Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  Sometimes, as we have seen, our sources do give good reason for thinking that a migration topos was in operation in their authors’ heads. The sixth-century Jordanes describes third-century Gothic migrations into the Black Sea region as one ‘people’ on the move, when the reality portrayed in more contemporary sources was much more complex. In due course we will encounter another excellent example in ninth-century accounts of fourth- and fifth-century Lombard migrations. But what about Ammianus on the events of 376?

  In this case, falling back on the migration topos argument looks deeply unconvincing. To start with, though this is just a footnote, it is entirely unclear to me that Ammianus does envisage either the Tervingi or the Greuthungi as ‘peoples’ in the sense of ‘communities of descent’ in some ideologically reflexive manner. In fact, he does not analyse them at all. What interests him, and this is generally true of ‘imperial’ accounts of barbarians, is the power of these groupings as military and political collectives, and hence any threat they might pose to Roman security. How they worked in detail was not his concern. The Tervingi surely were not a ‘people’ in the classic sense of the word: a closed biologically self-reproducing group whose members all shared pretty much equally in a distinct cultural identity. Social differentiation already existed in the Germanic world at the start of the Roman period, and had grown apace over the subsequent three centuries (Chapter 2). All the Germanic groups of the late Roman period that we know anything about went into battle with two hierarchically arranged groups of fighters, whose investment in their group identities was substantially different. These groups quite probably also incorporated slaves, who were not allowed to fight. That Ammianus does not explore any of this certainly limits our capacity to understand the Tervingi, but that is not the same as saying that he had one simple model for all groups of outsiders on the move. In fact – and this is much the more important point – it emerges clearly from his History that he was perfectly capable of differentiating between different types of mobile barbarian.

  In different chapters of his History, for instance, we meet barbarian warbands on Roman soil, engaging in their usual pastime of wealth collection. These groups are always identified as such, their numbers sometimes given in the few hundreds, and Ammianus clearly had no problem in telling a warband from a large mixed body of population. This is perhaps not surprising, given the huge difference in scale between a warband and the Gothic forces in action in 376. For that reason, his account of the battle of Strasbourg, which we encountered in Chapter 2, is still more pertinent. This involved, in Ammianus’ view at least, over thirty thousand Alamanni and their allies, gathered under the leadership of Chnodomarius – and all of them on Roman soil. Despite the size of the opposing force, Ammianus is perfectly clear that this was a military action that had the continued annexation of Roman territory in mind and was undertaken only by males. He also distinguishes clearly the range of recruitment methods that had been used to gather Chnodomarius’ army. Many were the followers of various Alamannic kings present at the battle, but some had overthrown their king to be present, and others were mercenaries hired for the occasion.6 Thus although the action involved very large numbers of barbarians, Ammianus did not suffer from any ‘barbarian army equals people on the move’ reflex.

  The point is reinforced if you look more closely at his account of what was going on north of the Danube around the time of the Goths’ appearance on the frontier. Not even all the outsiders who crossed the Danube in the run-up to Hadrianople, for instance, are presented as on the move with families. In the autumn of 377, the Goths found themselves in a difficult situation, trapped in the northern Balkans with food supplies running out. To help lever out the Roman garrisons who were holding the passes of the Haemus Mountains against them, the Goths recruited the help of a mixed force of Huns and Alans, promising them a large amount of booty. The stratagem did the trick. The point here is that, first, Ammianus can identify a force as politically mixed (not a ‘people’) when it was so – this one composed of Huns and Alans – and, second, that although they were mobile barbarians on Roman soil, he made no reference to women and children. For Ammianus, this was merely a mixed mercenary warrior band useful to the Goths in a tight situation.7

  Indeed, he does not describe even the Tervingi as a whole ‘people’ moving in untroubled fashion from their old homelands on to the Roman frontier. The Tervingi arrived on the Danube in two separate concentrations in 376 because there had been a split among them. The larger group led by Alavivus and Fritigern was composed of those who had decided to reject the leadership of Athanaric, from the established ruling house, and seek asylum inside the Roman Empire. A second and smaller, though still quite substantial, group later followed them to the river under the command of the old leadership. There, having initially thought of seeking asylum too, Athanaric took an alternative option. Ammianus explicitly describes the Tervingi as a political confederation in crisis, not a ‘people’ taking seamlessly to the road.8 The range of different types even of very large barbarian forces that he was able to describe, and the details of his account of the Goths in crisis, both lead to the same conclusion. Our Greek soldier was both sophisticated enough and well enough informed to describe events on the Danube specifically and accurately. When he tells us that concentrations of Goths came in large numbers, and with their families, this does not look remotely like a cultural topos. In other parts of his History, he described even very large barbarian groups on the move on Roman soil in quite different ways. He chose to present the events of 376 in the way he did quite deliberately, and not because it was the only model in his head. This much now, it seems, is more or less accepted. Even among scholars generally rather suspicious of large-scale migration, only one has tried to discount Ammianus’ account of the numbers involved, and that by asserting the existence of a general migration topos rather than by any more detailed argument.9 On balance, it is highly probable, therefore, that Ammianus knew what he was talking about.

  As for the other line of attack on Ammianus’ credibility – the emphasis he placed on the Huns as the first cause of these population displacements – this derives from a report in the Church History of one Socrates Scholasticus that Athanaric’s confederation split not in 376 in the face of Hunnic attack, but immediately after Valens’ earlier war against the Tervingi which ended in 369. It was after this, according to Socrates, that Fritigern broke with the leadership of Athanaric. On the basis of this, Guy Halsall has recently argued that Valens, not the Huns, was ultimately responsible for the arrival of the Goths on the Danube, in the sense that Valens’ campaigns inflicted defeats on Athanaric and the Greuthungi, thereby destabilizing Rome’s Lower Danubian client states. It was this dislocation that allowed the Huns to move into Gothic territory, and accepting this point undermines the traditional picture of the Huns as outsiders of enormous military power whose migratory intrusion destroyed an existing political order north of the Black Sea.10

  Obviously enough, Socrates’ report cannot be seamlessly folded into Ammianus’ picture. The two historians have completely different understandings of when and how the confederation of the Tervingi split. And this, in the end, is the fundamental problem with Halsall’s line of argument. The title of Socrates’ work is accurate, in that most of his work concerns itself with the development of the Christian Church. Only occasionally and tangentially do other events intrude, and then never in very much detail, so that Socrates’ overall knowledge of the fourth-century Goths is much less than that of Ammianus. Furthermore, Socrates was writing in Constantinople in the mid-fifth century, so was not contemporary with the events he was describing. When it comes to politics and military matters, it would be unsound methodologically to correct the contemporary and very specific account of Ammianus on the strength of an isolated report by Socrates, unless there was some compelling reason to do so – which there is not. And in fact, while it is easy on closer inspection to understand Socrates’ as a confused version of Ammianus’ account of Go
tho-Roman relations (some of the events are in the wrong order), the opposite is not true, since Ammianus includes much extra material that is not in Socrates’ text. Valens’ war against Athanaric, it is also worth noting, had ended in a stalemate that would arguably have strengthened the Gothic leader’s prestige, since he was invited to a summit meeting on the river with the Emperor and treated with great respect. The conflict would certainly have had much less of a destabilizing effect north of the Danube than the Emperor Constantine’s total victory over the Tervingi in the early 330s, when no Huns appeared.11 So neither of the critiques of Ammianus’ credibility are convincing, and we can reasonably proceed from the premise that large, mixed population groups of Goths were set on the move in the summer of 376 by the aggression of Hunnic outsiders.

  That being so, how are we to relate the migratory phenomena Ammianus described to patterns of mass human movement observed in the more modern world? In one sense, the scale and character of the migration flows of 376 are not out of step with modern case studies. For, as Ammianus and all our sources unanimously report, the underlying cause of the Goths’ move to the river was political and negative. The Huns were undermining the stability of the entire north Pontic region, and the Goths were looking to remove themselves to a safer locale. As Ammianus puts it:

  [The Goths] thought that Thrace offered them a convenient refuge, for two reasons: both because it has a very fertile soil, and because it is separated by the mighty flood of the Danube from the fields that were already exposed to the thunderbolts of a foreign war.12

  In Ammianus’ formulation, the Goths had two motives in mind: the attractions of Roman territory and a desire to escape the insecurity of life north of the Danube.

  Taking the second motive first, it is, of course, politically generated migration – in other words, fear – that characteristically sets large, mixed groups of human beings on the move: 250,000 in one month of 1994 in Rwanda, and over a million in another. Given its strongly political motivation, the scale of Gothic migration in 376 is not a problem. Where the action does depart from modern analogies, however, is in the degree of organization shown by at least the three major concentrations of Goths. This is not to deny – quite the opposite, in fact – that much human flotsam and jetsam was at large north of the Danube, but in the midst of it all, the Romans were faced with three fairly coherent groupings: both parts of the now split Tervingi, and the Greuthungi. This is quite different from all modern analogies. Whether one is talking central Europe at the end of the Second World War or Rwanda and Kosovo more recently, floods of political refugees have been precisely that: many unorganized streams of people running for their lives. If the migrants then found themselves in camps, leadership structures and organization have sometimes emerged, but the modern world has never thrown up an example of the kind of ordered evacuation described by Ammianus. Should we believe him?

  Again, I think broadly that we should. The observable contrasts between the events of 376 and modern mass migrations do make sense in the light of some of the basic differences in context. Part of the explanation for the oddity of the action, for instance, lies in the nature of the Hunnic threat facing the Goths in 376. The Goths have generally been portrayed in modern accounts as panic-stricken refugees desperately fleeing masses of Huns who were hot on their trail. The primary authorities provide plenty of justification for this view, since they surround the Goths’ arrival on the Danube with an aura of panic and defeat. The historian Zosimus can stand for many others:

  By wheeling, charging, retreating in good time and shooting from their horses, [the Huns] wrought immense slaughter. By doing this continually, they reduced the [Goths] to such a plight that the survivors left their homes which they surrendered to the Huns, and fleeing to the far bank of the Danube begged to be received by the emperor.13

  Narrative details preserved by Ammianus, however, suggest a significantly different picture. The Huns first attacked the Alans, Iranian-speaking nomads, who lived to the east of the Goths beyond the River Don. Having joined some of the Alans to themselves, they then attacked the Greuthungi. After a considerable struggle and the death in battle of two Greuthungi leaders – Ermenaric and Vithimer – the group decided to retreat westwards. This brought them into the territory of the Tervingi confederation. Its leader Athanaric advanced to the River Dniester, alarmed no doubt in equal measure by reports of the Huns and the fact that a large body of alien Goths was now camped on his borders. A surprise Hunnic raid then forced him back towards the Carpathians, where he attempted to create a defensive line to protect his domains. From Ammianus’ geographically elusive description it is possible to deduce that this may have been improvised out of an abandoned line of Roman fortifications that had been used to protect old Roman Dacia north of the Danube, the limes transalutanus. But more Hunnic raids undermined the collective confidence of the Tervingi in Athanaric’s leadership, and caused the ‘majority’ of them both to abandon him and to seek refuge inside the Roman Empire. They were joined in this enterprise by the still retreating Greuthungi, who seem to have adopted the asylum idea from the Tervingi.14

  How long had this all taken to unfold? The Huns’ attack on the Goths is usually written up as ‘sudden’, and, implicitly or explicitly, the events compressed into a timeframe of little more than a year. But some of the narrative details suggest otherwise. Of the two kings of the Greuthungi, Ermenaric resisted the Huns for ‘a long time’ (diu), and Vithimer ‘for some time’ (aliquantisper), a resistance which included ‘many engagements’ (multas clades). These are indefinite chronological indicators, but a ‘long’ resistance is more likely to be measured in years than months. Moreover, the Huns were still not breathing down the Goths’ necks even when the latter reached the Danube. They were able to sit patiently by the river, while an embassy was sent to the Emperor Valens to transmit the request for asylum in person. But Valens was about fifteen hundred kilometres away in Antioch, and, travelling by land, the embassy will have taken well over a month. None of this suggests that Huns were present in large numbers close to the Danube in 376, even if the Tervingi had just suffered from two substantial raids at their hands.

  The point finds general confirmation in subsequent events, which show that many Huns were still operating well to the north-east of the Black Sea as late as 400 AD. Most modern reconstructions have tended to picture them sweeping as far west as the Carpathians and even beyond, in 376 or immediately afterwards. In 395, however, when the Huns mounted a huge raid on the Roman Empire, their first on anything like such a scale, they went through the Caucasus Mountains, not across the Danube. This has been seen as a cunning plan, with the Huns dragging their horses thousands of kilometres around the northern shores of the Black Sea from Danubian bases – but this is absurd. Horses and men would have been exhausted even before the attack began. What this raid really shows is that, as late as 395, most of the Huns were still well to the east of the Carpathians, perhaps located in the region between the Volga and the Don (Map 7). This is confirmed by other reliable evidence, namely that more Goths (other than the Tervingi and Greuthungi of 376) and other non-Huns provided the main opposition to the Roman Empire across its Lower Danube frontier certainly as late as 386, ten years after the initial Gothic emigration, and quite probably beyond.15 Although the Huns certainly started the revolution north of the Black Sea which manifested itself in the arrival of the Goths on the Danube in 376, they did not themselves come so far west in large numbers at that point. In other words, the Tervingi were not facing an immediate deluge of Hunnic arrows and did have the opportunity to make a more measured response to the mayhem unfolding around them than is generally envisaged.16

  But if the Tervingi had the time to organize the kind of orderly evacuation Ammianus describes, is it plausible to suppose that they did? This would imply that they possessed a decision-making body of sufficient strength and coherence to formulate and push through such a plan, raising related issues about political capacity and about the streng
th of their group identity. That the leadership of the Tervingi could formulate ‘big’ decisions is clear enough from other evidence. As we saw in Chapter 2, the confederation managed to sustain coherent policies towards the Roman state, and, in particular, with regard to the degree of subjection that they, as clients, were willing to tolerate. This even stretched to the ambitious policy of organizing the persecution of Gothic Christians, because the new religion was associated with the Empire’s cultural domination. There is nothing implausible per se, then, in the idea that the Tervingi might have had sufficient strength of identity to respond as a group to the new threat posed by the Huns.

  How exactly these decisions were taken, and by whom, depends on the spread of social power in Gothic society at this date. In particular, the degree of social stratification and the extent of the ‘gaps’ between strata would dictate who was involved – and in what ways – in the decision-making process. At the top of the social scale, leaders such as Athanaric, Alavivus and Fritigern – called ‘judges’ and ‘kings’ in our texts – would have been actively advocating particular policies, but, as emerged in Chapter 2, a broader (freeman?) group would have enjoyed some kind of collective veto on suggestions made by their superiors, and hence would have played at least a passive part in the process. Elements of Ammianus’ narrative do indicate that this was so. The discussion about the decision to enter the Roman Empire was drawn out. Ammianus’ comment is diuque deliberans: they were ‘considering for a long time’. And I strongly suspect it was a heated exchange, too. Likewise, once south of the Danube, the new leadership of the Tervingi is repeatedly found ‘urging’ and ‘persuading’ its rank and file towards specific lines of policy, not simply issuing orders.17