Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  Imperial momentum had been established, and his sons and grandsons did more than maintain it. First, they ditched the Merovingians. After securing his own position, Charles’s son, another Pippin, made the final leap to royal lightspeed, deposing the last Merovingian, Childeric III, and having himself crowned king in 752. Now royal, the Carolingians quickly expanded the area under their control, the second half of the century being consumed in an orgy of conquest, initially under Pippin, but more particularly under his son and heir Charles, better known as Charlemagne: ‘Charles the Great’ (Karolus Magnus, 768–814). East of the Rhine, direct Frankish rule was asserted for the first time over peoples who had been periodically subordinate to the Merovingians, but often autonomous and sometimes entirely independent. By 780, self-assertive ducal lines in Alamannia, Thuringia and Bavaria had all been extinguished, and further north, Frisia had been subdued. Saxony, too, was eventually conquered outright, for the first time, but only in the early ninth century after two decades of punishing campaigning that had included forced baptisms, population transfers and wholesale massacres. On the back of these successes, Charlemagne directed his attentions further afield. The independent kingdom of the Lombards was crushed in the mid-770s, and in campaigns that culminated in 796 he destroyed the central European Empire of the Avars. The plunder taken on this expedition became proverbial.42

  Charlemagne’s conquests thus united Gaul, the territory between the Rhine and the Elbe, northern Italy and much of the Middle Danube region, together with parts of northern Spain, into one vast imperial state (Map 13). The Merovingians had at times exercised influence over large parts of this territory, but not everywhere in the form of direct rule, and their domination had never extended into Italy or the Middle Danube. Consonant with this, Charlemagne was much less shy in asserting that he had created an empire. From about 790 onwards, a consistent thread appeared in the writings of his team of resident royal intellectuals, extolling his success and his piety and declaring that both showed him to be a (or even ‘the’) true Christian emperor. There is not the slightest doubt, therefore, that Charlemagne’s imperial coronation on Christmas Day 800 in St Peter’s basilica in Rome happened not by accident but by design. Three hundred and twenty-four years after the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, full-blown Empire in the west was reborn.43

  For all its grandeur and the lasting importance of some of its cultural legacies, however, the Carolingian Empire proved no more stable than its Merovingian predecessor. By the later ninth century there were still Carolingian kings, but their effective power was confined to a limited block of territory around Paris. Elsewhere in west Francia, authority had devolved once again to a constellation of local princes who each exercised within his own domain the kinds of powers (over justice, the minting of coins, ecclesiastical appointments and so forth) that Charlemagne had previously wielded over the entire Empire. Sometimes these rights had been formally granted, sometimes merely usurped. As one contemporary chronicler, Regino of Prüm, put it in a charming phrase, after the death of Charlemagne’s grandson Charles the Bald in 871, each area had made a prince ‘out of its own bowels’. In the west, the Carolingian Empire had come and gone within a century of Charlemagne’s coronation.44

  In east Francia, beyond the Rhine, greater unity prevailed, providing – eventually – the third Frankish imperial moment of the second half of the millennium. Here, another of Charlemagne’s grandsons, Louis the German, enjoyed an unusually long reign, providing a greater heritage of political cohesion for the constituent duchies of east Francia – originally Saxony, Thuringia, Franconia, Suabia and Bavaria, to which Louis added Lotharingia and Alsace (Map 14). East Francia’s cohesive tendency survived the extinction of Louis’s line at the turn of the tenth century, and the region was brought to still tighter unity first by Conrad (King of east Francia during 911–18), originally Duke of Franconia; and then by Henry, son of Otto son of Liudolf, the Duke of Saxony from 912, then King of the east Franks from 919 until his death in 936. Within three years of his accession, Henry had forced the Suabians and Bavarians to recognize him as King of the east Franks. He then provided effective war leadership against the pagan Magyar nomads, who had moved into the Middle Danube region from the western steppe around the year 900. They rapidly made themselves public enemy number one, raiding far and wide across northern Italy and southern France and defeating no fewer than three major east Frankish armies between 907 and 910. On the basis of a carefully crafted programme of military reforms in the late 920s, Henry was able finally to defeat them at the battle of Riade (in northern Thuringia) in 933. This victory secured Henry’s position as king, but it was his son Otto I who took the dynasty’s authority to a new level.

  Not that this was easy. It took Otto until 950 finally to subdue different combinations of rebellious dukes and familial rivals. He also effectively continued another of his father’s key policies: expansion in the east. Otto then launched a powerful expedition into Italy in 951, taking control of most of its northern and central regions. This demonstrated that he was now the most powerful ruler of Latin Christendom, a status he confirmed by inflicting a crushing defeat on the still pagan Magyars at the battle of the Lech in 955. This gave him an irresistible combination of overt power and ideological legitimacy, since it was clearly God who had allowed him to defeat the pagans where so many other Christian rulers had failed. So armed, Otto was able to browbeat the papacy into another imperial coronation. A second Italian expedition was mounted in 961, after which he was crowned Emperor in 962. The third Empire of the second half of the first millennium had come into being. Although based ultimately on Otto’s inherited position in Saxony, the Ottonian Empire was a distinctly sub-Carolingian entity, a reasonably direct descendant of the east Frankish kingdom of the ninth century.45

  A succession of Frankish empires based firmly in northern Europe thus dominated large parts of western and west-central Europe between about 500 and 1000. They were never as stable as their Roman predecessor, the exercise of imperial power being punctuated by two periods of considerable political chaos, c.650–720 and c.850–920. This was because all three were based on a weaker type of state structure. In the Roman Empire, much day-to-day control was in the hands of local communities, but the the central authorities had always retained some key levers of power. They had the right systematically to tax the largest sector of the economy – agriculture – in order to generate substantial annual revenues. These were used to support a large professional army, a governmental machine and state legal structures (both laws themselves and the courts), which were the font of legitimacy in the Roman world. For all its limitations, and there were many, the Roman Empire thus operated a relatively big state structure in pre-modern terms. The three Frankish Empires of the second half of the millennium differed considerably in detail from one another, but none taxed agricultural production systematically to maintain large professional armies. They all drew the bulk of their armed might from the militarized landowners in the localities under their control. Sometimes this support could just be extorted, but usually it had to be attracted via reward. And since these later rulers were not renewing their revenues annually through large-scale taxation, this meant that wealth tended to flow outwards from the imperial centre to the more local landowning elites.

  As has been well observed, the three Frankish imperial moments of the later first millennium all occurred when circumstances favoured expansionary, predatory warfare. Profits from this activity allowed the imperial dynasts, whether Merovingians, Carolingians or Ottonians, to reward their militarized landowning supporters without having to impoverish themselves. But when expansion stopped, political fragmentation quickly returned, as rewards flowed outwards again from a now fixed body of resources.46 As we shall see, this particular aspect of later first-millennium imperialism would play an important role in the further transformation of barbarian Europe, as well as providing much of the explanation for the rather stop–start character of Frankish imperialism. E
ven so, for most of the second half of the period, the view from outside would have identified a predominant western European power whose influence encompassed large parts of the continent. And it is, of course, precisely the view from outside – that of the barbarians in the rest of Europe – that will concern us in the chapters that follow. Before we can properly examine how the rest of European society responded to the stimulus provided by this entirely new north European imperial power, and the patterns of expansion inherent to it, we must take account of two further major reconfigurations of the ancient world order.

  The Strange Death of Germanic Europe

  The first unfolded more or less simultaneously with the rise of the first of the Frankish imperial dynasties: the Merovingians. Their Empire, as we have just seen, stretched from the Atlantic to the Elbe, and comparing this area with prevailing patterns of development across the European landscape as they stood in the sixth century, it quickly becomes apparent that its extent east of the River Rhine coincided closely with those parts of the old Roman periphery – inner and outer – that had maintained a considerable continuity in their long-standing Germanic-type material cultures and associated levels of socio-political organization during the period of Roman collapse. This is a point of critical importance that is easily lost because it concerns areas of Europe whose history finds little or no coverage in the surviving historical sources. Its importance emerges immediately, even from a quick overview of the archaeological evidence.

  In the late Roman era, the largely Germanic-dominated inner and outer peripheries of the Roman Empire comprised huge swathes of territory running broadly north-west to south-east across the map of Europe. Its breadth in the north was approximately 1,000 kilometres, from the east bank of the Rhine to just beyond the Vistula. In the south, it was broader – more like 1,300 kilometres from the Iron Gates of the Danube to the west bank of the River Don (Map 15). Societies within this block of territory had relatively dense and increasing populations, relatively developed agricultures, relations of some kind with the Roman Empire, and material cultures that characteristically included substantial amounts of carefully crafted metalwork and pottery. By the sixth century, culture collapse had engulfed most of the area. In Ukraine and southern Poland, this occurred when the Cernjachov and southern Przeworsk systems disintegrated, not long after 400 AD. In middle Poland, collapse can be dated to c.500, and in Pomerania by the Baltic to c.500–25. In the Elbe–Saale region, complete collapse came right at the end of the sixth century; between the Elbe and the Oder, there is no sign of any Germanic continuity into the seventh. To the south of this zone, in Bohemia and Moravia, a thinning-out of Germanic-type remains is once more observable in the fifth and sixth centuries, followed by the total disappearance of such material between the mid-sixth and early seventh. By c.700, characteristic styles of traditional Germanic material culture were thus confined entirely to areas west of the Elbe (Map 15).47

  The fact that Merovingian Frankish expansion did not extend into any of the areas affected by Germanic culture collapse was not an accident. Like its Roman counterpart, Frankish expansion was accomplished by military annexation, whose potential benefits had always to be weighed against its many costs. Battles had to be fought, and these were many and fierce even if the historical evidence is not good enough for us to reconstruct them in detail. Sometimes, though, you get lucky. The nature of the Frankish takeover of the Alamannic kingdom, for instance, shows up beautifully in the evidence of widespread and dramatic destruction from the old hillfort sites, which, as we saw in Chapter 2, had emerged in the late Roman period as the centres from which the authority of kings was exercised. About the year 500, when historical sources tell us Clovis won his great victory, they – or all that have been investigated – were taken by storm, and, more generally, huge material-cultural discontinuities show up right across Alamannia. Not only were the hillforts abandoned, but new burial rites appear in the cemeteries, and in some places entirely new cemeteries came into use. The degree of investment of human and other resources required for such an aggressive takeover would only be made when its rewards were going to be commensurately large.48

  The collapse of long-standing patterns of central European, largely Germanic material culture in the fifth and sixth centuries meant that, east of the Elbe, there were no similarly coherent political structures to confront, and no relatively developed economies with accumulations of movable wealth to ransack. In the centuries either side of the birth of Christ, the Roman Empire had expanded to the limit of that era’s profitable warfare, and in the sixth century the Merovingians did the same. The one area of old Germanic Europe that maintained the old cultural patterns and didn’t fall under Frankish domination was southern Scandinavia: the Jutland peninsula, the south-western Baltic islands and the southern coast of what are now Norway and Sweden. But Merovingian power was exercised in neighbouring Saxony only in the form of hegemony rather than outright conquest, and this probably insulated Scandinivia from any wider Frankish ambition. This one partial exception doesn’t negate the general point, though. Only those areas of Rome’s inner and outer periphery where continuity of development had been maintained were worth the effort of Frankish conquest. In this sense, the new trajectories of development from the late Roman period played an important role in defining the limits of the new supraregional power of the post-Roman world.49 So far so good. But what exactly had happened in those other areas of Germania that saw such a dramatic disruption to well-established material cultural patterns?

  Thinking about this phenomenon, it is important to be absolutely clear about its nature. As the Polish archaeologist Kazimierz Godlowski above all demonstrated, culture collapse involved the disappearance, in the fifth and sixth centuries, of long-standing patterns of material-cultural development over vast tracts of central Europe. These patterns often ran back at least to the start of the millennium and sometimes beyond. But when discontinuity hit, it manifested itself in virtually every area of life reflected in the material-cultural remains: everything from the enduring economic links with the Mediterranean world that generated regular flows of Roman imports, to established craft traditions in pottery and metalwork. Technologically, pottery production simplified dramatically, the use of the wheel was abandoned. This was matched by a marked diminution in the range of pot forms and even in the overall quantities being produced. Metallurgical production similarly declined in scale – the range of ornaments being produced (or at least deposited) shrank almost to zero. Settlements also became much smaller.50 Essentially, the archaeological record shows striking simplification in every category by which the activities of the populations of the region are customarily analysed, compared and dated in the Roman period, and it all adds up to a massive change in lifestyles.

  What human history underlay these striking archaeological discontinuities?

  According to the interpretation championed by Godlowski, traditional cultural patterns vanished because the population producing them had itself largely disappeared. Where we have relevant literary sources, material-cultural collapse is geographically and chronologically coincident with the known movements of Germanic-speakers on to Roman soil. The Cernjachov and Przeworsk systems collapsed at the same time as Goths, Vandals and their other constituent populations were being displaced by the rise of Hunnic power in central Europe (Chapter 5), while the thinning-out of Germanic material culture along the Elbe in the fifth century has long been associated with the transfer of Angles, Saxons and others to Britain, and the southern movement of Lombard groups into the Middle Danubian region. These flows both continued into the sixth century, as we have seen, not least in response to the extension of Frankish imperial power eastwards, which led a large number of Saxons to join the Lombards in their trek into Italy.51

  The chronological links are much too tight to be accidental, but the total departure of Germanic populations is not the only possible, nor even the most likely, explanation of this extraordinary phenomenon. Since archaeol
ogical cultures must be understood as systems, the disappearance of established cultural forms can a priori have a number of causes. In this case, as other commentators since Godlowski have stressed, what we are dealing with is the disappearance of ornamental metalwork, weaponry and specialized wheel-made pottery, and these were largely produced for a Germanic social elite. The absence of such items from the observable spectrum of archaeological remains could reflect, therefore, the disappearance from these lands only of the political and militarized class for whom they were manufactured. A numerous – possibly very numerous – but archaeologically invisible peasantry, users of a much simpler material culture, might have been left behind.52 In theory, therefore, it is possible to explain culture collapse by positing anything from a total evacuation of the landscape at one extreme of the spectrum, to what you might term elite departure at the other. Where within this range does the evidence suggest the human history behind Germanic culture collapse fell?

  We will need to return to some of the evidence in more detail in the next chapter, when we look at the Slavic populations who eventually took control of these de-Germanized areas of central and eastern Europe. For the moment, a few more general observations can be made. First, Germanic culture collapse surely does not reflect a total evacuation of the affected landscapes. As we have seen in the case of the Goths north of the Black Sea, there is good reason to suppose that many groups among the indigenous population, who had become subordinated to Gothic intruders in the third century, did not form part of the later Gothic migration units that moved on into the Roman Empire from 376. Nor, again in general terms, do the numbers of Germanic migrants moving into the Empire in the late Roman period seem anything like large enough to have created large empty landscapes.