Some of the migrating subgroups were warbands – relatively small groups of a few hundred young men under the leadership of a particularly renowned warrior – on the make. The creation of small organized armed groups (such as that immortalized at Ejsbøl Mose) was a characteristic feature of Germanic society in the Roman period, some led by kings and some of them more egalitarian associations. Hence it is no great surprise that some of the archaeological remains hint at the participation of these kinds of group in the third-century action. East of the Carpathians, a few cemeteries have been unearthed from the early Cernjachov era – Cozia–Iasi, Todireni and Braniste – where, contrary to normal Cernjachov and Wielbark practice, the dead were buried with weapons. All the other equipment found would suggest that the groups interred in these cemeteries were Germanic intruders from the north. The presence of weapons, however, suggests that they originated somewhere outside the Wielbark system, probably from within Przeworsk areas further to the south. The cemeteries are not large, and would be entirely in accord with a picture of small armed Przeworsk groups seeking their fortune.35 It would be very interesting to have a full study of the age and gender of the populations found in the ribbon of Wielbark cemeteries that stretch along the Upper Vistula and Dniester. These too might reflect small migratory subgroups similarly skewed in age and gender, rather than a more normal cross-section of humanity. Much of the action in the west is also compatible with this kind of picture, especially since the Agri Decumates were not occupied at one go.
But not all third-century activity is explicable in terms of small groups of a few hundred. The Gothic leader Cniva could not have defeated the Emperor Decius, however restricted the area of his imperial rule, had not the king’s armed following numbered thousands rather than hundreds. The Goths and Heruli defeated around Thessalonica by Claudius are said to have lost several thousand men in the battle. You can obviously doubt the precise accuracy of these figures, but Claudius clearly had a major fight on his hands, and the great sea raid of 268–71, of which this encounter was a part, could not have done so much damage had its component forces been appreciably smaller than losses in the thousands would suggest.36 The evidence from the Marcomannic War is similar. Some of the action can be explained in terms of warbands, but not all of it. There is Dio’s report, for instance, that the Langobardi and Ubii between them mustered six thousand men for their initial attack on Pannonia, and there was a moment when the Quadi, seeking to escape from Marcus Aurelius’ punitive restrictions, were preparing to ‘migrate in a body to the land of the Semnones’ which lay further north between the Elbe and the Oder.37 The Romans prevented this projected move with countermeasures of their own, and we cannot be sure that every single member of the group was about to head off north, but the evidence certainly suggests that Germanic groups numbering several thousand could contemplate hitting the road.
That some groups of migrating Germani, at least, were substantial in number is also indicated by the unfolding pattern of events at their points of destination. The Goths and others who made the trek to the Black Sea, for instance, did not operate there in a vacuum. In 238, after their assault on Histria, the Romans granted the attacking Goths an annual subsidy on condition that they withdrew from the city and returned prisoners. This provoked a howl of protest from the local Carpi, who claimed to be ‘more powerful’ than the Goths. The Carpi, as we have seen, were a group of so-called free Dacians established in the Moldavian hinterland of the Carpathians, semi-subdued clients who had not been brought under formal imperial rule. The expansion into the frontier zone of Goths and other Germanic-speakers brought the migrants into competition with these Dacian groups. And, over time, Gothic power in the region grew directly at the Carpi’s expense. In the end, the Carpi lost out completely. Their political independence was totally dismantled, with large numbers – hundreds of thousands of them, according to Roman sources – being resettled inside the Empire either side of the year 300.38 Again, precise figures can be doubted, but not the overall picture. The Carpi disappear as an independent political force from the early fourth century, and we have explicit evidence that they were resettled south of the Danube. Likewise, there is not the slightest doubt that Germanic-speaking Goths replaced native Dacian-speakers as the dominant force around the Carpathian system.
It was, as we have seen, a well-established imperial response to competition in the frontier zone to thin it out by taking some suitably cowed immigrants into the Empire. The reception of the Naristi had been part of the solution to the Marcomannic War, Constantius had been ready to do the same with some Limigantes in 359, and there is no reason to doubt the reports that clearing out large numbers of Carpi from the frontier zone about the year 300 was part of the solution to the new problems of the third century. Nor were the Carpi the only losers. Further east, Germanic immigrants subdued the Sarmatian kingdoms and the old Greek cities of the Pontus, and an additional effect of their arrival was to make the Empire evacuate upland Transylvania.39 Not all the Carpi were transferred south of the Danube, and much of the indigenous population of Transylvania and the Pontic littoral remained in place. Nonetheless, large-scale resettlements and a total reshaping of the strategic situation in the region are clear signs that Rome’s existing arrangements for frontier security had been undermined by what was a major intrusion into the region on the part of a non-indigenous, Germanic-speaking population. For all of this, we do have to be talking of Germanic-speaking groups who could put several thousand fighting men in the field at any one time. Groups numbering just a few hundreds could never have achieved so much.
The pattern in the west was not quite the same. There are no records of conflict on such a large scale, and because the Alamanni were taking possession of abandoned territory in the Agri Decumates, they did not face the same imperative of having to oust sitting tenants. But that still doesn’t mean that all the action was very small-scale. Outside the Agri Decumates, the Alamanni did impose themselves over other indigenous Germani, such as the Rhine–Weser groups who eventually lost out to them on the Middle Main. This may well have required more consolidated group action. Likewise, as we will explore in more detail in a moment, the Burgundians came in sufficient numbers to preserve their own, distinct east Germanic dialect. Additionally, Burgundians and Alamanni periodically competed with one another in the fourth century, and this could easily have begun already in the third. If so, it will have been another factor pushing the Alamanni into more concerted, group, action – something that is entirely in line with the evidence we have for the whole emergence of their group dynamic.
On the one hand, the Alamannic confederation was the result of a long-drawn-out political process. When we first meet Alamanni in the third century, for instance, the Iuthungi were not part of the confederation. But by the mid-fourth, they were: one among the several cantons among whom protocols of under- and overkingship seem periodically to have operated (Chapter 2). This process had begun early in the third century. At one point, it was trendy to argue that the first convincing mention of the Alamannic confederation could not be dated before the 290s. It was then natural to argue that the third-century raiding and land-grabbing on this sector of the Rhine had been conducted by independent warbands, who started to form larger group structures only after seizing the Agri Decumates. But this dating was much too late. The Emperor Caracalla was already fighting Alamanni as early as 213. And while the Alamannic confederation did not at this point incorporate all the subgroups who would be part of it in the fourth century, this does suggest that major political reconfiguration was already under way right at the beginning of the third century, which in turn makes it necessary to think of the Alamanni as more than a collection of warbands even at this point.40 This being so, the action in the west was probably quite similar to that unfolding simultaneously east of the Carpathians, involving some larger-scale groups as well, certainly, as warbands.
There is probably a more general logic, in fact, to how such patterns of armed expansio
n tend to unfold, because the eastern evidence is reminiscent in some key respects of the better-documented flow of Norse expansion into western Europe in the ninth century. Here too, the action started small. The earliest recorded incident involved just three boatloads of Norwegians causing trouble on the south coast of England around the year 790. It stayed small-scale for about a generation and a half, but then grew as larger confederate bands began to operate in western waters from the 830s, some of them led by ‘kings’ or ‘jarls’, men who were already important in Norse society. The confederative tendency then reached a climax from the 860s in the great army era, when several of the larger groupings began to combine in new ways to achieve ends that required the application of still greater levels of force. In the case of the Vikings, the end in sight was defeating the armies of Anglo-Saxon and Frankish kingdoms. All this strongly recalls the patterns of Germanic expansion visible in the third century. It may well have begun with small-scale raiding, but sacking Roman cities, defeating Roman emperors and appropriating the assets of existing frontier clients all required a much greater level of force, leading, as in the Viking case, to the evolution of new confederations among the migrants so as to generate forces of appropriate size for the new ventures.41
The extent to which groups of Germanic immigrants incorporated women and children at different stages of the expansionary process still requires detailed study. But one striking contribution of the Wielbark system to the Cernjachov was precisely in the field of female costume (at least, female burial costume). As noted earlier, in both, women’s clothes were held with two brooches (fibulae) of similar style, one on each shoulder, and the same styles of necklaces and belts appear too. This mode of dress is not found among Dacian-speaking groups of the Carpathians before the third century. It is hard to believe that such a striking transfer could have occurred without substantial numbers of women – and therefore children too – having trodden the road south. The point is confirmed by the fact that the Goths, at least, among these migrants maintained their Germanic language over several generations from the mid-third to the later fourth century. If, as with the Scandinavian intrusion into Russia in the ninth and particularly the tenth centuries, we were looking at a phenomenon accomplished largely by small groups of armed men, as this latter example clearly was, then we would expect, as happened in Viking Russia, that the immigrants would quickly take on the language of their indigenous hosts. But as Ulfila’s Gothic Bible so spectacularly demonstrates, this was not the case following the third-century migrations. Ulfila was working among the Gothic Tervingi in the mid-fourth century, up to a hundred years after the immigrations to the Black Sea began, and the immigrants’ language remained at that point unambiguously Germanic.42 Without Gothic mothers to teach the language to their children, this could never have happened.
The evidence for the other migration flows is more sparse. Even for the Marcomannic War era, however, there is a limited amount of evidence that some of the migrant groups included women and children. It comes, fortunately, from Dio rather than from the Historia Augusta, and is therefore that much more credible. The blocked attempted move of the Marcomanni and Quadi into the land of the Semnones, for instance, specifically included the people as a whole (Greek, pandemei). Even more explicit, the Hasding Vandals negotiated at one point to leave their women and children in the safe keeping of a local Roman commander, while they attempted to take control of lands which had previously belonged to a free Dacian group called the Costoboci. This latter piece of evidence, in particular, makes it impossible to believe that the action of the Marcomannic War was carried forward entirely by young men on the make.43
The historical evidence for the third-century west, unfortunately, is entirely non-explicit on this front, leading one recent commentator to assert that it is ‘commonsense’ that the action there was carried forward by small male warbands. But some early female and child burials from the Agri Decumates incorporate intrusive Elbe–Germanic materials, and I would be cautious about making such assertions. It is not clear either that warbands would have been able to exert a sufficient level of force, or, even early on, that we shouldn’t be reading any appearance of the label ‘Alamanni’ as itself significant of a confederative political entity. More positively, the Burgundians showed a similar capacity to the Goths to hold on to the particularities of their language over the long term. The evidence for the east Germanic nature of their dialect is unequivocal, but actually dates from the very end of the fifth century, from the independent Burgundian kingdom that emerged in the Rhône valley out of the process of west Roman imperial collapse. Hence the Burgundians managed to retain their distinctive dialect despite two hundred years of living in the west. Like the linguistic patterns of the Gothic Tervingi, this is inconceivable without at least some ‘complete’ social groups, involving women and children, having made their way to the Main from east of the Oder.44 It is only reasonable to be more guarded when responding to the general dearth of migration descriptions from the third-century west. To say that it is ‘commonsense’ to think in terms only of warbands, however, is as much an assertion as always applying the invasion hypothesis, especially given the clear evidence from the contemporary east of more diverse patterns of migratory activity. In their different ways, the Vandal, Burgundian and Gothic evidence all give us excellent reason to think that second- and third-century groups of migrant Germani sometimes included women and children. That being so, I would hesitate to assert the contrary in the case of the Alamanni.
As to the total number of migrants involved, it is impossible to say. We have few figures for this, and anyway could make only a wild guess at the size of the various indigenous populations affected by the Marcomannic War and third-century Germanic expansions. But it is precisely when faced with this kind of evidential impasse that the qualitative definition of mass migration used in comparative studies becomes helpful. The ‘shock to the political systems’ at the receiving end of each of the migration flows could hardly be clearer. Especially in the third century, the Roman Empire abandoned Transylvanian Dacia, many of the Carpi were pushed out of long-established homes into the Empire, and whatever remained of them, together with the independent Sarmatian kingdoms and Greek cities of the north Pontic littoral, were all eventually subdued into a new political system created by incoming Germanic-speaking immigrants. The domination of this region by Germanic-speakers, so evident from c.300 AD, was the result of an armed migration flow certainly to be numbered in thousands, and very probably tens of thousands. Using a qualitative rather than a numerical type of definition now commonly adopted in migration studies, this was straightforwardly a ‘mass’ migration. So too, of course, in the west. The arrival of Alamanni and Burgundians, the evacuation of the Agri Decumates, the overturning of the domination of Rhine–Weser groups, and even the earlier emigration of the Naristi, cannot be thought of as anything other than serious events for the areas affected.45
They were also significant for the migrants themselves, amongst whom were generated in the course of migration both new political structures and even some entirely new groupings. Roman sources naturally concentrate on the violence that spilled over on to Roman soil: sackings of cities, raids over the Black Sea and displacements of groups like the Carpi. But even once the old indigenous groups had been overcome, another, periodically violent, process was let loose, as the various immigrants set about establishing a new political order among themselves. Roman sources from around the year 300 refer in passing to competition between the immigrant groups now established in Dacia.46 One of the fruits of this process was probably the confederation of the Tervingi in which, as we saw in the last chapter, a series of kings were subordinate to a ruling ‘judge’. I suspect that these kings were the descendants of originally separate migrant groups who came, by whatever means and for whatever reasons, to accept the domination of the Tervingi ruling dynasty. Jordanes’ simple picture of the transfer of a whole people from the Baltic to the Black Sea entirely fails to ca
pture these different levels of complexity.
There is, of course, much we will never know about these second-and third-century migrations. They clearly were flows of population, not the single pulses envisaged by the invasion-hypothesis model, and some of the action, especially in the early phases, was probably carried forward by warbands. But much larger forces than this were required for the more ambitious activities that were also a documented part of the process, such as permanent land annexations and fighting the bigger battles against the Roman Empire. The fact that the migrations also in some cases led to such substantial transfers of linguistic and material cultural patterns indicates that some of these larger groups consisted not just of men, but of women and children too. In part, then, the action does show some characteristics reminiscent of the old invasion hypothesis, especially in the extension of the domination of Germanic-speakers over the Black Sea region. Their armed arrival also eventually caused the exodus of not insignificant numbers of the indigenous population. Not as simple as the old invasion hypothesis, and not as antiseptic as an elite transfer, the Germanic takeover of the Black Sea region hovers somewhere between the two. It could perhaps be seen as a modified invasion-hypothesis model, where the migrants came in a flow that built momentum over time rather than in a block, where much of the indigenous population remained in place, but where large and mixed groups of migrants asserted themselves vigorously as the new political masters of the landscape.
Empires and Barbarians Page 18
