pay for large quantities of attractive Roman imports. But how are we to explain these concentrations?

  Part of the answer lies in logistics. The fact that a wagon of wheat doubled in price for every fifty Roman miles travelled emphasizes how difficult and expensive land transport was in
pre-modern times. Hence relatively low-value items – such as pottery, bronze and glass – were only ever likely to move comparatively short distances unless water transport or some other mitigating factor intervened. The fact that even spreads of Roman goods have been unearthed only within the immediate frontier zone, then, is not surprising. Transport may also explain some more particular phenomena. The possibility of water shipment probably allowed relatively distant places like Feddersen Wierde to be involved in supplying the Roman army of the frontier, and as the coin distributions suggest, the old Roman road networks of the Agri Decumates perhaps still facilitated trade in the fourth century, even after the area had fallen under Alamannic control. Logistics, however, will not explain everything.

  A second line of explanation requires us to look more closely at the mechanics of trade in the Germanic world, and the role played in Germanic society by the Roman goods received in return. If Caesar is to be believed, there was originally some Germanic resistance to trade with the Empire. But this was quickly and entirely overcome to a point where possession of Roman goods came to be associated with high social status. Analyses of the types of goods found together in richer burials have demonstrated a powerful correlation from the late first century AD between the presence of large numbers of everyday items of local manufacture, clearly expensive items of local manufacture (such as weapons and jewellery), and Roman imports. Thus Roman imports quickly came to be part and parcel of demonstrating social pre-eminence. Again, this is not surprising. Roman imports were exotic and had to be paid for by giving something in return to a Roman merchant. They were bound, therefore, to possess a certain cachet. It is also a further dimension of the phenomenon we have already observed. As in modern globalization, the benefits of ancient Germanic economic development were not enjoyed evenly, but concentrated in the hands of kings and their retainers; so, as one might expect, more Roman imports ended up in their hands.