The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History

by Peter Heather

  In the last few centuries BC, an extensive (rather than intensive) type of arable agriculture had prevailed across Germanic Europe. It alternated short periods of cultivation with long periods of fallow, and required a relatively large area of land to support a given population. These early Iron Age peoples lacked techniques for maintaining the fertility of their arable fields for prolonged production, and could use them for only a few years before moving on. Ploughing generally took the form of narrow, criss-crossed scrapings, rather than the turning-over of a proper furrow so that weeds rot their nutrients back into the soil. Ash was the main fertilizer.

  This is where the settlements of Feddersen Wierde and Wijster differ. For early in the Roman period, western Germani developed entirely new techniques, using the manure from their animals together, probably, with a more sophisticated kind of two-crop rotation scheme, both to increase yields and to keep the soil producing beyond the short term. For the first time in northern Europe, it thus became possible for human beings to live together in more or less permanent, clustered (or ‘nucleated’) settlements. Further north and east, the muck took longer to spread. In what is now Poland, the territories of the Wielbark and Przeworsk cultures, Germanic settlements remained small, short-lived and highly dispersed in the first two centuries AD. By the fourth, however, the new techniques had taken firm hold. Settlements north of the Black Sea, in areas dominated by the Goths, could be very substantial; the largest, Budesty, covered an area of thirty-five hectares. And enough pieces of ploughing equipment have been found to show that populations under Gothic control were now using iron coulters and ploughshares to turn the earth properly, if not to a great depth. Recent work has shown that villages had emerged in Scandinavia too. More intensive arable agriculture was on the march, and pollen diagrams confirm that between the birth of Christ and the fifth century, cereal pollens, at the expense of grass and tree pollens, reached an unprecedented high across wide areas of what is now Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany. Large tracts of new land were being brought into cultivation and worked with greater intensity.44

  THE MAIN OUTCOME of all this was that the population of Germanic-dominated Europe increased massively over these Roman centuries. The basic constraint upon the size of any population is the availability of food. The Germanic agricultural revolution massively increased the amount available, and the increase in population shows up in the cemetery evidence. Cemeteries in continuous use throughout the Roman period all show dramatic rises in burial numbers from the later period.

  Other sectors of the economy were also transformed. It is impossible to construct any kind of global overview, but iron production in Germania increased massively. In Poland, production at the two largest centres (in the Swietokrzyskie Mountains and in southern Mazovia) generated in the Roman period 8–9 million kilos of raw iron. This was much more than could have been consumed by local Przeworsk populations, and plenty of smaller extraction and smelting sites have also been recovered, such as the fifteen or so fourth-century smithies clustered on the bank of a river at Sinicy in the Gothic-dominated Ukraine. Similarly with pottery: at the start of the Roman period, the Germani made all of theirs by hand, and for the most part, apparently, on a local and ad hoc basis. By the fourth century, this kind of pottery was being replaced by wheel-made wares, fired at much higher temperatures and hence more durable and more sophisticated. These were the products of highly skilled craftsmen. Whether Germanic potters could make a living just from their pottery is unclear, but economic diversification was certainly under way. The change was most marked in areas of production geared to elite consumption. Grave goods show that glass was a treasured item among Germanic populations in the early centuries AD. Up to about the year 300, all glass found in Germanic contexts was imported from the Roman Empire. This is presumably why it was so valued – rather like Italian handbags are now. In the 1960s, however, at Komarov on the outer fringes of the Carpathians, excavators unearthed a fourth-century glass foundry. Such was the quality of its widely distributed products (all the way from Norway to the Crimea) that they had previously been thought to be Roman imports. The glass factory, complete with moulds, left no doubt that they were made in Germania.

  A similar story can be told about precious metals. Up to the birth of Christ, very few indigenously produced items of precious metalwork have been identified in Germanic settings, and in the first two centuries AD the vast majority of decorative items were still being produced in bronze only. By the fourth century, intricate silver safety-pins (fibulae) of a number of types had become familiar items of Germanic dress; and a few examples survive of work on a grander scale, notably one of the silver dishes of the famous treasure unearthed at Pietroasa in Romania in the late nineteenth century. How some, at least, of this ware was produced is suggested by evidence from the village of Birlad-Valea Seaca (in modern Romania), which probably fell within the territory ruled by Athanaric of the Tervingi. A characteristic grave good of Gothic territories north of the Black Sea is a composite comb made from deer antler. Combs had great cultural importance. Hairstyles were used by some Germanic groups to express either group affiliations (as in the famous Suebian knot) or status (the long hair of the Merovingian rulers of the Franks). At Birlad-Valea Seaca, excavators unearthed nearly twenty huts containing combs and their constituent parts at different stages of production. Clearly, the entire village was devoted to manufacturing combs.45

  There is much more that we’d like to know. Were these combs being produced commercially and exchanged, or was this some kind of subject village from which so many combs were demanded annually as tribute? Whatever the answer, there is no mistaking the extent and importance of the economic revolution that had transformed Germanic Europe by the fourth century. New skills were being developed, and goods were being distributed over far wider areas. Some of this production may have been non-commercial, goods being destined as gifts from one ruler to another, for example, but we know that the Tervingi traded extensively with the Roman world, as did peoples on the Rhine frontier. And although no coinage was produced in Germania, Roman coins were in plentiful circulation and could easily have provided a medium of exchange (already in the first century, Tacitus tells us, the Germani of the Rhine region were using good-quality Roman silver coins for this purpose).

  ECONOMIC EXPANSION was accompanied by social revolution. Dominant social elites had not always existed in Germanic Europe, or, at least, their presence is not visible in the cemeteries which are the main source of our knowledge. For much of the first millennium BC, central and northern Europe was marked by a near-universal adherence to cremation as the main form of burial rite, and grave goods were pretty much the same everywhere: some tatty handmade pottery and the odd decorated pin. Only in the third century BC did richer burials (the grandest among them often referred to by their German term, Fürstengraber, ‘princely graves’) begin to appear, and they were few and far between. Once again it was first in the Roman imperial period that strikingly disparate quantities of goods began to be buried with different members of the same Germanic communities. In the west, rich graves cluster chronologically, with one group at the end of the first century AD and another at the end of the second. But it is extremely unlikely that ‘princes’ existed only at these isolated moments, so that there is no easy correlation between wealthy burials and social status. Further east, numbers of grave goods built up similarly over the Roman period, but other means, such as huge mounds of stones, for marking out special status were first explored by second-century Germani. Unusually rich or grand burials say most, of course, about the pretensions and claims of those doing the burying, and it has been suggested that rich burials mark moments of intense social competition rather than moments of particular wealth.46

  Fortunately, we have some less ambiguous evidence, some of it written, to help us interpret their longer-term significance. Although there is little sign in the first century of the hereditary transmission of political pre-eminence, and leadership even
within small groupings was often multiple rather than individual, in the fourth century leadership among the Tervingi was handed down across three generations of the same family: in reverse order, Athanaric, his father the hostage, and the leader of the Tervingi who negotiated with Constantine. The best-informed of our Greek and Latin sources consistently label these leaders ‘judges’, but we don’t know what title ‘judge’ translates. There is every reason to suppose that the power of the second stratum of kings and princes, beneath these overall leaders, was also hereditary. A similar pattern prevailed among the Alamanni. The position of over-king was not hereditary, as we noted earlier, not least because the Romans tended to remove those who achieved that status; but the status of Alamannic sub-kings clearly was. Mederichus, the high-status Alamannic hostage who changed his son’s name to Serapio in honour of the Egyptian god, was the brother of Chnodomarius who led the Alamanni to defeat at Strasbourg in 357. Serapio also ruled as a king, and commanded the army’s right wing in the battle – a sign, perhaps, that he was not overly enamoured of his exotically Mediterranean name. Succession may not have passed straightforwardly from father to son, but Chnodomarius, Mederichus and Serapio represent a royal clan with the ability to pass its power across the generations. The same was probably true of other Alamannic kings. When the Romans eliminated the over-king Vadomarius, considering him to pose too great a threat, they also removed his son Vithicabius from the scene, suggesting that the father’s power was at least potentially heritable.47

  Archaeological evidence, too, has shed important light on the fourth-century Germanic elite. Archaeologists have managed to identify, dotted across Germania, some of the centres and dwellings from which it exercised dominion. On the fringes of the Rhine valley, in prime Alamannic country, excavations on the hill known as the Runderberg at the town of Urach have revealed a massive fourth-century timber rampart surrounding an ovoid area of seventy by fifty metres. Inside, several buildings were constructed, including a large timber hall, and smaller buildings dotted the hillside below. The hall was very much the kind of place where Alamannic leaders would have hosted gatherings for each other, and no doubt also feasted their retainers. Whether the smaller dwellings were occupied by retainers, craftsmen or ordinary Alamanni is not yet clear (the excavation has not been fully published). Further east, in Gothic-dominated territories, a few fortified centres, such as Alexandrovka, have been identified and partially explored. On most sites north of the Black Sea, Roman pottery sherds account for between 15 and 40 per cent of the total findings. At Alexandrovka, Roman, largely wine, amphorae sherds amount to 72 per cent; clearly a lot of entertaining went on here. What would appear to be the villa of another Gothic leader has been found at Kamenka-Antechrak. Consisting of four stone buildings with annexes and a courtyard, it covered an area of 3,800 square metres. Its extensive storage facilities and its above-average quantity of Roman pottery (over 50 per cent, this time consisting of both wine amphorae sherds and fine table wares) indicate that it, too, was a major consumption centre. At Pietroasa in Romania, finds of pottery and storage facilities show that a fourth-century Gothic leader reused an old Roman fort for similar purposes. This kind of separate elite dwelling was a new phenomenon.48

  Clearly, therefore, the new wealth generated by the Germanic economic revolution did not end up evenly distributed, but was dominated by particular groups. Any new flow of wealth – such as that generated by the Industrial Revolution, in more modern times, or globalization – will always spark off intense competition for its control; and, if the amount of new wealth is large enough, those who control it will erect entirely new authority structures. In Western Europe, for instance, the Industrial Revolution eventually destroyed the social and political dominance of the landowning class who had run things since the Middle Ages, because the size of the new industrial fortunes made the amount of money you could make from farming even large areas look silly. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Germania’s economic revolution triggered a sociopolitical one, and other archaeological finds have illuminated some of the processes involved.

  In antiquity, much of the Jutland peninsula was dotted with pools and extensive peat bogs, now largely dried out by modern land reclamation projects. Recent excavations have shown that, because of their capacity to swallow even very large items, these and similar parts of the North Sea coastal hinterland have long been used by nearby populations as depositories for their sacrifical goods. Individual items – from chariots to gold dishes – datable to a variety of periods have been unearthed. In the Roman period, from the later second to the fourth century AD, a series of weapon sacrifices were made, many of which have emerged from bogs and pools across the area: Vimose, Thorsbjerg, Nydam near Ostersotrrup, and Ejsbøl Mose. Many comprised the arms and equipment of large retinues – even whole armies – which were ritually mutilated as part of the sacrificial act. The most astonishing set of finds of the third century, made at Ejsbøl Mose in southern Jutland, gives us the profile of the force to which the weapons originally belonged. In this excavation archaeologists found the weapons of a small army of two hundred men armed with spears, lances and shields (at least sixty also carried swords and knives); an unknown number of archers (675 arrowheads were excavated) and twelve to fifteen men, nine of them mounted, with more exclusive equipment. This was a highly organized force, with a clear hierarchy and a considerable degree of military specialization: a leader and his retinue, not a bunch of peasant soldiers.49

  From this we can begin to see how leaders could so distance themselves from their peers as to make their power hereditary. In the Germanic world of the first century, power ebbed and flowed quickly. But if one generation of a family could use its new wealth to recruit an organized military force of the kind found at Ejsbøl Mose, and then pass on both wealth and retainers, its chances of replicating power over several generations were considerably increased. Organized military forces provided the enforcement by which the claims aired in rich burials were asserted in practice. By the fourth century, retinues were a crucial attribute of the powerful. Chnodomarius, the Alamannic leader defeated by Julian at Strasbourg, had a personal retinue of 200 warriors,50 inviting comparison with the Ejsbøl Mose deposit.

  Other sources emphasize that such retinues had plenty of uses outside of battle. The persecution of Christians which the Goth Athanaric launched after partially extracting the Tervingi from Roman domination in 369 generated a document of particular vividness, the Passion of St Saba, the story of the persecution and death of the Gothic martyr of that name. Saba was a ‘proper’ member of the Tervingi, not the descendant of Roman prisoners. The Passion was written on Roman territory, where the saint’s body was found after his death. Among the many precious details we are given is that intermediate-level leaders among the Tervingi had their own retinues and used them to enforce their will. It was a pair of heavies sent by a certain Atharid who eventually did Saba to death by drowning.51

  Retinues also help explain the nature of fourth-century seats of power. They were built and functioned, as we have seen, as centres of consumption (like the Runderberg, or Pietroasa in Romania). From the early medieval texts we learn that generous entertaining was the main virtue required of Germanic leaders in return for loyal service, and there is no reason to suppose this a new phenomenon. It required not only large halls, but also a regular flow of foodstuffs and the means to purchase items such as Roman wine, not produced by the local economy. As the existence of specialist craftworkers also emphasizes, Germania’s economy had developed sufficiently beyond its old Jastorf norms to support a far larger number of non-agricultural producers.

  The bog deposits make another crucial point. As sacrifices to the gods, they were probably thank offerings for victory: the Ejsbøl Mose deposit celebrates the destruction of the 200 men whose weapons were consigned to its depths. There’s no way of knowing exactly who they were. Were they the army of one small Germanic group defeated by that of another? Tacitus offers a revealing commentar
y on some Chatti and those who defeated them, a group of Hermenduri, in a struggle over salt deposits: ‘Both sides, in the event of victory, had vowed their enemies to Mars and Mercury. This vow implied the sacrifice of the entire beaten side with their horses and all their possessions.’52 The ritual sacrifice of defeated enemies was clearly not new. Just one of these small first-century tribal groupings could have put more than a couple of hundred men in the field, so that the Ejsbøl Mose deposit may celebrate the destruction of a bunch of rootless warriors on the make – possibly defeated while raiding south Jutland for booty, or in order to establish the kind of dominance that would have allowed them to extract tribute and foodstuffs more regularly. Either way, the find shows that while new flows of wealth usually end up being distributed unequally, this never happens without conflict.

  Another feature of much of Germania in the Roman period was a marked increase in the number of weapons burials. Military retinues were not only the result of sociopolitical revolution, but also the vehicle by which it was generated, and large-scale internal violence was probably a feature of the Germanic world from the second to fourth centuries. The hereditary dynasts who dominated the new Alamannic, Frankish and Saxon confederations probably established their power through aggressive competition. The same was true, in a slightly different context, of the Gothic world further east. There, a much larger element of migration was involved, but to create the confederations such as Athanaric’s Tervingi, indigenous populations had to be subdued and new hereditary hierarchies established. In both east and west, the growing wealth of the region generated a fierce struggle for control, and allowed the emergence of specialist military forces as the means to win it. The outcome of these processes was the larger political confederation characteristic of Germania in the fourth century.

  The Beginnings of Feudalism?