Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  First, the Frankish followers of Clovis and his sons were competing fiercely among themselves for the largest shares of the spoils of conquest (as William’s followers did after 1066). This was an anxious business for all concerned: hence perhaps their original tendency to show off their new wealth by burying large amounts of it with their dead in imitation of the sub-Attilan practices of their leaders. At the same time, the process was stressful for the indigenous population, who found themselves invaded by an intrusive new elite and incorporated into a kingdom that was imposing upon them new duties based on the alternative conception of a triple-tier social order and the rights and responsibilities appropriate to each of those tiers. For the indigenous population, therefore, in the midst of the major reshuffling of the social deck of cards set in train by Frankish victory, the new game in town was to find their way to the best possible outcome. This naturally meant cosying up to a member of the incoming Frankish elite, if one happened to settle in your immediate locality, a process illustrated perhaps at Frénouville; or more generally negotiating recognition of the highest possible status for yourself in the eyes of the new Frankish rulers. Either way, it is immediately apparent both that the process would be inherently stressful – and stressful in spades – and that there would be a powerful tendency to absorb the cultural and other norms currently sweeping through the Franks as they showed off the new wealth of conquest.

  Immigration and social stress are not competing explanations for the spread of the furnished burial ritual and the emergence of the new Reihengräber cemeteries. The process of Frankish migration itself generated competition and social stress which here took the form of the widespread adoption of burial trends that had their origin in the Danubian style of the Hunnic Empire. That, however, was in the beginning. Once the period of negotiation was complete and it had been decided who was free, freed or slave, then, as the nature of the Reihengräber cemeteries and the legal evidence suggest, the new social order acquired a greater stability.

  For all the problems that the sources present, it emerges that the creation of the Frankish kingdom involved migration on two or, better, three levels. South of the Loire, there was very little. Only a few garrisons were established, and while elite life there resonated to the new demands of Frankish kings, the amount of cultural and socioeconomic disturbance in the first instance was limited. North of the Loire, the picture is very different, although linguistic evidence indicates that this area requires subdivision. Between the River Rhine and the new Germanic/Romance language border, migration was significantly heavier than further west, where only some place names were affected in the longer term. In both parts of northern Gaul, however, the revolutionary nature of the changes is apparent. This was not a case of elite replacement, but, like the Anglo-Saxon takeover of Roman Britain, a redefinition of the entire meaning of elite status, and the social norms and value structures upon which it rested. The fact that some of those participating even at the upper levels were probably descended from indigenous inhabitants of the region does not make the transformation any less revolutionary, nor hide the fact that it was successful Frankish political expansion, involving a substantial element of migration, that made it all happen.

  MASS MIGRATION AND SOCIAL STRESS

  In the literal meaning of the term, neither Frankish expansion into north-eastern Gaul nor the Anglo-Saxon takeover of lowland Britain qualifies as Völkerwanderung. Neither were ‘peoples’ (German, Völker) to begin with, so they could hardly go wandering anywhere. And contrary to older conceptions of these processes, which envisaged something close to ethnic cleansing unfolding certainly in Britain and also in some areas north of the Loire, many indigenous Romano-British and Gallo-Romans clearly formed part of the new ethnic mix that had emerged in these former Roman provinces by the year 600 AD. The truth of this statement, however, doesn’t deny another. The previous two centuries had seen in both regions the unfolding of migratory phenomena that were substantial enough, whatever the actual numbers involved, to bring about major change on just about every level imaginable: politics, socioeconomic patterning, administrative organization and culture, whether material or non-material.

  One advantage of taking the Anglo-Saxon and Frankish case studies together is that, between them, they pinpoint the limits and potential dangers of overusing the elite-transfer concept. It does not make analytical sense to bracket together the Norman Conquest of England, where the incoming migrant elite settled happily within an existing socioeconomic structure of eliteness, with other instances where migrants demanding rewards came in sufficient numbers to cause a major restructuring of the prevailing social and economic order. The fact that the immigrants probably amounted to no more than a minority both north of the Loire and south of Hadrian’s Wall makes no difference. In both zones, Anglo-Saxons and Franks were responsible for revolutionary transformations going well beyond a simple process of elite replacement of the kind exemplified by the Norman Conquest.

  This raises the (perhaps not hugely important) issue of what might be the most apposite label to attach to each of these situations. Different researchers, I suspect, will take different views, but to my mind ‘elite transfer’ might be most usefully restricted to the type of encounter in which the domination of new immigrants did not require major socioeconomic restructuring along the lines of the Norman Conquest. And if you make that choice, the obvious term to reserve for alternative instances that did require a complete remaking of the socioeconomic order becomes ‘mass migration’. This will have some jumping backwards in alarm, but the fact is that no one believes any more in complete population replacement – the old invasion-hypothesis version of mass migration – so that ‘mass’ is an available and currently undefined, or imprecisely defined, term. It also has the advantage of tying in very neatly with the qualitative definition of mass migration employed in comparative migration studies. Remaking social and economic orders right down the social scale will always administer a huge shock, whatever the cultural context, and whatever the numbers of migrants involved.

  Much more important than particular choices of label, however, is the conclusion that in cases such as the Franks and Anglo-Saxons, migration is not an alternative explanation for major cultural change – even material cultural changes such as the adoption of a new burial rite – to social stress. The supposed equation between furnished burial rites and social stress does not always work, and each case needs to be looked at closely. Neither the odd furnished burial in an otherwise unfurnished cemetery landscape, nor regularly furnished burials in highly regulated contexts such as the Reihengräber, look as though they reflect social stress. The great advantage of the Frankish evidence over the Anglo-Saxon comes from the fact that so many of their cemeteries have been dug up more recently (although some of the more recent Anglo-Saxon cemetery excavations do make the same point). These excavations have also allowed the initial process of electing to bury the dead with a relatively wide array of goods to be more thoroughly explored, and it is this which to my mind puts social stress and migration so firmly on the same page of the explanatory hymn book. Being able to see that the insertion of a rich outsider into a community led the locals to bury both in an entirely new cemetery and according to the outsider’s rituals can only prompt the conclusion that adopting the new rite was part of the indigenous response (part-voluntary, part-involuntary, I would imagine) to the problem posed by having a new landowning elite roll into town (or, in fact, into the country).

  This of course is only a model, and matters did not everywhere progress in the same fashion. At Krefeld-Gellep, immigrant and native seem to have kept to separate cemeteries, but the general pressure to conform was strong enough to bring the latter culturally into line nonetheless. The fact, too, that the Frankish settlement process happened after the fact of conquest, while that of the Anglo-Saxons occurred in mid-struggle, could have contributed to some substantially different local consequences. Continued conflict with other indigenous groups might well have
made it more difficult for conquered natives to achieve good outcomes in the Anglo-Saxon case than in the Frankish, and, as we have seen, the linguistic evidence strongly indicates that the new landowning elite of lowland Britain by c.600 AD was composed overwhelmingly of immigrant elements.

  These particular points aside, there are many ways in which Frankish and Anglo-Saxon migration illustrate and develop the main themes of this book. Transport logistics – the Anglo-Saxons providing a first example of sea-borne migration – and active fields of information decisively shaped both, but perhaps above all it is again the interaction of migration and patterns of development, and the huge role played by prevailing political structures, that jump out of the evidence. Frankish and Anglo-Saxon migration can be seen as mechanisms by which unequal patterns of development were renegotiated. Despite its own economic transformations during the Roman era, non-Roman western Europe lagged sufficiently far behind adjacent areas of the Empire for the latter’s wealth to exercise a strong pull. Unlike a modern economy, the wealth of this world was generated above all by agricultural activity, and offered migrant labour few high-paying or high-status jobs – being a peasant was no more fun west of the Rhine than it was further east. The main way for most outsiders to access any of this wealth, therefore, was to raid it regularly for movables, apart from a relative few who made it big in the Roman army. Throughout the Roman period, this greater wealth was protected by armies and fortifications. As lowland Britain and north-eastern Gaul fell out of central imperial control at different points in the fifth century, however, the restriction these imperial institutions had imposed upon the capacity of outside populations to seize control of capital assets was removed, and raiding, after a time lag, turned into predatory migration, aiming at the seizure of landed estates.

  Unequal development was ultimately responsible, then, for both flows of migration. But both the Frankish and the Anglo-Saxon versions were effect, rather than cause, of central Roman collapse. They played a major role in dismantling such structures of local Roman provincial life as remained upon their arrival in northern Gaul and Britain, respectively, but in both cases it was the failure of the imperial centre’s capacity to maintain enough force on its fringes that exposed these provincial Roman societies to immigrant attention.

  What, though, of the bigger picture? If we widen the focus to the western Roman Empire as a whole, what role did migration play in its overall collapse? And given that migration and patterns of development ought to be close bedfellows – as indeed we have found them to be again in this chapter – what effects did the collapse of the Empire have upon the prevailing pattern of unequal development that had marked out Rome and its neighbours before the era of the Huns?

  7

  A NEW EUROPE

  IN 476 AD, ONE HUNDRED YEARS after the Goths first asked its ruler for asylum, the eastern half of the Roman Empire was still a going concern, running much of the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Near East, Egypt and Cyrenaica as a unitary state. Some migrants had found their way into its Balkan territories as the Hunnic Empire collapsed, but most were incorporated on the kinds of terms that the Roman Empire had always offered. They may well have retained some low-level autonomy, but after the departure of the Amal-led Goths for Italy in 488 they were made part of the Balkans’ military establishment only in such small concentrations that they posed no substantial political or military threat to the integrity of central imperial control.

  The situation in the old western Empire was entirely different. In the fourth century, it continued to dominate its traditional territories from Hadrian’s Wall to the Atlas Mountains of North Africa, as it had for the past three hundred and fifty years, or, if you leave Britain out of the equation, four hundred and fifty. By 500 this long-standing unity had vanished. In its place stood a series of successor kingdoms, most of which, some small exceptions in the western British Isles apart, were built around military forces whose ancestors had lived beyond the imperial frontier before 376. Vandals and Alans built a kingdom centred on the richest provinces of former Roman North Africa, Sueves another in north-western Spain, Visigoths a third in south-western Gaul and the rest of Spain, while Franks in northern Gaul, Burgundians in south-eastern Gaul, Anglo-Saxons in Britain and the Amal-led Ostrogoths in Italy had all done much the same.

  This book is about migration and development, not a fully fledged exploration of the collapse of the western Empire. It is no part of its subject matter to consider the internal evolution of the Roman state over its five hundred-year history, or how this contributed to eventual imperial collapse, which it certainly did. It is to the point, however, to take stock of the migratory phenomena examined in the last three chapters, and their overall contribution to one of the great revolutions in European history. Traditionally these kingdom-forming groups from beyond the frontier were thought of as ‘peoples’: culturally homogeneous entities, mixed in age and gender and with strong senses of group identity, who reproduced themselves over time largely by endogamy rather than by taking in new recruits from outside. In more romantic visions, the action was also given a strongly nationalist spin. The vast majority of these kingdom-forming groups were Germanic-speaking, and if you crossed your fingers firmly enough behind your back the fifth century could be presented as the culmination of four hundred years of Germanic resistance to Roman oppression, which had begun with Arminius’ destruction of Varus and his legions in the Teutoburger Wald in AD 7.

  Recent revisionist views have sought to overturn such interpretations in a number of key areas. First, the kingdom-forming groups were not ‘peoples’, but improvised coalitions of manpower with neither cultural homogeneity nor any strong senses of identity. Second, so the argument goes, their manpower was literally that: manpower. There may have been some women, but not many, and the groups resembled armies much more than peoples. More radical revisionists have even argued that our Roman sources are infected with a migration topos that turned all outsiders on the move in Roman territory into ‘peoples’. Less radical ones would prefer that while some barbarians certainly moved, the more important story, given the lack of strong group identities holding these barbarian groups together, was the way in which manpower gathered around new leaderships once a few people had moved. Third, the period was marked by no straightforward hostility between Romans and outsiders; in one influential view, the fall of the western Empire has been characterized as a ‘surprisingly peaceful’ process, where the Romans showed a marked willingness to come to terms with outsiders, and the outsiders lacked any intention of bringing down the Roman state. Rather than the violent cataclysm traditionally portrayed, the Empire disappeared by mixture of accident and consensus as barbarian outsiders were invited inside it, and some of the greater Roman landowners eventually preferred to come to terms with them rather than continue to pay the amounts of taxation that the imperial state had required to support its armies.1

  So how do the processes of migration we have been observing in the late fourth and fifth centuries shape up in the light of both traditional and revisionist conceptions of the fall of the Roman west? Equally important, what part did Roman imperial collapse play in transforming patterns of political and economic organization – development, in other words – right across the European landscape?

  EMPIRE FALLS

  Some of the revisionist arguments have real substance. There was no barbarian conspiracy to bring down the Roman Empire. The vast majority of the immigrants we have been examining did not cross the frontier and march hundreds of kilometres with that as their express intention. For the most part, too, the different immigrants operated independently of one another, and were just as likely to fight one another as they were the Empire. The Visigoths were happy to be employed by Rome to fight Vandals, Alans and Sueves in Spain in the 410s, and in the 420s Vandals and Alans fought their erstwhile Suevic partners. Later on, Franks fought Visigoths; and in their conquest of Italy, the Amal-led Ostrogoths, the various refugees from the collapse of Attila’s Empire w
ho had become incorporated into Odovacar’s army. Even as late as 465, most groups south of the Channel still had no idea that the western Empire was about to end. Their political agendas even at this late date were focused on securing a beneficial alliance with the rump west Roman state, while seeking to prevent other groups from doing the same.2 There is also much evidence of immigrant leaders and Roman elites forming new political bonds that cut across the old divides between Roman and barbarian. As early as the 410s, Alaric’s successor at the head of the Visigothic coalition, Athaulf, rallied Roman support to his cause in Gaul, and the Vandals had some Hispano-Romans in tow when they conquered North Africa. This type of alliance continued right down to the deposition of the last western emperor in 476, but perhaps found its archetypical expression in the attempt by Goths, Burgundians and Gallo-Roman aristocrats to construct their own imperial regime behind the figure of Eparchius Avitus in the mid-450s.3 Other elements of the revisionist case, however, are much less convincing.