Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  Other features of the Cernjachov system had different origins. While handmade Wielbark ceramics were commonly used early on, a more sophisticated wheel-made pottery, broadly analogous to provincial Roman types, quickly became characteristic of the system. And if the longhouse certainly had its origins in the Germanic-dominated cultures of north-central Europe, another characteristic dwelling in many Cernjachov areas was the sunken or semi-sunken hut (in German, Grübenhaus). These, by contrast, had long been indigenous to the eastern foothills of the Carpathians and beyond, and are not found in Wielbark or any other northern Germanic settlements of the first and second centuries. Excavators have also found occasional examples within Cernjachov cemeteries of a distinctive Sarmatian burial practice: placing possessions on a shelf cut within the grave. A Sarmatian population group thus apparently continued to play its part in the new mix generated by northern Germanic immigration towards the Black Sea.26

  The interpretation of these remains was for a long time contentious. As soon as the first Cernjachov materials were recovered in 1906, their obvious similarities to characteristically Germanic materials from north-central Europe, especially in terms of metalwork, were duly spotted, long before the Wielbark system had been identified. They were quickly linked to the migration of Goths known from historical sources, and in the Nazi era cited in grotesque justification of territorial demands in Eastern Europe. Nazi bureaucrats went so far as to rename towns of the Black Sea region after great Gothic heroes, Theoderichshafen – ‘the harbour of Theoderic’ (a great Gothic leader of the fifth and sixth centuries, Chapter 7) – being suggested for Sevastopol in the Crimea. In short, the ‘invasion hypothesis’ was applied to the material with unadulterated vigour. Metalwork of the same type had been found beside both the Baltic and the Black Seas, so population groups from the former must have taken over the latter, driving out the indigenous population – a view that found some support, to be fair, in records of the departure of the Carpi.

  But, even aside from the politics, this was much too simple a response to the complexities of the evidence. Although its imprint is clear enough, the remains of the Cernjachov system contain many non-Wielbark elements as well, and objects and customs can certainly be transferred from one area to another without the need for a substantial movement of population – migration – as the mechanism. Objects can be traded, and technologies and habits adopted or even evolved separately. The creation of the Cernjachov system, despite the obvious similarities to its Wielbark neighbour, cannot, therefore, by itself prove that that there had been any migration. And, as we have seen, it is a key element in the anti-migration argument that the identified parallels between Wielbark and Cernjachov remains would not be strong enough to make anyone think in terms of migration, if Jordanes’ account of the Goths’ trek in particular did not exist.

  In my view, however, not only is the historical evidence – even apart from Jordanes – more than strong enough to support the idea that migration was a key factor in the refashioning of the Pontic littoral, but the archaeological evidence is more compelling than the anti-migrationist reading suggests. Before looking at the material, it is important first of all to remember what we might expect to find. Unless you’re dealing with the rare situation of an intrusive population driving out the existing one more or less in its entirety, or where land is being colonized for the first time, then the archaeological traces left by migration are unlikely to be that impressive. Where migrants were mixing with an indigenous population it will only be a few, possibly very few, elements of their material culture – those consciously or unconsciously linked to deeply encoded belief or behavioural patterns – that will necessarily be transferred. In other areas of life, migrants are likely enough to adopt convenient elements of indigenous cultural origin (as many modern migrants do), or become an unidentifiable component in new cultural amalgams created by the collision of migrant and host populations. In short, you’re never likely to get more than an ambiguous reflection of migration from archaeological evidence, so that archaeological ambiguity can itself never disprove the possibility of a migration having occurred.

  But in the case under discussion, in fact, the archaeological evidence suggesting migration is far from insubstantial. This is not just my opinion, I hasten to add, but also the unanimous verdict of the experts who have been working in detail on the materials in the last generation. It is also worth emphasizing that these experts have no ideological axes to grind. The two most influential figures here are Kazimierz Godlowski and Mark Shchukin, the former Polish, the latter Russian. Both had to fight hard battles in their early years against one-party intellectual establishments that were deeply committed to points of view different from their own. Godlowski’s work was instrumental in undermining an old orthodoxy (which we will return to in Chapter 8), that ‘submerged’ Slavs had always occupied Polish territory. And it was Shchukin who conclusively redated the Cernjachov system to the late third and fourth centuries and established thereby its link to the Goths, against entrenched Soviet establishment opinion which also for a long time was determined to appropriate its relatively advanced remains for early Slavs. In the aftermath of the Second World War, likewise, neither Poles nor Russians have had the slightest ideological interest in exaggerating the role of Germanic-speakers in central and south-eastern Europe, so neither can reasonably be accused of playing intellectual games for the purposes of self-advancement. The reasons behind their unanimity in asserting deep links between the Wielbark and Cernjachov systems are not, in fact, difficult to find.

  When the developing Wielbark system of the first and second centuries AD is compared with the new systems generated east of the Carpathians and north of the Black Sea in the third century, the similarities that emerge are striking. We are dealing not with the transfer of isolated objects or technologies but with much more distinctive cultural traits, comprising customs expressive of social norms (female costume), socioeconomic life strategies (longhouses) and even deeply held belief systems (burial rites). It is also striking that Wielbark ceramics are prevalent in the early stages of Cernjachov development, and that the Wielbark system had been expanding dramatically in a south-easterly direction in the preceding generations, right up to the boundaries of the region where its Cernjachov counterpart would come into existence.27

  None of this is to say that there isn’t more to do here. A full-scale monograph comparing the prevalence of cremation with that of inhumation in the cemeteries of the two systems, with proper emphasis on regional variation, would be nice; not to mention, eventually, a detailed regionally based discussion of varying farming strategies within the huge territories of the Cernjachov system. Where do we find longhouses, and where do sunken huts prevail? Given the way that migration tends to operate only in channelled form until a large body of information builds up among potential migrations, my suspicion is that both of these lines of inquiry might help identify the denser concentrations of immigrants, and hence, by inference, other areas where indigenous populations were in the majority. Even with the current state of our knowledge, however, the parallels are strong enough, and run deeply enough, to conclude that the archaeological material does indeed support the historical evidence in indicating that migration from the north-west played a major role in the third-century revolution north of the Black Sea.

  As with the Marcomannic War, the evidence base for the third-century migrations is not everything you would like it to be, and the validity of some of the individual items can certainly be challenged. Nonetheless, an entirely anti-migrationist reading smacks of special pleading, given the weight of both historical and archaeological indications that migration played a key role in the action. There is more than enough, overall, to establish that Germanic migration in the general direction of Rome’s riverine frontiers began to play a role in disturbing the status quo in barbarian Europe from the mid-second century, and gathered still further momentum in the third. There was some migration in the west, and more in the east, and
in both cases migratory phenomena were operating alongside the other political and socioeconomic transformations that generated the new confederations of fourth-century Germania. But to accept this is merely to open the inquiry. Migration can take many forms and have many and interlocking causes. What was the nature and scale of this third-century Germanic migration, how did the minutiae of its processes work themselves out, and what, ultimately, generated it?

  MIGRATION AND THE GERMANI

  No surviving contemporary source describes the population movements associated with the Marcomannic War in any detail, but we do have one account of third-century Gothic migration preserved in the sixth-century Gothic history of Jordanes, himself partly of Gothic origins. He describes the move of the Goths to the Black Sea:

  When the number of the people increased greatly and Filimer, son of Gadaric, reigned as king . . . he decided that the army of the Goths with their families should move from that region [beside the Baltic]. In search of suitable homes and pleasant places they came to the land of Scythia, called Oium in that tongue. Here they were delighted with the great richness of the country, and it is said that when half the army had been brought over, the bridge whereby they had crossed the river fell in utter ruin, nor could anyone thereafter pass to or fro. For the place is said to be surrounded by quaking bogs and an encircling abyss, so that by this double obstacle nature has made it inaccessible. And even today one may hear in the neighbourhood the lowing of cattle and may find traces of men, if we are to believe the stories of travellers, although we must grant that they hear these things from afar. This part of the Goths, which is said to have crossed the river and entered with Filimer into the country of Oium, came into possession of the desired land, and there they soon came upon the race of the Spali, joined battle with them and won the victory. Thence the victors hastened to the farthest part of Scythia, which is near the Black Sea.28

  Jordanes is reporting here pretty much a textbook example of the invasion hypothesis in action. One king and one people move en masse to a new home, defeat the indigenous occupants and take possession of the land. How much of this, written down nearly three hundred years later, bears any relationship to third-century realities?

  The Flow of Migration

  Enough information survives in more contemporary sources to demonstrate that the migration processes of the time were far more complicated than Jordanes’ much later account suggests. For one thing, a whole series of Germanic groups, not just Goths, were involved in the action. More interestingly – and this is a much more substantial departure from his vision – the Goths and other participants in the migration flow did not operate as united, compact entities along the lines of Jordanes’ one king/one people model. This point is best illustrated, in fact, from the Goths, where the more contemporary evidence is fullest. In these sources, Gothic groups are found operating in different ways over a wide geographical area: by land and sea everywhere from the mouth of the Danube, where the Emperor Decius was killed, to the Crimea (a distance of nearly a thousand kilometres) and beyond. Consonant with this highly dispersed action, a whole series of individual Gothic leaders feature: Cniva, Argaith, Guntheric, Respa, Veduc, Thuruar and Cannabaudes. Some appear in alliance with one another, but no overall king of the Goths is ever referred to in reliable contemporary sources, and emphatically not Jordanes’ Filimer.29

  The end result of all this disparate third-century activity was also the creation not of one fourth-century Gothic kingdom, which would be the natural consequence of a single well-organized land-grabbing exercise, but several. It is often supposed, again on the strength of Jordanes, that the events we were discussing generated two major Gothic political entities north of the Black Sea: the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths. But Jordanes has retrospectively imposed the Gothic political patterns of his own sixth century on the fourth-century past. Visigoths and Ostrogoths, groupings who formed successor states to the west Roman Empire in the fifth century, were both demonstrably new creations of that century, formed under Roman eyes and on Roman soil, as we will see in due course. No contemporary source gives us a complete survey of the Gothic-dominated north Pontic world of the fourth century; life is never that convenient. But, in the fifty years or so after c.375, at least six major concentrations of Goths appear as independent actors in entirely contemporary historical sources. Each of these is likely to have derived from a politically independent Gothic unit of the fourth century, suggesting that we should be thinking of half a dozen or even more Gothic political entities rather than just two. This is entirely in line with what you would expect from the highly diverse nature of Gothic activity in the third century. And while this point is best documented for the Goths, it applies to the other groups as well. In the great sea raid of 268/9, the participating Heruli divided in two separate groups – one operating with Goths in Attica, the other besieging Thessalonica in Macedonia. Third-century migration was not remotely as simple as Jordanes’ formula – one king, one people, one move – might suggest.30

  Third-century patterns also departed from the invasion-hypothesis model on another level, with previously unknown Germanic groups appearing in our sources for the first time. Heruli, Gepids and Taifali all make their historical debuts in third- or very early fourth-century sources. It is possible that they had previously existed and just been overlooked, but, on the simple level of naming names, the first- and second-century listings of Tacitus and Ptolemy seem pretty comprehensive, so that there is some reason to think their silence here significant. Nor is it surprising to find new Germanic groups being created in the course of these tumultuous events. New groups – the Alamanni and Iuthungi – were appearing in the west at precisely this time, and we do know that Germanic groups came and went. Like any human organization, they could be created and destroyed, and the information we have would seem to indicate that the political patterns of Roman-period Germania were pretty fluid. For the first century, for instance, Tacitus describes the creation of the Batavi. Originally a part of the Chatti, they broke away from the main group, acquired their own name and subsequently pursued a separate historical course. His work also recounts the effective extermination at different times of three other groups: the Ampsivarii, the Chatti (showing how sensible it was of the Batavi to have broken away) and the Bructeri. All of this makes it entirely plausible that Gepids, Heruli and Taifali were new units of the third century.31

  Even Jordanes, in fact, preserves an echo of this more complex reality. All his accounts of Gothic migration incorporate a strong motif of sociopolitical fragmentation. In the Filimer migration a bridge falls down, parting some of the Goths from the main body. Elsewhere, he tells the story of a previous Gothic migration in three ships from Scandinavia. In that case too, one of the ships lags behind, and out of this separation, so Jordanes tells us, were born the Gepids. Despite the extreme scepticism in vogue in some quarters, there is actually a good chance that both of these stories echo, if at some remove, Gothic oral histories. If so, those histories, while tending to describe migration in terms of kings and peoples, nonetheless preserved something of the deeper reality – that political discontinuity, rather than the uncomplicated transfer of entire pre-existing social units from point A to point B, was a central feature of the action.32

  On one very simple level, the archaeological evidence also reflects this basic fact. Although the extensive similarities between the Wiel-bark and Cernjachov systems can reasonably be taken to reflect a substantial transfer of population between the two, the Wielbark system itself did not disappear but continued to exist down to the fifth century in broadly its old haunts to the north-west of what became Cernjachov territory. Archaeologists have also begun to identify a number of intermediate material cultural systems, placed geographically between the two. Discussion continues as to whether to view these as entirely separate from the two main systems, or as local variants of one or the other, and any temptation to identify them instantly with any of the groups named in third- and fourth-century source
s needs to be resisted. Material cultural boundaries might reflect political boundaries, but, as we have seen, it cannot just be assumed that they do. However interpreted – and it may be that, under closer scrutiny, the whole Cernjachov system will eventually be recategorized into a series of interrelated regional groupings – the group (generated c.180–220 AD) and the Ruzycankan and Volhynian groups (generated c.220–60) make it very clear that the material culture generated by the migrants, echoing the new political order, was distinctly non-monolithic. Not all the Wielbark groups involved in the general move south shared in the same outcome. Some followed one historical trajectory which led to their involvement in the creation of the Cernjachov system and the other new groupings, others continued more or less as before but in a new environment, and some chose not to move at all.33

  The third-century migrations were carried out, therefore, not by total population groups but by a series of subgroups, each operating to some extent independently of one another, very much replicating the pattern of many modern migration flows (Chapter 1). Some of the movements associated with the Marcomannic War were probably similar. The attack on Pannonia which opened the war proper clearly did not involve all the Langobardi. Langobardi in large numbers moved definitively into the same Middle Danubian region only some three hundred and fifty years later, in c.500 AD, and most had probably continued to live in the northern Elbe region in between. The same was substantially true of Germanic migrations in the third-century west. Here we have even less narrative evidence, but the archaeology shows very clearly that the Agri Decumates were not occupied in one fell swoop. As we saw in the last chapter, political power remained devolved among the fourth-century Alamanni, and this probably reflects this earlier period when groups moved into the new landscape piecemeal. Some, it seems, moved in soon after the Romans abandoned the territory in c.260, but elsewhere the process was much slower. Elbe–Germanic materials superseded Rhine–Weser materials on the Middle Main, for instance, only in the early fourth century, the best part of two generations later.34 In both east and west, therefore, the third century saw fragmented, diverse flows of migration rather than massive land seizures by ‘whole’ peoples. But how exactly should we envisage the population groups who undertook the migrations?