Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  The largely voluntary economic motivation of our third-century migrants thus also had a strongly political dimension. This was not the negative political motivation that underlies modern trails of refugees, but a predatory motivation of a more (for want of a better word) ‘positive’ kind. The wealth building up among the mainly Germanic societies on the fringes of the Roman world could not be tapped into by individuals just turning up and requesting a share of it, in the way that migrant labour might seek employment in the industrial or service sectors of a modern economy. The new wealth was not being generated in factories which needed large quantities of labour. On the contrary, it was located at the courts of client kings, who redistributed the profits derived from their various transactions with the Roman state to their key supporters. It was these kings who initially received the subsidies, toll income, payments for military service and, quite probably, a cut from the cross-border raids as well. A few individual immigrants presumably managed to work their way into royal retinues, but this represented no mass demand for immigrant labour. Retinues were not very numerous and required only military specialists anyway. For larger groups of immigrants, the only way to liberate any of the new wealth was to turn up armed and in sufficient numbers to replace a client king and take control of his income. In the third century many immigrants grasped the opportunity, in both east and west, and client kings were replaced in such numbers as to rearrange the political geography all along Rome’s European frontiers.

  Germanic Voortrekkers?

  This important point explains why, although mainly economic and voluntary in nature, Germanic population flows in the later second and third centuries sometimes involved large migration units. This stands in stark contrast to similarly voluntary flows in the modern world, where the units of migration tend to be tiny: the individual or a few companions. What seems to be a contradiction is explained by fundamental differences in the economic context. Modern migration flows are actually dictated by the type of economic opportunity available – a mass demand for individual workers. The same principle applied in the Roman period, but the nature of the economic opportunity was different. In the modern world an immigrant can access a reasonable share of the wealth being generated by economic development by getting work in factories or service industries. In the second and third centuries, the path to success lay in being the leader, or part of the military elite, of a client state occupying a profitable corner of the Roman frontier world. Here, the appropriate migration unit – even though the population flow was voluntary and largely economically motivated – sometimes had to be large to succeed. From the days of Rome’s earliest advance to the Rhine and Danube, no attractive spot along the frontier was ever unoccupied. If you were an outsider wanting to become part of the profitable frontier system, your only option was to move in with sufficient force to oust a sitting tenant. Predatory activity from outside the frontier zone may have begun with smallish-scale raids such as the first-century attack on Vannius (although even that looks pretty substantial), but if you wanted to move into a region permanently, military manpower in the thousands, not hundreds, was called for.55

  This explains, if in slightly paradoxical fashion, the other apparent anomaly in these ancient migration flows: that women and children sometimes made their way towards the frontier zone alongside their warrior menfolk. Why this was so follows on from the scale of military force required to take over one of the revenue-generating positions close to the frontier. In Roman-era Germania it was easy enough, as we saw in the last chapter, to put together warbands of a few hundred men, but forces of this size, while fine for raiding, could never have effected the kind of structural change we see happening right along Rome’s European frontiers in the third century – everywhere new sets of immigrant clients were replacing the incumbents. If we consider this problem in the light of the degree of development then prevalent in Germania, in order to assemble forces of the necessary size for higher-order military activities such as conquest, kings would need to convince not just their retainers but also large numbers of armed freemen to take part in the expedition. As we have seen, society was not yet so dominated by kings and their retainers that mobilizing these latter alone would provide enough men for the task in hand, any more than assembling just Alamannic kings and their retinues would have given Chnodomarius a chance at Strasbourg.

  This observation is central to the seeming peculiarity of third-century Germanic migration. Retinue sizes were structurally delimited by the scale of available economic surplus. So large numbers of freemen had to be involved, and this greatly increased the likelihood that at least some families would also participate in any given expedition. When these expeditions were long-distance, one-way trips, as were those of the Goths and other Germani from Poland to the Black Sea, this was unavoidable, as with the Vandals in the Marcomannic War.56 Because of the massive overuse of the invasion hypothesis in the past, there is great resistance now, particularly among archaeologists, to the idea that mixed groups might ever move in force, deliberately to take over a new landscape. This negative reaction – that such a vision of any past events must be a myth, even if it is reported in contemporary and generally reliable sources – is so well entrenched that it is worth pointing out that analogous phenomena have been observed in the modern world.

  By about 1800 AD, there were around forty thousand Boer settler families farming within the confines of the original Dutch settlement in the hinterland of the Cape of Good Hope, first established in 1652. Most of them were interconnected by marriage. But as the fiscal and cultural pressure of British imperialism started to build up in the early nineteenth century, they began to look for new lands. The Boers’ group organization did not run to a state structure but was sufficiently established for a commission (the Commissie) to send out scouting parties to check out the agricultural potential of neighbouring territories. One party brought back disappointing news of what is now Namibia, but a second – consisting of twenty-one men and one woman – made its way over the Zoutspansberg Mountains and found that the northern Transvaal and Natal offered more promising opportunities. As a result, individual parties began to assemble and make their way north at a rate of ten to fifteen kilometres a day, at first in groups of about fifty to a hundred families, each accompanied by their livestock and with all their worldly goods crammed into a wagon pulled by oxen. In February 1836, Hendrik Potgieter set out with two hundred people and sixty wagons, closely followed by other groups of similar size: Johannes van Rensburg with nineteen families, Louis Tregardt with seven (including the eighty-seven-year-old Daniel Pfeffer to teach the thirty-four children in the group), Andries Pretorius with sixty wagons, and Gert Maritz and Piet Retief with one hundred each. All of these groups consisted of men, women and children of all ages.

  Aside from the quality of the grazing, the Boers had been attracted by the scouts’ reports that unclaimed land was plentiful. This proved mistaken. There were two militarily powerful kingships in the target areas, the Matabele of Mzilikazi and the Zulu of Dingane, who were not about to let the Boers take whatever they wanted. After initial attempts at negotiation, one of which led to the famous death of Piet Retief at the hands of Dingane clutching a supposed agreement over land grants, and the deaths in a subsequent night raid of five hundred trekkers including fifty-six women and one hundred and eighty-five children, the Boer leaders decided that the power of these kings had to be broken. So they reorganized themselves to create larger striking forces, which ruthlessly smashed the power of their enemies. The trekkers enjoyed a major technological advantage: five-foot-long flint-locks they could fire several times a minute from horseback. Hence relatively small Boer forces could wreak havoc. Even when attacking Mzilikazi’s main political centre, a few hundred men killed three thousand Matabele at no cost to themselves and burned the king’s kraal to the ground. Dingane’s Zulus, too, proved powerless in the face of firearms. These military successes encouraged more trekkers to move away from British rule, and twelve tho
usand of them eventually headed away from the Cape.

  Apart from their technological superiority, which meant that relatively few Boers were required to fight even major battles, what happened here is identical to that suggested by reports of what went on north of the Black Sea in the third century (and, indeed, in the Viking west in the ninth). Small groups of wealth-seeking intruders reorganized themselves into larger groups when it became apparent that the acquisition of capital wealth – control of the land – required the destruction of major political obstacles. The way that an initially peaceful migration flow quickly turned itself into deliberate armed predation is also a salutary reminder. Homo sapiens sapiens is perfectly capable of organizing itself into armed groups with sufficient capacity to seize the assets of others, and does sometimes do so using migration as the vehicle. Equally important, and despite the overtly military element to their activities, the Boer migration units always contained women and children as well as men, just as the third-century materials indicate was the case with at least some of the Germani. This not only shows that armed mixed groups are an a priori possibility (which – so strong is the rejection of the invasion hypothesis – some have come to doubt), but also reinforces the reason why this will tend to happen. Where the military capacity of a land-grabbing group depends either only partly or not at all upon professional soldiery, but rather on owner-farmers who also fight, then any of those farmers who join the migration stream will bring their families with them. Young Boers were taught to ride and shoot from an early age – so, too, the women, who were far from helpless in battle even without their men – and it was this military capacity that subdued the Matabele and the Zulus. As we know, second- and third-century Germania had some military retinues, but they were not huge, and since they did not have a massive military advantage such as firearms over the Carpi and Sarmatians, the Germanic groups who forced their way into the northern Pontus needed to be much larger than a Boer commando. They had to draw, therefore, on the larger cross-section of freemen fighter-farmers in Germanic society, and these men naturally brought their families with them.

  To have a chance of success, would-be expedition leaders had to couch their recruiting drives in broad enough terms to attract freeman warriors. No description of one survives from this early era, but these few words depicting the Gothic leader Theoderic putting together his first major military expedition in c.470 AD nicely evoke the likely process:

  Now Theoderic had reached man’s estate, for he was eighteen years of age and his boyhood was ended. So he summoned certain of his father’s adherents and took to himself his friends from the people, and his retainers almost six thousand men.57

  This expedition wasn’t a one-way trip, so there was no reason to take families, but it shows that, even in the fifth century, mobilizing a sizeable force meant looking beyond the retinues and towards a broader tranche of Germanic society. For a complete explanation of the second- and third-century phenomena, however, and particularly of what made freemen and their wives open to persuasion that joining an armed expedition to the Black Sea was a good idea, we also need to bring in one further factor, which again figures strongly in modern case studies of migration: inherent mobility.

  The populations of both the Przeworsk and the Wielbark zones – like the inhabitants of the rest of Germania in our period – practised a mixed agriculture. Cows, as Tacitus reports and as is borne out in some of the settlement archaeology, were a status item by which wealth was measured, but grain was the staple diet, and its production the cornerstone of economic activity. The Germani were not nomads in any real sense of the word; they did not cycle their herds between designated blocks of summer and winter pasture, as some contemporary steppe nomads did. But in the early centuries AD many Germanic societies, and certainly those of Wielbark areas, lacked the necessary agricultural expertise to maintain the fertility of their arable fields over more than a generation or so. Viewed in anything but the short term, therefore, their settlements tended to be mobile. As the fertility of one set of lands was exhausted, the population would move on, constructing new settlements as they went. Consonant with this, in the Wielbark world cemeteries seem to have provided a much more stable focal point for life as well as for death. They were much longer-lived – that at Odry remained in use for the best part of two hundred years, during which time many settlements came and went – and perhaps even functioned as centres of communal life. A striking characteristic of Wielbark cemeteries before 200 AD, for instance, is a large stone circle, containing no burials but sometimes equipped with a post in the middle. Archaeologists have plausibly suggested that these circles may have marked out communal space for meetings. Be that as it may, the Wielbark population clearly expected regularly to relocate itself.58

  This is highly relevant because comparative studies have repeatedly demonstrated that migration is a life strategy more readily adopted by populations who are already mobile. The point even applies across generations. Statistically, the children and grandchildren of immigrants are much more likely than the average to move on. Another reason why population groups comprising men, women and children were ready to trek from the Wielbark and Przeworsk areas to the Black Sea is that their inability to maintain long-term agricultural fertility meant that they were already pre-programmed to use relocation as a strategy for achieving greater prosperity. In one sense, to direct that strategy in a coherent move over a relatively long distance represented no more radical a departure, say, than the seventeenth-century English peasant who, having made it out of the countryside and into the town, then decided to take ship for the Americas. In another, of course, it was.

  Up to about 200 AD, perhaps on the strength of a slight population increase – to judge by the number of settlements in use in each generation – relocation on the part of Wielbark groups took the form of a steady if unspectacular drift southwards into previously Przeworsk areas. This phase of Wielbark expansion corresponds quite well with what we might expect from a wave-of-advance model, the drift south being the product of random individual choice as the population slowly increased, rather than a large-scale flow of directed migration. Movement north was constrained by the Baltic Sea, and in any case soils improved as you moved away from the sandy, rocky deposits left on its southern shores by ancient glaciers. The subsequent trek to the Black Sea was a totally different kind of enterprise. The distances involved were much greater, and the moves took place over a shorter time. Second-century expansion spread out three hundred kilometres or so in a south-easterly direction over something like fifty to seventy-five years. Its third-century counterpart covered well over a thousand kilometres in an equivalent time. So this second flow, or second stage of the same flow, was obviously much more directed, and it had to be.

  Steady settlement drift from a perhaps slightly expanding population had now become deliberate armed intrusion, for financial gain, into an alien political locale. And, again, the parallels with the history of the Boers are striking. Between the first settlement of 1652 and 1800, individual settler families drifted outwards from the Cape over the eight hundred kilometres separating it from the Orange River, which marked its original boundary, as population expanded (Louis Tregardt, for instance, had seventeen children by four wives). This, too, would fit a wave-of-advance model. Movement across the river in response to the negative political, economic and cultural impetus provided by the British was built on the back of this tradition of movement, but directed and accelerated into a quite different phenomenon. Migration units became larger, and, as we have seen, the population flow rapidly evolved into military predation when it was resisted. Likewise, too, in the case of the third-century Germani: their shift in destination with regard to the northern Pontus required careful planning. Individual Germanic families from the north drifting into the Black Sea region would have got precisely nowhere, assuming that they had it in mind to annex land. Establishing military hegemony in a new world required careful planning and a mass of population, even if this m
ass was organized in a number of separate expeditionary forces rather than the one ‘people’ envisaged by the old invasion hypothesis.

  FLOWS OF PREDATION

  There is much about these second- and third-century migration flows that will always remain beyond our grasp. The available evidence does not allow us to explore precise trigger factors in detail, nor to ask which individuals were ready to participate, and why, when many of their neighbours stayed at home. But the evidence is good enough to establish that migration was a major factor in the reconstruction of the frontiers of Roman Europe. ‘Development’ – processes of sociopolitical and economic transformation resulting in the new confederations of the late imperial period – was also central to the action. But an anti-migrationist reading of the evidence has to discount too much archaeological and historical evidence, and spectacularly fails to explain the cultural shift in the nature of Rome’s main partners across the Lower Danube and Black Sea frontiers. Further west, the migration element was less dramatic, but perfectly distinct nonetheless in the Alamannic occupation of the Agri Decumates and the arrival of substantial numbers of Burgundians on the River Main.