Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  A central aim of this study, however, has been to re-examine the evidence for first-millennium migration with a more open mind, and above all to reconsider it in the light of everything that can be learned about how migration works in the modern world. And from this point of view, one of its key conclusions is that the evidence for migration in the first millennium is both much more substantial and much more comprehensible than has sometimes been recognized in recent years. A deep-seated desire to avoid mentioning migration (a more successful version of Basil Fawlty and the war) has thus been wrenching discussion of some pivotal moments of first-millennium history away from the most likely reconstruction of events, and, in so doing, hampering analysis of the broader patterns of development that were under way.

  It is an inescapable conclusion from all the comparative literature that a basic behavioural trait of Homo sapiens sapiens is consistently to use movement – migration (mentioned it again, but I think I got away with it . . .) – as a strategy for maximizing quality of life, not least for gaining access to richer food supplies and all other forms of wealth. The size of migration unit, balance of motivation, type of destination, and other detailed mechanisms will all vary according to circumstance, but the basic phenomenon is itself highly prevalent. In practice, two particular migration models have been retained in even the most minimizing of recent discussions: ‘elite replacement’ for larger-group movement, and ‘wave of advance’ for smaller migration units. Part of the attraction of both has been that they are safely different from the old invasion hypothesis. Elite replacement suggests both that not very many people in total were involved in the action, and that their migratory activity didn’t really have that much effect. If you just replace one elite with another, what’s the big deal? The wave-of-advance model employs mixed migratory units – essentially families – but their colonization of landscapes is piecemeal, slow, by and large peaceful, and decidedly not deliberate – intention being one of the elements of the old invasion model which revisionists find most problematic. How much of first-millennium European migration can be successfully described by employing these models?

  Migration Modelling

  Some of it, certainly. Cheating only slightly in chronological terms, the classic, superbly documented example of elite replacement is the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. In the following twenty years or so, as Doomsday Book shows, an immigrant, basically Norman elite took over the agricultural assets of the English countryside, evicting or demoting the existing landholders. But the overwhelming majority of the indigenous population remained exactly where they had been before the Normans arrived. Likewise, at least some elements of Wielbark expansion in the first and second centuries AD and of its later Slavic counterpart, particularly the spread of Korchak-type farmers through the largely unoccupied central European uplands, probably had a wave-of-advance quality about them. Looking at the millennium as a whole, however, these models are both too simple and too narrow to describe the totality of recorded migratory action.

  First, the models themselves need a substantial overhaul. They either collapse different situations into undifferentiated confusion, or are of such limited applicability as to be more or less useless – at least for first-millennium Europe. As currently construed, elite replacement fails to distinguish the particularity of a case such as the Norman Conquest, where the invading elite could fit easily into existing socio-economic structures, leaving them intact, and any broader effects on the total population remain correspondingly small, if not so minimal as those wanting to undermine the importance of migration might think.2 But this kind of elite replacement applies only when the incoming elite was of broadly the same size as its indigenous counterpart, and I strongly suspect, even if I could never prove it, that, over the broad aeons of human history, this will have been true only in a minority of instances.

  Certainly the first millennium AD throws up more examples of a different kind of case, where the intruding elite, if still a minority – and even quite a small one – compared to the totality of the indigenous population, was still too numerous to be accommodated by redistributing the available landed assets as currently organized. In these cases, existing estate structures had to be at least partially broken up and the labour force redistributed. As a result of this process, the entire balance between elite and non-elite elements of the population was restructured, and the overall cultural and other effects of the migration process were likely to be correspondingly large. This kind of elite migration could not but have huge socioeconomic consequences, and potentially also much greater cultural ones as the indigenous population came into intense contact with an intrusive elite, which was more numerous than its old indigenous counterpart. It was this intense contact, seen in Anglo-Saxon England and Frankish Gaul north of Paris from the fifth century, and perhaps to a lesser extent the Danelaw after 870, that generated substantial cultural, including linguistic, change, as the indigenous population was forced into modes of behaviour dictated by a new and relatively numerous foreign elite living cheek by jowl among them.3

  Different again were cases of only partial elite replacement, particularly common in more Mediterranean regions of the old Roman west in the fifth and sixth centuries. Here there was some economic restructuring to accommodate the intruders – Goths, Vandals, Burgundians and others – but considerable elements of the old Roman landowning elites survived. In the longer term, it was the immigrants in these cases who struggled to hold on to their existing culture, and long-term linguistic change moved in the other direction. That is not to say, however, that this – the most limited form of migration on display in the first millennium – had only negligible consequences for the areas affected. In the first instance, high politics were dominated by the intrusive elites at the expense of their indigenous counterparts, at least when it came to matters like royal succession, and the overall political effect was sufficient to initiate major structural change. The disappearance in the medium to longer term of large-scale, centrally organized taxation of agricultural production, and the consequent weakening of state structures in the post-Roman west, are best explained in terms of the militarization of elite life that followed the creation of those structures at the hands of intrusive new elites.

  The wave-of-advance model requires an equally substantial theoretical overhaul. The basic problem with it, even with ostensibly relevant cases such as Slavic Korchak expansion in the fifth and sixth centuries, or Wielbark expansion in the first and second, is that the Europe of the first millennium AD retained few if any uncontested landscapes of the kind that may have existed when the first farmers had been operating four thousand years before. By the year 1000, there were still plenty of forests, and we take our leave of European history at a moment when a further wave of agricultural expansion was in the process of hacking great swathes through them. But farmers had been clearing the landscape for millennia by this date and many of the best spots had long since been claimed. In this kind of context, random, uncontested expansion, even by small groups, was rarely an option. Korchak-type family or extended family groups probably did spread in largely uncontested fashion, but they did so by moving in a thoroughly non-random fashion through less sought-after, more marginal habitats of upland central Europe. And even here, the total subsequent subjugation of landscapes to the Slavic cultural model, combined with the documented aggression of Slavic groups in other contexts, strongly suggests that a degree of coercion might still have been involved. The same was probably also true of earlier Wielbark groups. Early Wielbark expansion seems to have been carried forward by small social units, but adjacent northern Przeworsk communities certainly came into Wielbark cultural line as a result of their activities. This could have been voluntary, but I suspect that examples of small-scale migration from the Viking period give us a more likely model for what was going on.

  Small-scale Scandinavian migration units began carving out territories for themselves in northern Scotland and the northern and western isles of Brit
ain from pretty close to the start of the ninth century. In this case, the logistic problem of getting access to shipping imposed constraints that did not apply in the Korchak or Wielbark cases. Hence, as is documented in subsequent Scandinavian expansion into Iceland and Greenland, the migration units, even if small, did have to be organized by jarls or lesser landowners (holds) who had sufficient wealth to gain access to shipping. But whereas Iceland and Greenland were more or less unpopulated landscapes, northern Scotland and the isles were not, and, even if the migrating units were individually small, Scandinavian expansion into these territories was certainly aggressive. Older suggestions that the result was ethnic cleansing are outdated, but the indigenous population was forcibly demoted to lesser status, and, over time, absorbed into the invaders’ cultural patterns. Small-scale migration need not, therefore, necessarily mean peaceful migration. As long as they confronted an indigenous population who did not have larger-scale, regionally based political structures, small migration units could still insert themselves successfully by aggressive means. Alongside a wave-of-advance model for small-scale migration that was random in direction and peaceful in nature, therefore, we need to add small-scale migration flows that were non-random or aggressive, or both. This kind of model is potentially highly applicable to the generally already-occupied landscape of first-millennium Europe, relevant not only to Wielbark, Korchak, and some Viking expansions, but also perhaps to the early stages of eastern Germanic expansion towards the Black Sea in the third century, of Elbe Germani into the Agri Decumates; or of Slavic groups north and east into Russia in the seventh to the ninth centuries.

  What also emerges from the evidence is that too clear a line cannot be drawn between wave-of-advance and larger-scale migration. Just because an expansion began with small-scale migration units, does not mean that it stayed that way. The best-documented case here is provided by the Vikings. Initial Scandinavian raiding and settling, in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, were all carried forward by small groups. The earliest recorded violence involved the crews of three ships – perhaps a hundred men – and there is no reason to think that the settlements around Scotland and the isles need have been carried forward by groups much larger than this. But, as resistance and profits both built up, and the desire eventually formed to settle more fertile areas of the British Isles, where larger political structures in the form of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms barred the way, more important Scandinavian leaders became involved in the action, and larger coalitions formed among the migrants. This reached its climax during the Great Army period from 865, when coalitions formed with the idea of carving out settlement areas first in Anglo-Saxon England and then in northern Francia. If the early raids were undertaken by groups of no more than a hundred strong, the series of Great Armies each comprised much more like five to ten thousand men. The water-borne nature of the action in the Viking era always needs to be kept in mind because it imposed logistic problems that did not apply in other cases, but the evolution from raiding parties to great armies nonetheless provides a well-documented model of how – on the back of evident and growing military and financial success – originally small-scale expansion might eventually suck in much larger numbers of participants. The evidence is not so good for some of the earlier expansions, and these were not affected by the problems of water transport. Nonetheless, the expanding momentum of Viking-era migration provides a helpful model for understanding a series of other first-millennium migratory phenomena, not least the second- and third-century Gothic, and fourth- and fifth-century Lombard expansions, which again, it seems, started small, but grew in scale until forces large enough to fight major battles against Roman armies and regional competitors (such as the Carpi), came to be involved. Anglo-Saxon expansion into former Roman Britain can also be partly understood with such a model in mind, and it is potentially applicable to the third-century Alamanni.

  Even without venturing into really contentious areas, therefore, the full range of first-millennium evidence suggests some major revisions to now-standard migration models. But in addition to small-scale migration, elite replacements, and migration flows of increasing momentum, first-millennium sources do periodically report large, mixed groups of human beings on the move: 10,000 warriors and more, accompanied by dependent women and children. Not only do such reports arouse suspicion because they seem uncomfortably close to the old invasion hypothesis, but this particular type of migration unit does not figure in modern migratory patterns, where large, mixed groups of migrants are seen only when the motivation is political and negative – when populations are fleeing oppression, pogrom and massacre, as in Rwanda in the early 1990s. This is not what is reported in first-millennium sources, which describe both a more positive motivation and a greater degree of organization among groups intruding themselves in predatory fashion into other people’s territory. Can we believe what the sources seem to be telling us? Should we retain large, mixed and organized groups of humanity as part of the overall picture of first-millennium migration?

  Invasion

  Even when employing the most up-to-date methods – DNA or steady-state isotope analysis – the kind of evidence that archaeological investigation brings to this debate is at best only a blunt tool. It remains hotly disputed whether much usable DNA will ever be recovered from human remains of first-millennium vintage laid down in the damp and cold of northern Europe. And too much has happened in demographic terms since the first millennium for the percentage distributions of modern DNA patterns to give much clear insight into the relative proportions of their progenitors 1,500 years ago, except perhaps in the highly exceptional case of Iceland, where there was no human population before the Viking era.4 Steady-state isotopes, likewise, only reveal where someone came to dental maturity. The children of two immigrants will have fully indigenous teeth, and this kind of analysis will always carry an in-built tendency to underestimate the importance of migration. Arguments based on more traditional types of archaeological investigation – the transfer to new regions of items or customs originally characteristic of another – are also unlikely to be any more conclusive.

  The reasons are straightforward. By the birth of Christ, most of Europe had been settled and farmed, after a fashion, for millennia. And since even the most aggressive and dominant of immigrants usually still had a use for indigenous populations as agricultural labour, migration did not tend to empty entire landscapes. Furthermore, as all comparative study has emphasized (and modern experience shows), when migrants move into an occupied landscape, the result – in material and non-material cultural terms – is always an interaction. There are only a relatively few items in any particular group’s material cultural profile that are so loaded with meaning that they will be held on to, for good or ill, in the longer term. Everything else is open to change under the stimulus of new circumstances, so you can hardly expect migration to involve the complete transfer of an entire material culture from point A to point B in normal first-millennium European conditions. There will always be some elements of continuity in the material cultural profile of any region subject to migration, and this makes it entirely possible, if you are so inclined, to explain any observable change in terms of internal evolution. Goods and ideas can move without being attached to people, and if what you observe archaeologically is no more than a limited transfer of either, it will always be possible to explain it in terms of something other than population displacement. But the fact that it will always be possible to do this does not mean that it will necessarily be correct to do so, and the inherent ambiguity of archaeological evidence is sometimes misinterpreted. Ambiguity means exactly that. If the archaeological evidence for any possible case of migration is ambiguous – which it usually will be – then it certainly does not prove that migration played a major role in any observable material cultural change – but neither does it disprove it. What all this actually amounts to is that archaeological evidence alone cannot decide the issue. It is important to insist on this point because there
has been a tendency in some recent work to argue that ambiguous archaeological evidence essentially disproves migration, when it absolutely does not. Overall, of course, this forces us back on to the historical evidence. How good a case can be made from historical sources for the importance of large, organized and diverse groups of invaders on the move in the first millennium?

  The answer has to be complex. There are some clear instances where a migration topos, a misleading invasion narrative, has been imposed on more complex events. Jordanes’ account of Gothic expansion into the northern Black Sea region in the late second and third centuries is a classic case in point, as is the picture of the fourth- and fifth-century Lombard past to be found in Carolingian-era sources and beyond. But in other cases, the historical evidence in favour of distinct pulses of large-scale migration involving 10,000-plus warriors and a substantial number of dependants is infinitely stronger: the Tervingi and Greuthungi who asked for asylum inside the Roman Empire in 376, for instance, or the movement of Theoderic the Amal’s Ostrogoths to Italy in 488/9. In both these cases, attempts have been made to undermine the credibility of our main informants, respectively Ammi-anus and Procopius, but they lack conviction. Ammianus described many different barbarian groups on the move on Roman soil in the course of his historical narrative and only on this one occasion does he refer to very large mixed groups of men, women and children. The idea that he was infected by some kind of migration topos in this instance, but not elsewhere, takes a lot of believing. Likewise Procopius: he is not in fact the only source to describe Theoderic’s Ostrogoths on the march to Italy as a ‘people’ in a quasi-invasion-hypothesis sense of the term (a large, mixed grouping of men, women and children). One contemporary commentator even described them as such in person to Theoderic and other actual participants gathered at his court. You wouldn’t want to hang anyone in a court of law on this kind of evidence, but its credibility is pretty much as good as anything else we get from the first millennium. To reject it on the basis of a supposed migration topos is arbitrary.5