The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization
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1.2 The ‘Wandering of Peoples’ (Völkerwanderung), which overran the western empire, as shown in an historical atlas.
1.3 ‘Attila followed by his barbarian hordes tramples on Italy and the Arts’. Detail from Delacroix’s painting of 1847 in the library of the Assemblée Nationale, Paris.
Unsurprisingly, an image of violent and destructive Germanic invasion was very much alive in continental Europe in the years that immediately followed the Second World War.14 But in the latter half of the twentieth century, as a new and peaceful western Europe became established, views of the invaders gradually softened and became more positive (Fig. 1.4). For instance, book titles like The Germanic Invasions: The Making of Europe AD 400–600 (of 1975) did not question the reality of the invasions, but did present them as a positive force in the shaping of modern Europe.15
More recently, however, some historians have gone very much further than this, notably the Canadian historian Walter Goffart, who in 1980 launched a challenge to the very idea of fifth-century ‘invasions’.16 He argued that the Germanic peoples were the beneficiaries of a change in Roman military policy. Instead of continuing the endless struggle to keep them out, the Romans decided to accommodate them into the empire by an ingenious and effective arrangement. The newcomers were granted a proportion of the tax revenues of the Roman state, and the right to settle within the imperial frontiers; in exchange, they ceased their attacks, and diverted their energies into upholding Roman power, of which they were now stakeholders. In effect, they became the Roman defence force: ‘The Empire … had better things to do than engage in a ceaseless, sterile effort to exclude foreigners for whom it could find useful employment.’17
1.4 The barbarian tamed. Two late-twentieth-century images of Germanic settlers. In one, a warrior-king has removed his helmet, to show that he is a worldly-wise, even kindly, middle-aged man, not a testosterone-driven thug. In the other, the shield has become a fashion accessory.
Goffart was very well aware that sometimes Romans and Germanic newcomers were straightforwardly at war, but he argued that ‘the fifth century was less momentous for invasions than for the incorporation of barbarian protectors into the fabric of the West’. In a memorable sound bite, he summed up his argument: ‘what we call the Fall of the Western Roman empire was an imaginative experiment that got a little out of hand.’18 Rome did fall, but only because it had voluntarily delegated away its own power, not because it had been successfully invaded.
Like the new and positive ‘Late Antiquity’, the idea that the Germanic invasions were in fact a peaceful accommodation has had a mixed reception. The world at large has seemingly remained content with a dramatic ‘Fall of the Roman empire’, played out as a violent and brutal struggle between invaders and invaded (Fig. 1.5). But, amongst historians, the new thinking has definitely had an effect, particularly on the overall packaging of the Germanic settlements. For instance, a recent European volume about the first post-Roman states is entitled Kingdoms of the Empire: The Integration of Barbarians in Late Antiquity.19 There is no hint here of invasion or force, nor even that the Roman empire came to an end; instead there is a strong suggestion that the incomers fitted easily into a continuing and evolving Roman world.
To be fair, Goffart himself acknowledged that his account of peaceful accommodation was not the full story—some of the Germanic incomers had simply seized what they wanted by violence. After all, he stated clearly that the late Roman experiment in buying military support had ‘got a little out of hand’. But such nuances seem to have been forgotten in some recent works, which present the theory of peaceful accommodation as a universally applicable model to explain the end of the Roman empire. For instance, two distinguished American historians have recently stated that the barbarian settlements occurred ‘in a natural, organic, and generally eirenic manner’, and take issue with those historians who still ‘demonize the barbarians and problematize the barbarian settlements’—in other words, those who still believe in violent and unpleasant invasion.20 As someone who is convinced that the coming of the Germanic peoples was very unpleasant for the Roman population, and that the long-term effects of the dissolution of the empire were dramatic, I feel obliged to challenge such views.
1.5 The traditional view of the fall of empire—Romans and barbarians fight it out.
PART ONE
THE FALL OF ROME
II
THE HORRORS OF WAR
IN 446 LEO, bishop of Rome, wrote to his colleagues in the North African province of Mauretania Caesariensis. In this letter Leo grappled with the problem of how the Church should treat nuns raped by the Vandals some fifteen years earlier, as they passed through Mauretania on their way to Carthage—‘handmaids of God who have lost the integrity of their honour through the oppression of the barbarians’, as he discreetly put it. His suggestion was intended to be humane, though it will seem cruel to a modern reader. He agreed that these women had not sinned in mind. Nonetheless, he decreed that the violation of their bodies placed them in a new intermediate status, above holy widows who had chosen celibacy only late in life, but below holy virgins who were bodily intact. Leo advised the raped women that ‘they will be more praiseworthy in their humility and sense of shame, if they do not dare to compare themselves to uncontaminated virgins’.1 These unfortunate nuns and Bishop Leo would be very surprised, and not a little shocked, to learn that it is now fashionable to play down the violence and unpleasantness of the invasions that brought down the empire in the West.
The Use and the Threat of Force
The Germanic invaders of the western empire seized or extorted through the threat of force the vast majority of the territories in which they settled, without any formal agreement on how to share resources with their new Roman subjects. The impression given by some recent historians that most Roman territory was formally ceded to them as part of treaty arrangements is quite simply wrong. Wherever the evidence is moderately full, as it is from the Mediterranean provinces, conquest or surrender to the threat of force was definitely the norm, not peaceful settlement.
A treaty between the Roman government and the Visigoths, which settled the latter in Aquitaine in 419, features prominently in all recent discussions of ‘accommodation’. But those historians who present this settlement as advantageous to Romans and Visigoths alike do not go on to say that the territory granted in 419 was tiny in comparison to what the Visigoths subsequently wrested by actual force, or by the threat of force, from the Roman government and from the Roman provincials. The agreed settlement of 419 was centred on the Garonne valley between Toulouse and Bordeaux. By the end of the century the Visigoths had expanded their power in all directions, conquering or extorting a vastly larger area: all south-west Gaul as far as the Pyrenees; Provence, including the two great cities of Arles and Marseille; Clermont and the Auvergne; and almost the entire Iberian peninsula (Fig. 2.1).2 From Clermont we have some contemporary evidence of the local response to their expansion. Armed resistance was organized by the city’s bishop and aristocracy, and was for a time vigorous and effective. Clermont surrendered to the Visigoths only on the orders of the Roman government in Italy, which hoped thereby to save Provence and the strategically much more important cities of Arles and Marseille. We are told, admittedly by a very partisan source, that at one point during a siege, rather than surrender, the starving inhabitants of Clermont were reduced to eating grass.3 This is all a very far cry from a peaceful and straightforward ‘accommodation’ of the Visigoths into the provincial life of Roman Gaul.
The experience of conquest was, of course, very varied across the empire. Some regions were overrun brutally but swiftly. For example, the Vandals’ conquest of North Africa, starting in 429 and culminating in the capture of Carthage in 439, was a terrible shock to an area of the empire that had escaped unscathed earlier troubles, and we have already encountered the nuns of Mauretania who were caught up in this violence. But after 439 Africa was spared further Germanic invasion, although it increa
singly had its own native problems, from the fierce Berber tribes of the interior.
Other regions, particularly those near the frontiers of the empire, suffered from much more prolonged violence. Northern, eastern, and central Gaul, for instance, were contested in the fifth century between a bewildering number of warring groups: Romans, Bacaudae, Britons, Saxons, Franks, Burgundians, Thuringians, Alamans, Alans, and Goths all fought for control of Gaul, sometimes in alliance with each other, but sometimes fragmented into even smaller groupings. This unrest lasted for almost a century after the Germanic crossing of the Rhine during the winter of 406–7. In this part of the Roman world, a degree of internal peace and stability returned only at the end of the fifth century, with the establishment of larger Frankish and Burgundian kingdoms. Similarly, though for a somewhat shorter period—from 409 until the Visigothic conquests of the 470s—control of the Iberian peninsula was fought over by Romans, Bacaudae, Alans, Sueves, Goths, and two distinct groups of Vandals. The Chronicle written by Hydatius, a bishop based in the north-west of the peninsula, gives a highly abbreviated but none the less depressing account of the repeated raiding and invasion that were the inevitable consequence of this contest for power. Hydatius associated the arrival of the barbarians in Spain with the four scourges prophesied in the Book of Revelations, and claimed that mothers were even driven to kill, cook, and eat their own children. More prosaically, and more reliably, in 460 he himself was seized inside his cathedral church by a band of Sueves who held him prisoner for three months.4
2.1 The original settlement by treaty of the Visigoths (in 419), and the areas they had taken by force by the end of the century.
Even those few regions that eventually passed relatively peacefully into Germanic control had all previously experienced invasion and devastatation. For instance, the territory in Aquitaine that was ceded to the Visigoths in the settlement of 419 had already suffered raids and devastation between 407 and 409, and in 413 large parts of it had again been ravaged, this time by the Visigoths themselves, the future ‘peaceful’ settlers of the region.5 A similar story can be told of Italy and of the city of Rome. During the middle years of the fifth century Italy slipped slowly and quietly into Germanic hands, culminating in a coup and brief civil war in 476, which deposed the last resident western emperor, sent him into retirement, and established an independent kingdom. If this were the whole story of Italy’s late antique contact with the Germanic peoples, it would indeed have been a remarkably peaceful transition. However, between 401 and 412 the Goths had marched, at one time or another, the length and breadth of the peninsula, while in 405–6 another invading army had troubled the north and centre. The widespread damage caused by these incursions is shown by the extensive tax relief that the imperial government was forced to grant in 413, the year after the Goths had left the peninsula. This was a time when the emperor desperately needed more, rather than less, money, not only to fight the invaders, but also to resist a string of pretenders to the throne. Yet it was decreed in 413 that, for a five-year period, all the provinces of central and southern Italy were to be excused four-fifths of their tax burden in order to restore them to well-being. Furthermore, the damage that the Goths had inflicted appears to have been long-lasting. In 418, six years after the Goths had left Italy for good, several provinces were still struggling to pay even this substantially reduced rate of taxation, and had to be granted an extended and increased remission.6
The city of Rome was a powerful bargaining counter in negotiations with the western emperor, and it was repeatedly besieged by the Goths, before being captured and sacked over a three-day period in August 410. We are told that during one siege the inhabitants were forced progressively ‘to reduce their rations and to eat only half the previous daily allowance, and later, when the scarcity continued, only a third’. ‘When there was no means of relief, and their food was exhausted, plague not unexpectedly succeeded famine. Corpses lay everywhere …’ The eventual fall of the city, according to another account, occurred because a rich lady ‘felt pity for the Romans who were being killed off by starvation and who were already turning to cannibalism’, and so opened the gates to the enemy.7
Nor was the departure of the Goths for Gaul in 412 the end of the woes of Rome and Italy. In 439 the Vandals seized the port and fleet at Carthage, on the North African coast opposite Sicily, and began a period of sea-raiding and conquest in the Mediterranean. Sicily, up to this date immune from trouble, was particularly badly affected, but Vandal raids also reached much further afield. In 455 a Vandal fleet captured Rome itself, and, over a fourteen-day period, subjected it to a second, much more systematic, sack, eventually sailing back to Carthage with its ships laden with booty and captives. Amongst the prisoners were the widow and two daughters of the late emperor of the West, Valentinian III. These imperial women, being very valuable, were certainly treated with care; but other captives had a far harder time—we are told that the then bishop of Carthage sold his church’s plate in order to buy prisoners and prevent families from being broken up, when husbands, wives, and children were sold separately into slavery.8
Living through Invasion
A remarkable text, the Life of a late-fifth-century saint, provides a vivid account of what it was like to live in a province under repeated attack. Severinus was born in the East, but chose for his ministry a western frontier province, Noricum Ripense, on the south bank of the Danube, now within modern Austria and Bavaria (Fig. 2.2). He arrived in Noricum shortly after 453, and remained there for almost thirty years, until his own death. Like the accounts of other saints’ lives, that of Severinus does not provide a coherent and full record of political and military events during his lifetime; rather it is a collection of vignettes, centred around his miracles. However, because Severinus served a provincial population under attack, the Life provides plenty of circumstantial detail on relations between Roman provincials and the Germanic invaders. It is also fortunate that the author of the Life, Eugippius, who shared many of Severinus’ experiences in Noricum, was a good raconteur.9
2.2 The upper Danube in the time of Severinus of Noricum.
By the time Severinus arrived, Noricum had already experienced nearly fifty years of insecurity and warfare, including a short-lived revolt against imperial rule by the Noricans themselves.10 It would seem that during these decades Roman administration, and any control over the province from the imperial court in Italy, had already disappeared. There is no mention in the Life of a Roman governor of Noricum, nor of an imperial military commander, and the neighbouring provinces, of Raetia and Pannonia, seem already to have fallen almost completely into Germanic hands. Eugippius indeed describes the Roman defences of the Danube as a thing of the past: ‘Throughout the time that the Roman empire existed, the soldiery of many towns was maintained at public expense for the defence of the frontier. When this practice fell into abeyance, both these troops and the frontier disappeared.’ He goes on to tell a wonderfully evocative story of how the last vestige of imperial military power in the region finally came to an end. Apparently, despite the general collapse of the Roman defensive system, one imperial garrison, that of the city of Batavis, was still in existence in Severinus’ time. But the only way the soldiers could receive their pay was by sending some of their number south and over the Alps into Italy to collect it. On the very last occasion that this was done, the emissaries ‘were killed during the journey by barbarians’; their bodies were later found washed up on the banks of the river. No more imperial pay ever reached Batavis.11
During Severinus’ time, the defence of the region seems to have depended, not on imperial organization, nor even on a united provincial defence, but on the initiative of individual cities. Furthermore, local control does not seem to have extended far beyond the walled settlements; a number of different Germanic peoples were active, raiding or fighting, deep within the province—above all Rugi and Alamans, but also Thuringians, Ostrogoths, and Herules—and the Life records several incidents in which pe
ople were either killed or captured in the Norican countryside. Two men, for instance, were seized in broad daylight within two miles of the city of Favianis, having left the safety of the walls to gather in the fruit harvest.12
In the years that he spent in Noricum, Severinus was able to help the provincials in their dealings with the invaders in a number of different ways. On one occasion, it was his miraculous foretelling of events that saved the city of Lauriacum from a surprise attack; but for the most part his aid seems to have been more mundane. In particular, he was able to win the respect of successive kings of the Rugi and Alamans, despite the fact that the latter were still pagan, and to intervene with them on his flock’s behalf. When an Alaman king came to visit Severinus in Batavis, the latter was able to negotiate the release of around seventy captives.13 However, the Life makes it clear that, over the course of Severinus’ stay, what power and independence still remained to the Noricans gradually ebbed away. The city of Tiburnia escaped capture only by buying off its besiegers; while Asturis, Ioviaco, and Batavis all fell to assault. Ioviaco, we are told, was captured by Herules, who ‘made a surprise attack, sacked the town, led many into captivity’, and hanged a priest who had been foolish enough to ignore Severinus’ warnings to abandon the settlement; and at Batavis, when the city fell to Thuringians, those still in the town (having ignored similar saintly warnings) were either killed or led into captivity.14