Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  Second, for all the messiness of the post-Attilan political process from which they emerged, some of these larger group identities were not so easy to destroy. Despite becoming part of Theoderic’s following in 487/8, for instance, the Rugi maintained their independence over two further generations down to c.540, when they were still a recognizable entity in the Italian landscape. For all their travails and splits, likewise, the Heruli retained a significant sense of their group identity for another forty-odd years after their defeat at the hands of the Lombards in 508. Without it, they would never have sought a leader of the traditional ruling house from among those of their number who had moved north to Scandinavia.56 To judge by their histories, both the Rugi and Heruli were ‘medium-sized’ entities. They were clearly not as militarily powerful, say, as the Gothic, Lombard or Gepid confederations which generated much longer-lived political entities, and into which elements of the Rugi and Heruli were eventually absorbed. In both cases, the evidence has been questioned. The mission of the Heruli to Scandinavia has been labelled a ‘fairy story’, and the resurfacing of the Rugi in 540 no more than an invention of the historian Procopius, who had – it is claimed – such a strong tendency to view any barbarian grouping as a ‘people’ that he ought not to believed. Both are stories recounted in detail in only the one source, and where that is the case, it is always possible to deny their validity. But is there any real substance to these arguments?

  In my view, there isn’t. In the case of the Heruli, the Scandinavian mission is told in great circumstantial detail in the middle of what adds up to a full account of their fortunes after their defeat by the Lombards. Other parts of this story are confirmed in other sources, and what Procopius describes, in total, is the effective destruction of Herulic identity. When two contingents of Heruli end up fighting each other, as they did in 549 when one was fighting for the Gepids and the other (via the east Roman Empire) for the Lombards, then you have to conclude that the Herule label had ceased to mean much as a determinant of human behaviour. The account is entirely plausible, there are no inconsistencies or obvious errors. There are of course other things one would like to know, but the narrative satisfies all the normal criteria for basic credibility that ancient and medieval historians usually employ. In the case of the Rugi, likewise, different sources record the extent to which they played an independent hand during Theoderic’s conquest of Italy in the early 490s. They swapped sides twice in fact, first to join Odovacar and then going back to the Goths. So we should not wonder at finding them – or some of them – with their identity preserved for a further generation or so after the conquest of Italy.

  The only reason to doubt either of these stories is that they fail to fit in with the preconceptions about identity held by the modern scholars doing the doubting. Heavily influenced by the ideas of Barth, both are proponents of the idea that Germanic groups of the mid-first millennium could not have had strong group identities. But Barth, as we have seen, represents only one strand in modern research into identity, which lends no overwhelming support to the preconception that group identities ought always to be highly malleable. According to circumstances – the precise nature of any individual situational construct – group identity can be weaker or stronger, and, in the case of the Rugi, Procopius even offers a mechanism as to how identity was maintained: namely, by a voluntary ban on marriage outside the group.57 Given its coherence and detail, I am happy to accept what the evidence is telling us. The Heruli and Rugi probably were not ‘peoples’ in the classic nineteenth-century sense of the term. There is no evidence that either possessed within them strong cultural commonalities (though none either, to be fair, that they didn’t), and they may have incorporated outsiders through various alliance systems as Attila’s Empire broke up. They surely also, like all the other Germanic groups known from the period, incorporated strong status divides. But nonetheless they were bound by group identities capable of exercising a strong hold over significant numbers of their constituent populations.

  And although you can more easily conceive of this being true among such smaller and less diverse groupings, it seems to have been true even of some of the larger group identities as well. When the Byzantines decided to conquer the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy in 536, their arrival sparked a sequence of defections from subgroups who preferred to make their peace with the invaders rather than continue with their independent Gothic allegiance. One surviving papyrus beautifully illustrates the plight of a Gothic estate owner called Gundilas, who twisted and turned, swapping sides repeatedly in a desperate attempt to hold on to his land, as the fortunes of war fluctuated around him over the next twenty years. But neither the defectors nor Gundilas can have reflected the majority response to Byzantine invasion among Theoderic’s supporters and their descendants. If they had, those twenty years of warfare would not have followed in which the Goths attempted to maintain their political independence, especially since the Byzantines offered them a peace deal that would have allowed them to keep their lands in return for political submission. What really emerges from both Procopius’ narrative and a wider range of evidence is that a core body of higher-status warriors who had the most invested in Gothic group identity was slowly destroyed in the war years as more and more of them fell in battle.58 These were the men who had most to gain from maintaining the group identity that gave them their high social status, and these were the men most willing to fight for its continuance. My best guess is that such higher-status warriors, both among the Goths and among other Germanic groups of this era, were the real building blocks of group identity, and that the relative robustness – or otherwise – of any particular group depended upon their allegiances and attitudes. That does not mean, of course, that even among these higher-status individuals all felt the same degree of group allegiance. This doesn’t happen in the modern world, and it’s hard to see why it should have been any different in the ancient.

  MIGRATION AND EMPIRE

  There is not the slightest doubt that even at elite-warrior level the rise and fall of the Hunnic Empire forced major renegotiations of group identity. One bout was stimulated by conquest, and the mechanisms of control this brought in its wake: particularly the suppression of dangerous larger-scale lordships. A second followed Attila’s death, sparking a rush towards reorganization, as concentrations of military manpower formed among those subject groups powerful enough to throw off Hunnic control. But there is no reason to suppose that either of these processes substantially eroded the distinction between Huns and their subjects. The Huns themselves had a clear interest in maintaining this divide in broad terms, even if Attila, by targeted blandishments, was careful to cultivate a compliant or semi-compliant set of subject rulers. Without such demarcation, the benefits of having conquered all these subjects in the first place would have been lost, and, in any case, some probably more peripheral groups, like the Gepids, do seem to have been left with their kingships intact. Here was a structure, therefore, in which there were clear barriers to wholesale changes of group identity. But if as a result the successor kingdoms start to look more like alliances than ‘peoples’, and the kinds of identity they created were more obviously political than cultural, they nonetheless managed to create firm group identities among large cores of supporters, to judge by the fact that extensive military counteraction would be required to dismantle them and that, even after major defeats, these identities would sustain themselves for another couple of generations.

  That at least is the conclusion suggested by the historical evidence, and there is no good reason to disbelieve it. The evidence on which this narrative is based passes all the normal tests of credibility, and the only reason to reject it would be an a priori assumption that identity in the fifth century could not have worked like this. But modern understandings of group identity do not sustain that assumption; in fact, it fits perfectly well with a vision of group identities operating in layers, and with individuals having some freedom to alter their allegiances according to circumst
ance. Even if they did not belong to culturally homogeneous ‘peoples’, the names need to be taken seriously as considerable concentrations of human beings. This in turn suggests that when these groups moved into and out of the Middle Danube region as the Hunnic Empire rose and fell, it should have generated substantial migratory activity. The limited amount of detailed contemporary evidence available to us confirms this suggestion.

  Attila’s Peoples

  Most of the best historical evidence for barbarians on the move again concerns Goths, this time the Amal-led Goths who burst into Middle Danubian history under the leadership of Valamer, eldest of three brothers, soon after the death of Attila. It’s worth exploring the evidence for these Goths in some detail because it provides a reasonably solid benchmark against which to think about other migratory moments which are referred to much more briefly. The case is still open, in fact, on whether they arrived west of the Carpathians only after the death of Attila, or whether their sudden pre-eminence in the mid- to late 450s was due to Valamer’s unification of several separate Gothic warbands who were already settled in the Middle Danube region as Hunnic control collapsed. Either way, in 473, soon after their great victory at the battle of the Bolia, they left Pannonia for the Balkan provinces of the eastern Roman Empire, now led by Thiudimer, the second of the brothers. There followed a number of long-distance treks as a series of complicated political manoeuvres worked themselves out over the next six years. Initially, the group moved about a thousand kilometres from the Lake Balaton area to the canton of Eordaia, just west of Thessalonica. At this point Thiudimer died and leadership devolved on his son Theoderic. In 475/6 they moved on another 600 kilometres to Novae on the Danube, followed by another 800-kilometre trek from the Danube via Constantinople, which in 479 resulted in the seizure of the fortified port of Dyrrhachium on the Adriatic coast.

  The negotiations that followed between Theoderic and the east Roman Empire are reported in detail by the contemporary historian Malchus of Philadelphia, who gives us some sense of this group that had covered two and a half thousand kilometres in six years since its departure from Pannonia. In the course of those negotiations, the Goths’ leader offered six thousand picked warriors to Adamantius, Constantinople’s ambassador, to participate in a number of possible enterprises. This clearly wasn’t the sum total of his armed forces, since the non-combatants were to be left in Dyrrhachium, which required a garrison of at least two thousand. In the case of the Amal-led Goths, therefore, we must be dealing with a fighting force of around or perhaps slightly over ten thousand men. In the same negotiations, Theoderic referred to the ‘large number of non-combatants among his forces’, and women and children formed an integral part of this force when it subsequently made its way to Italy. If not a people in the nineteenth-century sense of the word, the Amals led a large mixed group of several tens of thousands into the Balkans, analogous to those earlier Gothic groups that crossed the Danube in 376 or the large groups participating in the Rhine crossing of 406.59

  This central point has been denied by one major study of Gothic identity in Italy (the kingdom that Theoderic’s Goths went on to create after their Balkan adventures). This claims that the presence of women and children among the group is reported by only one east Roman historian, Procopius, and that his evidence is tainted by a classical migration topos. Theoderic’s force was not a cohesive group of refugees fleeing from the chaos of the post-Hunnic Middle Danube, but a new group that snowballed in the Balkans, composed largely of disparate elements of the east Roman military and very largely of warrior males. That Theoderic’s highly mobile force included substantial numbers of women and children is mentioned, however, in a range of sources: not just Procopius, but also a contemporary panegyrist of Theoderic, speaking in 507 to some of those who had made the trek just eighteen years before, and in an Italian saint’s life, again composed in Italy under Theoderic’s rule.60 The accusation against Procopius is as unconvincing, therefore, as it was when levelled against Ammianus Marcellinus’ account of the events of 376. And in fact, again like Ammianus, Procopius was demonstrably capable of describing a range of barbarian activities. Not all the barbarians found on the move in his histories are described as migrating ‘peoples’. Slavic and other raiding all-male warbands for instance, are found there aplenty. We also know that, like the Goths of 376, the Amal-led Goths trailed behind them a huge wagon train. While Theoderic and Adamantius were negotiating, a Roman force surprised this slower-moving tail, which had not yet reached the safety of Dyrrhachium, and captured two thousand wagons. It was presumably in this extraordinary appendage that the group transported its women and children, its possessions, and apparently also its seed grain and agricultural equipment. For it was expected by all the Byzantine negotiators who dealt with Theoderic in the Balkans that any political settlement with him would involve granting his Goths unpopulated agricultural land.61 Though not a ‘people’, these Goths formed a large, mixed population, which could plausibly be expected to farm as well as fight. The idea that one group of men might engage in both activities has again been questioned in some recent studies, but, as we have seen before, it makes perfect sense in the light of the limited number of specialist warriors that prevailing levels of economic development in Germanic society could actually support. Any large-scale military enterprise undertaken by Germanic groups in this era had no choice but to recruit from a broader social range than military retinues, among men who held land and had families, as well as among more rootless youngsters. Farmer-fighters, as among the Boers, are a natural corollary of any agricultural society that cannot support a large professional military.

  Even this, however, fails to capture the full scale of the following Theoderic led to Italy. During his stay in the Balkans, he added to his entourage a large contingent of new recruits, taken from a second and entirely distinct Gothic force that had been established in Thrace for some time before the Amal-led Goths arrived in the Roman Balkans in 473. How long is a moot point. The origins of these Thracian Goths are obscure, and they could easily have been the product of several separate bouts of immigration into the Roman Balkans. One major influx occurred as early as the 420s, when Roman military action, as we saw earlier, removed many Goths from Hunnic rule in the Middle Danube. These Goths were then resettled in Thrace, which is precisely where we find the second Gothic force well established in c.470. This means, of course, that there is pretty much a two-generation gap between the initial settlement and the point where the Thracian Goths are mentioned as a separate force in contemporary historical sources.

  This raises an obvious issue. Linking the two would require the settled Goths to have maintained some kind of group identity in the intervening period, during which time they appear not to have had their own king. The first king of the Thracian Goths we know of established his authority only in the early 470s, when the group revolted following the murder of its patron in Constantinople, the general Aspar. But before Aspar’s murder, they had enjoyed a special status, that of foederati. The significance of this term seems to have been that it was given only to groups so favoured that their internal cohesion was not destroyed when they were incorporated into the east Roman military. And enough Goths and Gothic-named generals, likewise, turn up among Roman forces in the Balkans between the 420s and c.470 to suggest that the Thracian Goths of the 470s really can be traced back in some way to the earlier settlement. That said, Attila’s Empire contained other Gothic groups besides, and its collapse prompted some to move into the eastern Empire. Bigelis led his Gothic force to defeat on east Roman territory in the mid-460s, and its survivors (together, possibly, with others who don’t happen to be mentioned) could easily have been incorporated into an existing body of Gothic soldiery. Nor is it necessary to suppose that all the Thracian ‘Goths’ were indeed Goths, even if contemporary sources describe them as such.62

  Whatever their origins, by the early 470s the Thracian Goths formed a distinct element within the Balkan military establishment, one agai
n complete with its own women and children. At this date, they too numbered well over ten thousand fighting men. In 478, their leader – also, unfortunately, called Theoderic, but usually known by his nickname Strabo, ‘the squinter’ – extracted from Constantinople pay and rations for thirteen thousand men. The force was also cohesive enough to elect its own leader to conduct negotiations with the Roman state, and had been its trusted ally. In receipt of large subsidies (nine hundred and ten kilos of gold per annum), they were settled quite near to the imperial capital, with close ties to some important political figures there. The magister militum and patrician Aspar, their political patron up to 471, was a power broker and kingmaker who had been responsible for the election of the Emperor Leo in 457. Aspar continued to wield much of the real power in Constantinople, to the extent that Leo – known as ‘the butcher’ because of it – organized his assassination in 471 so as to claim his political independence. Their closeness to a figure of this stature demonstrates that the Thracian Goths were a major force in the eastern Empire, and they revolted, presumably, because the murder raised questions about the continuation of their privileged status. But even after Aspar’s death, Strabo retained ties to the extended imperial family, and other supporters in Constantinople kept him informed of events at court. The Thracians’ evident integration into the east Roman body politic also reinforces the idea that some of them had been established there as a privileged body of soldiery since the 420s.63

  Initially, the arrival of the Amal-led Goths in the Balkans set up a three-way conflict, as the two Gothic groups manoeuvred for position around the eastern imperial court. It was partly resolved when Theoderic the Amal organized the assassination of Strabo’s son Recitach in 483/4. He was then the newly elected leader of the Thracian Goths, his father having met an equally grisly end when a rearing horse threw him on to a spear rack. On Recitach’s demise, most of the Thracian Goths threw in their lot with Theoderic. No source says this out loud – the east Roman history covering the period survives only in extracts made in the Middle Ages, and the relevant fragment records only the assassination and not its consequences – but, at this exact moment the Thracian Goths suddenly disappear from the historical record as a distinct group, and only a few dissenting individuals, who refused to join the Amal, remained in the east in the sixth century. There was also a logic pushing the two groups to unite, since together they could operate more effectively against Constantinople, whose policy had been to get them to fight each other and then mop up the remains. And the results were momentous. To judge by the separate indications we have for the size of the two forces, this added another 10,000 men to his own, thereby approximately doubling the Gothic military manpower at Theoderic’s disposal; and 20,000-plus does seem more or less the order of magnitude of later Gothic forces in Italy.64