Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  Even if better dating evidence for the collapse of villa society were eventually to lead to the conclusion that Roman society fell apart before Saxon assault became significant, moreover, this would only partly alter the picture. For one thing, as we will examine in more detail in the next chapter, Romano-British landowning society was cast adrift by its Roman mother ship only because of the damage inflicted upon central imperial structures by other immigrants into the continental territories of the western Empire after 405. More specifically, it was also the Anglo-Saxon migration flow that dictated what happened afterwards: the fact that a relatively small dominant elite was replaced by a relatively large one, and that major cultural changes, linguistic and others, moved lowland Britain in a decidedly Germanic direction. Everything suggests that the indigenous population had only a limited capacity to decide its own fate in these centuries.

  Fundamentally, therefore, a combination of elite transfer followed by cultural emulation cannot satisfactorily explain the transformations observable in lowland Britain between 400 and 600 AD. But nor was the Anglo-Saxon takeover a mass replacement of the existing indigenous population. In deciding how we might usefully recategorize it, it is helpful first to explore the analogous transformations unfolding simultaneously in northern Gaul, where the largely more recent archaeological evidence allows us to look more closely at the response of an indigenous society facing, in circumstances similar to the Romano-British, the arrival of land-grabbing outsiders.

  THE FRANKS AND ROMAN GAUL

  The intrusion of Frankish power into Roman Gaul presents us with a similar intellectual problem to that which has generated such different views of the Adventus Saxonum. At broadly the same time as historical sources (in this case of slightly better quality) indicate that Frankish power was building up west of the River Rhine, a new burial habit was adopted across wide areas of Gaul north of the River Loire. Roman burial patterns, in Gaul as elsewhere, had evolved over the centuries towards inhumation with no gravegoods. Around the year 500, however, there was a sudden explosion in richly furnished burials right across the region, and it became common for most graves to contain at least something. Males were customarily buried with a range of weapons, together with some personal items, females with rich costume jewellery of kinds not dissimilar to those found in lowland Britain in the early Anglo-Saxon period (Map 12). The big question, as north of the Channel, is this: can elite transfer followed by cultural emulation satisfactorily account for all the observable data?

  The March of the Merovingians

  The rise of Frankish power under the Merovingian dynasty was essentially a phenomenon of Roman imperial collapse. The term ‘Frank’ first appears in contemporary sources right at the end of the third century, like that of the Alamanni, but postdated accounts of the crisis earlier in that century give Franks a major role, and there is no good reason to disbelieve them. It is unclear, as we saw in Chapter 2, whether subgroups given the Frankish label (Ampsivarii, Bructerii, Chattuarii, Chamavi, Salii) in our late Roman sources had any real sense of overall political community. They lived in sufficient physical proximity to make political interrelationships a necessity and may even, like the contemporary Alamanni, have seen moments of real confederation under leaders of pre-eminent power. But the sources do not allow for certainty, essentially because Ammianus tells us much less about them than about the Alamanni. At this point, like so many Germani all along Rome’s European frontiers, the different Frankish groups were the Empire’s semi-subdued clients. Individual Franks were regularly recruited into the Roman army, some rising to top commands, while whole auxiliary contingents occasionally served on particular campaigns. Yet at the same time, campaigning was periodically required to keep them from raiding the Empire too successfully and too often; or even, when opportunity presented itself, from seeking to annex pieces of Roman territory. After the defeat of Chnodomarius the Alaman, for instance, the Emperor Julian also found himself having to fend off Salian Franks who were trying to move on to Roman territory.59 With the decline of the western Empire in the fifth century, this balance of power was undermined, and the Frankish cat leapt vigorously out of the bag. Frankish groups figure more prominently, and in a wider range of roles, in the declining western Empire’s affairs from around the 460s, when we start to hear in particular of a group of Franks led by one Childeric.

  Childeric’s father, eponymous founder of the Merovingian dynasty, was called Merovech, but all the sources report of him was that he was the offspring of a sea monster. And even Childeric’s career is full of question marks. His grave at Tournai in modern Belgium is one of the great all-time finds of European archaeology (Plate 16). When the mound was opened in May 1653, the excavators found a staggering array of gold and jewellery, including a signet ring which conveniently carried the name of the grave’s occupant: Childeric regis (King Childeric). Many of the items were subsequently stolen from their display cabinet in 1831, but they had been extensively recorded in great, if sometimes mistaken, detail within two years of their discovery. At that point, famously, the pins of Childeric’s brooches were thought to be pens. The sad remnants of the original treasure can now be viewed in the Cabinet des Médailles in Paris. Fascinatingly, a recent re-excavation of the burial site has revealed that, aside from this plethora of gold, Childeric was also buried with the corpses of at least twenty-one horses in three separate pits. Among the gravegoods were some of the unfortunate animals’ gold fittings. A few of these, found in the first excavation, had generated another of history’s great foul-ups. In the time of Napoleon, according to one of the more imaginative ideas of the excavator, they were interpreted as the remains of a great royal cloak, and the Corsican emperor had one made, embossed with similar designs, for his imperial coronation in 1801.60

  The grisly magnificence of Childeric’s tomb marks him out as a powerful warlord, but still leaves many puzzles, especially when compared with the historical sources. These amount to a tantalizing series of vignettes, including the arresting comment that he was exiled for eight years at one point for seducing too many of his followers’ women. Putting the complexities of his personal life to one side, these vignettes show his career to have been immersed in the death throes of Roman imperial power in Gaul in the 460s. By that time, the Empire’s central authorities had lost control of much of their tax base, with the result that its power was in terminal decline. In Gaul, this manifested itself in an increasing difficulty in exercising control over both the Empire’s own army commanders and the various groups of outsiders (such as Alaric’s Visigoths) who had already been settled there. Thus we find Childeric in 463 leading a Frankish contingent serving in the forces of Aegidius, commander of the Roman army in Gaul, who was fighting the Visigoths. Such was the complexity of imperial dissolution by this date, however, that the Visigoths were allied with the central imperial authorities in Italy against Aegidius, who was in rebellion. Whether this shows Childeric as loyal to the Empire or not is a thoroughly moot point. It is also clear that he never ruled more than just one group of Franks, who, even in the next generation, operated in a number of separate warbands.

  What the sources don’t shed any light on is the original basis of Childeric’s power. Was he a prince of the Franks selling the services of his warband to the Roman state, or had he followed a more Roman career, rising though the ranks of the Roman army of the Rhine in the years of its decline? The other large gap in his career profile is how he moved from subordinate ally of Aegidius in the 460s to ruler of a substantial chunk of Roman Gaul by the time of his death. Immediately afterwards, Bishop Remigius of Rheims wrote to Clovis, Childeric’s son and heir, in terms that portray him as the ruler of the former Roman province of Belgica Inferior. On the basis of this description, and of his Belgian resting place, the source of Childeric’s power has traditionally been placed in the north. But the limited information we have from the 460s places him further south and much more within a Roman military context. It has recently been suggested that the
real source of his power was his command of a substantial part of the old imperial field army, after central control over it had finally collapsed. This is certainly possible, but would make his Belgian burial just a little odd. The evidence is equally compatible with seeing him as a Frankish warband leader who played Roman politics while there still seemed real rewards to be won from it, then returned to a more straightforwardly Frankish political context once the Empire had lost all meaning in Gallic political life. The Burgundian king Gundobad, for instance, followed the same kind of career trajectory at exactly the same time. Either way, we have to see Childeric as one of the most successful warrior leaders to emerge from the wreck of Roman power in Gaul, commanding one of the largest remnants of its former forces, and operating alongside those headed by other commanders mentioned in our sources, such as Aegidius’ son and heir Syagrius and the Counts Arbogast and Paul.61

  Although Childeric was highly successful, it was in the reign of his son that Frankish history was really transformed. As you’ll find it in the textbooks, Clovis reigned from c.482 to 511, but only the date of his death is certain. His accession has to be worked out from other dating indications in the account of his reign provided by the later sixth-century historian Gregory of Tours. These, however, are not trustworthy.

  The outlines of Clovis’ career are clear enough, but many question marks hang over the details. Shortly after his accession, Clovis is traditionally held to have extended his territory as far as Paris, well beyond the confines of Belgica Inferior, by defeating Syagrius, who probably inherited what was left of Aegidius’ old command. The victory has long been part of the Clovis story, but the source base is extremely thin. The victory is placed in 485/6 by Gregory of Tours, the only author to report it, and has recently been the subject of controversy, particularly over the likely size of the territory under Syagrius’ command. But if there is considerable reason to wonder about Gregory’s chronology, as we shall see in a moment, the campaign itself was probably historical enough.62 Less doubt surrounds the overall effects of this and Clovis’ other campaigns. By his death in 511, he had taken most of south-western Gaul from the Visigoths, brought the Burgundians under Frankish hegemony, and ranged widely on the eastern bank of the Rhine, with the Alamanni in particular having been brought under his sway. In the process, the Frankish world was turned upside down. Not only did Clovis conquer large tracts of ex-Roman territory, but he also eliminated many rival Frankish kings. Gregory of Tours mentions seven individually: Sigibert and his son Chloderic who were established at Cologne, Chararic and his son, Ragnachar plus his two brothers, Richar and Rignomer, who held power in Cambrai and Le Mans. There is also a reference to ‘other relatives’, who may or may not have been rulers with independent power bases. A political patchwork, where power had been divided between a number of independent princes, gave way to the undisputed sway of a single monarch. Gregory was careful to note that, on executing each of his rivals, Clovis added their followers and treasure to his own power base.63

  Precisely when this restructuring of Frankish politics occurred is unclear. Again, our only narrative is provided by Gregory. Writing sixty years and more after Clovis’ death, Gregory was clearly stitching together stories about Clovis from a variety of sources, in many cases having to guess at their chronology. The Visigothic campaign is well dated by other sources to 507, but independent confirmation of the other events is lacking, and Gregory’s overall vision of Clovis’ military progress is deeply suspect, not least because all the major campaigns are placed at convenient five-year intervals through the reign. This could, of course, be correct, but it does look as though Gregory (or even a later interpolator) just spaced them out evenly. There are also more specific reasons for suspicion. Clovis’ great victory over the Alamanni is placed by Gregory in the fifteenth year of the reign (496), but contemporary sources record him inflicting a huge defeat on the Alamanni about a decade later. There could have been two campaigns, of course, but if there was only one it will be Gregory who is mistaken. Controversy also surrounds his account of Clovis’ conversion to Catholicism. Gregory places it just before the attack on the Arian Christian Visigoths, and was thus able to portray that campaign as a Catholic crusade that God crowned with victory. Another contemporary source puts baptism after the victory, and implies that Clovis had at least toyed with the idea of converting to Arianism.64

  The elimination of Clovis’ Frankish rivals, likewise, is traditionally dated to c.508, because Gregory places all these killings after the defeat of the Visigoths. This is entirely possible, but it is just as likely that the rivals had been eliminated in stages throughout his career. Clovis’ reported excuse for eliminating Chararic, for instance, is that the latter had failed to aid him against Syagrius. But Syagrius had been defeated (admittedly only according to Gregory) in c.486 and it seems odd for Clovis to have waited more than twenty years before taking out the defaulter. You also have to wonder how Clovis managed to put together enough military power to defeat the Alamanni and Visigoths in such quick succession, if he had not already increased his power base by incorporating these other warbands, and this would be my own best guess at the true story. Nonetheless, the overall picture is clear enough. In a career analogous in its effects to the combined careers of Valamer and Theoderic among the Ostrogoths (Chapter 5), Clovis created one of the most powerful of the successor states to the western Roman Empire by simultaneously annexing large tracts of Roman territory and uniting a series of previously independent Frankish warbands.65

  How much Frankish migration was part of this process?

  The Divided Kingdom

  Both historical and archaeological sources demonstrate that from within the sixth-century Frankish kingdom there emerged two distinct zones, broadly separated from one another by the River Loire. South of the river there was considerable continuity with the Roman past. Many of the old Roman landowning families retained their estates, along with much of their culture and many of their values. As they appear especially in the writings of Gregory of Tours and Venantius Fortunatus, two generations after Clovis, these people spoke Latin, were conscious of their Roman senatorial heritage, and retained an interest in Roman culture. This is not to say that the new kingdom had left their lives untouched. It was no longer possible for them to follow bureaucratic careers in the imperial administration, for example, and success or failure now had to be fought out at the royal courts of Clovis and his Merovingian successors, the source equally of major secular and Church appointments. There were also important economic developments, with Marseilles replacing Arles, for instance, as the chief entrepôt for Mediterranean trade. Nonetheless, south of the Loire intrusive barbarian settlements seem to have been few in number: one or two have been identified potentially in the Charente, and on the border with the Visigoths in Aquitaine. Otherwise the archaeological landscape continued to resonate to sub-Roman norms in its funerary rites, the dead being buried without gravegoods, and in its general material culture. There is hardly any sign of Frankish immigration at all, not even at the level of Norman conquest-style elite transfer, and the basic Roman unit of local political, social and administrative life – the city (civitas) together with its landowners – remained firmly in place.66

  North of the Loire, the situation could not have been more different. Somewhere between c.400 and c.600 AD, life moved decisively away from the established norms of the Roman era, in ways that were not dissimilar in material cultural terms to what we have already observed in Anglo-Saxon England. As in lowland Britain, the civitas, that stalwart of Roman administration, disappeared from view. There is no evidence that military service was organized here in the sixth century on the basis of civitas contingents, as it was in the rest of the kingdom. Social and economic structures were likewise transformed. Legal sources portray a society recategorized, again as in Anglo-Saxon England, into three social groups: the free, a class of permanent freedmen, and slaves. The second of these, it is worth remembering, was unknown to the Roman worl
d. There is also much qualitative evidence that a Roman-style restricted aristocracy was replaced with a broader social elite of less entrenched pre-eminence – again, as in Anglo-Saxon England. The legal sources do not differentiate by different wergilds, for instance, between the mass of freemen and a smaller nobility; Gregory of Tours does not refer to any major figure from the north as a ‘noble’ in the course of his massive narrative of sixth-century events (where many, from old Roman families south of the Loire, are so designated); and large, compact landed estates, the essential building block of socioeconomic dominance for a true aristocracy, only began to re-emerge in this region in the seventh century. Up to that point, the term villa simply meant a geographical area, not a centrally run unit of agricultural production.67

  This does not mean that there weren’t significant variations in wealth in these northern territories, or even that their old Roman elites had completely disappeared. Well into the seventh century, leading landowners of the former Roman regional capital at Trier determinedly styled themselves ‘senator’ in inscriptions. One surviving Roman landowner from the early Merovingian period has even left us a will: no less a figure than Bishop Remigius of Rheims himself, whose congratulatory letter to Clovis on his accession provides us with key information about the rise of the Merovingians. But Trier was clearly exceptional. Over eight hundred, or about a third, of all the post-Roman inscriptions of northern Gaul have been found in its environs, with none of the other old Roman cities of the region producing any comparable cache. And while Remigius’ will is decent enough evidence that some kind of Roman elite survived, it does show him to have been only a very modest landowner compared either with his properly Roman ancestors of the fourth century or his later Frankish successors of the seventh and beyond.