Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  Prevailing disparities in development thus dictated both the westerly and southerly directions taken by most of the migrants, once the Huns or the decline of Roman power had set them on the move, and the nature of the migratory units themselves. And all this, of course, is exactly what modern migration studies would lead us to expect. As we have seen, patterns of migration are intimately linked to patterns of unequal development. In the case of the late fourth and the fifth century, however, the migratory processes not only reflected existing inequalities of development across different parts of the European landscape, but also caused their substantial rearrangement. This was true both for the different migrant groups as they coalesced into the new state-forming supergroups, and also right across the European landmass.

  THE NEW ORDER

  In 510 or thereabouts, Theoderic the Amal, Ostrogothic King of Italy, wrote to the eastern Emperor Anastasius:

  You [Anastasius] are the fairest ornament of all realms, you are the healthful defence of the whole world, to which all other rulers rightfully look up with reverence: We [Theoderic] above all, who by Divine help learned in your Republic the art of governing Romans with equity. Our royalty is an imitation of yours, modelled on your good purpose, a copy of the only Empire.

  This looks like sucking-up in spades, but it wasn’t. In 507/8 Anastasius’ fleet had been raiding the eastern Italian coastline, and the Emperor had also provided diplomatic support for Frankish attacks on one of Theoderic’s main allies, the Visigothic King Alaric II. Against this backdrop, the really significant part of the letter comes in its next few lines:

  And in so far as we follow you do we excel all other nations . . . We think that you will not suffer that any discord should remain between two Republics which are declared to have ever formed one body under their ancient princes, and which ought not to be joined together by a mere sentiment of love, but actively to aid one another with all their powers. Let there be always one will, one purpose in the Roman kingdom.

  Theoderic’s initial flattery thus leads into a carefully crafted argument, which, in context, amounted to a diplomatic demand note. It can be paraphrased roughly as follows: ‘The eastern Empire is the model of complete divinely ordained rectitude, I follow it entirely; therefore I am the only other properly legitimate Roman ruler in the world, and superior – like you – to all the other successor state kings. You should be in alliance with me and not the Franks.’ And his pretensions were not greatly misplaced. He eventually came through the crisis of 507/8 with his position greatly enhanced. The Franks smashed the Visigothic kingdom at the battle of Vouillé in 507, but east Roman sea raids didn’t prevent Theoderic from picking up the pieces. From 511 he became sole ruler of both the Visigothic and the Ostrogothic kingdoms, comprising Italy, Spain and southern Gaul. He also ruled a chunk of the old Roman Balkans, exercised a degree of diplomatic hegemony over both the Burgundian and the Vandal kingdoms, and ran an alliance system that stretched up into Thuringia in western Germania. At the height of his powers, he dominated the western Mediterranean and ruled over a structure encompassing a good third to a half of the old western Empire. His ruling style – as the letter suggests – was also entirely Roman. He built Roman-style palaces, held Roman-style ceremonies in them, maintained the public amenities and even subsidized the teaching of Latin language and literature. The signals were easy to read. One of his Roman senatorial subjects hailed him in an inscription as ‘Augustus’, the most imperial title of them all.33

  Faced with Theoderic in all his intimidating pomp, you could be forgiven for wondering if the fall of the Roman west to intrusive military powers from beyond its frontiers had made any real difference at all. In the second decade of the sixth century, forty years after the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, western Europe was still dominated by a Mediterranean-based imperial power. The fact that the edifice was under new management might seem neither here nor there. But appearances are deceptive. Theoderic’s revival of a Mediterranean-based western Empire proved entirely transitory. In the second half of the millennium the centre of imperial power in the west was to be located not in the Mediterranean at all, but much further north.

  Empires of the Franks

  First impressions might suggest that the Franks inherited Rome’s imperial sceptre through an entirely contingent sequence of events. Theoderic’s Gothic Mediterranean Empire failed to survive a succession crisis generated by his own death in 526. At that point, and contrary to the king’s wishes, the Ostrogothic and Visigothic parts of his Empire were redivided, each being ruled separately by different grandsons. And any lingering hopes that some future successor might rekindle the flames of the western Empire on the back of a Gothic power base were utterly extinguished in twenty years of warfare, starting in 536, when the east Roman Empire under the rule of Justinian (527–65) destroyed the Ostrogothic kingdom, as it had destroyed that of the Vandals in the early 530s. There was also a strong element of chance in Justinian’s decision to launch these western campaigns in the first place, since they were born of defeat in an earlier war against Persia that had left him desperately in need of a victory to shore up his waning prestige. Looked at more closely, however, the failure of Theoderic’s Empire reflects much more fundamental adjustments in Europe-wide balances of power – themselves the result of an interaction between half a millennium of development in barbarian Europe and the collapse of the Roman state.

  By the late fourth century AD, before the great era of migrations began, the European landscape was marked, as we have seen, by massive inequalities of development. South of the River Danube and west of the Rhine lay the territories of the Empire, characterized by Europe’s highest population densities, the most developed exchange systems capable of supporting towns and considerable short- and long-distance trade, a relatively small and relatively rich landowning elite, and state structures of real power. These could mobilize the resources of the Empire’s territories to support such large-scale enterprises as professional armies, major building programmes and a governmental bureaucracy. Roman territory was bordered by its inner periphery of semi-subordinate client kingdoms, which generally received substantial trade privileges and diplomatic subsidies from the Empire but were subject to political interference and notionally owed certain – particularly military and economic – services to the Empire, which it was periodically able to extract.

  These client states were part of the broader imperial system, but their relationships with the Empire were never entirely smooth. They often used force, or the threat of it, to attempt to maximize the financial benefits that could follow from a close relationship with the Roman state, and to minimize any accompanying exploitation. As we have seen, the Empire periodically launched campaigns to achieve exactly the opposite outcome. The new wealth that collected in the periphery via interactions with the Empire – trading, raiding and diplomacy – had also played an important role in generating political transformation. Dynasts who wished to control all the new wealth that came from proximity to the Empire had had to build up their military power accordingly, and were enabled to do so by the extra wealth that they came to control. But there was also an element of consent within this process, since the greater power of these leaders meant that they could offer their supporters the best hope of fending off imperial interference. All of these processes pushed political organization in the inner periphery towards the creation of larger and more powerful entities, and their aggregate effects show up in the new confederations that appeared along the entire length of Rome’s European frontiers in the third century.

  Beyond this inner periphery – still viewing matters from a Roman perspective – lay an outer periphery. Here the populations generally stood in only an indirect relationship with the Empire, but their territories were a source of raw materials and other resources that were shipped into it via the inner periphery. Hence they had received some of the economic benefits that flowed into barbarian Europe from five hundred years of interaction with Rome. The outer
periphery also shared in some aspects of the inner periphery’s political transformation, not least because elements of its population periodically organized themselves to take control of the greater wealth that was available closer to the frontier. This began to happen through raids in the first century AD, but shows up in more substantial transfers of militarily organized population groups from the outer to the inner periphery in the so-called Marcomannic War of the second century, and above all in the expansions of Goths and others from the outer periphery towards the Roman frontier in the third.

  The boundary between the inner and outer peripheries cannot be fixed with precision, and in practice the two probably elided. As well as the periodic population intrusions from outer to inner, Roman diplomatic contacts spread to some extent beyond the innermost ring. In the fourth century we know, for instance, that from time to time the Empire had diplomatic relations with the Burgundians of the Main valley, ‘behind’ the inner Alamanni on its southern Rhine frontier. The boundary of the outer periphery, however, is reasonably easy to fix. There is no sign of any interaction – direct or indirect – with the Roman world in archaeological remains of the period very far east of the River Vistula or north of the forest steppe zone of southern Russia (Map 2). Down to the late Roman period, the populations of most of this huge territory continued to preserve the very simple Iron Age farming lifestyles that had marked out these landscapes from long before the birth of Christ.

  In the broadest of terms, therefore, development in the Roman period had created four bands across the European landscape compared with the three-speed Europe that existed around the start of the millennium. Then, Roman/Celtic Europe west of the Rhine and south of the Danube was generally far more developed than Germanic Europe up to the Vistula, which, in turn, was more developed than the lands further to the east. By the fourth century, the more intense development generated by contact with the Empire had subdivided the old middle band of Germanic Europe into the inner and outer peripheries that we have just examined.34 The migratory activity associated with the fall of the Roman west not only reflected the four bands of unequal development running across the European landscape, but also transformed them out of all recognition. The profound nature of these changes shows up clearly if we take a close look at the kingdom of the Merovingian Franks north of the Alps and Pyrenees, and consider why it was left as the only possible centre of supra-regional power in the west after the destruction of Theoderic’s Empire.

  As we saw in the last chapter, the Franks’ progression towards superpower status had accelerated in the reign of Clovis. Not only did he unite some previously separate Frankish warbands, but he used this power base to conquer large swathes of territory in what is now France and western Germany. And once Theoderic’s Gothic Empire fell apart, the way was open for a dramatic escalation in Frankish expansion. From the early 530s, Clovis’ sons and grandsons extended a mixture of hegemony and conquest over a much wider swathe of territory. Like Theoderic earlier, they were well aware of their achievements. When Clovis’ grandson Theudebert wrote to Justinian in about 540, he declared himself the ruler of many peoples, including Visigoths, Thuringians, Saxons and Jutes, as well as the lord of Francia, Pannonia and the northern seaboard of Italy. Theudebert went very close indeed to claiming the imperial title outright. A prerogative of Roman emperors was that they alone could issue gold coins. This had been inherited from the period when many Roman cities had had their own base-metal coinages, and continued generally to be observed after 476. Theudebert, however, started to issue his own gold coins, and many of his Merovingian successors followed suit.35

  To explain the rise of Frankish imperial power just on the basis of contingent events, like Justinian’s destruction of the Ostrogothic kingdom, would be to miss much of its real significance. For all his glory, even Theoderic had had to strain every sinew to hold the rising Frankish tide in check. His alliance system of the 510s was designed to contain further Frankish expansion, and the whole edifice rested on a rickety unification of the Visigothic and Ostrogothic kingdoms, which, for all Theoderic’s ambitions, must always have been odds on to collapse after his death. And once this extraordinary but improvised Gothic power block fell apart in 526, Frankish expansion began again, well before Justinian’s assault on Ostrogothic Italy. In the early 530s, the Burgundian and Thuringian kingdoms, deprived of Gothic support, quickly fell under Merovingian sway, and all this before the first east Roman troops set foot in Italy.36 Justinian’s campaigns removed any chance that a Gothic counterbalance to the Franks might re-emerge in the western Mediterranean, but that had been looking unlikely anyway. The main point to emerge from all this is that in the post-Roman world the most likely source of supraregional power in western Europe lay not in the Mediterranean, but north of the Alps and Pyrenees.

  This was an unprecedented development, which must not be taken for granted, as it easily can be if you view events just from a modern perspective. It is not that odd, given everything that’s happened since, to find France, Benelux and western Germany providing the basis of a militarily and politically powerful entity. But when this first happened in the sixth century AD, it represented a huge break with the past. The ancient world order in western Eurasia was one where the resources of the Mediterranean reached such a precocious level of development that states based upon them had always been more powerful than anything further north.37 In the sixth century, for the first time in recorded history, an imperial power emerged that was based on the exploitation of more northern European resources. This very signifcant phenomenon was a direct result of the processes of development that had been operating on the fringes of the Empire during the Roman period. The social, economic and political transformations under way on its periphery had all tended to generate ever stronger economies and political societies, and the rise of the Franks exploited this new strength to the utmost.

  As first Roman control and then Gothic influence evaporated from north of the Alps, Childeric, Clovis and their descendants swallowed up both Roman territory west of the Rhine and large parts of the Empire’s old inner and outer peripheries on the other side of the river. East of the Rhine other, so-called Ripuarian, Franks were quickly incorporated into the new enterprise, as were the Alamanni, again in Clovis’ own lifetime, after the huge defeat they suffered in 505/6. In subsequent generations, a mixture of conquest and domination established different degrees of Merovingian control and hegemony over more easterly neighbours – Frisians, Saxons, Thuringians and Bavarians. Some kind of Frankish superiority was even acknowledged, it seems, in parts of Anglo-Saxon England. This new supraregional power base ran from the Atlantic in the west more or less up to the River Elbe in the east (Map 13). It combined, therefore, both a substantial portion of former Roman territory west of the Rhine, and large portions of the old Empire’s inner and outer peripheries to the east.38

  The ancient world had seen Mediterranean-based supraregional powers of several shapes and sizes, and in this sense the successor states created there by longer-distance migrants such as Theoderic’s Ostrogoths were just a new variation on a long-established theme. But a brand-new phenomenon now emerged in the European landscape, and the existence of the Frankish superpower firmly reflected the five centuries of transformation effected in the north by the diplomatic, economic and other workings of the Roman state. Without the increased socioeconomic and political development that its existence stimulated in the inner and outer peripheries east of the Rhine and north of the Danube, these lands could never have provided the basis for a truly imperial power. By sponsoring the emergence of the new Frankish-dominated northerly power block, therefore, these earlier transformations set the developing pattern of European history off on a new trajectory in the second half of the first millennium. And from the sixth century onwards, the new superpower was itself to become a major factor in the further development of the European landscape.

  That said, the path of Empire north of the Alps in the second half of the millennium did
not run so smoothly as it had for its Mediterranean counterpart in the first. Roman emperors had come and gone, and a few peripheral territories had been lost in the third century. The Empire’s modes of government, likewise, were transformed over time. But this was largely a process of organic, internal evolution, at least up to the third century. Essentially, the Roman Empire remained the same state ruling over broadly the same territories for the best part of five hundred years.39 The same was not remotely true of imperial western Europe in the second half of the millennium. Merovingian greatness peaked in the sixth century, and by the second half of the seventh, much of the real power had fallen into the hands of regionally dominant blocks of local landowning elites, in Neustria, Austrasia and Burgundy (Map 13). This in turn allowed peripheral areas to reassert their independence. The Thuringians seem to have been independent from the revolt of Radulf in 639, the Saxons and Bavarians soon after 650. Even the long-subdued Alamanni reasserted their independence by the early eighth century.40

  Later Merovingian political fragmentation was followed by a dramatic resurgence of Empire in the same century at the hands of a second Frankish dynasty, the Carolingians. The new dynasty originally came to prominence as Merovingian loyalists with lands between Cologne and Metz, more or less modern Belgium, where the Merovingians too had first burst on to the historical stage. Those who study the first millennium AD have a distinct advantage when it comes to the age-old game of Name Five Famous Belgians. There is no need to tell the Carolingian story in any detail here, but in the late seventh century the first really prominent member of the dynasty, Pippin, made himself dominant in northern Francia, over both Austrasia and Neustria, after the battle of Tertry in 687. Ruling at first through a Merovingian frontman, in the next generation Pippin’s son Charles Martel successfully reunited to this northern Frankish heartland all the old territories of Gaul controlled by the Merovingians at their height. By 733 he was moving his supporters into Burgundy to establish his control in the south-east. After a lengthy struggle, Aquitaine in the south-west was conquered in 735. Charles Martel also campaigned east of the Rhine, forcing the Frisians, and notably the Saxons in 738, to start paying him tribute again.41