[This is the paper I presented at the kind invitation of Prof Martial Staub, at the University of Sheffield last night. My thanks to Martial, Simon Loseby, Charles West and others for their hospitality, and to the audience for excellent questions.
The piece is in three parts: a discussion of why the topic of the barbarian migrations matters; a close reading of a recent article about palaeogenomic evidence; and some things that I need to think about in revising Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West.]
Twelve
years ago, beating the deadline for the REF census by a week, I published my
Big Book of Barbarians. To my disappointment,
although it’s a book I am proud of and indeed currently regard as my magnum
opus, it hasn’t, in spite of some very good academic reviews, had the impact
that I naturally had hoped it would.
Partly this was down to pretty minimal publicity by the publishers, and
it hasn’t been translated into many other languages unlike its
competitors.
Partly,
though, I suspect it is down to the fact that it doesn’t toe any party line or
fall neatly into any sort of historiographical camp. It doesn’t argue for long-term continuity, it
doesn’t argue that Rome never fell, or that the fifth century wasn’t an
important rupture in European history, but it doesn’t argue that the Fall of
Rome was all down to Barbarian migrations or invasions either. Equally it doesn’t argue that there were no
barbarian migrations. One of the many
reasons I find the historical profession so dispiriting is that people didn’t
appear to be able to grasp the argument but tried to shoe-horn it into some
pre-existing historiographical niche.
So, I have been accused of being an ‘anti-migrationist’, something that I
am not, as ought to be clear to anyone with basic literacy reading p.418 of the
book and the succeeding discussion about how migrations work. Although, like many others, I have wanted to
think critically about the numbers given in late antique sources, I have to my
knowledge never even denied that significant groups of people migrated from Barbaricum into the Roman Empire. My argument doesn’t rely on any assumptions
about the scale of migration although ultimately that’s unknowable anyway; it
can cope with all realistic orders of magnitude. What I have questioned is, firstly, whether these represented the only or
even the most numerically significant, population movements in late antiquity
and, secondly, and more importantly, whether such migrations were a cause or
consequence of, or became a focus for the changes of the ‘long fifth
century’. Indeed, to be blunt, while few
things in history might be labelled as simply, empirically wrong, I think that
the idea that barbarian migrations brought down the Western Roman Empire is one
such.
So
why does that idea live on? I have
attempted, not without controversy, to address this tricky issue before. The knots in which eminent academic historians
and archaeologists tie themselves in order to make the case can be quite
extraordinary. You will find the partial
or selective citation of evidence, its tendentious employment, absolute Pretzel
logic, the airy refusal to engage with critique and the similar dismissal of
counter-arguments via ad hominems. (1) Placed alongside mockery of complex ideas, accusations
that the latter are simply ‘fashionable’, all the usual rhetorical techniques,
one must ask why there is such
investment in the idea. On p.445 of The Fall of Rome, Peter Heather says,
‘there is no serious historian who thinks that the western Empire fell entirely
because of internal problems or entirely because of exogenous shock’. That
sounds fair enough but either he’s subtly telling us that he’s not a serious
historian or it’s just rhetorical window-dressing, for four pages later he comes out with
the following:
‘Without the
barbarians there is not the slightest evidence that the western Empire would
have ceased to exist in the fifth century.’
Now,
if you can parse the logic of that word-salad, good luck to you – you might for
instance ask how there can logically be
evidence for a counter-factual – but what it appears to be attempting to say is that Roman Empire would not have
fallen had it not been for the barbarian invasions. If you are saying that the
Empire would have gone on and on had it not been for the barbarian invasions,
then you are – very clearly – saying that the Roman Empire fell, ultimately, entirely
because of exogenous factors.
Why
do we so badly
need the barbarians to
have brought down the Empire?
Partly, as
I have argued
before, there’s – bizarrely – a certain comfort to be had in the
idea that the barbarians did it: it frees us from the need to think critical or
uncomfortable thoughts about society and politics.
The barbarians are just out there and
‘other’, beyond any sort of control; raging, gnashing their teeth, intent
purely on invasion and conquest.
Simple
explanations are always more attractive and they don’t come much simpler than
the idea that there was this furious, savage barbarian world opposed to the
Roman Empire, which eventually crashed through the frontier and destroyed
civilisation, especially when one eschews any explanation for that crashing
through. The barbarian invasions are often a bit of a
deus ex machina in modern anlyses, even more so when just pushed by an even greater
deus ex machina: Huns.
Now, with Kyle Harper's work, the Huns themselves
need even less explanation, for their migration was itself brought about by
another
deus ex machina – climate
change.
So now we have a
Holy Trinity ex machina.
All
this of course has enormous modern resonance.
During the build-up to the 2016 Referendum, Arron Banks, leader of
Leave.EU, tweeted about how uncontrolled
migration had brought down the Roman Empire and he came into conflict with Mary
Beard (ironically, since Beard’s own book on the Roman Empire is very
traditional in its view of Gothic Migrations bringing about the downfall of the
West, partly because she seems unaware of recent scholarship on the issue, and
partly because the ‘Late Antiquity’ paradigm has always had a weird blind-spot when it
comes to the end of the Western Empire).
The barbarian migrations have been a political football since well
before the French Revolution but the simplistic Barbarian Invasions argument
has a lot of traction currently, amid the rise of the Far Right,
ethno-nationalism and xenophobia: the ‘legitimate concerns about migration’ in
the media’s preferred euphemism. A
tranche of populist books has appeared recently in France, likening the
so-called ‘threat’ of Islamic migration to the civilisation-destroying
narrative of the barbarian invasions.
You don’t need to ask who the only anglophone historians cited in these
books are. Amazon reviews of books on
the end of the Roman world make interesting sources for research into popular
perceptions of the period. You will find
books which don’t rework the barbarian invasions narrative dismissed as
‘liberal’ political correctness; arguments (like mine) that even try to explain
how migration works dismissed as ‘sociological clap-trap’ – you don’t need to explain barbarian migration: that’s just what barbarians do!(2)
You’d
think on that basis that there’d be some attempt to insert a modicum of nuance
into the discussion, especially in this post-truth, ‘we’ve had enough of
experts’ age. Sadly not. The arguments have become less subtle but
wider-ranging; the evidential sleights of hand more egregious; the wording ever
more unsubtle. Lazy references to the
results of ‘immigrant violence’; discussions of
the tensions of having to live among immigrants, as though this is a natural
cause of stress; desperate attempts to pin even change that effectively
predates significant barbarian settlement as nevertheless down to barbarian
attack, even where the latter is barely evidenced. The repeated use of ‘immigrant’ as a synonym
for barbarian – sometimes ‘armed immigrant’. The description of groups that have been inside the Empire for between two and
four generations as ‘immigrant groups’ or ‘outside groups’. This is horrible, incendiary – at best
irresponsible – language. One book structures
its argument around these points: 1: barbarian immigration destroyed the Roman
Empire – it didn’t mean to but it did; 2: the end of the Roman Empire was the
end of (a) civilisation; and 3: we need to be careful about our own
civilisation (note that the first two elements of the book are replete with all
kinds of dubious uses of evidence, some of which the author must surely have
been aware of); attending Daily Mail-funded
festivals giving lectures on how migration brought down the Roman Empire, as
part of a strand on the ‘migrant crisis’.
The loaded language referred to above, the assumption that people who
have never known life outside the Empire, and nor had their parents, and even
grandparents, as ‘immigrant groups’ is soaked in assumptions and
dog-whistles.
This language doesn’t
impose itself. I managed to write a
500-page book about the barbarians without using the word ‘immigrant’ to
describe a barbarian group more than once (and then to describe a third-century
Germanic-speaking Gothic elite moving into what became ‘Gothia’, outside the
Empire) and never as a synonym for barbarian; I checked yesterday.(3) This language is a choice.
I
confess I don’t understand it. I have
always found this difficult to square with what I had always got the impression
were the perpetrators’ fairly liberal politics.
Does one simply not want to alienate one’s book-buying fan-base and kill
the goose that lays the golden eggs? If
you’re going to pander to them like that, though, you might as well hold their views. Is it some abstracted essay-tutorial idea
about ‘winning the argument’?(4) Have these
people just not noticed that words have implications and effects?
I am
convinced that there is a core ethical demand at the heart of historical
research. Clearly, bad stuff happens in
history; historical explanations aren’t dependent upon ethics. Would that they
were. In that case, though, why are these
authors refusing to even engage with people who try to bring more nuanced
readings of the sources to the table, and indeed being so downright snide about
their work? Why are they making their
arguments less, rather than more, subtle? With less, rather than more,
nuance? Why aren’t they thinking harder
about their vocabulary? Why haven’t they at least stated that, although this is
how they see the end of the Roman Empire, and that that’s just unfortunately
how it was, we ought to be very careful about applying the lessons to the
modern world? (I challenged one of them
to do so, to no avail.) Or maybe they are
happy about all this. As stated, I find
this very hard to believe but there comes a point when the evidence begins to
pile up… The most charitable
explanation, as I have said before, is an incapacity for, or aversion to,
serious, sophisticated, subtle, self-reflexive thought.
So, the
resonance and contemporary importance of the debate on the invasions or the
migrations and the role of the barbarians in the end of the western Empire (the
Fifth-Century Crisis as I prefer to call it) simply won’t go away. That, the fact that I have changed my mind or
developed my ideas about lots of it, and the fact that there’s been huge
amounts of new work, especially archaeological, since I finished writing Barbarian Migrations in about 2005 have
led me to want to produce a radically revised second edition. I want to do a second edition because there
are nonetheless large swathes that I still stand by and I want to keep as they
are. I don’t want to keep reproducing
the same book under a new title. There’s
been enough of that.
II
As a
focus for some thoughts I want to talk a little about an area that has – quite
alarmingly – become a growth area of late: the use of genetics, DNA, to discuss
the Barbarian Migrations.
I will focus
on one particular article that made quite a splash last year (
full reference at right: it's open access). It is an
interesting and important piece, to be sure, with all kinds of things to think about.
The paper looks at a cemetery at Szolad in
modern Hungary, Late Antique Pannonia, and another at Collegno in Northern
Italy, areas linked by involvement in the
Lombard Migration.
It showed that there
were discrete groups within both cemeteries which showed different genetic traits, which it related to northern and
southern Europe.
These groups showed
some similarities with different methods of burial and in terms of their diet.
 |
| There is a Collegna as well as a Collegno in the Metropolitan City of Turin; make sure you type the right one into Google maps... |
When
the paper was published, one person retweeted the link with the claim that
it showed ‘Peter Heather was right. The Völkerwanderung was a thing!’ Does it?
We’ll see. Does it indeed do
anything to help us ‘understand’ ‘6th-century barbarian social organization and
migration’. Here I will be definitive: no. No, it doesn’t. At all. What it might do is describe a couple of
situations where people had moved and one case where people who might have been
the incomers used different burial practices, and that’s valuable, if it does
that. But if we want to understand that migration we are no
further on than when we were at the start, unless
(and this is important), the implicit argument is that if migration
occurred it must have been
‘barbarian’ and, as we have seen, barbarian migration needs no explanation, and that material culture and social
organisation must be explained by
migration. Unless, in other words, the
fact of barbarian migration is the necessary and sufficient cause for late
antique population and cultural change. You
can therefore understand, in the current climate, the gushing about how this
had proven that the Great Migrations were ‘a thing’.
But
let’s hold on right there. Let’s have a
look at the data. Now, I am not a
scientist and make no pretence at being, so I have
absolutely no reason to doubt or cast any aspersions whatsoever on the lab
science. I have no option but to assume
that it was all entirely rigorous and I see no reason to doubt that. And the correlations are interesting. But scientific rigour is about more
than lab technique. I want to say at the
outset that these data and the correlations are extremely rich in potential
implications but that their ability to contribute to our understanding, to use
their term, of late antique society has been completely clouded by an
unfortunate – I would say quite unscientific
– attempt to shoehorn it into a particular narrative, a particular set of presumptions
based upon specific readings of the written sources, and a failure to question
with sufficient rigour its presuppositions about material culture.
Anyway,
here (
right) is the palaeogenomic make-up of the two samples.Now, look at those and you will see that the
two sites on either side of the Alps look pretty similar.
So, the first question is this: why are we
assuming that this has to be about migration and change in the 6
th
century? The reason for that comes when we look at the two groups (red and blue
in these diagrams).
The blue group are
identified as having a palaeogenomic signature that is ‘northern European’ and
the red are those with a signature that is more in line with southern
Europe.
How is this established?
The two groups were compared with DNA
profiling from modern European populations and
then from a range of historical DNA samples from across Europe.(
5)
The first
problem here is that the blue and red dots on this map are not easily
identifiable with particular graves. I am assuming that they might be if one
went back through the data published in the supplementary documents (which I
haven’t had time to do) but it would have been really helpful to have had the
graves identified on this diagram for ease of comparison with the kindred
groupings showed earlier.
This
presentation (again a result of deliberate choice) obscures things.
As you can see the blue and the red look
pretty clearly distinguished.
Set
against the modern DNA populations, though,
it’s not entirely helpful that South-East Europe, Southern Europe and Central
Europe are put in more or less the same colour; squinting away at the diagram
shows that the spread within these modern populations is nevertheless pretty
broad and overlaps quite a lot. (
I have tried to indicate the spread through an overlay on the published diagram, above) The means of the three are fairly close
together. (
Also shown in an overlay, with the area shaded blue.) Note too how the modern Hungarian population (lime green on the diagram:
this spread again is overlaid onto the published diagram, marked with the lime green line) differs quite a lot from the 6
th-century
samples.
This seems odd given that the
authors wish to use the other modern populations as a meaningful background
sample to identify local groups in the past.
The
problems are underlined if you compare the results with the historical DNA
samples. If you look at the historical DNA
samples from Hungary you will notice not only that they are quite different
from those of the modern population of Hungary, but that actually they cover a
range that would include most of the ‘blue’ group of putative northern
immigrants. (
I have overlaid the published diagram, right, with an open blue ring indicating the spread of ancient Hungarian DNA samples, and a shaded red ring showing that spread if one excludes its the outliers).
The ‘red’ group of supposed
locals, by contrast, is excluded.
We’ll
come back to that.
Note though that
there are
no historical DNA
comparanda from Italy.
Why do the
authors think that these are, in the case of Collegno at least, locals? Well
that’s partly because the red group has most affinities with the modern
southern European population.
That
doesn’t really amount to much given what I just said.
Their local status is actually established
not by genetics at all but by the strontium content of their teeth.
[
I have rewritten this bit after a closer look at the data]
In the diagram above I have re-coloured the various groups under discussion in order to make the differences between the two cemeteries clearer. The 'blue group at Collegno has been re-coloured in a dark olive green, and the red group at Collegno in a sort of horrid puce shade. The distribution of the four groups has then been enclosed in an open ring of the appropriate colour. A number of things become immediately apparent. The first and most obvious is just how discrete the two groups at Collegno are. They are the upper-most and bottom-most groups in the diagram. That is clearly an important result. On the other hand, though, it does reveal how disparate in size those two sample-groups are, with only four 'local' subjects. The third kindred at Collegno also emerges more clearly, between the other two (the purple triangles)
On the other hand, though, it shows significantly different things for Szolad, and emphasises some points made, but played down, in the article. Both blue and red groups there (still blue and red, circles, in the redrawn diagram) are more disparate and both have internal variation that is sometimes greater than the variation between the two
groups. Here we seem to have something rather more like a spectrum than two clearly distinct groups, so one is entitled to ask why
they have been presented as representing such clearly discrete groupings.
The other thing that emerges is the subtle but interesting difference between the 'blue' group at Szolad (circles) and the 'blue' (now 'dark olive') group at Collegno (I suspect a nearest-neighbour analysis would highlight the relative lack of overlap) and, even more so, between the 'red' group at Szolad and the 'red' (now 'puce') group at Collegno. Again, we need to ask why the data are being presented
like this? Why present the groups in the same colours, suggesting the same binary, on the two sites? Why, for instance, is the 'red' group at Szolad not being presented as 'purple' like the 'purple' group at Collegno, who seem rather more closely related according to the diagrams above? Why the blue/red binary? What interpretation are we being steered towards? Shading the two groups in the same colours, even while using different shapes, nonetheless works to obscure the differences between the groupings at the two sites. This is important if we are supposed to see the 'blue' group at Collegno as somehow related to that at Szolad. The data seem to permit the possibility that this group had come from somewhere quite different.
 |
| Another representation of these points. |
If one were to plot the
different graves according to the sort of nearest neighbour analysis suggested above and
colour the samples according to some sort of gradient, how different would
the diagrams of the two cemeteries' genome samples look?
It
is also important to remember that deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) doesn’t have
either an ethnic identity or a prima facie geographic signature. When the authors talk about southern or
central or north-western European genomes, that is a potentially misleading
shorthand for a whole series of statistical analyses, probabilities and
judgements, comparing data with ancient and modern samples. Neither sample, at either end of the
chronological span, can be claimed to be unproblematic or to have a secure or
necessary linkage with specific, precise regions. Whenever one reads about the
regional genetic similarities of the subjects of these burials one needs to
explode that phrase and imagine someone trying to match a small piece of a
jigsaw against the images on two overlaid, but changing kaleidoscopes, neither
of which has a hard and fast linkage with any precise geographical location.
None
of that need matter, nonetheless. Let’s assume (as I must) that the analyses have the techniques to be able to do that and that the stats, in the current state of our knowledge, are significant. The labelling of genomes by European region (and by percentages according to European region) remains problematic, nonetheless. We can however enquire seriously about the
extent to which the experiment is being structured by the answers it wants to
give. In other words, how good is the
science in terms of the setting up of the experiment? Two samples have been
selected from two regions known from historical sources to have been, at some point, occupied by Lombards.(6)
Where is the control? Surely, we
need a sample either from a period in which, or a place where, Lombards weren’t involved. What if this
sort of pattern is typical for cemeteries in the Po Valley, or in
Pannonia/Hungary? The historical samples
from Hungary gives us reason to suspect they might be. The lack of Italian comparanda gives us no sound
basis for judgement one way or the other.
Think back to the red group. Why
is a so-called ‘South European’ group in Pannonia being assumed to represent the local
population when, as we have seen, it differs from the general range of
historical DNA samples in the region far more than the ‘blue group’. Why aren’t we looking at these as the
migrants?
The
analysis of the strontium content of the teeth did not seem to suggest that the
blue, ‘northern’ group were necessarily more likely to be outsiders than the
‘southern’ red group.(7) They were,
however, evidently more heterogeneous in origin than the red group. According to the ‘narrative’ the study was
supposed to be ‘testing’ barbarian immigrants were heterogeneous, but on what
basis would one assume that the population of late Roman Pannonia wasn’t? In Collegno, by contrast, it seems that the
‘northern group’(8) does appear to have migrated into the area recently, unlike the red, which is interesting
and very valuable. (Note, though, that it
doesn’t prove either that the red
group had not also been outsiders, but more than a generation previously, or where the blue group had been more
than a generation earlier.(9) Indeed, ‘[e]ven amongst the two family groups of
primarily central/northern ancestry [sic] there is clear evidence of admixture with
individuals with more southern ancestry’.)
The conclusions, say the authors, are ‘consistent
with an origin of this group east of the Rhine and north of the Danube and we
cannot reject the migration, its route, and settlement of the Longobards
described in historical texts.’(p.9) Indeed they are, but the problem is that they
are simultaneously at least as consistent with an almost infinite range of alternative
interpretations and do nothing to render that reading more plausible than the
others. In short, we set out with a
series of assumptions and the experiment did nothing to rule those out, so we
are going to imply that it has confirmed them.
This is bizarre. I had always
thought that scientific method proceeded by deduction, by ruling explanations out, rather than simply picking, out of
a wide range of possibilities, the one that accords with the analysts’
preconceptions on the grounds that it had not been excluded by the experiment. There is actually very little that is ruled
out by this experiment, other than the idea that late antique populations were
entirely static and genetically homogenous, which I do not think anyone was
proposing in the first place.
And
yet, another assumption, common to many such studies, appears to be that historical
populations have generally been stable.
Three quotations:
'While
previous sampling from the era has been limited, we note that published fourth-
to seventh-century genomes from Britain, Bavaria, Lithuania, and the Caucasus,
analyzed alongside our own ancient samples, cluster close to their modern
counterparts.' [Here, they leave out the fact
that the Hungarian data don’t.]
'We found no
evidence that such ancestry was present in northern Italy during this time (who
instead resemble modern southern and Iberian Europeans), which would be
consistent with inferred long term
barriers to gene flow in Europe across the Alps.' [This is bizarre. The only ancient DNA data they had from Italy (the cemetery at Collegno) included substantial evidence of such ancestry in a larger number of cases than the others. Remember there were no historical DNA samples for comparison. By any rigorous scientific standards, this ancestry is being rejected as Italian purely on a priori grounds. Not for the first time, logic has a bad day in 'barbarian migrations studies'…]
'Modern
European genetic variation is generally highly structured by geography.'
This
latter puzzling.
Population movement
across the Alps, while difficult and dangerous, has been constant since
Ötzi
the Iceman
Going over the Alps like Ötzi (bue arrow, at right) is not, in any case, how you get from Pannonia to
Italy (red arrow) but, even if it were, a cursory glance at
Roman history will show numerous fairly large-scale movements of people,
whether barbarians or Roman armies, as well as constant traffic across the Alps
–
and this is crucial –
in both
directions.
This is why a control,
or other comparanda, was essential.
How
likely is it that a sample of
any
cemetery in the Po Valley, dating to
any
period between the ‘Celtic’ settlement of Cisalpine Gaul and now, would
contain at least some people with
genetic make-up suggestive of comparatively recent origins north of the
Alps?
Would, in other words, have a
profile looking rather like this?
I
strongly suspect that the answer is ‘pretty likely’ at the very least.
The
analyses made no linkage between the incoming group in Collegno and the
supposedly immigrant group at Szolad, other than the broad similarity of their
genetic make-up when plotted on diagrams 2a and 2b, [and, as we've seen, their similarity is rather less striking than at first seems to be the case, suggesting different origins]. The (modern) geographical regions associated
with the blue group are moreover pretty broad, so things are far less precise
than they might seem.
Think
of all the possibilities. If the incomers at Collegno do have, loosely,
‘central European DNA’ could they not be descended from Ostrogoths, or from any
of the barbarians who made up Odoacer’s army?
For that matter, although growing up in the locality, why can the ‘red’
kindreds at Collegno not belong to either those groups? What if they were descended from ‘Romans’ who
had moved back from the transalpine provinces (cp the Life of Serverinus of Noricum)?
Many
studies like this seem to offer two options: a: telling us something that we
already knew and no sane person doubted (people moved into the Roman Empire
from barbaricum), or b: telling us
something that must be wrong because it’s impossible and no one was suggesting
anyway (no one moved and populations were entirely homogeneous). Hence, they frequently rely on setting up ‘b’
as a straw man. In this case, so far
from proving that the Great Migrations, the Völkerwanderung, were ‘a thing’, as
far as late antique barbarian migrations are concerned, this article, I
contend, tells us – at best – nothing we didn’t know already and, with
considerable likelihood, not even that.
I wonder how much money it cost...
There
are many troubling aspects of the analysis.
One is the assumption that, rather than being a constant of human
history, migration has to be pinned to one particular period, ‘the migration
period’, and must go in one direction only (that set by a certain reading of the narrative sources). Another, implied earlier, is the
way in which migration is assumed to be a necessary and sufficient explanation
for cultural change. It is, to be sure,
interesting that the analyses suggest a linkage between different kindreds and
particular funerary rites and diets, and that these include the evident
incomers at Collegno, but this does not explain
the use of those rites. For one thing,
the association between the furnished inhumation burial rite and ‘Germanic’
ethnicity has absolutely no prima facie evidential support whatsoever in the
archaeological record. For one thing, it
is clearly developed within the frontier provinces of the Roman Empire. For another, as Irene Barbiera has proven,
inhumation with weapons was a rite known in Northern Italy since before the
‘barbarian migrations’. That cannot be
stressed strongly enough. If repeated
ancient DNA studies reveal that furnished inhumation was generally employed by
incoming groups from Germania Magna,
then that will demonstrate that this old assumption was the luckiest guess in
the history of archaeology; it won't retroactively confer logical and empirical rigour on earlier studies that made that assumption. But it will
not explain why these groups, with no
prior history of using the rite before their migration suddenly decided to
employ it once on Roman or formerly Roman territory.(10)
 |
| What does this sentence even mean? |
Even
more troubling is the analyses’ conclusion that genetic or biological kinship
might underline ethnic identity.
It tries to hedge around this but that is
clearly the implication.
There is
absolutely no reason why all of those different kindreds could not have all
shared the same ethnic identity.
The
only grounds for presuming ethnic difference, other than the notion, which the
authors make a show of rejecting, that ethnicity is biological and that
different genetics mean different ethnicities, is the idea that burial ritual
is linked to biology/ethnicity. That assumption
is no more than that and finds little support in serious archaeological
analyses. For one thing, the relative
furnishing of burials has been linked to age and stage of the life-cycle in
numerous studies across western Europe over the past thirty years. At one point the authors of the piece even
talk about ‘religious evolution’ at Collegno, wheeling on another
presupposition about the meaning of burial rites that has been repeatedly
knocked on the head since the 1970s. If
the significance of the rite is religious, how and why is it also ethnic? If the idea, which is implicit in this piece,
that ethnicity, based on ‘blood’, is sufficient to explain material cultural difference (the second quotation above talks about a 'link'; it does not talk about an explanation: this is elementary),
gets any traction, we run the risk of setting back by a generation, perhaps
two, the understanding of early medieval western European social history, as
analysed through its burial data. There
are interesting and enormously important things to ponder about the linkage
between kindred, rite and diet demonstrated in these analyses, but they aren’t
the ones suggested by the authors and a link is not an explanation.
The
really disturbing aspect of historical DNA studies in recent years – not
necessarily this study, although, as I have just said, it is not free from the
problem – is, however, an attempt to link modern regions with historically
attested ethnic identities via genetics.
The implications of this don’t need to be spelled out. Long-term, ethnic, geographical, genetic
continuities are being suggested, not unproblematically, and getting huge media
coverage. We are on the verge of turning
ethnic identity back into race. We are
running the risk of turning the clock back even further in our understanding of
society and identity, to a return to 'blood and soil'. I don’t entirely know whether the people
working on these projects – generally scientists with a very poor understanding
of late antique history and archaeology – have considered the implications of
what they are doing. Those out there
writing their Amazon reviews deriding ‘sociological clap-trap’ will love this
of course but, as the fact that Amazon itself has to hide some of their
comments as potentially offensive shows, they are, in the current parlance,
‘gammons’ and they would. The academic
community has a duty to be better than this.
This is not, as I have been accused by the self-same Amazon reviewers of
wanting to do, to cover up uncomfortable data; it is to think harder about
those data and what they mean,(11) and to make sure that scientific experiments are
driven by cutting-edge historical thinking and set up in rigorously scientific
fashion so that they can contribute to debate and public knowledge in responsible
fashion.
And
note (wearily) that, by the end of the article, our supposed migrants have become
invaders…
III
In the time that remains, I want to talk
briefly about what – if it were to constitute that sort of research – my
revision of the Barbarian Migrations
book needs to address. Again, this is
not to deny that there were barbarian migrations or that they were an important
feature of the period, but an attempt to recast the ‘Fifth-Century Crisis’ that
includes the fragmentation of the western Empire and the movement of barbarian
groups. It’ll be a list of things we can discuss.
The first is to develop the idea that I proposed in an
article that Martial [Staub] invited me to write for German History, and which was clearly too complex for one Spanish
professor, who tweeted that it was ‘the most ridiculous presentism’. Once again, to some people, any attempt to
rethink the mechanisms of migration and the nature of the frontier that moves
away from the gnashing-teeth, ‘waves of savages’ view is simple ‘presentism’:
political correctness gone mad. We need
seriously to rethink the relationships between the Empire and northern
Barbaricum, not as two opposed worlds but (as indeed some Romans also
considered it) as a core and a periphery.
The late imperial Barbaricum was soaked in Roman influences and relied
heavily upon a set of well-managed relationships with the Empire for its
political and social stability. If you
want to think responsibly about migration you need to think critically about
dominant cores and politically, economically subordinate peripheries. One of the most important aspects of that
relationship was the frontier itself. It
is vital to think how the frontier was not simply a barrier, straining to hold
back a tide of barbarians (even if the author of the De Rebus Bellicis and other Romans often conceived of it as such)
but was also a managed relationship
and a key mechanism for
migration. To think further about that
we need to consider the movements not simply from Barbaricum into the imperial provinces but those in the opposite
direction as well: above all, barbarians going home, but also traders. We need to look at the exchange systems that
ran from the Empire to the north, the movements of goods in those
directions. These are all well studied:
they aren’t new areas by any means, but we need to integrate them into how we
see information flows as well as population movements, into an overall
understanding of how migration operated.
And we need to think of how political and cultural groupings moved up
and down the great routes between the Baltic and the imperial limes.(12)
This has two important
implications. One is that, contrary to
the idea that the barbarians had acquired so much wealth from the Empire that
they were by c.400 richer, more powerful, and more independent, the opposite is
the truth. The collapse of those
well-managed relationships around 400 caused, as such things had caused
earlier, crises beyond the frontier. As
had also happened throughout imperial history, those crises created winners and
losers and the losers headed for Rome: drawn as well as pushed; not simply shunted
along.
But the really surprising thing about
the fifth century, as I began to explore in that article, is the fact that the
eventual collapse of the frontier, so far from opening the floodgates to mass
migration sweeping over the provinces, actually more or less killed off
large-scale, long-distance population movement.
After the ‘Great Invasion’ of 406, and the Burgundian crossing of the
Rhine a few years later, there are really no more great barbarian invasions in
the west from barbaricum, until the
Lombards. What we have instead is the
sort of slow, gradual drift across the frontier, over the Rhine, across the
North Sea. What sort of scale this
operated on at any one time is difficult to establish but it was very clearly a
quite different phenomenon from many of the types of migration that had
dominated the Imperial period. As I said
in the article mentioned, the dictum I came up with in the 2007 book, that the
End of the Roman Empire caused the Barbarian Migrations and not vice versa, is,
as I now see it, quite wrong. The End of
the Roman Empire was effectively also the end of the barbarian migrations. Remember, the Lombards migrated into a
reconquered Italy across a re-established imperial frontier, and the Ostrogoths
came from the Eastern Empire. Bizarrely,
the Franks seem to have inherited the Roman attitude to the Rhine as a
frontier, but in practice the Frankish frontier seems to have been quite
different.
There are a couple of points stemming
from that which I think a revised Barbarian
Migrations… needs to develop. The first is
to expand the points I made about the human, lived scale of the period, the
fact that people get old and they die, that twenty years took as long to happen
in the fifth century as they do now.
These are, weirdly, points that have not impinged on a lot of the
scholarship. But we need to remember
that – probably – most of the Vandal warriors who sacked Carthage in 439 had
almost all been born, and had grown up, in the Roman Empire. Only those older than 33 would have been born
in Barbaricum. How many actually had any meaningful memory
of life outside the Empire? Geiseric,
the arch-Vandal of so many narratives, was almost certainly born on Roman
soil. So, probably, were all the leaders
of the (Visi)Goths after Athaulf. By 414
that group of Goths – if, that is, they were related to those who crossed the
Danube in 376, though perhaps not all of them were – had been in the Empire for
thirty-eight years. Theoderid, killed in
battle in 451, is unlikely to have been older than seventy-five at the
time. The warriors who followed Euric in
the late 460s and 470s, as well as being born in Gaul, were probably the
children of Goths born in Gaul, and grandchildren of people born either in the
Balkans or en route across Italy or Spain.
The Burgundian warriors famously mocked by Sidonius, if young warriors,
had probably been born in Sapaudia, likely sons of men born elsewhere in Gaul. And who were their mothers? Likely provincial Romans. These men, of these generations, Burgundians,
Vandals, Goths, are those referred to as ‘immigrant powers’ or ‘outside groups’
by Peter Heather on p.435 of The Fall of
Rome. What assumptions lead one to
call a second-, third- or even fourth-generation provincial Roman, even one also
deploying a Gothic, Burgundian or Vandal identity, an immigrant or an outsider? Referring to such people, still, as
immigrants or outsiders might well of course be simply lazy rather than
ominous, a basic failure to remember the biographical details of such
‘barbarians’ (just as Heather forgets the biography of Emperor Honorius, whom
he calls an 'infant' in 406, when he was actually 21). That however is all the more reason to
emphasise them, when assessing the role of soldiers and leaders who held
non-Roman identities in the fragmentation of the Empire (an issue of such
contemporary importance). Identities are
not entities; they are not essential or immanent. As I argued recently, they are wagers; the
section on identity is another part of Barbarian
Migrations in need of a rewrite.
Growing out of that is another point that needed developing in the first edition: that the
Fifth-Century Crisis is not about Barbarian Invasions but above all about
factions and civil war. Those factions
are regional alliances between soldiers and their commanders, with barbarian
identities – as many of the fourth-century Roman army had already deployed –
and provincial Roman aristocrats. We
need to rethink the assumptions that bedevil the discussion of provincial
politics: that the barbarian soldiers had the whip-hand and were the leaders,
that they were seeking to create independent kingdoms, and that people knew or
even thought that the western Roman Empire was dying in the fifth century. A key change I will make to the book is
abandoning the idea that in the 470s people knew the Empire had fallen. They clearly hadn’t, and they didn’t until
Justinian’s Wars in the mid-sixth century.
People very clearly, I think, knew something had gone badly wrong in the
470s and that the pars occidentalis
was no longer functioning as such, but I can see no reason to think that they
knew it was never going to make a come-back.
What exactly was a ‘king’ in the fifth-century west? We need to stop thinking about this through a
medieval lens and think harder about what the ‘courts’ of barbarian ‘kings’
meant in the fifth century. As I have
said before, kingdoms were for losers.
The intention of all the factions that we can identify, was to gain
control of the Empire, on the fourth-century model and, for generals, barbarian
and Roman, on the model of Stilicho.
Those that managed to control the imperial centre – Ricimer and Gundobad
for example – did not use the title king.
Wherever we can make the comparison, military and civilian elites are in
cahoots and evidently equals.
Above all, though, what the
fifth-century crisis is about is Christianisation. This is the gaping
hole in Barbarian Migrations and the
Roman West.(13) Survey pretty much any
body of evidence from the fifth century and you will find that the narrative it
tells you is not about barbarian
migrations or invasions and the end of the Roman Empire but about the
encroachment of Christianity into all areas of life. What is happening, as part and parcel of the
politics I just referred to, or hand-in-hand with it, is a reorganisation of
the ways in which people organised the world, from one with the civilised Roman
male at the centre and barbarians as one of the elements that circled around
that, with the civilised Roman male as the ultimate manifestation of legitimate
authority, to one where the legitimate centre was defined by religious
orthodoxy, correct belief, and the outside by heresy. The stories of the barbarian migrations and
the end of Rome, and of fifth-century western Christianity have too long been
studied separately so that they appear to be contemporary but somehow running
on different tracks. I think though that
the two are far more intertwined than we have thought, even in Peter Brown’s
recent(-ish) books.
Finally, in Brother Bobby’s words, ‘I
got one more thing I’d like to talk to y’all about right now’. And it is the
last aspect of the book that I want to develop – again something that is there,
and to a greater degree than in other books, but which needs expansion – is a
further return to the human scale of the history of the period. Where do all of these things intersect –
identities of various sorts, religion, politics, community, the ironies of
political narrative – if not in gender and the family? The very basic structures or environment into which the
historical actor is ‘thrown’, if one can use a Heideggerian term without being
suspected of advocating a return to Blut und Boden. Julia Hillner kindly tweeted that I was one of
only a few people who crop up in bibliographies on the End of the Roman World
and The Roman Family. Those two areas do
– like Religion and secular politics, economy and society – need to be put
together. In Barbarian Migrations I concluded by saying that I was trying to put
people back into their history, but I think that there was more that could be
done there, and above all I do think that that has to be done if one is going
to get at what the changes from a series of Roman provinces to a congeries of
accidental barbarian kingdoms was really about. We really need to put migration into a much more rounded total history of the fifth century rather than prioritising it as an explanatory focus.
It has been a long time since the story
of the Fifth-Century Crisis has mattered, politically, as much as it does at
the moment. It matters that we think
hard – harder – about it; it matters that we get our approaches right; we need less concentration on argument and rhetoric, on winning debates, and more on understanding and hermeneutics(14); it
matters above all that we do it better.
***
Notes
1: My anger about all this is justly infamous but has been badly misrepresented. I do think that some things are worth getting angry about, and the misuse of the Barbarian Migrations and the End of the Roman Empire to fuel xenophobia and racism, and the way some modern authors pander to this, is one such. However, to look at the origins of this ire and animus, I invite you to compare my engagement with Peter Heather’s work in
Barbarian Migrations, and its tone, with Heather’s engagement – if you can call it that – with my work, and
its tone, in
Empires and Barbarians. I never expect to be agreed with; I do expect basic academic courtesy to be reciprocated. If people see fit to treat me intellectually as a second-class citizen, the gloves will come off. That may stem from my own biography as (unlike so many) a first-generation academic not educated at the 'right' schools and universities, but there we are.
2: Check out the reviews by someone who writes as 'E.L. Wisty', a walking illustration of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Also a sadly typical illustration of how little regard the historical profession is held in by hobbyist 'know-alls'.
3: I wondered whether I had been hypocritical about the use of the word 'immigrant' so searched for 'immigra' through all my Word files for the book. It is used principally in the discussions of ethnicity theory, migration theory and references to modern politics and in considering how one might identify an immigrant archaeologically. Beyond that it hardly appears at all: twice in total in all the narrative chapters. I don't recall trying hard to avoid its use.
4: This is a bugbear of mine at the moment, which I want to blog about: the way in which a particular type of 'brilliant', rhetorical argumentative style, fostered in the educational establishments that furnish us with our top politicians has come to dominate British politics and broadcast journalism. It's a style that eschews subtle or deep thought or reflection and we need to address that. It has done the nation a great deal of harm and precious little good, especially of late.
5: Another issue that I was unable to elucidate is why grave Sz19 is listed as part of a 'blue' kindred.
6: Assuming the Lombards who moved to Pannonia and the Lombards who left were still significantly the same groups of people. This appears not to be addressed.
7: This would tally with the considerably less discrete genome signature of the 'blue' and 'red' groups at Szolad.
8: Again, remembering all the problems in such designations
9: Remember that the genomes do not forcefully suggest that they originated in the same part of the world as the 'blue group' at Szolad.
10: One of the problems seems to stem from the fact that although the team included a couple of historians who are (though less so than is sometimes thought) progressive in their interpretations, the archaeologists involved are much more traditional. The absence of a specialist in more rigorous analyses of cemeteries was felt in the contradictions within the published argument.
11: The article under discussion shirks badly on hard, clear, rigorous thought. I was enormously disappointed by it. The word on the street was that it was a real game changer which would force us to rethink all sorts of things. In the end it's intellectually sloppy, like so much 'historical science' coming out of the USA these days.
12: It is a matter of urgency to think about the links between the dominant, 'core' part of the world and its dependent subsidiaries, and the
responsibility of the former for what goes on in the latter. It is by no means 'ridiculous presentism' to see that this mattered in Late Antiquity as much as in the modern world and that we need to internalise that for all our sakes.
13: The same gap can be found in the roughly contemporary books by Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins of course, but with much less importance. It matters far less to the arguments they make and indeed in Ward-Perkins' case, he is arguing that there has been too much concentration on religion.
14: See note
4 above.
***
