This much, however, is only an interim conclusion. We need to ask further questions if we are going to arrive at any real understanding of the action. Why did these migration flows occur when they did, and why did they all tend in the direction of the Roman frontier? The conclusion that they consisted on occasion of mixed population groups raises another question of huge importance. Some modern migration flows do consist of large mixed groups, when political motives predominate. But these take the form of unorganized floods of refugees, without political leadership or direction. Before the evidence for large, mixed and, above all, organized migrant groups can be accepted, it is also necessary to counter the ‘commonsense’ objection that expansionary activity was usually undertaken just by all-male warbands. Is there a cogent reason why some of the Germanic migration flows should have included women and children alongside armed men when it came to asserting their domination over a new landscape?
Inner and Outer Peripheries
The direction of the migration flow – broadly towards the Roman frontier, but with a much more dramatic outcome in the east in terms of how much territory the migrants took over – begins to make sense if we think about it in the light of two factors that play a central role in all modern migration flows: ‘fields of information’ and the general context created by political structures. The field of information operating in the west doesn’t require much comment because the Alamanni were moving over such a short distance into the Agri Decumates. We can take for granted that they knew or could quickly come to know about their destination. But the epic treks of the eastern Germani need much more explanation. How much did the migrants actually know about the northern Pontus?
The most direct route from the Wielbark and Przeworsk areas of central and northern Poland to the Black Sea ran around the outer arc of the Carpathians, making use of the Upper Vistula and Dniester valleys. As we have seen, a ribbon of Wielbark cemeteries of the right date suggests that this was the route taken. Not only is this one of central-eastern Europe’s natural thoroughfares, but traffic along it had been particularly busy in the few centuries either side of the birth of Christ, when it was being exploited as one of the two main axes of the Amber Route uniting the Mediterranean world with the amber-producing shores of the Baltic Sea. As mentioned earlier, the solidified gum of submerged trees was highly prized for jewellery in the Mediterranean world, and one of the chief exports out of Germania. Substantial numbers of merchants were thus regularly treading the Goths’ main migration route during this era, and some Wielbark populations were actually involved in the trade, constructing and maintaining a complex series of wooden bridges and causeways close to the Baltic.47 Late second- and third-century Germanic-speaking migrants from north-central Europe could thus draw on substantial reservoirs of information about lands south and east of the Carpathians, and possible routes towards them. Thanks to the amber trade, they knew the route well and had some understanding of the societies and contexts that lay at the other end. I strongly suspect, though, that a closer analysis of the archaeological evidence would show that this east Germanic migration flow initially operated in a channelled fashion, the migrants clustering at only a relatively few destinations within the north Pontic zone, until the full regional situation became better known to them.
Once in the Black Sea region, further fields of information quickly came into play. The migrants soon learned of the attractive possibilities for gain presented by raiding the economically more developed Roman Empire, and the different routes by which such raids might be mounted. Some of these may have been partly known already, since Gothic troops were serving with Roman armies against Persia even before the attack on Histria in 238. An inscription dated thirty years before that attack records the presence of what were probably Gothic soldiers in the Roman army of Arabia. But before they arrived, the immigrants can have had no knowledge of the geography of the eastern Mediterranean and its hinterland, or that the rich coastlands of northern Asia Minor lay just across the Black Sea. That information soon became available. From the mid-250s they were mounting sea-borne raids across the Black Sea, and there is no doubt where the necessary intelligence came from. Historical sources are explicit that the maritime expertise of the populations of the Greek cities on the northern shores of the Black Sea provided ships and sailors for these expeditions. It is no stretch to suppose they were also the source of the information that lucrative raiding possibilities awaited anyone who could find some way to cross the two hundred kilometres and more of open sea that separate the northern and southern shores of the Pontus.48
But if the choices of third-century migrants were being influenced by information flowing along the Amber Route, they were also shaped, perhaps more decisively, by the political structures of the world around them. In the modern world, migration flows are interfered with by states who attempt to channel, encourage, or limit them by means of passports, border controls and immigration policies. Ancient state structures were much less sophisticated, but the Roman Empire did operate immigration policies when it came to group admissions, and its broader effect on the Germanic migration flows of the third century is obvious.
Expansion out of Germanic north-central Europe from the middle of the second century was not just limited to Wielbark groups. Langobardi and Ubii from the mouth of the Elbe, further west, delivered the wake-up call that marked the onset of the Marcomannic War. And non-Wielbark Germania, as we have seen, remained active into the third century. The migration both of Alamanni from the Elbe triangle and of Burgundians from further east played a major role in reconfiguring the political geography of the Rhine frontier region at exactly the same moment as other assorted Germani were expanding east of the Carpathians. In the course of the third century, therefore, the strategic situation was being restructured in broadly similar ways all along Rome’s Germanic-dominated European frontiers. And in both east and west, Rome’s strategic position was altered for the worse. In both, an element of migration was operating alongside broader political transformations. In the west, political restructuring predominated and is the element which most immediately catches the eye: its result, the new Frankish and Alamannic confederations. In the east, by contrast, migration predominated, because Germanic expansion took in such huge tracts of territory and effected major cultural changes. In their new world north of the Black Sea, the migrants created larger and more complex political structures than anything that had existed among them in north-central Europe.
But if the broad mix of components was similar, the overall effect was entirely different as between east and west. East of the Carpathians, vast new territories were brought under the control, or at least hegemony, of Germanic-speakers, and a large number of new political units came into being, as the migrants spread out over the landscape. In the west, the geographical expansion of Germanic-dominated territory was limited merely to the Agri Decumates, and political transformation ran more straightforwardly towards confederation than the greater diversity of political process visible north of the Black Sea. The explanation for these fundamentally different outcomes lies in the fact that Germanic expansion in the west ran head-on into the military and political structures of the Roman Empire. These were at times during the third century in considerable disarray, mostly because of the rise of Sasanian Persia, which stretched Roman resources and demanded substantial redeployments to the east. This presented expansion-minded Germanic groups with many opportunities for short-term profit in mid-century, but in the long run Roman imperial structures proved durable. After a long period of modification (not least a substantial increase in taxation), enough resources were found both to parry the Persian threat and to limit the possibility of large-scale Germanic expansion to the west. Put simply, because of the strength of the Roman army and its fortifications, Germanic expansion in the west was confined to small amounts of new territory, and most of the energy was channelled into internal political restructuring and short cross-border attacks. There could be no repeat in the west of
events north of the Black Sea, where the more fragmented power structure of Rome’s clients allowed the Germanic migrants to create a new hegemony over vast tracts. The Roman Empire may not have had the bureaucratic capacity to issue passports, but its frontier structures played a major role in shaping the contrasting outcomes in eastern and western Europe of exactly the same explosive mixture of migration and political reorganization.49
Looked at closely, then, the routes and varying results of these migrations make perfect sense in the light of modern migration studies. But two big issues remain. What caused such a substantial number of Europe’s Germanic-speakers to take to the road at precisely this time? And how are we to account for the apparently anomalous nature of the migration flow, involving, as the evidence suggests it did, some large mixed social groups?
More than anything else, the lack of first-hand information hampers our understanding of migrant motivations. The discussion cannot be conducted on the basis of individual case studies, as any more recent analogue would be, because none exist. Nonetheless, as we have seen, migrants’ motivation is nowadays generally modelled using a matrix with economic and political motives on one set of axes, correlating with voluntary and involuntary movement on the other. The general expectation is that all four parameters will apply in virtually all cases, if in dramatically varying combinations, so that for some migrants voluntary economic motivations will predominate, whereas for others involuntary political ones. And even if we can’t do the job in the kind of detail we would like to, adopting this kind of approach remains a highly productive way forward.
Looked at in the round, the evidence strongly suggests that there was an involuntary political element to at least part of the migration flow. We’re clearly not talking in terms of a politically motivated flood of refugees on anything like the scale of Rwanda in the early 1990s. But a striking feature of late second- and third-century Germania, as we saw in the last chapter, is the evidence for an increase in violent political competition, as shown by the relatively dense cluster of weapons deposits turning up in Danish and other bogs. And there is no reason to suppose that the proto-Danes of the third century were particularly quarrelsome. The smart money must be on the bogs having allowed both more and better evidence of increased violence to be preserved there than elsewhere. At least, the contemporaneous emergence of the new political confederations, with their growing martial ideologies of leadership, are hard to envisage without the same kind of increased violence. Against this backdrop, it would be odd, in fact, if migration into new areas had not come into the equation as one response to the heightened dangers of living in old Germania. Growing competition for control of the same assets has always been one major cause of relocation.50 But if escalating political competition partly helps explain why so many Germani were on the move in the first place, a much more positive economic motivation helps explain its main geographical direction.
Occasional Mediterranean imports aside, archaeological investigation has uncovered, as we saw in Chapter 1, a Germanic world at the dawn of the Roman era possessed of only a simple material culture: handmade ceramics, little in the way of precious metals, and relatively few mechanisms for expressing status in material form. Much of this changed over the next few centuries, as the Germanic world opened itself to contacts with the more developed economies of the Mediterranean. The result was to generate many new flows of wealth across the frontier – from the profits of new trade links, diplomatic subsidies and cross-border raiding. A key point about all this new wealth, however, was that the profits were not evenly distributed in social terms: particular classes benefited disproportionately. And nor were they equally distributed geographically. Most of the wealth-generating contacts with the Roman Empire distinctly favoured Germanic groups established in the immediate frontier zone.
Diplomatic subsidies were paid only to groups established close to the frontier. It’s hard to tell, for instance, exactly how far beyond the frontier Constantius’ rearrangement of frontier politics, examined in the last chapter, would have stretched: certainly more than just a few kilometres, but probably no more than two or three days’ march for his legions, so maybe a hundred kilometres. Cross-border raiding, while not confined to those right on the frontier, was certainly also much easier for them. The same is true of trade in agricultural produce and other raw materials. Transport logistics made it much easier for those in the frontier zone to supply their products to the Roman soldiers – the basic source of demand. The point should not be overstated. Villages such as Feddersen Wierde could profit from Roman demand because of easy water transport, and some high-value exchange networks, like those of slaves or amber, stretched far into the interior of Germania. It was presumably predatory interior Germani, for example, who did the initial raiding for slaves, and the Wielbark causeways show that someone in northern Poland was benefiting hugely from the Amber Route. Nonetheless, most of the wealth flows benefited, solely or unequally, the frontier zone, and even longer-distance trade had to work its way eventually through middle-men – kings taking tolls, if nothing else – right on the border. It can’t have been only Vannius king of the Marcomanni who saw the wealth-generating potential of making Germanic traders bring their goods to Roman merchants on his soil, so that he could charge tolls. Monopoly is such a beautiful way to make money, and it was in order to achieve precisely this, presumably, that trading arrangements figured so strongly in diplomatic agreements between client states and the Roman Empire.
As much recent work on frontiers in general, and the Roman frontier in particular, has underlined, it is important to view installations like Hadrian’s Wall as the centre of a zone of cultural and economic contact stretching out for some distance either side of it, rather than as a preclusive defensive line. One result of this has been a tendency in recent analysis to underestimate the amount of violence and confrontation that we should be expecting along and across the frontier line. There is a significant element of truth in this, but it is not the whole truth about the frontier situation. For all that populations either side of it engaged in a whole range of contacts with one another, they were not just sitting in their own little frontier comfort zone, blithely unaffected by the wider world.
The rhythms of frontier coexistence could be undermined from one direction, for instance, by a Roman emperor’s need for prestige. In the later 360s, Valentinian I wanted to show his landowning taxpayers that he was tough on barbarians. He therefore reduced the annual gifts to the kings of the Alamanni – with disastrous results. They recycled these gifts to their followers in order to sustain their own prestige, so that Valentinian’s economies threatened their authority. The result was a wave of violence that destabilized the Alamannic sector of the Rhine frontier.51 Much more fundamental in my view, however, was the inherent tendency of the frontier zone to be destabilized from the non-Roman side. The reason why this was so follows on directly from what we have just observed. Its intense contacts with the more developed Roman world opened up the frontier to a whole series of new wealth flows. Their overall effect was to create a two-speed Germania whose economy and society worked at higher and more intense levels of development the closer you got to the Roman frontier, and vice versa. As a result, marked differences in wealth quickly built up between this frontier zone and the Germanic interior. In my opinion, this inequality was a crucial further component in the motivation behind the migration flows of the second and third centuries. They are an entirely logical consequence of the broader phenomenon of unequal development. Armed groups from the less rich outer regions were looking to seize by force a share of the attractive opportunities available closer to the Rhine and the Danube.
Such a tendency had begun to manifest itself as early as the first century. We have already encountered the first-century client king Vannius who prospered long and happily in the first half of the century on the basis of Roman subsidies and the wealth he derived from Roman merchants residing in his kingdom. This happy state of affairs eventually came
to an end in 50 AD, however, when his wealth was ransacked by a group of Germani from outside the frontier zone, who put together an expedition of sufficient strength to seize his assets.52 This same basic motive – to seize the wealth available in the frontier zone – is evident or deducible in all the events of the third century. The Black Sea region, for instance, was rich in visible and highly moveable potential booty. Fabulously wealthy individual burials, full of precious metals, are characteristic of the archaeology of the Sarmatian kingdoms of the north Pontic shore in the early centuries AD. There is every reason to suppose that so much wealth acted as a magnet to Goths and others who had got wind of it through the regular passage of people and information up and down the Amber Route. And once they had moved in, the Germanic immigrants acted in other ways that were all designed to maximize their access to its riches.53
The first armed Goths to appear in the Black Sea zone not only sacked one of its cities, Histria, in 238, but also promised to keep the peace if they were granted an annual Roman subsidy.54 This group clearly grasped what kind of regular income could be forthcoming from a more intimate relationship with the Roman world. So too with the raiding: the motive, whether in the Balkans or across the Black Sea, was to acquire moveable wealth in all its available forms, human and otherwise. The remains of the new Germanic-dominated kingdoms established there, visible in the Cernjachov cultural system, illustrate the point succinctly, especially when compared with Wielbark remains. Precious metals are much more often found. In Cernjachov remains of the late third and fourth centuries, silver fibulae are reasonably common; they are rarely found in Wielbark burials of the first and second. Roman pottery is also extremely common in Cernjachov settlements and burials, both fine dinner services and the remains of amphorae that originally held wine or olive oil. Despite the absence of any internal or private Gothic account of the immigrants’ motives, I am confident, therefore, that they organized themselves into armed groups precisely to gain access to the wealth of the frontier zone. Its wider range of contacts with the Roman world had not only made the frontier much richer than outer Germania, but by the same token had made it a natural target for groups from the interior, who organized themselves to seize their own shares.
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