The Problem of Barbarians

LightSpectra said:

Plotinus was worried that there was a clique forming on this board? The mods are in it too now.

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I'm missing out on all the cabal fun!

Guy H said:

http://600transformer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/two-worlds-become-one-counter-intuitive.html

Might be of interest.

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It is.

It's certainly been clear to me in what relatively little modern literature I've read on the so-called migration period that most of the people that use that term don't really do a good job of recognizing that migration was a regular part of frontier life, let alone distinguishing the fifth century migrations from the other migratory activity that went on. It's really quite amazing how an author like Peter Heather can take the receptio of the Limigantes, say, and then not really discuss what these sorts of things mean for the flows of people across the frontier.

It might be a good idea to make clear that the article is really only dealing with the former frontier of the Western Empire, though. As I understand it, the traditional use of Völkerwanderung continues the migration narrative beyond the Lombards and accounts for Slavs, Avars, Magyars, and other stuff taking place in "outer Europe". It's dubious periodization, of course, but it's still a Thing, at least, as far as I'm aware. (Heather, at the very least, seems to think it is, judging by his book from a few years ago.) It was especially jarring to not see anything about the Slavs in an article for German History - but then run into the epigram about the fall of the Empire ending the migrations.

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Out of curiosity, I was wondering if you have a blog response to the notion of DNA testing being able to show migratory activity, or a good article citation that does deal with it. (I kinda got lost looking for something like that on your blog.) I mean, on the face of it, DNA evidence shows nothing about ethnicity, and even less about the sort of identity-based politics that surrounded the demise of the Roman West. Anybody trying to claim that a given test can support a sort of conquest narrative would have a hard time demonstrating causation.

But even so, these sorts of test articles do periodically come up, and even from time to time make a splash in the media. There was that one 2002 article that keeps getting a new lease on life, for instance. I'm really not much good with the specifics of the way these tests work, but I assume that they are demonstrating something, and if it's not a datable discrete migration flow that had political and military consequences, then I have to wonder what they are showing. Or do these tests tend to be based off of methodological errors? I never really know how to respond when somebody else brings them up.

Guy H said:

http://600transformer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/two-worlds-become-one-counter-intuitive.html

Might be of interest.

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Excellent article. Thank you very much.

By the way, any relation to Dr. Paul Halsall at Fordham University?

Dachs said:

It is.

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Thanks.

Dachs said:

It's certainly been clear to me in what relatively little modern literature I've read on the so-called migration period that most of the people that use that term don't really do a good job of recognizing that migration was a regular part of frontier life, let alone distinguishing the fifth century migrations from the other migratory activity that went on. It's really quite amazing how an author like Peter Heather can take the receptio of the Limigantes, say, and then not really discuss what these sorts of things mean for the flows of people across the frontier.

It might be a good idea to make clear that the article is really only dealing with the former frontier of the Western Empire, though. As I understand it, the traditional use of Völkerwanderung continues the migration narrative beyond the Lombards and accounts for Slavs, Avars, Magyars, and other stuff taking place in "outer Europe". It's dubious periodization, of course, but it's still a Thing, at least, as far as I'm aware. (Heather, at the very least, seems to think it is, judging by his book from a few years ago.) It was especially jarring to not see anything about the Slavs in an article for German History - but then run into the epigram about the fall of the Empire ending the migrations.

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Fair point. That's the trouble you end up in by looking for a nice epigram! A little rewording might indeed help. On the other hand I'm not entirely sure that traditional Germanist views of the migrations include all the others. Classic works like Wenskus' don't (as far as I can remember, anyway), which is why Pohl's first book on the Avars was an important shift. Völkerwanderungszeit as a periodization certainly doesn't go much beyond the earlier C6th, or at least Spätvölkerwanderungszeitlich can mean 6th century (at least according to an article I have in front of me). I doubt Slaves get much of a look-in in traditional views, because old world Germanists didn't recognise them as Peoples, or indeed in some cases, as people...

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Dachs said:

Out of curiosity, I was wondering if you have a blog response to the notion of DNA testing being able to show migratory activity, or a good article citation that does deal with it. (I kinda got lost looking for something like that on your blog.) I mean, on the face of it, DNA evidence shows nothing about ethnicity, and even less about the sort of identity-based politics that surrounded the demise of the Roman West. Anybody trying to claim that a given test can support a sort of conquest narrative would have a hard time demonstrating causation.

But even so, these sorts of test articles do periodically come up, and even from time to time make a splash in the media. There was that one 2002 article that keeps getting a new lease on life, for instance. I'm really not much good with the specifics of the way these tests work, but I assume that they are demonstrating something, and if it's not a datable discrete migration flow that had political and military consequences, then I have to wonder what they are showing. Or do these tests tend to be based off of methodological errors? I never really know how to respond when somebody else brings them up.

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This may be the piece you were looking for: http://600transformer.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/abuse-of-dna-in-study-of-early-medieval.html

I usually point people at the relevant bit of Catherine Hills' 2003 book on The Origins of the English, and Martin Evison's piece in Hadley and Richards (ed) on Cultures in Contact. The relevant bit on DNA in Worlds of Arthur got a bit longer and split into parts of two different chapters since I wrote that post. The grumpy Anglo-Saxonist who read the ms said my objections were motivated by ideology... Because the use of DNA to prove ethnicity/migration clearly isn't. Ho hum.

LightSpectra said:

Excellent article. Thank you very much.

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Thanks!

LightSpectra said:

By the way, any relation to Dr. Paul Halsall at Fordham University?

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Not as far as I know. Paul's doing some teaching at Manchester now I think. I am often asked that, or indeed if I *am* him, or (at this year's Kalamazoo) if I used to be called Paul...

The grumpy Anglo-Saxonist who read the ms said my objections were motivated by ideology... Because the use of DNA to prove ethnicity/migration clearly isn't. Ho hum.

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I agree that ethnicity isn't reduceable to biology and ancestry, but surely it can tell us about migration in general? To use my favourite analogy, genetic evidence of their remains could tell us that Wilhelm II, Nicholas II and George V* were indeed closely related, but it couldn't reveal anything about their ethnic identity (different ethnic identities, in fact).

Or is what I am saying exactly the point?

*The latter two even had a strong familial resemblance.

Lone Wolf said:

I agree that ethnicity isn't reduceable to biology and ancestry, but surely it can tell us about migration in general? To use my favourite analogy, genetic evidence of their remains could tell us that Wilhelm II, Nicholas II and George V* were indeed closely related, but it couldn't reveal anything about their ethnic identity (different ethnic identities, in fact).

Or is what I am saying exactly the point?

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That's actually a wonderful example of the point.

Imagine 2000 years from now someone might dig up the bones of Wilhelm, Nicholas and George, and conclude that the British must have been colonizing Europe all throughout the 19th century,

I think another problem is knowing exactly what to look for. What genetic markers would be associated with a certain group and which are spread around. I think DNA tests can reveal intriguing information that someone might be able to make an argument with, but it's not entirely clear that someone will be able to make that argument. It's possible there's too much noise to figure it out.

DNA recovered from those of the time period would be better than DNA of modern populations, but then you run into sample size problems.

Guy H said:

Fair point. That's the trouble you end up in by looking for a nice epigram! A little rewording might indeed help. On the other hand I'm not entirely sure that traditional Germanist views of the migrations include all the others. Classic works like Wenskus' don't (as far as I can remember, anyway), which is why Pohl's first book on the Avars was an important shift. Völkerwanderungszeit as a periodization certainly doesn't go much beyond the earlier C6th, or at least Spätvölkerwanderungszeitlich can mean 6th century (at least according to an article I have in front of me). I doubt Slaves get much of a look-in in traditional views, because old world Germanists didn't recognise them as Peoples, or indeed in some cases, as people...

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Huh. Didn't really know very much about German-language late antique periodization. Guess I just assumed that it would be similar to the popular understanding of that term - as I understand it - in the English-speaking world.

Other than that, it looks more or less like a minor iteration on the sort of (excellent, by the way) pieces you've been writing for years. The only other thing I can think of is that you might be trying to do too much in the article by exploding some of the other tropes about Roman-barbarian interaction, like Luttwak's old book, but they do tend to tie into your overall argument, even if they're not particularly critical to it.

Guy H said:

This may be the piece you were looking for: http://600transformer.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/abuse-of-dna-in-study-of-early-medieval.html

I usually point people at the relevant bit of Catherine Hills' 2003 book on The Origins of the English, and Martin Evison's piece in Hadley and Richards (ed) on Cultures in Contact. The relevant bit on DNA in Worlds of Arthur got a bit longer and split into parts of two different chapters since I wrote that post. The grumpy Anglo-Saxonist who read the ms said my objections were motivated by ideology... Because the use of DNA to prove ethnicity/migration clearly isn't. Ho hum.

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That's it exactly. Thanks again.

Judging by Jonathan Jarrett's comment at the bottom, it seems like the time-scale calculations for this stuff are even less certain than I'd thought. I assumed that they could get a margin of error of a few generations, which is why I assigned so much meaning to the argument. But if these studies are, working from the same data, coming to conclusions proving their preconceptions about things as widely variant as Indo-European language and the Saxon migration, the studies deserve even less attention than I thought.

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I hope you don't mind, but I was wondering about something else in your Barbarian Migrations narrative. You spend a great deal of time talking about the Goths and the distinction between "barbarian People on the move" and "Roman field army" - and how Alaric fluidly employed both notions when it suited his purposes to do so. It's a very compelling argument - at least in my mind - that Alaric and his group did not fit the migrationist model that has been constructed for them and were more of a faction in the Roman military and pressure group on the imperial authorities. And you seem to generally agree with what Walter Goffart has said about most migratory activity being short-range and whatnot.

But then there are the Rhine invaders, whose movements were not exactly short range at all. Obviously, with them, identity was fairly fluid as well, as the merging of Alans, Silings, and Asdings in Iberia shows. But are there reasons to believe that these were elements of the Roman army, too, or elements of the ramshackle arrangement Stilicho made for the Rhine frontier to cover for the troop drawdowns there? These groups don't really fit the "barbarian People on the move" explanation, but what explanation is there to substitute for it? Why did these groups move into Gaul in the first place, why didn't they go back over the Rhine, and how did they stay relatively cohesive for so long?

the problem with this article is that it self consciously tries to raise trouble. his ignorance of the importance of the barbarians to the fall of the western roman empire is like the pirenne thesis all over again. wickham's description of the changing role of the aristocracy and its connection to the breakdown of the roman tax system solidified the importance of the barbarians in the historiography of late antiquity.

TedSkymer said:

the problem with this article is that it self consciously tries to raise trouble. his ignorance of the importance of the barbarians to the fall of the western roman empire is like the pirenne thesis all over again. wickham's description of the changing role of the aristocracy and its connection to the breakdown of the roman tax system solidified the importance of the barbarians in the historiography of late antiquity.

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Why is breaking with the status quo a problem?

I also doubt anything is ever "solidified" in historiography. Could you bring a more substantive critique?

TedSkymer said:

the problem with this article is that it self consciously tries to raise trouble. his ignorance of the importance of the barbarians to the fall of the western roman empire is like the pirenne thesis all over again. wickham's description of the changing role of the aristocracy and its connection to the breakdown of the roman tax system solidified the importance of the barbarians in the historiography of late antiquity.

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I don't think you know what you're talking about.

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Yui108 said:

Why is breaking with the status quo a problem?

I also doubt anything is ever "solidified" in historiography. Could you bring a more substantive critique?

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i will try and bring a more substantive critique while being fairly brief.

first, i will address the "solidification" of historiograpy. while i agree that nothing is ever completely solidified, certain works will live on as central parts of historiography and continue to influence scholarship for many, many years. works such as brown's biography of st. augustine, and r.w. southern's making of the middle ages. i believe that wickham will continue to entrench itself as the best example of the work currently being done on the transition from the late antique to the early medieval.

now, onto the article at hand. while the author does make some good points, he undervalues the importance of the barbarians to the transformation of the west. one aspect of barbarian culture that transformed the roman world is the way aristocracy operated within society. late roman aristocracy were a civilian aristocracy that competed over a series of bureaucratic offices. while barbarian elites attempted to fit into this elite archetype, they ultimately failed as the role of the aristocracy in the west took on a more martial characteristic. a simplistic example of this is the transition from the toga to (forgive me for forgetting the title of the garment) a equestrian outfit. this transition was critical to the breakdown of the unity of the late roman west. one of the most important functions of the late roman (pre barbarian) civilian elite was to ensure the tax system which is essentially what knit the roman empire together.

indeed, there was very little else that connected north africa to gaul (aside from of course a shared culture, but let's not talk about that right now). the roman empire was a commonwealth. while this is not a perfect description, it is illustrative. the empire was a collection of cities that were more or less self governed. the job of the governor sent from rome was essentially to march around a province and hear cases that could not be solved by the local courts or to pass death sentences (civic authorities could not pass death sentences, that right was reserved for the emperor and his representatives. this is why in martyr passions it's always imperial governors as the bad guys killing the poor helpless christians.). the only other contact that acity/province would have with the imperial throne was to ask for help building necessary public works.

when the barbarian aristocracy stopped maintaining the local tax networks, the empire drifted apart. an important aspect of this tax network is that it did not often rely on currency paid to rome. north africa is an important example of this. north africa produced more olive oil than any other region of the empire. indeed, while augustine was in italy he complained of the lack of enough olive oil to keep lamps burning into the night to continue his studies, such was the abundance in north africa. when north africa broke away from the rest of the empire (and the vandals actively destroyed their connection to the roman tax network). this phenomenon happened everywhere. grain from southern gaul ceased to be shipped to rome is another example. much of gregory i's duties involved securing grain shipments and turning his former lands (he donated his family's extensive lands to the church) into grain producing lands to feed the people of rome.

this changing role of elites within roman culture represents a fundamental change to roman culture that is more important than any of the economic problem/social problems that the roman government faced. nero bankruped the during his rome and set off a series of civil wars. the empire didn't fall during the flavian dynasty. furthermore, during late antiquity the eastern half of the roman empire experienced its greatest economic boon period. if the tax system hadn't broken down the redistribution network could have fueled the ailing west for many years.

the importance of the tax system is illustrated by the rise of islam. when the arabs emerged from their desert incubation they maintained the tax network and were able to create a remarkably stable empire from an economic point of view.

Might be a good idea to read my 600-page book on the subject before accusing me of being ignorant of the importance of the barbarians. Your simple parroting of Chris Wickham's ideas (which are in any case not very dissimilar from mine) fails by not addressing what, exactly, a barbarian was in the fifth century, or the continuing militarisation of the Roman provincial aristocracy, or the ways in which the eventual dominance of the military model of aristocracy was a long process that only really came to its term around 600, by which time the idea of a Barbarian was (even more than before) very much not what your crude idea takes it for being. Any sophisticated analysis of post-imperial aristocracy will have a tough job finding what can unproblematically be labelled as 'barbarian' influences. I dealt with this at some length in Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West.

Guy H said:

Might be a good idea to read my 600-page book on the subject before accusing me of being ignorant of the importance of the barbarians. Your simple parroting of Chris Wickham's ideas (which are in any case not very dissimilar from mine) fails by not addressing what, exactly, a barbarian was in the fifth century, or the continuing militarisation of the Roman provincial aristocracy, or the ways in which the eventual dominance of the military model of aristocracy was a long process that only really came to its term around 600, by which time the idea of a Barbarian was (even more than before) very much not what your crude idea takes it for being. Any sophisticated analysis of post-imperial aristocracy will have a tough job finding what can unproblematically be labelled as 'barbarian' influences. I dealt with this at some length in Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West.

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@TedSkymer



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TedSkymer said:

this is why in martyr passions it's always imperial governors as the bad guys killing the poor helpless christians.

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Not that it's relevant to the main topic here, but I'd say martyr stories give precisely the opposite impression. They never portray the Christians as helpless - rather they are always portrayed as strong and in control of the situation, baffling the governors by choosing to die rather than take the repeatedly offered option of sacrificing to Caesar's genius.

If I might haul this page up to the top again; does anyone know of any writings on language of those migrating into the Empire during the waning decades/centuries of Rome in the West?

I was just thinking this morning about how different modern French and German are, and I was curious if this would have been the case for their ancestors, say around 900-1000AD. Now I certainly understand that there's a huge amount of latin roots in modern French, but I'm surprised that - assuming these language groups differentiated around the fall of Rome in the west - there isn't more German influence in French.

I think we've already established in this thread that people moving into the Empire from across the Rhine were thoroughly Romanized, but it just seems odd to me that there's no real trace of their former languages carried down to today.

Another possibility would be that modern German is descended from an entirely different language group than what was spoken by immigrants to Roman Gaul, but given the similarities between German and English, and that no mass migrations into Germany come to mind, that seems to me unlikely.

History_Buff said:

If I might haul this page up to the top again; does anyone know of any writings on language of those migrating into the Empire during the waning decades/centuries of Rome in the West?

I was just thinking this morning about how different modern French and German are, and I was curious if this would have been the case for their ancestors, say around 900-1000AD. Now I certainly understand that there's a huge amount of latin roots in modern French, but I'm surprised that - assuming these language groups differentiated around the fall of Rome in the west - there isn't more German influence in French.

I think we've already established in this thread that people moving into the Empire from across the Rhine were thoroughly Romanized, but it just seems odd to me that there's no real trace of their former languages carried down to today.

Another possibility would be that modern German is descended from an entirely different language group than what was spoken by immigrants to Roman Gaul, but given the similarities between German and English, and that no mass migrations into Germany come to mind, that seems to me unlikely.

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*sigh* I'll get to this in more detail a bit later. I just got back from a 12 hour busride and right now all I want to do is sleep, but the long and short of it is by 900-1000 they would have been fairly unintelligible. Also be careful with your wording there is a big difference between "German" and "Germanic". However if you want to grab a peek at Frankish/Early French to get an idea of Germanic influences into French, try to see if you can find a copy of The Tale of Roland. As I recall Norman Davies has a passage from it in his monumental tome "Europe: A History". It's very interesting in that it looks like French, but has some decidedly Germanic elements to it.

So it's more a case that a little bit of what I shall call proto-Germanic blended with a lot of Latin to form what eventually became modern French, but it just doesn't seem that way to someone like myself, who speaks neither?

And yeah, it's a tricky thing to talk about. Certainly the language of whatever people moved into Roman territory wasn't German, but some proto-German (Germanic?) language. And French has gone though quite a journey to become what we know it as as well I know.

History_Buff said:

So it's more a case that a little bit of what I shall call proto-Germanic blended with a lot of Latin to form what eventually became modern French, but it just doesn't seem that way to someone like myself, who speaks neither?

And yeah, it's a tricky thing to talk about. Certainly the language of whatever people moved into Roman territory wasn't German, but some proto-German (Germanic?) language. And French has gone though quite a journey to become what we know it as as well I know.

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It's not proto-Germanic either...but...yes, essentially.