Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances
einfallen: (a) to collapse, to cave in; (b) in ein Land ~ to invade (a country); (c) (night) to fall, (winter) to set in; (d) (beams of light) to be incident; (e) (game birds) to come in, settle; (f) to join in, come in (on a piece of music), break in (to a conversation); (g) (thought) occur to somebody…
Collins German Dictionary
einfallen:… loan translation of Latin incidere.
Reklams Etymologisches Wörterbuch von Lutz Mackensen
The Germanic invasions—irresistible and ineffectual
The end to the Roman occupation of Britain, when it came, was determinate and sudden. Alaric, leader of the Visigoths, was threatening to invade Italy. In 401 Stilicho, himself a Vandal but the empire’s commander-in-chief, withdrew the garrison from Britain to reinforce the empire’s heartland. This left Britain itself defenceless against the steadily increasing incursions of Germani along its ‘Saxon shore’, the coast facing Europe. In 410 the Britons sent an appeal to the emperor for reinforcement: his reply was to order them to look to their own defence; somewhat surreally he added that the raising of local forces would not be taken as hostility to Rome. That was the last they heard. Within a generation, there was no British province to defend. The Saxons had come to stay.
The end of the Roman empire in the west was soon to follow. On 31 December 406 there had been a mass crossing of the frozen Rhine: Suebi from the east side of the Rhine, together with Vandals originally from farther east, and Alans (not German speakers at all, but Iranians, driven out of the Pontic steppes by the Huns), then cut a swath across Gaul and entered Spain. The Vandals kept going, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar (then still known as the Pillars of Hercules), and by 439 were established at Carthage in North Africa (where they built a navy and became the new power in the Mediterranean).
Alaric had succeeded in entering Rome in 410 (although the centre of government had moved to Ravenna), and committed the ultimate horror of sacking it, but died shortly after. The Visigoths then continued an advance that took them across southern France and into Iberia, constricting into its corners the preceding Suebi, Alans and Vandals. There they founded a new kingdom that lasted 250 years, ruling first from Toulouse, and later Toledo.* Ultimately, in 711, their reign was terminated by something completely new for Europe, a Muslim (Arabic-speaking) invasion from the south.
But back in the east, the generation following Alaric had seen Attila, king of the Turkic-speaking Huns from 435 to 453, bring the Hunnish domain west to include all of Germany.† He was held off from Gaul in 451, and when he died soon after, his empire disintegrated into a mosaic of German tribes in the west, and a Slav area in the east, with the Huns dominant only back round the Black Sea.
By 476 the political centre of Rome had fallen, and the last emperor, the juvenile Romulus Augustulus, had been humanely deposed by Odoacer, who had once been a German-speaking follower of Attila, but most recently one of the empire’s own commanders. Different tribes of Germani then spread and settled with bewildering speed across the corpse of the old empire. Within fifty years, the Franks (who for two hundred years had been settled in the area of modern Belgium, even employed by the empire as border patrols) had assumed control of most of Gaul, spreading from the north, with the Burgundians holding a large, but diminishing, area in the south. The Ostrogoths, soon to be displaced by the equally Germanic Lombards, held Italy, the south-west of Gaul and Dalmatia on the eastern Adriatic coast. After this the west of Europe began to settle down; but the east of Europe had yet to undergo incursions in turn from Avars (from 550) and Bulgars swiftly followed by Khazars (from 650) and Magyars (from 750).§
Amazingly, the linguistic effects of this political and demographic turmoil, which lasted 150 years in the west of Europe, were slight. Certainly a polyphony of new languages must have been heard, if briefly, west of the Urals between 400 and 850. But west of the Elbe there can have been precious little change from the state of affairs essentially brought about by Caesar’s conquest of Gaul around 50 BC, other than the vanishing echoes of Germanic languages, Saxon, German and Gothic, as they passed rapidly across the central plains of Gaul and out of hearing in the farther reaches to the south and west.
* Their ascendancy was notable for unending struggle against the Basques: each king making the proud, but apparently empty, boast in his annals ’domuit Vascones–he tamed the Basques’.
† Strangely, Attila is really his nickname in Gothic, and means ‘Dad’.
§ Of these, only the language spoken by the Magyars is clear: it was Hungarian, related to the Uralian languages of northern Siberia. As for the others, Avar was probably a Mongol and Bulgar and Khazar Turkic languages. Old Avar does not seem to have been the same as what is now known as Avar, which is a language of the north-east Caucasus, spoken in Daghestan and Azerbaijan, and quite unrelated to Turkic. Bulgar may survive in scattered pockets across Siberia to this day, known as Chuvash. (This name is identical with Tabgach, the name of a people famous for their fourth-century conquest of northern China.) (See Chapter 4, ‘Language from Huang-he to Yangtze’, p. 140.) The Khazars ruled from the Caspian Sea to Kiev for a century (c.650-750), and are chiefly famous for their choice of mass conversion to Judaism in 861. Today’s Karaim are their descendants. Another Turkic group, the Tatars of the Golden Horde, moved across in the thirteenth century.
When the dust from galloping hoofs had cleared, the creak of covered wagons had died away, and the gilt had dried on the palaces of the newly self-appointed royal families of medieval Europe, language boundaries were eerily familiar. The edge of Germanic had possibly slipped a little to the west during the long period when the empire’s borders had still been defended, not least because neighbouring Germans had increasingly been invited across it, as foederati, ‘treaty people’, or laeti, ‘joyous ones’, to serve in the army, or on the land, for the benefit of Roman society. But the line between Germanic and Romance was still drawn from the western end of the mouths of the Rhine in a south-eastward direction. And the repeated falling of parts of Gaul under German domination, and ultimately being firmly settled under the Franks, did not serve to translate it or rotate it further.
The failure of Frankish domination to replace the language of Gaul was paralleled in the other new German kingdoms. In Italy under the Ostrogoths and Lombards, in Iberia under a succession of Vandals, Suebi, Alans and Visigoths, in coastal North Africa under the Vandals, the language established under the Roman empire persisted.* Despite the fact that the Visigoths ruled Spain for 250 years, one cannot even detect a significant number of Gothic words borrowed into Spanish from this period. Menéndez Pidal, the Spanish historical linguist, writes:
It appears that the Germanic elements in Spanish do not proceed, in general, from the Visigoth domination of the peninsula, as might have been expected: the number of invaders was relatively slight to have much influence; moreover, the Visigoths, before reaching Spain had lived for two centuries in intimate contact with the Romans, now as allies now as enemies, in Dacia, Moesia, in Italy itself and in Gaul, and were very much permeated with Roman culture.43
* Latin bore a charmed life in North Africa, for a century (428-533) under the Vandals, and then controlled by the Roman empire resurgent from Constantinople until 696. The career of the most famous resident, St Augustine (354-430), bishop of Hippo, would have been unthinkable outside a Latin-speaking milieu. Remarks he makes in some of his sermons provide evidence that bilingualism with Punic, the old language of Carthage, may have persisted until the fourth century (Sznycer 1996). Evidently the common people continued to speak Berber (as they do to this day). But the Arab takeover in the eighth century, backed up by the conversion to Islam of the Berber-speaking hinterland, would be much more quickly influential in changing the region’s working language than the Vandals had been (or perhaps even the Romans, in the 750 years since the destruction of the independent Carthage).
Our explanations have to be post hoc. No dou
bt the majority of advancing Germans would have been fighting men, and no doubt they would have taken brides from the populations among whom they eventually settled. The language in the new homes, so far from Germany, would have been set by the local mother and her family. But the same could have been said about the Roman invaders of Gaul five hundred years before, or indeed Mexico and Peru after the Spanish conquests a millennium later. Yet there, the conquerors’ language, spreading no doubt through the opportunities it gave to be part of the new economic order, soon began to win out. Here, apparently, the conquerors had no wish other than to put the old order under new management. But after beating its defenders, they ultimately depended on their victims to provide the life they sought. It is a tale more familiar in China than anything in the history of the West.*
Spoken Latin is from this point on called Romance, signalling that the emerging dialects of Vulgar Latin were now free to develop independently of one another (although the first vernacular document that survives in a precursor of French dates only from 842).† The German and Alan invasions marked the final, total failure of the empire’s civil defence. One of the effects of the social dislocation that came in its train would have been a breakdown in the availability of education. In fact, there is evidence that illiteracy had been growing everywhere since the instability of the preceding century. Numbers of preserved inscriptions decline in the mid-third century, severely in Italy, drastically in a border region such as Upper Moesia (modern Bosnia), dying out everywhere around 400.44 Augustine, writing in North Africa in the early fifth century, recounts as a miracle the story of a slave who could read.45 In the middle of the sixth century, Caesarius of Arelate (Arles, near Marseilles) recognises that not only rūsticī but even negōtiātōres (merchants and businessmen) may be unable to read.46 Without widespread education, consciousness of the norms of classical Latin would no longer act as a brake on oral transmission.
Besides the weakening of scholarly tradition and memory, two other forces will have fostered the break-up of Latin as a single language. One is that, all over its range, Latin had speakers who were in positions of influence but whose parents had grown up speaking something else, most often a Germanic language. The other stemmed from the breakdown of the centralised systematic administration, and the rise of feudal society: individuals and families were organised much more into personal hierarchies, from the king and his baronial supporters down to the smallholder and his serfs, each link bound by personal loyalties of homage. This meant that localities became more inward: increasingly, people stayed put, in contact only with their neighbours; and the result was a faster separation of Roman speech into local dialects and languages.
* Just the latest example is the Manchu, who ruled China from 1644 to 1911, but were totally absorbed by their subject population. Their language is now on the edge of extinction. (See Chapter 4, ‘Language from Huang-he to Yangtze’, p. 143.)
† The ‘Strasburg Oaths’, a treaty between Ludwig the German and Charles the Bald. Ironically, it comes only after the restoration of a single government across most of France, German and Italy. (See Chapter 8, p. 317.)
Slavonic dawn in the Balkans
But if, from the language point of view, the net effect of the Germans’ westward Völkerwanderung was nil, their fellow victims of incursion from the east, the Slavs (Tacitus’s Veneti), had far better luck. In the mid-fifth century, the Huns surged through and past them, then withdrew to the Black Sea, leaving the Veneti and their kin to move permanently into the eastern plains (polye) of Poland vacated by the Vandals and Lombards, among others. The following surges of Avars and Bulgars were more or less successfully resisted by the eastern Roman empire. But they served not only to flush the remaining Germans (Gepids, Ostrogoths and Lombards) out of the more southerly areas, the Carpathians and the Balkans; they also served to cover the Slavs’ push southward. In the sixth century, the Slavs took possession of the arterial route from Aquileia on the Adriatic to Constantinople, a road that had kept this part of the empire, alone in the east, strongly linked to Latin-speaking Italy. In this way they finally moved into the Balkan territories of the Roman empire, including—as we have seen (see Chapter 6, ‘Intimations of decline’, p. 261 )—Greece itself. In that traditional centre of the civilised world they were to be diffused and assimilated by the residents; but farther north, their relative numbers were far more overwhelming. By the seventh century the Slavs had been left in linguistic possession of most of eastern Europe, where they are to this day.*
The question naturally arises: why did the Slavic conquerors’ language establish itself, while that of the Germans largely disappeared? But there is no evident answer. Latin survived as Romanian at least; and this might suggest that, as in western Europe, the Slavic invaders had abandoned their language in an area where they were confronted with a more organised culture. But the geography hardly fits. It was Dalmatia and Moesia (former Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria) that were long-term Roman provinces, unchallenged since Trajan had conquered the whole area of the Balkans in AD 106-7; Dacia (modern Romania) had been abandoned for strategic reasons in 271, when Germanic-speaking Gepids and Visigoths had taken over. It is true that Dacia had at first been heavily settled with colonists by Trajan.47 And there were surviving Romance speakers (known to the Greeks as Rhômšnoi) up and down the Dalmatian coast until the beginning of the twentieth century. But the explanation seems to be that the Latin-speaking population drifted northward from Moesia into Dacia over the next few centuries; Bláxoi hodîtai, ‘Vlach nomads’, were a feature of the scenery on the northern marches of the empire up until the eleventh century.48
* They made a late exception to admit the Magyars in the tenth century, creating the Hungarian pocket in the midst of Slavic central Europe.
Whatever the intervening history, the Roman culture of the Balkan area, always something of an outpost, does not seem to have been strong enough ever to revive under the new Slavic masters.
Against the odds: The advent of English
Perhaps something similar happened at the opposite end of the Roman dominions, for Britain too lost its Latin in the face of invasions in this period. It also lost its British. This event of language replacement, which is also the origin of the English language, was unparalleled in its age—the one and only time that Germanic conquerors were able to hold on to their own language.
Prima facie, the fate of Britain should have been just like that of Gaul or Iberia, or indeed Italy. Germanic invaders, in this case from the north-western coast of Europe, entered a reeling province of the Roman empire in the fifth century AD, and never went home. In light of the experience of western Europe, this should have resulted in a few centuries of turmoil before the establishment of a more or less stable kingdom or (failing unification) an array of states, which would have ended up speaking some new variant of Latin. In fact what happened was a gradual advance and settlement of the invaders (whom we may term oversimply ‘Saxons’*), from the south-east towards the north-west, a process arguably never completed but at least covering the lowland areas up to the Pennines and Dartmoor by the end of the sixth century, and most of modern England and south-eastern Scotland by the end of the seventh. Gradually, over the same period, the number of regional kingdoms reduced to three, Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex.
Linguistically, the intermediate stages are obscure, but the triumph of Latin as a popular language, analogously to what always happened on the Continent, never even looked possible. There is never any sense of a takeover of British society by Saxons; it is more the classic story of alien invaders gradually establishing a bridgehead, then spreading out, and building a new order on their own terms, like European imperialists in the Americas. There are no records in British of the period, but the records left in Latin (notably Gildas’s De Excidio Britonum, ‘The Ruin of the British’, c.540, and Nennius’s compilation of Excerpta up to c.800) paint a hostile picture of the Saxons as destroyers. West Saxons were literate from the ninth century in their own la
nguage (itself a curiosity for Germanic invaders), the Norsemen from a little later. Neither pay much heed to their British predecessors.
How could this be? The Britons, after all, were heirs to four hundred years of Roman civilisation, just like the Gauls, and were if anything notorious for their military prowess; indeed, potentates from Britain (Maximus in 388, Constantine in 407) had twice led successful forces on to the Continent in the previous fifty years. Granted that the major forces had already been withdrawn to Italy, allowing the Saxons to make their bridgehead, in the generations that followed the Britons should still have had expertise in depth to regroup in the 90 per cent of the country they still controlled, and either drive back, or force a compromise with, the incomers.
* There is actually an implicit dispute in the sources on who these invaders were. Evidently they were speakers of a Low German dialect, but Gildas ( a Celt, writing before 550) calls them Saxons ( or more exactly Saxones ferocissimi illi nefandi nominis Saxones deo hominibusque invisi, ‘those ferocious Saxons of unspeakable name hateful to God and men’, xxiii.l), while Procopius (a Greek—less personally involved—writing also before 550, and probably using information from Angles on a Frankish mission to Byzantium) says they were Angles and Frisians (Gothic War, iv.20). It is the Venerable Bede, in his history published in 731, who calls them Angles, Saxons and Jutes ( i. 15 ). The Saxons and Franks (named for their favourite weapons, the seax or knife and the franca or javelin) were not among the tribes known to Tacitus, but would have lived where he places the Chauci and the Tungri, at the mouths of the Weser and Rhine respectively.
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World Page 38
