[This is the text of a lecture that I gave at the University of Tübingen last Wednesday. Many thanks to Mischa Meier, especially, for the invitation and a lovely introduction, and also to Steffen Patzold and Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner.
The paper starts by rehearsing some arguments I have made before about the size of late antique 'barbarian' armies and the restrictions on that imposed by logistics and economics, which it underlines by adducing some comparative material. It poses the question of how those questions might apply to the migration of larger groups - specifically the sort of large groups who arrived in a specific place at a particular time: the sort of large-scale, short-term migration envisaged in the typical 'Migration of Peoples' (Völkerwanderung) paradigm.
After a brief discussion of the perils, or rather the limitations, of the sorts of analogy employed in 'Migration Theory', it looks at the types of migration from Barbaricum to the Roman Empire, and their respective logistical feasibility, first from what I call the 'Immediate Zone' close to the frontier and then from the 'Intermediate Zone' in the heart of Germanic-speaking Barbaricum. On this basis it suggests that the movement of 100,000 people (a figure picked simply from its recurrence in studies of the migrations from all sorts of perspective) was, while not impossible, at least over shorter distances, at the limits of possibility, and a decision from which there was probably no going back.
From there it suggests that what would make it less of a gamble would be the ability of the Roman Empire to supply such large groups. It suggest that the Empire might have had an interest in doing so. The Empire alone had at least the possibility of doing so, as is further suggested by the fact that the large-scale migrations of the fifth-century overwhelmingly took place within a Roman logistical context. Finally the argument is underpinned by the fact that once Roman logistical and other structures on the frontier had ceased to exist in the mid-5th century, this type of migration effectively ceased. The overall argument of my 2014 paper, "Two Worlds Become One: A Counter-Intuitive View of the Roman Empire and 'Germanic Migration'" (German History 32.4 (2014)), that 'the end of the Roman Empire produced the end of the barbarian migrations' is underscored.]
1 Introduction
A. Three well-known scenarios:
I want to remind you of three very well-known scenarios, to
which I will return in more detail towards the end of my lecture.
The first is the famous Tetrarchic medallion showing the
entry of barbarian families into the Roman Empire, crossing the Rhine at Mainz
under the gaze of the emperors.
The second is perhaps the most famous: the image of the
Tervingi gathering on the Danube in 376 and petitioning the Empire to grant
them entry. I want to remind you all of the extremely well-known accounts of
the subsequent starvation and mistreatment of the Tervingian migrants.
The third and final scene is another obvious one: the
crossing of the Rhine by the Vandals, Sueves and Alans on the last day of 406
or possibly – as Michael Kulikowski argued and later retracted – 405. [1]
B. Not anti-migration
Before going further, I have been described, in print, as an
‘anti-migrationist’ and, recently, as someone who thinks that migrations only
involved a few elite warriors. I find it sad that such writers wish to
misrepresent my arguments.
I have argued:
- That certain types of archaeological evidence need not and in some cases cannot be read as simple signs of migration
- That the fourth-sixth-century migrations of people from Barbaricum were not the only and not necessarily the largest movements of people in the period and may not have been on a larger scale than in the earlier Roman period.
- That the migrations of barbarians in the fourth and fifth century did not bring down the western Roman Empire.
But note, first, that none of these arguments logically
implies a non-belief in migrations. And second that not one of these arguments
implies a particular view of the size of migrations. Nowhere have I argued that
migrations didn’t happen or that they were only the movements of small elite
groups of warriors. Indeed, I have explicitly argued for larger-scale
migrations.
My position has generally been for a variety in the scale
and nature of migrations. What I have been sceptical of is the traditional idea
of the migrations of entire peoples. I remain sceptical, but that scepticism is
something I will explore and question in this lecture.
I want to develop some thoughts I expressed first in Barbarian
Migrations and the Roman West and then in a significant modification published
in German History in 2014.
***
2 Numbers and logistics
I want to rehearse some arguments I have made before about
numbers, in the military context. I am not the first to express scepticism
about the numbers Roman sources give for the size of barbarian forces, yet such
numbers are still routinely repeated in modern works. If we leave aside huge
figures like 80,000 or 100,000 we can look at the number given by Ammianus for
the Alamannic army at the battle of Strasbourg in 357: 35,000 – a number often
repeated without the usual scrutiny or reservation. How likely is it that even
a confederacy like the Alamans could put together an army that size?
One can think comparatively. Armies of that order of
magnitude were not common in better-documented eras until the seventeenth
century, although they are certainly attested in the late middle ages. The
largest recorded muster of the medieval kingdom of England was just over 32,000
men, in the 1340s. One might mention, in contrast, the capacity of the Zulu
kingdom to put armies of over 20,000 men into the field but it must be
remembered that these armies assembled quickly, in a different sort of terrain
and political structure, and dispersed equally quickly. Could the Alamanni have
done something similar? It is worth considering how this could have happened
but we need to think hard about those mechanisms and not simply assume them. Such
an army would need, like the Zulu, to assemble, fight and disperse quickly. For
the Alamanni, a point can be made here, to which I will return: the presence,
in however decayed condition, of the Roman road network in the former Agri
Decumates, which, perhaps would allow a large army to assemble quickly. Such a
force would nonetheless not be sustainable over a long campaign.
The reason for that is logistical. The largest settlements
in Iron-Age Germanic-speaking Barbaricum had populations numbering only
hundreds. In other words, the economy of Germania Magna was not geared to the
provisioning of large numbers of people. An army of 35,000 men would be a
population group seventy times the size of the largest settlements in Germania.
Historically, armies have sometimes been more numerous than cities; the English
muster of 32,000 in 1347 – if they were all gathered at the same place, which
is not entirely clear – was two or three times the size of most of the larger English
cities, though still be smaller than the estimated population of London at that
date. But not seventy times larger…! For that ratio Edward III would need to
have assembled something like 700,000 men. The larger late medieval armies
were, moreover, raised in urbanised societies with fully monetary economies and
complex market, trade and supply networks and systems, taxation, better
agricultural techniques with greater yields and so on: things not available to
a fourth-century barbarian polity.
Moving of 35,000 men through the late antique landscape – on
either side of the Rhine – would consume the grain supplies and livestock of
entire communities every day, producing famine, and probably still going
hungry. The late Tim Reuter described the effect on the ninth/tenth-century
landscape of an army of 20,000 men as equivalent to the down-wind fall-out ellipse
of a nuclear explosion; it’s an image worth remembering, not least because the
socio-economy context of Carolingian Europe offered more possibilities for
supporting a larger army than did that of Iron Age Germania.
A much smaller army, say 10,000 men – or less – could be catastrophic
for the population of the regions through which it moved. To see the sort of
devastation wrought on Roman provinces that is sometimes attested in the
written sources does not require us to envisage enormous invading hordes.
The solution to these problems would be for individual
contingents to bring their food with them. How many days’ supplies could be
transported by a warrior? With baggage animals, the amount increases but, as
the classic studies of military logistics have demonstrated, the demand for
fodder and food for the animals’ attendants grows parallel to the number of
baggage animals. Charlemagne expected his warriors to bring food for three
months’ service in the early ninth century. Again, while that is an interesting
comparandum, one needs to take account of broader context. Charlemagne’s was a
much more complex and well-organised realm than any in fourth-century Barbaricum:
urbanized and monetized to some extent. He also enacted at length about supply
carts, package animals, the preservation of fodder for passing troops and the
maintenance of bridges and boats. The law about a three months’ supply also
applies to the caballarii of a monastery, mounted troops supplied from a large
land-owning establishment. Indeed, Charlemagne envisaged that the resources of
four farms were necessary to furnish a single warrior. How much of this can be
applied to Iron-Age barbarian armies? We would need much better evidence than
we currently have before we could assume that much of it was applicable in
detail. Charlemagne’s field armies were almost certainly much smaller than
30,000 men. Karl Leyser suggested that such armies were fed as much by cattle
on the hoof as by waggon- or pack-horse-loads of grain; this might apply to
barbarian forces too. If so, however, issues about fodder and ease of movement
across difficult terrain are emphasised.
It’s nonetheless worth remembering that in the 350s a force
of 600 Franks caused Julian serious problems.
There’s no logical reason to suppose that Roman writers were more likely
to be telling the truth when they mentioned low numbers than when they recorded
very high ones but we might accept that this was a ‘small’ force. The Romans
defeated it by starving it out. Before that, it can have done enormous
damage. Six hundred warriors would be
more than entire Roman communities outside the towns and could move rapidly,
consuming settlements’ bread, killing and eating the cattle they were saving
for winter, murdering anyone who objected, raping and/or enslaving women and
children with impunity. If a couple of Roman field army regiments caught them,
the game would be up and swift punishment meted out, but it’s vital remember
the damage and trauma even a small raiding force could cause. Let’s not sanitise this!
This has important implications for barbarian migrations that
have rarely been discussed. How feasible was it for a barbarian ‘horde’ of 20,000
warriors plus families and followers – up to the number of 100,000 frequently
found in modern discussions (including mine) – to travel any distance or for
any length of time?
We must ask serious questions before repeating the numerical
estimates that have become almost canonical in the literature. My paper is
mostly about asking questions – frequently quite obvious ones. Many are unanswerable, in some cases perhaps
only in the current state of our knowledge but in others they concern things we
can never know. Nonetheless the existence and importance of these questions
need to hang over future discussions of migration. We can’t simply assume
things. We can’t be afraid to challenge age-old consensuses, to point out the
difficulties in making assumptions or to admit there are things we can’t know.
Consequently, I am not going to argue for specific answers. Too
much writing about the history of the migrations, including some of mine, has
been about arguing that one or other interpretation must be correct. We need to
stop trying to win arguments and to establish interpretations that can be
labelled right or wrong. This attitude has impoverished scholarly and political
debate in Britain and produced Brexit. We must recognise that great swathes of
the study of what we call the Barbarian Migrations can’t be reduced to
totalizing ‘correct answers’ but are areas of discussion where many
possibilities must be kept in dialogue. Highlighting answer-less questions
reminds us of this.
How feasible is the traditional image of a migration of
people?
***
3. The peril of analogies
Over the past thirty years there has been much use made of
so-called Migration Theory – a body of general comparative observations about the
phenomenon of migration. This has, to be sure, provided useful information and
permitted a more sophisticated understanding of late antique migrations. There are, however, some limitations,
especially as far as large-scale migration is concerned. Many of the most
useful insights of migration theory concern what one might call migratory
processes: the different forms of migration; the flows of information; the
demographic make-up of certain types of migrant groups in particular types of
movement; the various push and pull factors involved. Where thinking about large-scale migration,
migration theory tends to discuss a longer-term, cumulative process such as,
for example, European migration to North America. That individual and small-group migration
from Barbaricum occurred and, over the whole Roman period, resulted in the
movement of possibly hundreds of thousands of people into the Empire seems uncontroversial. It is quite feasible that areas where
extracting a living was hard and, over time, possibly becoming harder were
largely depopulated because of migration.
It’s perfectly likely that many of the people departing such areas moved
into the Roman Empire, but there’s no reason to suppose that they all did.
It must be said nonetheless that many of the forms of
migration studied, and which can be shown to have existed in Iron Age Germania were
predicated on the possibility of return. Many analogies for migration occur,
furthermore, in very different economic and technological contexts from those
of Late Antique Barbaricum. Most importantly, the fact that these types of
migration are not merely possible but demonstrable in our period does not,
logically, authorise us to declare that the paradigm of The Great Migrations,
or Invasions, has been validated, as I have recently seen argued. This is what philosophers call a ‘category
error’: the application of a conclusion drawn from one thing to something else
as though they were the same thing, though in fact they are quite
different. The Great Migration, Völkerwanderung
paradigm is not about the gradual movement of hundreds of thousands of people
over centuries; it is about a specific, short-term, large-scale phenomenon: the
arrival in one moment of a single large group – counted in tens of thousands – to which contemporaries applied an ethnic name: the Goths; the Vandals; the Burgundians;
the Lombards. And the argument that the
arrival of these groups resulted in large-scale political and cultural change:
specifically the End of the Western Roman Empire. That sort of migratory phenomenon is very
difficult to find convincing comparative material for. Though providing much
interesting logistical information, things like the westward migration of
European Americans or the Boer Great Trek are bad analogies, being the cumulative
movement of individually quite small groups rather than of whole peoples.
We must start from Iron Age realities.
***
4 Different mechanisms of migration and interrelationship in different zones of Germania
It’s crucial to underline the well-recognised fact that the
phenomenon of ‘barbarian migration’ was diverse, including a wide range of
movements.
I would divide these first by ‘zone’ of Barbaricum. In the past
I have adopted a rather crude threefold division of Germania Magna, according
to practical nearness to the frontier. This needs refinement and more subtlety
but for now it might be useful.
‘Immediate’ zone
I provisionally labelled the first zone the ‘frontier zone’,
though I later thought that a better term was needed to avoid perpetuating the
idea of two opposed and confronted ‘worlds’. The Immediate Zone might work.
Here, relationships were sometimes fraught. This is the zone
from which raids on Roman territory were launched and where, possibly more
seriously, Roman military retaliation took place. At the same time, though,
this was also a zone where the web of Roman-non-Roman connections was dense. By
c.300 Roman material culture had come to dominate this zone. Forceful arguments
have been made that Roman imports into Barbaricum before the third century were
intermittent and dependent upon particular political events.[2] By the later
Roman period, as far as I can see, cross border interactions were much more
general.
All kinds of migration are practical in this zone, from the
very small to the large-scale. Individuals seeking employment in the Roman
army; families seeking a better life than was available on the lands they
currently farmed; and so on. We know a lot about the legal relationships
between the Empire and various categories of barbarian immigrant and I won’t
discuss that; it is well covered in the literature. The key features that I
want to discuss later will surely have applied but to a lesser degree.
The one form of larger-scale migration that I want to
discuss concerns migration into the Empire of particular groups for political
reasons. From the earliest late Republican encounters with the barbarians north
of the Alps one of the most important, repeated dynamics was the movement to
Roman territory of ousted political factions, particularly those supported by
Rome.
The relationships between the British Empire in Natal and
the African peoples across the Mzinyathi (Blood) and Thukela rivers before and
after the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 provide very instructive comparisons.[3] In both cases
the Empires set up or supported their preferred local leaders and were expected
to allow their factions to cross into their territory when defeated. Pro- and
anti-imperial factions and attitudes beyond the frontiers swirled and shifted
according to circumstance. The military balance of power was overwhelmingly,
insurmountably in favour of the imperial powers in any protracted
confrontation, whatever short-term, morale-sapping and dramatic victories might
occasionally be won by their opponents.
Factions that took refuge in the Roman (or British) imperial
orbit could be numerous and politically very significant, but they were not
entire peoples. I would like to stress this. The choices before us are not
simply between small aristocratic warrior groups (as in the ‘elite transfer’
model) or the migrations of hundreds of thousands of people (as in the
traditionalist Völkerwanderung model). In Barbarian Migrations and the Roman
West I frequently wanted to stress this intermediate ‘factional’ order of
magnitude. It’s a disappointing index of how entrenched, simplistic, polarized
and binary the debate on the migrations has become that, if one does not
suggest or believe in the movement of whole tribes, one is assumed by default
to be arguing for the migration only of small groups of hundreds (or very low
thousands) of warriors, or even to deny the existence of migration. What I want
to suggest is how significant, complex, difficult, and traumatic even a
migration on this intermediate scale could be.
In the famous Tervingian migration of 376, it is crystal clear
from the accounts of Ammianus Marcellinus and others that this was not the
migration of the whole people. It is not clear that it was even the movement of
the majority of the Tervingians. It was clearly a lot of people but that didn’t
need to mean the whole or even a large proportion of the trans-Danubian Gothic
population.
There are very distinctive things about this migration,
nonetheless. One is its economic and ecological situation. Semi-nomadic
pastoralism played a large part in the economy north of the lower Danube, as
it did in every period we know about between the Bronze Age and the late
nineteenth century at least. It was not the only element, as the archaeology of
the Černjachov Culture shows, but written and archaeological sources – and the
fact that Roman authors, especially those writing in Greek, considered the
Goths to be Skythai – underline that a mobile, pastoral existence was a
significant part of their way of life.
For at least some elements of the Tervingian population,
packing one’s goods into a wagon and moving was not beyond the normal range of
experience. Some of those that moved must nonetheless have belonged to more
sedentary elements of Gothic society. For all, though, as far as we can
reconstruct the circumstances of 376 – and whether you follow a short-term
‘exogenous’ Hunnic explanation or a slightly longer-term ‘trans-Danubian
instability plus Hunnic intervention’ interpretation – these circumstances made
the movement of Alaviv and Fritigern’s Goths a fairly sudden decision. Organising
everything necessary for a sustainable long-term movement was doubtless
impossible. One imagines that they took
whatever grain they had and drove their herds and flocks before them, as food. The distance the Tervingi had to cover to
reach the Danube was nevertheless pretty short, across easier terrain and
through their own confederacy’s territory.
All this makes the assembly of tens of thousands of Goths on the northern
bank of the Danube perfectly plausible.
Even so, it is likely that the Tervingi were going hungry before the
Romans ferried them across the Danube.
Once across the river, as we know, things got even worse.
The Tervingian migration was exceptional, but exceptional
doesn’t mean unique, and crises like this had happened before on the Danube,
not frequently but, at least over the longue durée, regularly – the receptio of
the Sarmatians forty years previously had been the most recent instance. The
features of Tervingian migration just described facilitated this. The mechanics
of migration in the Steppe and neighbouring regions need to be studied
separately from those further West. We
need to think more about the differences between these different contexts.
*
‘Intermediate’ zone
I want however to focus, less on movements like those of the
Goths, than on migration from regions further West, behind the ‘Immediate
Zone’, in what I call the ‘Intermediate Zone’.
Some of the most significant fifth-century migrations appear to have
come from this part of Barbaricum.
It’s clear that contacts with the Roman Empire reached the
north of modern Germany. If less
frequent than in areas close to the frontier, they were nonetheless socially
and politically important, perhaps more so.
To provide some well-known examples: the official imperial metalwork
found in Lower Saxon cremation burials; the trade that flowed up the river
networks from the Black Sea and the Danube to Scandinavia; the prestigious
Roman silverware found in exceptional burials like those at Haßleben; the
importance of Roman cultural influences such as those that led to the adoption
of Roman-style inhumation, or the influence of Roman decorative styles; and so
on. Who knows what the inhabitants of
the Baltic coast thought the Roman Empire was like – maybe their ideas of the
Empire were as mad as the Roman ideas of what the people on the Baltic were
like.[4] Nonetheless, the
people of central Germania Magna knew about the Empire and knew it was a powerful,
culturally-dominant place.
The same reasons for migration as in the areas close to the
frontier applied here too: individual or small-group career migration; small-group/familial
migration for economic reasons; larger-scale migration of politically-ousted
factions. But the mechanics of getting to the Roman Empire were quite different. Leaving aside seaborne transport down the
North Sea/Channel coast there were various options. From the North German plain, one could move
down the Hellweg and similar routes to the Lower Rhine, or one one might travel
up the Elbe and its tributaries to Bohemia and thence to the Upper Danube. Other routes might be across the central
German mountains. Clearly all were used.
They offer different problems and potentials. The northern German and Elbe route are in
some ways easier but they pass through settled regions occupied by other
political groups. The central mountain regions were – as far as we know – quite
thinly occupied in the Roman Iron Age. Many
provide good archaeological evidence of occupation in the Bronze Age and
pre-Roman Iron Age; evidence which vanishes at about the time that the Roman
limes were created, though pollen data suggest that there was not a complete
absence of settlement. This might make passing
through the region less politically or socially difficult; one could graze
animals and hunt. On the other hand, the terrain was more difficult and there
were fewer communities upon which to draw for guidance or support in case of
disaster.
Many unanswerable questions arise. Were there rights and
obligations of hospitality for travellers in Germania Magna? Did approved
travellers pass through a region under the protection of the local ruler? Did
people hire guides? Did small groups band together for protection, like the
caravans moving through Mexico to the US border in the contemporary world? How
many migrations in search of a better life ended up in disaster: starving or freezing
to death in the mountains; drowning in swollen rivers; murdered, raped, enslaved
and sold on by local warriors; how many resulted in an Iron Age equivalent of human
trafficking? We don’t think enough about the human dimension of late antique
migration; the human realities behind the lines on our maps of contacts.
Three factors exist in dynamic tension: speed; supply; and
security. Individuals or small groups
might move quickly and require fewer supplies but might be exposed to
attack. The larger the group, the more
secure it might be, but the greater its need for supplies and the slower it
would move. The optimum group would possibly be a medium-sized group of
warriors, especially if mounted, which could pass quickly through intervening
territories, cross difficult terrain more easily, negotiate passage and
generally be too threatening to be worth attacking.
But under what circumstances – with what practicality – might
a large proportion of, let alone a whole, tribe move? We can reject the idea
that any barbarian group realistically thought that it could set off and
conquer land in the Roman Empire. It might be that a gradual deterioration in
the weather, harvests and so on could provoke a large-scale movement with the
decision ultimately to seek admission into the Empire. Such a decision would need lengthy
preliminary discussion, political agreement and planning. When do you leave? After lambing/calving in Spring, but with
only the grain left after Winter? After the harvest was in but with not long
before Winter? If harvests had been
getting worse these decisions would have an extra dimension. We can rule out movement due to actual
famine. Migration due to that kind of
catastrophe tends to produce the tragic imagery of people dying of hunger,
begging on the roadside – familiar from the Irish potato famines of the 1840s –
not the appearance of mighty, conquering warriors. In more recent periods we are presented with migrations
during famines from the countryside to towns, and thence, sometimes, further
afield but these scenarios require monetized, urbanized societies with proper
transport networks which simply didn’t exist in late antique Germania Magna. A catastrophic period of famine might
depopulate a region but would be most unlikely to result in a single
unidirectional mass-migration. Weakened
by hunger, migrants would easily fall prey, possibly willingly, to groups
through whom they passed or among whom they sought sanctuary.
The traditional picture is of migration fuelled by the
violent encroachment onto a territory of more powerful neighbours. Again, it’s difficult to find evidence that
this happened to the extent that entire peoples took to the road. The Hunnensturm did not drive all, and
probably not even most, Goths abroad.
Most Goths stayed and by c.400 had accepted or become involved in,
Hunnic rule, married into or otherwise joined Hunnic society; all the famous fifth-century
Huns have Gothic names. It seems likely
that this was the usual means by which political control changed, though I do
not want to sanitise the process: killing, rape, violent displacement,
enslavement also occurred.
One must, however, think about practicalities. How could a group of, say, a hundred thousand
people it have been able to move through Germania Magna? I imagine that groups
had to be sent out to find routes and to negotiate passage through their lands with
the rulers of neighbouring peoples. Elements of this are found in the narratives
of migrations in our sources. Those
stories speak of deals done with their threatening aggressors. All this seems plausible, although it’s also
possible that, if I was able to think about these hypothetical problems
involved in moving a people through the territories of others, so were the
authors of these tales. What if the
neighbours said no? Could a group like
that pass through hostile territory without significant losses from perpetual
ambushes, raids and opposed river crossings?
Even without enemy attacks, how long would the waggon train,
the column of people, have been? How
many miles could it have covered every day?
I cannot imagine it being more than about 10km a day at most. Gregory of Tours describes the party that
accompanied Princess Rigunth towards Spain for her marriage – numbering perhaps
4000 people – as covering five miles (8 km) in one day. The whole would move at
the speed of the slowest waggon. How big
would its campsites have been? If one
compares the probable length of the column (dozens of miles) with the distance
it could cover per day (rather less) the column would soon break up into a
chain of smaller contingents. A swollen or otherwise temporarily uncrossable
river would nevertheless cause them all to pile up again. How long would it take to cross a river, or
climb over a mountain pass? What was the
mortality among the very young and old? Sickness would surely be a major
threat. Dysentery was a major killer in
early medieval armies made up of relatively young, healthy men.
There is however an important factor to balance against
these difficulties: distance. We aren’t
talking about the Oregon Trail. Google
Maps tells me that the distance from Bremen to Nijmegen is 170 miles or 273 km. Taking into account the lack of good roads
and bridges, and that things might not go so well, I suggest that a generous
estimate is that our migration could get from the lands of the Saxons to the
Rhine frontier in a couple of tough, unpleasant months. If they set out in May, when – at least in
Carolingian opinion – the fodder was sufficient, they expect to be on the Roman
frontier in July. There would be no
going back though. If the Romans decided
not to let them in would the return journey be feasible? Would (in this case)
the Franks let these Saxons back through their territory or would they see them
as vulnerable? If they were generous or the
Saxons fought their way back, they’d find themselves back home – assuming those
homes hadn’t been occupied by enemies or former neighbours – perhaps in October
(allowing for a month of negotiations on the frontier), with no harvest to
gather in (or which had been reaped by other people), with most of their
livestock and grain store consumed. This
would not be an easy Winter. The
decision to put a people on the move was one from which there was no going
back, something that understandably one finds in the written stories about
migrations.
This hypothetical example follows the shortest and easiest
route from the interior of Germania Magna to the limes (and oddly there were as far as I can see no great migrations on
this route!). Every other option involves
longer distances and more difficult terrain – principally mountains. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the
route up the Elbe valley from Wolfsburg to Vienna on modern roads is 700 km
long, across less easy ground. That’s
longer than the Great Trek which took small groups of Voortrekkers six months
to complete. A single, large-scale late
antique migration on that route seems to me to be out of the question. It would take the best part of a year and
probably involve sitting out a Winter. Unsurprisingly,
therefore, we don’t find reliable reports of such huge Völkerwanderungen from
one end of the Elbe to the other. The
second half of this route, from Prague to Vienna, would on its own be a
similar distance as our first example, but across more difficult terrain. One would be looking at something more
arduous and from which the possibilities of return were slimmer. That would be at least as true of any other
route from the heartlands of Germanic-speaking Barbaricum to the imperial
frontier.
My examples assume all went well, that passage was granted,
that the locals got out of the way of the migrants as they passed through, and
that the migrants didn’t take to rustling cattle, stealing food from or robbing
the locals. It’s easy to see how, if
things went wrong, a major political and humanitarian crisis could occur, with
locals reduced to potential starvation by the eating up of their food,
skirmishing and fighting on the route and a general snowball (rather than
domino) effect of displaced people, famine and probably disease in its wake. To some extent perhaps this was what happened
in 376.
What can we conclude from this? Clearly not that a late antique migration of
100,000 people across Germania Magna was impossible, at least over shorter
distances.[5] I suggest, though, that such a movement could
not have been easy or straightforward.
Late antique writers clearly understood that it would be a dramatic and
possibly traumatic upheaval and so should we.
Such phenomena need to be placed at the bounds of the possible, in the
order of the exceptional, not treated as a general feature of life in late
antique Barbaricum.
***
5 The frontier and immigration
Let’s now reintroduce the Romans into the equation. In 2014, I argued that we should not see the Imperium
and Barbaricum as two opposed and confrontational worlds but as the core and
periphery of a single, closely-integrated Far Western Eurasian world. I also pointed out that the limes were not
simply a barrier but also a mechanism of migration. The frontier was not just a line on a map but
part of an information network. People
passing through bring information about the regions linked (not separated) by
the Limes: what was happening in the barbarian world; what was happening in the
Roman - the opportunities for recruitment; where you needed to go to be
accepted; what the best routes were; whether some routes needed to be avoided; what
sort of requirements needed to be met. Migration
follows particular routes and entry points, it does not (contrary to popular
belief and propaganda) simply wash over a border like a tide. The tragedy currently being enacted on the
southern US border makes this very clear.
The points on the Limes where barbarian migrants entered the
Empire were dense nodes on information networks, which reached far into
barbarian territory. After all, Romans could
communicate and have diplomatic relationships with the peoples of the interior
of Germania, like the Burgundians. It’s interesting to speculate about what
roles access to this information played in society in Germania. Did merchants
serve as guides? As organisers of ‘caravans’?
As ‘dragomen’? Clearly, these information networks radiating from the
frontier were essential to all the kinds of small-scale migration that
comprised a big part of the everyday life of the frontier. How might it have played a part in the
larger-scale migration that has been my principal focus?
***
6 What was the Roman Empire’s involvement?
It is difficult to imagine that the Empire had no role in large-scale
migrations, given the information networks just mentioned and the deliberate,
planned nature of these movements. It
surely could tell peoples closer to the Empire to refuse passage of such groups
if it wished, and provide military assistance if needed. I imagine that that sort of provision was a
part and parcel of the foedera made with barbarian rulers on the frontier and
beyond. If we accept that, which seems
uncontroversial, then, by the same token, in other circumstances the Empire
surely had the ability to instruct groups to let migrants through – especially
if they had a prior relationship with Rome.
The Romans knew well the advantages of barbarian
immigration. It was a good source of
recruits for the army; and of tillers either of land that had been abandoned or
of the estates of the rich. Just as
importantly, the admission of barbarian petitioners was an important element of
good imperial rule. Remember the
Tetrarchic medallion; or the commonplaces of imperial panegyric. It was a fine way of showing how the whole
world was indeed the Orbis Romanum, with the Empire at its centre.
This is where a more radical proposal emerges. The best way to mitigate all the logistical
problems set out in this paper was surely through Roman support. The Empire could most easily organize and
provide supplies for large groups of migrants. If the Empire wished to admit
these migrants, it did not want them starving, emaciated and disease-ridden. It
seems plausible, perfectly congruent with what we know of Rome’s frontier
policies, that, alongside the usual gifts and sweeteners for the local barbarians, food supplies could be shipped into Barbaricum if needed.
This was most possible in the former Agri Decumates where a
vestigial Roman road network existed and projected quite far into Germania –
one reason, I am sure, why this is pretty much the only place where the Romans
regularly campaigned beyond the frontier.
Tough migration routes from the centre of Germania Magna across the
thinly inhabited central mountains could bring you down to the Agri Decumates.[6]
***
7 The scenarios again
On the basis of these thoughts let’s return to the three scenarios
mentioned at the start.
The Tetrarchic Medallion
I am going to assume that we have the depiction of – if not
a specific then at least a typical – occasion. The obvious question is: how were
the Emperors there on that day? Presumably there must have been holding camps
beyond the frontier, either until sufficient numbers of would-be immigrants had
built up for a formal ceremony of receptio to be practical or worthwhile or,
alternatively, until arrangements had been thrashed out with larger groups and
the Emperors had arrived to oversee their entrance into the Empire. Again, one would be left with the idea that
such groups would, at least at this point, be supplied and fed by the Romans.
The Goths on the Danube
The considerations detailed above reinforce my reading of
the events of 376, specifically that the crisis was not unprecedented in the
magnitude of the group demanding admission but in the scale of Roman
corruption, incompetence and mismanagement, all emphasized by the absence of
the Emperor and his leading officials, far away in Antioch. I would now add to that the speed at which
events unfolded. My considerations lead
me to suspect that the specific circumstances of the Tervingian migration meant
that it could have happened much more quickly than would usually be the case – without
the usual advance warning – perhaps over only a matter of weeks. Again, though, the consequences make
abundantly clear how essential was the Roman logistical ability to supply very
large numbers of people.
The Great Invasion
My third example was the ‘Great Invasion’ of c.406. We know little about this other than it took
place on the 31 December – the middle of Winter. That fact is crucial. Most authorities agree that the migration
itself had something to do with the creation of a Hunnic hegemony north of the
middle and lower Danube, even if they disagree on the details of that causal
relationship. How did the Vandals, Alans
and Sueves (whoever they were) find themselves opposite Worms – far from the
Hunnic bases of power – in the middle of Winter?
My hypothesis contains many elements which are not
original. I suggest that the Romans
refused some elements of this group – such as the Alans – admission anywhere on
the Danube frontier during or in the aftermath of Radegaisus’ invasion and,
while feeding and supplying them, nevertheless shunted them westwards along the
road north of the Danube frontier. Other
groups – like the Vandals – might instead have crossed the mountains from
central Germania and come down into the Agri Decumates on that route. Whether the ‘Sueves’ were another group from
the centre or north of Germania crossing the mountains, or a group from the
Danube shunted west, or a disaffected faction of the Alamanni is unknowable, but
clearly the Romans ended up gathering diverse groups of displaced barbarians in
the former Agri Decumates, on the edges of Alamannic and Frankish
territory. I don’t think we need suppose
that all of these had started their treks together even if they ended in one place. Under normal circumstances this was sound
policy. Grouped in an area where they
could be monitored and supplied more easily, the Romans could arrange proper
reception and the distribution of different elements to the army or to estates
of various sorts in different regions.
These were not normal circumstances. There was no emperor or effective imperial
court at Trier. Honorius was not going
to travel to that part of the world, especially during Radegaisus’ invasion. Archaeology suggests a profound
socio-economic crisis in northern Gaul around 400 and it is likely that much of
the Rhine frontier was not properly manned after the catastrophic defeats of
the western field army in 388 and 395 and the need to provide troops to defend
Italy against first Alaric and then Radegaisus.
If one accepts the traditional date of 31 December 406 for the
Rhine-crossing, things had got even worse: the British army had raised a
usurper who had invaded Gaul. In these
circumstances it is easy to see how, as in 376, the organization of proper
supplies on the Rhine frontier could have broken down. By mid-winter the assembled groups of
barbarians would be in real danger of catastrophe and so forced their way into
the Empire. It’s interesting that the
only group recorded as opposing them were the Romans’ allies, the Franks.
***
8 Migration within the Empire
Before concluding, I want to make a final point that I think
underlines my thesis. In fifth-century
history we have numerous well-attested movements of large groups: the Goths of
Alaric and his successors between c.395 and 418; the Vandals in the 420s;
perhaps the Burgundians to Sapaudia in the 440s; the movements of Theoderic’s
Ostrogoths; and so on. Estimates of the
size of these groups are only estimates but the plausible orders of magnitude
are in the range of ten to twenty (perhaps thirty) thousand fighting men plus
women and children. The numbers of the
latter are impossible to know and, as I have said before, their existence by no
means proves that we are looking at a ‘people on the move’, though – as I have
also argued – the binary choice of ‘people or army’ is incapable of capturing a
complex and evolving situation. Whatever the case, we are looking at the
movement of tens of thousands of people.
There can be no debate about that – certainly I have never doubted it
even if I might guess fewer tens of thousands than, maybe, Peter Heather
would. Anyone arguing that I think these
were the movements only of elite warriors has either not read my work or is
misrepresenting it. My point, however,
is that these movements are crucially different from those in Barbaricum. They are within the context of the Imperium
Romanum, its road networks (and the multiplicity of practicable routes), its
logistical capacity, its complex monetised, urbanised economy. Many of these movements were, we know,
supervised by the Romans themselves or made while in alliance with the Imperial
government. Not that this made them
easy. Supplying an army of 60,000 men in
362 had taxed the Empire’s logistical capacities to their limits but these were
at least movements within Imperial territories.
Again, the safe large-scale movement of people is generally only
feasible in a Roman context.
***
9. Conclusion
In 2014 I argued that not only was migration a normal,
central part of the operation of the Roman frontier but that that frontier and
the information networks centred on it were crucial to the possibilities of
migration from Barbaricum. Without the
organisational structures of the Limes, migration of most of the types we can
trace was effectively impossible.
The argument I have presented, which I hope you at least
consider worth thinking about, broadens that thesis to encompass the kind of
large-scale, short-term movement of people that is central to the Völkerwanderung
paradigm – and which I think did occur throughout the Roman period. Such movements are easiest to envisage as practical,
as less of an enormous, existential gamble, either the the support and
assistance of the imperial state or within its logistical and economic
frameworks. Accepting this does not
require you to discard the idea that the Empire was brought down by, in Peter
Heather’s words, the ‘exogenous shock’ of several such movements in a short
period of time, if you are that way inclined, though it adds a welcome element
of irony to the account.
This further emphasises that Empire and Barbaricum were
crucially interconnected. It densifies
the links between core and periphery.
The final argument supporting this is that, once the western limes had
collapsed in the middle third of the fifth century the sort of large scale
migration that I have been discussing ended in the West. The last Volkswanderung,
of the Lombards in 568, was after all a movement within the decayed structures
of former imperial provinces towards the newly established imperial Italian
frontier.
In 2007 I argued that the the End of the Roman Empire caused
the Barbarian migrations rather than vice versa. Throughout Roman history,
Roman crises certainly led to many of the kinds of movements that I have been
discussing but, as I argued in 2014, this formula was incorrect. As I hope I have further suggested this
evening, it was in fact the collapse of the Western Roman Empire that caused
the End of the Barbarian Migrations.
Notes
[1] I
don’t find the counter-arguments against his 405 date as convincing as he does!
[2]
E.g. M. Erdrich, Rom und
die Barbaren. Das Verhältnis zwischen dem Imperium Romanum und den germanischen
Stammen vor seiner Nordwestgrenze non der späten römischen Republik bis zum
Gallischen Sonderreich Römisch-germanisch Forschungen 58 (Philipp von
Zabern. Mainz 2001)
[3]
On this topic, I cannot recommend highly enough Ian Knight, Zulu Rising. The
Epic Story of iSandlwana and Rorke’s Drift (Pan. London, 2011), which is a
far wider-ranging and more important history than its subtitle suggests.
[4] It’s
an important corrective to the current emphasis on networks to think about what
– if anything – the people at the opposite ends of the lines on our maps and
diagrams thought or knew about each other.
[5] I
think I would rule out a 700km trek up the Elbe, over the mountains into
Bohemia across the Czech basin and over more mountains to the Danube.
[6] This
was Alamannic territory and might be why the Romans were so keen to keep the
Alamans under control in the fourth century – and perhaps also why the Alamanni
were so dangerous when this was not possible - and also why they expected their
diplomatic gifts to be of a particular quality!
