Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  It is obviously not possible to say exactly how many people were caught up in the migratory activity generated by the rise and fall of the Hunnic Empire and the new opportunities for expansion that then became open to Rome’s nearer neighbours as it lost the capacity to maintain frontier security. One negative thought experiment, however, is worth running with. This involves considering how many migrants are known to have emerged from the areas that suffered culture collapse. There are reasonable indications, for instance, that both Visigoths and Ostrogoths could field around, or a few more than, twenty thousand fighting men. The armies of the Vandals, Alans and Sueves were between them probably just as large, certainly in 406 before they suffered such heavy losses in Spain, while Burgundian manpower, if probably smaller, was not minimal. We have little conception of how many Middle Danubian refugees were recruited into the army of Italy or east Rome’s Balkans military establishment; but to judge by the numbers given for the Heruli, the many different groups we hear of will between them have amounted to at least another 10,000-plus warriors, and quite possibly double that. Migrant Anglo-Saxon numbers are perhaps the most controversial of all, with guesses ranging from 20,000 to 200,000.53

  If for the moment we take a maximum view of this evidence – for reasons that will become apparent – it would suggest that the largest possible figure you could reasonably calculate for the number of Germanic warriors who departed from the zones suffering culture collapse was something over 100,000 men, but certainly not 200,000. There is much guesswork here, but it is not a vastly inflated figure, and this order of military magnitude really is required to explain how the immigrants were able, between them, to bring down a west Roman state that determinedly resisted their intrusions. I suspect, anyway, that 100,000 is not making sufficient allowance for how many immigrant warriors died in the course of the action. Nonetheless, something over one hundred thousand does give us a ballpark figure to work with. How many people in total were on the move depends on how consistently women and children accompanied these warriors, and on the very murky subject of how many slaves came along for the ride. Here again, let’s take a maximum view – and in any case, despite some recent attempts to deny it, there is both a decent amount of evidence that most of the larger groups were mixed in age and gender, and also, further reason to accept that this was so. As we have seen, traditional accounts multiplied the numbers of fighting men by five to get total population figures for mixed groups, but something nearer to four may be more correct. On the other hand, none of this makes any allowance for slaves. Putting all this together, a reasonable maximum estimate might put the total exodus from the areas which suffered culture collapse at something around or perhaps a bit over half a million souls.54

  The reason for bothering with such calculations is that we do know the size of the territory affected. Germanic culture collapse affected an area defined broadly by the Rivers Elbe and Vistula in the north and the Iron Gates and the Lower Don in the south. At a rough calculation, this weighs in at close to a million square kilometres. For the migrations of the late Roman period to have emptied this area, population densities across it would have to have been in the region of 0.5 per square kilometre. This is an impossibly low figure. Even allowing for the fact that agricultural regimes were not intensive, it is simply impossible for the departure of half a million people to have emptied such a huge area. The figures are only guesstimates, but one recent study has suggested (and reasonably so) that just what it calls the Pontic-Danubian region (Map 15) must have contained between three and four million people in antiquity, and the population of just the Great Hungarian Plain has been put at something like three hundred thousand in the early medieval period. For all that every number cited in the last two paragraphs is an approximation, we can nonetheless safely discount the possibility that culture collapse in central and south-eastern Europe was caused by the complete evacuation of its population.55

  In general terms, then, Germanic culture collapse was caused by the disappearance only of particular elite groups from the affected areas. But this conclusion needs to be tempered with two further observations. First, for all the transformations of the preceding centuries, Germanic society of the fourth century was not dominated by a very small elite. New distributions of social power did emerge between the first and fourth centuries, but the elite of the Germanic world still represented a larger percentage of the population than the tiny landowning class, say, that had dominated in the Roman world. As we saw in Chapter 2, and as the events of the so-called Völkerwanderung confirm, we must think in terms of social and political power (and group identities) shared between fairly broad oligarchies of freemen, numbering between a fifth and a third of the warrior population. Nor was participation in the migrations, at least among the larger groups like the Goths and Lombards, limited just to this dominant oligarchy. At least two social strata of warriors – possibly to be equated with the free and freed classes documented in early medieval law codes – are observable in these intrusive groups, not just a single body of elite soldiery, and sometimes they brought slaves with them as well, not to mention families.56 Elite departure was thus not a very small-scale phenomenon.

  Second, as we shall see in the next chapter, the evidence indicates that population levels did nosedive dramatically in some particular localities. Once again, this suggests that Germanic migration may not have been entirely negligible in demographic terms, and the two points may well be linked. Because the Germanic elites were not so tiny in the first place, and had some dependent social groups (slaves and freedmen) attached to them, then when a concentrated group of migrants left a particular area, this may well have created empty districts.57

  Not only did prevailing patterns of development dictate the working-out of the migratory processes of the late fourth and the fifth century, therefore, but the reverse was also true – the migrations affected patterns of development. One major consequence of this interaction, as we have seen, was the emergence of an unprecedented type of imperial power for western Eurasia, based on north European resources. Because, however, the Roman Empire came to an end in a process that saw substantial armed and organized groups from the periphery relocate themselves in the heart of its former territories, the process of imperial collapse was matched by parallel transformations in large parts of this periphery. Culture collapse caused by the departure of the still fairly broadly based elite of Germanic Europe changed totally the socioeconomic and hence political organization in the old periphery of the Empire, and marks a second major break with the ancient world order – a break quite as important as the rise of the Franks’ northern European Empire. It was to have enormous consequences for the emergence of Slavic Europe, as we shall see in Chapter 8, but this process was also profoundly shaped by the third major reconfiguration of the old world order that unfolded in these middle centuries of the first millennium.

  Out of Arabia

  Up to about 600 AD the eastern half of the Roman Empire, with its capital at Constantinople, maintained its imperial credentials as the dominant power of the Mediterranean. Strong though his position was in the 510s, Theoderic the Ostrogoth had held back from making his claim to imperial power absolutely explicit, for fear of alienating the rulers of Constantinople. And in the next generation, the astuteness of the king’s judgement showed through, when Justinian’s forces, in twenty years of brutal warfare from 536, played more than just a walk-on role in the emergence of imperial power north of the Alps by destroying the Ostrogothic Italian kingdom. This military adventure followed an astonishingly successful earlier conquest of the Vandal North African kingdom in 532–4. Then in the early 550s, in Justinian’s later years the east Romans established a toehold in southern Spain. Constantinople’s domination of the Mediterranean had moved from latent to manifest within the space of about twenty years.

  East Rome’s collapse in the seventh century from these heights of imperial grandeur was every bit as dramatic as that of its western counterpart in the fifth. In the
early 610s, it looked as though it was about to be conquered by its traditional bête noire, Sasanian Persia, which took control of many of its key revenue-producing districts: Syria, Palestine and Egypt. By 626, a Persian army was even camped on the south side of the Bosporus, while its nomadic Avar allies besieged Constantinople, just over the water. Astonishingly, the Empire clawed its way back from the jaws of this defeat. Constantinople survived the siege, and the Emperor Heraclius mounted a series of campaigns through Armenia into Mesopotamia which, by autumn 628, had brought Persia to the brink of collapse. The Sasanian King Khusro II, who had launched the war of conquest, was deposed, and most of the conquered territories were restored to Heraclius’ rule.

  No sooner was the ink beginning to dry on the history of Heraclius’ great victory, however (provisional working title: The Original Comeback Kid), than it had to be deposited in the nearest waste-papyrus bin. Out of a long-neglected corner of the Near East burst a new enemy – Arab tribes united only within the last decade by Islam and Muhammad – sweeping all before them. Heraclius’ triumph turned to dust in his mouth as, before the end of his reign, Syria, Palestine and Egypt were all lost once more, and Asia Minor turned into a battle-ravaged wasteland. By 652, other Arab armies had conquered the entire Persian Empire, and within a further two generations the new Empire of Islam stretched from India to the Atlantic.58

  The details of this astonishing revolution in world history are not central to this study. Suffice it to say – and this will come as no surprise – that nearly as many reasons have been offered for east Roman imperial collapse as for that of its western counterpart. Traditional lines of explanation have often centred on Justinian’s conquests in the western Mediterranean, arguing that they were overambitious and left his successors a poisoned chalice of bankruptcy and imperial overstretch. But if ‘a week is a long time in politics’, as one British prime minister famously commented, this link looks hard to sustain. Justinian died in the mid-560s, the Arab conquest came seventy years – or pretty much three whole generations – later. The events could still be interrelated in some way, of course, but they don’t look like simple cause and effect. More recently, those concentrating on internal reasons for Constantinople’s collapse have switched their attention to alternatives: the periodic sequence of plagues that afflicted the Mediterranean world from 540 onwards, and – perhaps related – signs of possible later sixth-century economic decline in the Roman Near East.

  These explanations all have something to say, but outside factors also need to be taken into account: not least, the all-in knock-down twenty-five-year war between Constantinople and the Persians that immediately preceded the Arab conquests. Persia and eastern Rome fought one another on and off throughout the sixth century, but for the most part only in limited fashion: through surrogates in Caucasia, or by sieges designed to capture the odd strategic fortress. This restricted pattern of warfare fizzled out in the early seventh century, when the two powers fought each other head on, and ultimately to a standstill. There was a triumphant fightback by Heraclius when all seemed lost, but the terms of the 628 peace treaty show that the end result was actually a draw, through exhaustion. Despite Heraclius’ victories, Constantinople failed to get back every piece of territory lost since 602. This, of course, immediately provides part of the explanation for the Arab victories over both empires that quickly followed.59

  But attention also needs to be paid to the Arab world itself. Here, the galvanizing effect of Muhammad’s new religion, creating unity within a previously fragmented population, ranks centre-stage. But, as with the appearance of new confederations capable of forming successor states out of the western Empire’s periphery in the late fourth and the fifth century, there is a backstory here of huge importance. Looked at in the round, the evidence demonstrates a steady growth in the size and power of Arab client states on the fringes of the Roman and Persian Empires between the fourth and sixth centuries, just as there had been in those of the western Empire’s European peripheries between the first and the fourth.60 What concern us here, however, are the broader effects of this seventh-century revolution on European-wide patterns of power. Two stand out.

  First, the rise of Islam destroyed east Rome as a truly imperial, supraregional power. If you read texts produced in Constantinople after the deluge, this is not immediately obvious, and the city itself was not to fall to a Muslim power until Mehmet the Conqueror’s cannon finally blasted a hole through the city’s great Theodosian landwalls in 1453, near the modern Topkapi bus station. For most of the preceding seven hundred years, the rulers of the city had called themselves ‘Romans’ (even while writing in Greek), and maintained all the old Roman ideologies of supremacy: claiming to be god-appointed emperors, whose job it was to bring proper order to the entire human cosmos.

  As in so many contexts, though, it is important to look beneath the surface. Then, what really strikes you about Constantinople after the mid-seventh century is how much state power had haemorrhaged away. Islamic conquest deprived Constantinople of many of its richest provinces: Syria, Palestine and Egypt in the first generation, quickly followed by North Africa about forty years later, and eventually Sicily as well. Asia Minor was retained, but became a major battlefield in further conflicts with the new Islamic state, and the archaeological evidence shows how badly its economy was affected. All the great cities of antiquity, where they survived at all (and some didn’t), ceased to be major centres of population, manufacture and exchange, being transformed into military fortresses and command posts. Coinage, likewise, became exceedingly scarce, and everything points to a massive simplification of the economy. Before these disasters, the east Roman Empire was quite similar in ‘shape’ to the Ottoman Empire of the sixteenth century, from which interesting tax records survive. These can be used to gloss the likely extent of Constantinople’s losses in the earlier period in terms of state revenue (although the overwhelming nature of the disaster is anyway clear). And if you do the calculations and make some appropriate adjustments, it becomes apparent that the rise of Islam deprived Constantinople of between two-thirds and three-quarters of its revenues; that is, of between two-thirds and three-quarters of its capacity to act.61

  The consequences of this diminution show up with great clarity in the big picture of European history after 600 AD. From the early seventh century, Constantinople was no longer a pan-Mediterranean power and major player on the broader European stage. Though still important in the eastern Mediterranean, it became in many ways an unwilling satellite state of the Islamic world, no longer substantially in charge of its own fate. Its subsequent periods of prosperity and decline correlate closely and inversely with the history of the new Islamic power block. When Islam was politically united, Constantinople was condemned to decline; when – as sometimes happened – Islam itself fragmented, there was room for modest expansion. In short, the self-proclaimed imperial Romanness of the rulers of post-seventh-century Constantinople is a chimera. The losses suffered at the hands of Islam meant that these emperors were now ruling what was as much a successor state to the Roman Empire as any of the new powers of the Roman west a century earlier. My own preference, in fact, is to use ‘Byzantine’ rather than ‘east Roman’ from the mid-seventh century, as a reflection of how great a sea change the rising tide of Islam had created in Mediterranean history.62

  Second, the reverse of the same coin, Islamic explosion created a new superpower on the south-eastern fringes of Europe. It engulfed not only much of the east Roman Empire, and certainly its richest territories, but its old Sasanian sparring partner too. The result, when some of the dust had settled by the early eighth century, was a gigantic Empire running all the way from Spain to northern India. Ruling such an enormous entity using pre-modern communications was always a logistic nightmare, in addition to which there were major ideological divisions over how the Islamic Empire should be run, and by whom. Not surprisingly, therefore, its internal history was rarely stable. Even if their political control was al
ways a bit arthritic, though, and certainly declined with distance from their respective capitals, both the Umayyad Caliphate centred on Damascus between the 660s and the mid-eighth century, and the Abbasid Caliphate centred on Baghdad from the later eighth to the early tenth, represented huge concentrations of imperial wealth and power, on a scale that surpassed even that of the Roman Empire at its height.63 This superpower based in the Near Eastern fringes of the European landmass was too far away to intervene directly in the unfolding history of migration and development in barbarian Europe, but its indirect effects on these processes were enormous. Not only did it remove the east Roman Empire from the map of major players in European history, but, as we shall see in the chapters that follow, its diplomatic and economic tentacles stretched up through the Caucasus on to the western steppe, and from there beyond, into eastern and even northern Europe.

  SYSTEMS COLLAPSE AND THE BIRTH OF EUROPE

  In part, the fall of west Rome (and that of the Roman east too, for that matter) has to be understood as the playing-out of the full consequences of development processes that had been at work throughout the half-millennium of the Empire’s existence. Much of the new strategic pattern that prevailed across the European landscape from around 500 AD was dictated by the emergence of a supraregional power block in northern Europe made possible by the transformations of the previous five hundred years. As we have seen, in the late fifth century the Franks emerged as a new force in the old Empire’s inner periphery. They proceeded to combine their original homelands with former imperial territory west of the Rhine and other parts of Rome’s inner and outer peripheries. The resulting imperial power block was the first of its kind based on the exploitation of northern, non-Mediterranean, European resources. There is a very real sense, therefore, in which the Roman Empire, in the long term, sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Its economic, military and diplomatic tentacles transformed adjacent populations until they were strong enough to rip it apart.