Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  Levels of development also explain the other fundamental oddity of these second- and third-century population flows: that many of the warriors were accompanied by women and children. Germanic-dominated Europe of the early centuries AD was a world of low-tech, small-scale farms producing only limited food surpluses. As a result, the economy could not support large warrior retinues; the kind of food renders available even to fourth-century kings could support only one or two hundred men. Again like the Boers, therefore, the kind of larger military expeditions that were required to take over a revenue-producing corner of the Roman frontier could never have been mounted using just the small numbers of military specialists that existed in the Germanic world. Recruits were required from a broader cross-section of society, many of whom already had dependants. These participants would obviously not have wanted to leave their dependants behind in the long term – aside, perhaps, from a few of the younger teenage ones – but even to have left them in the short term, while the expedition reached a hopefully successful conclusion, would have been to expose them to substantial risks. In context again, therefore, it was only natural for Germanic expeditionary forces of more than one or two hundred men to be accompanied by numerous familial dependants.12 There were a few women even on the Boer scouting expeditions, but the larger trekking parties were always mixed, and the women, in fact, were far from bystanders when it came to fighting; they loaded the flintlock rifles and even shot them when necessary. Germanic women of the second century had no rifles to load, but they no doubt had their own key roles to play, even on substantially military expeditions. Although the recorded nature of these Germanic migration flows looks odd, both in size and composition, in the light of some of the comparative literature, it does accord with the fundamental principles behind observed migratory behaviour, once due allowance is made for differences between the first and third millennia.

  Völkerwanderung and Beyond

  The evolving patterns of development and migration unfolding in the Roman era came to a head in the so-called Völkerwanderung. In the later fourth and fifth centuries, documented European history is marked by the appearance of a whole series of migrant groups comprising 10,000 or more warriors and a large number of dependants, which were powerful enough to survive direct confrontation with the military and political structures of the Roman imperial state. Seen in the broadest of terms, these extraordinary pulses of large-group migration were produced by the intersection, at a critical moment, of a number of related lines of development. First, by the mid- to late fourth century, processes of economic and political development among the Germani had reached a point where political structures had sufficient strength to hold together such enormous groups of warriors and their dependants within a reasonably solid edifice. But, second, these structures had been generated by the expansionary processes of the second and third centuries, and were close enough in time to those events to retain a tradition of migration that could be mobilized when circumstances were appropriate or demanded it. And, third, perhaps the other side of the same coin, their economic structures were not yet so rooted in the arable cultivation of any particular landscape that it was impossible for them to conceive of shifting their centre of operations to another locality.

  Viewed against the backdrop of long-term development in the Germanic world, and particularly against the more immediate events of the third-century crisis, the existence and activities of these very large migrant groups are certainly explicable, but that should not take away from the extraordinary nature of the action. For, though larger and more cohesive than their counterparts of the first century, none of the groups that initially emerged from the imperial periphery was in itself large enough to confront the Roman Empire with success, and yet the aggregate outcome of their collective activities, as we have seen, was the destruction of the west Roman state. This highly unpredictable outcome was itself the result of further intersections between contingent historical events and longer-term patterns of development.

  First, it took the unintentional stimulus provided by the Huns to get sufficient numbers of these largely Germanic groups from beyond Rome’s Rhine and Danube frontiers moving on to Roman soil at broadly the same time to make it impossible for the Roman state merely to destroy them. Had these groups – even given that they were larger and more cohesive – arrived separately on Roman territory, the result would eventually have been their destruction, and there were still far too many of them to organize any unified plan for the Empire’s destruction. The key element missing from the Germanic world of the imperial periphery, as opposed to its Arab counterpart, was the lack of a Muhammad to provide an alternative and unifying ideology to that of the Roman state. But, second, once established on Roman soil, the processes of political amalgamation that had been unfolding over the long term beyond the frontier reached a relatively swift climax. This key point was missed in much of the traditional nationalist historiography. By insisting on treating the groups who eventually founded successor states to the western Roman Empire as ancient and unchanging ‘peoples’,13 this historiography missed the fact that most of them were explicitly documented as new coalitions which formed on Roman territory out of several groups – usually three or four – and who had been independent of one another beyond the frontier. Visigoths and Ostrogoths, Merovingian Franks, the Vandal–Alan coalition – all represented a further step-change in the organization of barbarian political structures, and it was this further evolution which really produced groups that were large enough (deploying now 20,000 warriors and more) to destroy the western Empire.14

  Contingent as much of this was – there is no sign that there would have been such an influx on to Roman soil without the intrusion of the Huns – one dimension of the action was far from accidental. The new and much larger political formations that became the basis of the successor states could not have come into being on the far side of the frontier. The level of economic development prevalent in the periphery of the Empire in the fourth century did not produce sufficient surplus to allow political leaderships enough patronage to integrate so many followers in that context. Only when the economy of the Empire could be tapped directly for extra wealth, and when the Roman state was providing extra political stimulation towards unification in the form of a real outside threat, was there a sufficient economic and political basis for these larger entities to come into existence. Political structures were the product of, and limited by, prevailing levels of development, and the new state-forming groups could not have emerged in a purely barbarian context.15

  But if there is a real sense in which the Völkerwanderung can be seen as the culmination of Roman-era patterns of development in barbaricum, its outcomes nonetheless revolutionized broader patterns of development across Europe as a whole. To start with, the new states that emerged on former Roman territory made imperial Europe considerably less imperial. The epicentre of supraregional power in western Europe shifted decisively north around the year 500, the second half of the millennium being marked not by Mediterranean-based imperial power, but a series of broadly Frankish dynasties whose prominence was based on economic and demographic assets located north of the Alps between the Atlantic and the Elbe. Again, this can be seen as a culmination of trends of development set in place in the Roman period. The fact that the new imperial power of western Europe should be based on a combination of a chunk of former Roman territory with a substantial part of its ex-periphery is a clear sign of how profoundly that periphery had been transformed by its interaction with Roman power in the preceding centuries. At the birth of Christ, this landscape on either side of the Rhine could never have supported an imperial power, not being remotely wealthy or populous enough, but Roman-era development on both banks of the river radically transformed this situation. At the same time, the political structures of post-Roman Frankish-dominated western Europe, particularly the militarization of its landed elites, meant that this new imperial state was different in kind to its Roman predecessor. Lacking the power
to tax agricultural production systematically, it was a less dominant and less self-sufficient kind of entity, which required the profits of expansion to provide its rulers with enough patronage to integrate its constituent landowners. And when broader circumstances did not allow for expansion, fragmentation followed, with power quickly seeping away from the centre to the peripheral localities. Periods of great central authority and external aggression – the hallmarks of empire – thus alternated with others of disunity in the second half of the millennium, where Roman imperialism had previously presented a more consistently cohesive face. There is a real sense in which the pre-existing inequalities of the first half of the millennium were in part eroded from the top, as it were, by the fact that imperial Europe became less consistently imperial.

  More fundamentally, and also more interesting given that it has been so much less discussed, is the effect of the Völkerwanderung upon barbarian Europe. By the sixth century, Germanic-dominated Europe as it had stood in the Roman era had almost completely collapsed. Where, up to the fourth century, similar socioeconomic and political structures had prevailed over a huge territory from the Rhine to the Vistula in the north and to the River Don at their fullest extent in the south, by c.550 AD, their direct descendants were essentially restricted to lands west of the Elbe, with an outlying pocket on the Great Hungarian Plain, which was about to be terminated by the arrival of the Avars (Map 15). The Völkerwanderung had played a central role in this revolution, though not by actually emptying these landscapes of all their inhabitants. Settlement did completely disappear in some restricted localities, but, even making maximum assumptions, the exodus from Germanic Europe from the fourth to the sixth century was not on a large enough scale to denude central and eastern Europe of its entire population. What the Völkerwanderung clearly did do, however, was empty much of the old inner and outer peripheries of the Empire of the armed and organized, socially elite groupings which had previously run them. From the perspective of barbarian Europe, the period saw not just the collapse of the Roman Empire, but also the collapse of the larger state-like structures and organizations of its periphery, the vast majority of which relocated themselves, in the course of the migrations, on to parts of just the old inner periphery – between the Rhine and the Elbe, and the Great Hungarian Plain – and actual, largely western Roman territory.

  This first extraordinary revolution in barbarian Europe marked a caesura in over half a millennium of broadly continuous development over large parts of central and eastern Europe. It also allowed a second and equally dramatic transformation. In the aftermath of Germanic collapse, population groups from the third zone of Europe as it stood at the start of the Roman era started to develop, for the first time as far as we can see, substantial political, economic and cultural interactions with the rest of Europe. The Romans had some kind of knowledge of the Venedi who inhabited that part of Europe’s low-speed zone closest to them. Tacitus in the first century knew that they were out there, beyond the Vistula and the Carpathians; Ptolemy a couple of generations later could add the names of a few of their broader social groupings. But, remarkably, there is no evidence at all that these populations were sucked into the political events of the first half of the millennium in any shape or form. Venedi mounted no known raids into Roman territory, find no mention in narratives of the Marcomannic War or the third-century crisis, and do not even seem to have participated in the structures of Attila’s Empire, which incorporated so many of the other population groups of central and eastern Europe. Nor do the distribution maps of Roman imports suggest that these European population groups from east of the Vistula and north of the Carpathians played a major role in any of the trade networks stretching out into barbaricum in the Roman era, though some of the routes surely passed through their territories.

  More or less immediately after the collapse of Germanic Europe, however, Slavic-speakers started to emerge from the low-speed zone to take an increasingly important role in recorded narratives of broader European history. By about 500 AD, they had moved south and east of the Carpathians into direct contact with the east Roman frontier, and were beginning to raid across it. Their capacity to do so may have been the result of preceding interactions with Goths and others of the more organized groups of the Germanic periphery to the Roman Empire, which pass more or less unmentioned in our historical sources.16 Be that as it may, the new contacts with the east Roman Empire massively accelerated any nascent processes of development already operating among those Slavic groups involved, as raiding and diplomatic subsidies brought in unprecedented quantities of movable wealth, and stimulated among them both militarization and the formation of larger political structures, both of which allowed profits from the new relationship with Constantinopolitan territories to be maximized. All this ran parallel to some of the kinds of transformation seen in the Germanic world in the early Roman period, and, following the collapse of Germanic Europe, Slavic-speakers had already emerged by 550 as the main barbarian ‘other’ confronting east Rome’s civilization in south-eastern Europe.

  At this point, a second nomadic ‘accident’ bent existing processes of development substantially out of shape, and acted as a crucial catalyst in the further transformation of barbarian Europe. Like the Huns, the Avars swiftly built a powerful military coalition in central Europe, one of whose main effects was to siphon off still larger amounts of Mediterranean-generated wealth into now largely Slavic-dominated central Europe. This, of course, further stimulated the competition for control of that wealth, which had already been producing a new kind of military kingship in the Slavic world even before the Avars appeared. Equally important, and just like the Huns, the Avars lacked the governmental capacity to rule their large number of subject groups directly, operating instead through a series of intermediate leaders drawn in part from those subject groups. We lack much in the way of detailed information, but there is every reason to suppose that this would have had the political effect of cementing the social power of chosen subordinates, further pushing at least their Slavic subjects in the direction of political consolidation.17 The third major effect of the Avars was both to prompt and to enable a wider Slavic diaspora, as some Slavic groups moved further afield to escape the burden of Avar domination. Large-scale Slavic settlement in the former east Roman Balkans – as opposed to mere raiding – only became possible when the Avar Empire (in combination with the Persian and then Arab conquests) destroyed Constantinople’s military superiority in the region. But at least some of these Slavs were as much negatively motivated by a desire to escape Avar domination as they were by a positive desire to move on to Roman territory. Elsewhere we lack historical narratives, but the same desire to escape Avar domination surely played a substantial role in the widespread further dispersals of Slavic groups from c.550 onwards: westwards towards the Elbe, northwards to the Baltic, and even eastwards into the heart of Russia and Ukraine. It remains unclear to what extent this eastern expansion represented the first intrusion of Slavic-speakers into western Russia, or whether we are really looking at the expansion of particular groups of Slavic-speakers who had been made more politically organized and militarily potent through their interactions with the East Romans and Avars, and were thus able to assert their dominance over fellow Slavic-speakers who had not participated in the same process.

  Either way, the process of Slavicization – the establishment of the dominance of Slavic-speaking groups across vast areas of central and eastern Europe – again combined processes of migration and development in intimate embrace. Interaction with the Roman Empire’s more developed economy generated new wealth flows which prompted political consolidation and militarization among at least some Slavs. But the groups who benefited from this new wealth were only able to do so because they had already physically moved into a tighter Roman orbit after the collapse of the Hunnic Empire, presumably in order to make precisely these kinds of gain. The sociopolitical revolution they experienced as a consequence then pre-prepared them, especially
under the extra stimulus provided by the Avars, to spread their domination by further migration across broad swathes of central and eastern Europe. Some of this certainly involved the absorption of the clearly numerous indigenous populations that had survived the processes of Germanic collapse. Some of that absorption will have been peaceful, as some east Roman sources suggest, but at the same time many Slavic groups were becoming increasingly militarized, and the results of Slavicization were strikingly monolithic. If some Slavic groups, particularly of the Korchak type, remained peaceful small-scale farmers up to the year 600 and beyond, many others were undergoing rapid transformation as new wealth brought social differentiation and militarization. Much of the subsequent Slavicization of Europe was clearly brought about by the armed and dangerous Slavs, not the Korchak farmers – not least in those parts of Russia where Slavic domination was advanced by communities of a few hundred pushing one fortified settlement after another into clearly hostile territory.