The evidence also establishes the interconnections here between migration and development. The two are not alternative lines of explanation, as they have sometimes been portrayed, but essentially intertwined in the unfolding of events, and on many levels. First, the process of development in Germanic society was itself a fundamental cause of the migration flows, both negatively – by making its internal workings so violently competitive that some may have sought safer homes elsewhere – and positively, in the sense that the new wealth of the immediate frontier zone encouraged groups from the outer periphery to move in and displace the sitting tenants. Contact with the Roman Empire was generating considerable but geographically disparate development in Germania, and, as in the modern world, marked differences in wealth acted as a spur to migration. Second, the mechanism by which this new wealth had largely been generated – being Rome’s preferred partner on a particular section of the frontier – also explains part of the seeming oddity of the resulting migration flow. These centuries saw nothing so simple as the old invasion hypothesis at work. Numerous separate expeditions, only some of which were substantial, carried the action forward. Large sections of the indigenous population at both the Baltic and the Black Sea ends remained in place after the migration process had worked itself out. We are not looking, then, at the transfer of an entire population unit from point A to point B, with added ethnic cleansing. But to gain access to the new wealth of the frontier zone by making Rome shift your group into preferred-partner status in place of another, you did sometimes have to assemble large military forces in order to overturn the existing political order. Unlike today, therefore, migration units had to be both large and heavily armed.
Third, the fact that ambitious kings who wanted to move from the periphery into the frontier zone could not put together forces of sufficient size just from their military retinues explains the other peculiarity of the larger groups involved in the flow: the participation of women and children. The result was a migration flow that took the form neither of wave of advance nor of elite transfer. Small familial groups moving randomly over the landscape would have been mopped up piecemeal by the Carpi, Sarmatians or Rhine–Weser Germani, and kings with their warband-sized retinues could not have won the big battles that needed to be fought.
Aside from offering us an additional migration model that emphasizes the fundamental links between migration and development, the changes that took place in Germanic society in the early Roman era have another dimension: we can discern in them the first glimmers of the overarching process that would eventually even out the massive regional disparities in development characteristic of the European landscape at the beginning of the first millennium. Well beyond those regions that had fallen under direct Roman control, contact with the Empire on every level unleashed forces whose cumulative effect was to transform Germanic society. The result by the fourth century, as we have seen, was that much more substantial political structures had come to hold sway over a much larger population. These forces were felt most intensely close to the frontier, but they had some effects beyond, most obviously because some of the economic networks – those producing amber and slaves, for instance – extended long tendrils. Of still greater importance was the appearance of a richer inner periphery, surrounding the Roman Empire proper, which generated a tendency towards predatory migration into it from the regions beyond. Thus, much more than a thin client strip around Rome’s European frontiers now fell within range of wider-ranging processes of transformation that would eventually undermine the Mediterranean’s dominion. Even by the late Roman period, however, vast areas of east-central and eastern Europe remained unaffected. This would change when the new political order of client states created by the second-and third-century migration flows was thrown into tumult in the later fourth century. And if migration had so far played a secondary role to development that too was about to change. The era of the Huns had begun.
4
MIGRATION AND FRONTIER COLLAPSE
PROBABLY LATE IN THE summer of 376, the majority of the Gothic Tervingi, the Empire’s main clients on the Lower Danube frontier for most of the fourth century, turned up on the northern banks of the river asking for asylum. They were led by Alavivus and Fritigern, who had broken away from the confederation’s overall ruler Athanaric. The equally Gothic Greuthungi, who had previously lived further from the frontier, east of the River Dniester, soon followed them. Both Tervingi and Greuthungi had been established south and east of the Carpathian Mountains for at least three generations, so it is not surprising that their sudden displacement towards the Danube was associated with a broader wave of regional unrest. After some thought, the east Roman Emperor Valens decided to admit the Tervingi into the Empire, offering them assistance across the Danube, but to exclude the Greuthungi. The latter, however, soon found an opportunity to cross the river without help or permission, and were quickly joined by other uninvited guests: Taifali plus some Huns and Alans in 377, more Alans in 378, and some of Rome’s Middle Danubian Sarmatian clients in 379. Long-established inner clients like the Tervingi, Taifali and Sarmatians, outer clients such as the Greuthungi and Alans, and previously unknown Hunnic intruders were battling it out for control of the zone north of Rome’s east European frontier, and the struggle had spilled over on to imperial territory.
About a generation after 376, the established order beyond Rome’s central European frontier – the Middle Danube basin west of the Carpathians – suffered an equally spectacular collapse. There were probably many smaller-scale participants as well, but four major groupings of barbarians figured in the action. A largely Gothic group, first of all, led by a certain Radagaisus, crossed the Alps into Italy in 405/6. These were followed at the end of 406 by a mixed force of Vandals, Alans and Sueves, who crossed the Rhine into Gaul and cut a swathe of destruction through to Spain. Shortly afterwards, a mixed force of Huns and Sciri crossed into the east Roman Balkans, capturing the fortress of Castra Martis in the province of Dacia. Finally, Burgundians elbowed their way past their western neighbours, the Alamanni, to establish themselves on and over the River Rhine around Speyer and Worms. We don’t know when the Burgundians did this, exactly, but it was sometime between 406 and 413. In fourth-century terms, this again represented a mixture of established frontier clients (Sueves), groups who were occasionally part of Rome’s diplomatic web (Burgundians and Vandals), and complete outsiders to the Middle Danubian region (Alans).1
Nor, from a Roman perspective, was this sequential collapse of its eastern and central European frontiers the end of the misery. The Tervingi and Greuthungi who crossed the Danube in 376 had eventually made a kind of peace with the Roman state in 382, after six years of warfare which, famously, had seen them destroy the Emperor Valens and two-thirds of his field army on 9 August 378. Some of them – how many is a question we must return to – from 395 gathered round the leadership of Alaric and his successors. This force moved first around the Balkans, then into Italy – twice – and finally on to Gaul, where another agreement rooted them more firmly this time, in Aquitaine, from 418. From this settlement eventually emerged the Visigothic kingdom: a first-generation successor state to the western Roman Empire. A similar capacity for continued movement was shown by some of the groups bound up in the central European frontier collapse. Most famously, some of the Vandals and Alans who had ended up in Spain from 409 took ship, twenty years later, for North Africa, where they too eventually established an independent kingdom. And in the meantime the Burgundians too moved on, if in less dramatic fashion. After a heavy defeat at the hands of the Huns, many were resettled by the Roman state around Lake Geneva in the later 430s. From this settlement eventually emerged a third successor state to the old Roman west.
Some of the distances here are extraordinary. The extended trek of the Tervingi and Greuthungi from the north-west corner of the Black Sea to Aquitaine totalled about two and a half thousand kilometres, even just as the crow flies (and as the Goths didn’t). The Vandals went from
Slovakia or thereabouts to Tunisia, via Spain and Morocco, not far short of four thousand kilometres, and the Alans who accompanied them even further. Before 376, the River Don marked the western boundary of Alanic territory north of the Black Sea, and from there to Carthage it was a – perhaps literally – staggering five thousand kilometres.
In traditional accounts of the first millennium, these tumultuous events on Rome’s European frontiers and beyond were heralded as the beginning of the great Germanic Völkerwanderung: literally, ‘the movement of peoples’ (even if not all of those involved were Germanic-speakers). The Goths, Vandals, Burgundians and many others who feature in the two chapters that follow were thought of as complete populations of both genders and all ages who had long-standing group identities and deliberately moved in compact groups from one piece of territory to the next. In the process, they destroyed the power of the Roman state in western Europe, and in some accounts of the action this represented the dénouement of a struggle that had begun as long ago as 9 AD when Arminius’ coalition destroyed Varus and his three legions in the Teutoburger Wald. And if this were not a big enough story, the events associated with Roman frontier collapse had, as we have seen, a still bigger role to play in understandings of the creation of Europe. The model they seemed to provide – of entire peoples on the move – was applied wholesale to European pre-history, which was all explained in terms of migration, invasion and ‘ethnic cleansing’. The frontier intrusions of the late Roman period thus provide a crucial test case. Were they undertaken by large population aggregates, mixed in age and gender, or were they not?
‘A SOLDIER ONCE’
Several contemporary sources mention the arrival of the Goths on the Danube in 376. All share the same basic view that its ultimate cause was the emergence of a new force on the fringes of Europe: the mysterious Huns (of whom more in a moment). One even puts a figure on the number of refugee Goths gathered on the riverbank: two hundred thousand people of all ages and both genders. Fundamentally, though, our understanding of what was happening depends on one Roman historian in particular: Ammianus Marcellinus. Only Ammianus provides any circumstantial detail at all about the Goths’ defeats and subsequent departure for the Roman frontier. He and he alone, for instance, tells us that at one point there were three separate concentrations of Goths on the Danube’s banks, and that non-Gothic groups were involved in the action too. Likewise, it is only Ammianus’ account that explains how the Greuthungi made their decision to move after the deaths of two kings and how the confederation of the Tervingi split as different factions advocated and won support for alternative responses to the Hunnic menace. Beyond these details, Ammianus, like the other sources, is entirely explicit on two points. First, the Goths came to the river in very large numbers. He never gives a total figure (in fact he says there were too many to count), but he does record that the Emperor Valens gave battle at Hadrianople on the intelligence that he was facing ten thousand opponents, which he understood to represent only part of the total Gothic military force loose in the Balkans at that point. Second, these warriors had come with their wives and children.2
No late Roman commentator ever sat down to draw up a precise description of any migrant group of barbarians – stating that eight out of ten migrant males, say, came with their families – but Ammianus clearly understood the action as being driven by armed migrant males moving with families, their belongings carried in a wagon train, which features at several points as a mobile fortress that could be pulled (like that of the Boers) into a defensive laager, and must have been of enormous size. As noted earlier, historians have often used a multiplier of 5:1 for the ratio of total population to warriors, but that is a guess. But whatever ratio you choose, up to twenty thousand warriors or perhaps even more, plus their families, has to mean many tens of thousands of people in total on the move. And while making it quite clear that not every migrant belonged to one of the major Gothic concentrations, Ammianus does report a striking degree of political coherence among the two main groups of Goths – Tervingi and Greuthungi – who crossed into the Empire in 376. They each negotiated as a body with the Roman state from the banks of the Danube, and continued to act together, for the most part, afterwards.
If we take these main features of Ammianus’ report for 376 together – the Gothic groups’ mixed gender/age makeup, the fact that we are dealing with several tens of thousands of people, that they were on the run from the Huns, and the coherent way in which the immigrants dealt with the Roman state – then you can see what makes modern commentators hesitate. It all adds up to something that looks worryingly like the old invasion hypothesis: one people, one leadership, and one clearly directed move or set of moves with invasion and flight playing a major role. We have seen too that this kind of phenomenon – different again from the flows of predatory migration of the third century and the Viking period – is strikingly absent from modern, better-documented case studies of migration. In the face of both of these problems, can we believe the picture drawn with such clarity by Ammianus?
Establishing the credibility of an ancient historian operating in the classical tradition is never straightforward. Back then history was a branch of rhetoric, and although it aimed at truthfulness, truth did not have to be merely literal. A high degree of artistry was expected, partly for the audience’s entertainment, but this might again be harnessed in the service of bringing out a deeper truth about persons or situations. What we know about Ammianus in particular is deeply intriguing. He closed his History with a memorable and essentially accurate, if limited, one-line self-description: ‘a soldier once and a Greek’ (miles quondam et Graecus). He was born in Antioch in the largely Greek-speaking eastern Empire, and clearly received an excellent education in Greek and Latin language and literature before entering the army, where he rose to mid-staff officer rank as a general’s aide. He faced battle many times and undertook secret missions – behind Persian lines on one occasion and to assassinate a usurper on another – but, as far as we can tell, he never commanded a unit in action. He left the army in the mid-360s on the death of the last pagan Roman emperor, Julian the Apostate, and was himself a non-Christian. Otherwise he doesn’t tell us much about himself or his purposes in writing history, except to mention in passing a few places that he’d visited between leaving the army and eventually moving to Rome in the late 380s, where his History was brought to completion in the early 390s.
There is a huge and growing literature on the historian and his work, from which two points emerge clearly. First, while claiming to be interested in the truth, Ammianus was not averse to deploying literary artistry in the service of what he considered to be true, and sometimes even evasion. The big cultural story unfolding around him in his own lifetime was the progressive Christianization of the Empire, but he deliberately minimized its appearance in his text, and may even have attempted to conceal a personal aversion to it in the guise of favouring religious toleration. And what is true of his treatment of religion may be equally true of his treatment of other matters, where a lack of candour is less obvious.3 But all that said, Gibbon regarded Ammianus as a ‘most faithful guide’. Gibbon was no fool, and the second point reinforces the quality of this judgement. By an extremely wide margin, Ammianus provides the most detailed and informative narrative to survive from the late Roman period (or pretty much any other Roman period, for that matter). What we’ve already seen of his Gothic narrative is true at many other points, as well: the level of circumstantial detail included in his text simply overwhelms, where they overlap, other sources of surviving information. This vast body of knowledge was acquired partly from his own experience (his secret missions get extensive and entertaining coverage, for instance, and Ammianus was also on Julian’s failed Persian campaign), partly from talking to informed participants such as the retired palace eunuch Eucherius, but also from consulting documentary archives. He refers at one point to a ‘more secret’ archive he wasn’t allowed a glimpse of, which makes it plain that there were
others that he did see, and at another he lets slip that it was his normal practice to look up the official records of their careers when writing about military functionaries. A French historian has also successfully demonstrated the substantial extent to which Ammianus’ narratives are constructed on his reading of the original dispatches that had gone back and forth between Roman generals and their subordinate commanders.4 In other words, alongside literary artistry and calculated evasion, you have to reckon with Ammianus having engaged in something analogous to modern historical research, without which the degree of detail in his narrative would have been impossible. No simple blanket answer to the question of Ammianus’ reliability is possible, therefore, and passages have to be considered case by case.
In relation to the events of 376, Ammianus’ credibility has recently been attacked on two counts, one profound, the other only slightly less so. Most important, it has been suggested that his account of the events of 376 looks a bit like the old invasion hypothesis because he (and the other authors who write in less detail) couldn’t help but portray the action in that fashion. It was so ingrained in classically educated authors that ‘barbarians’ moved as ‘peoples’ – interrelated ‘communities of descent’ – that they automatically wrote up any example of outsiders on the march on Roman soil along these lines. Deeply ingrained in their heads, in other words, was a migration topos, which made it impossible for them to give an accurate characterization of barbarians on the move. Second, it has been argued that Ammianus’ emphasis on the Huns as the root cause of the Goths’ arrival on the Danube is misplaced. It was in fact Roman action that had destabilized the Gothic client world, allowing the Huns to move into new territories, so that the latter were not quite the ferocious outside invaders that our sources portray.5 These are important critiques, but are they convincing? Has Ammianus misunderstood the significance of the Huns’ role, and did he describe the events of 376 as a mass movement of men, women and children because he lacked the conceptual machinery to do otherwise?
Empires and Barbarians Page 21