In the time that remains, I want to talk briefly about what – if it were to constitute that sort of research – my revision of the
Barbarian Migrations book needs to address. Again, this is not to deny that there were barbarian migrations or that they were an important feature of the period, but an attempt to recast the ‘Fifth-Century Crisis’ that includes the fragmentation of the western Empire and the movement of barbarian groups. It’ll be a list of things we can discuss.
The first is to develop the idea that I proposed in an article that Martial [Staub] invited me to write for
German History, and which was clearly too complex for one Spanish professor, who tweeted that it was ‘the most ridiculous presentism’. Once again, to some people, any attempt to rethink the mechanisms of migration and the nature of the frontier that moves away from the gnashing-teeth, ‘waves of savages’ view is simple ‘presentism’: political correctness gone mad. We need seriously to rethink the relationships between the Empire and northern
Barbaricum, not as two opposed worlds but (as indeed some Romans also considered it) as a core and a periphery. The late imperial
Barbaricum was soaked in Roman influences and relied heavily upon a set of well-managed relationships with the Empire for its political and social stability. If you want to think responsibly about migration you need to think critically about dominant cores and politically, economically subordinate peripheries. One of the most important aspects of that relationship was the frontier itself. It is vital to think how the frontier was not simply a barrier, straining to hold back a tide of barbarians (even if the author of the
De Rebus Bellicis and other Romans often conceived of it as such) but was also a managed
relationship and a key
mechanism for migration. To think further about that we need to consider the movements not simply from
Barbaricum into the imperial provinces but those in the opposite direction as well: above all, barbarians going home, but also traders. We need to look at the exchange systems that ran from the Empire to the north, the movements of goods in those directions. These are all well studied: they aren’t new areas by any means, but we need to integrate them into how we see information flows as well as population movements, into an overall understanding of how migration operated. And we need to think of how political and cultural groupings moved up and down the great routes between the Baltic and the imperial
limes.(12)
This has two important implications. One is that, contrary to the idea that the barbarians had acquired so much wealth from the Empire that they were by c.400 richer, more powerful, and more independent, the opposite is the truth. The collapse of those well-managed relationships around 400 caused, as such things had caused earlier, crises beyond the frontier. As had also happened throughout imperial history, those crises created winners and losers and the losers headed for Rome: drawn as well as pushed; not simply shunted along.
But the really surprising thing about the fifth century, as I began to explore in that article, is the fact that the eventual collapse of the frontier, so far from opening the floodgates to mass migration sweeping over the provinces, actually more or less killed off large-scale, long-distance population movement. After the ‘Great Invasion’ of 406, and the Burgundian crossing of the Rhine a few years later, there are really no more great barbarian invasions in the west from
barbaricum, until the Lombards. What we have instead is the sort of slow, gradual drift across the frontier, over the Rhine, across the North Sea. What sort of scale this operated on at any one time is difficult to establish but it was very clearly a quite different phenomenon from many of the types of migration that had dominated the Imperial period. As I said in the article mentioned, the dictum I came up with in the 2007 book, that the End of the Roman Empire caused the Barbarian Migrations and not vice versa, is, as I now see it, quite wrong. The End of the Roman Empire was effectively also the end of the barbarian migrations. Remember, the Lombards migrated into a reconquered Italy across a re-established imperial frontier, and the Ostrogoths came from the Eastern Empire. Bizarrely, the Franks seem to have inherited the Roman attitude to the Rhine as a frontier, but in practice the Frankish frontier seems to have been quite different.
There are a couple of points stemming from that which I think a revised
Barbarian Migrations… needs to develop. The first is to expand the points I made about the human, lived scale of the period, the fact that people get old and they die, that twenty years took as long to happen in the fifth century as they do now. These are, weirdly, points that have not impinged on a lot of the scholarship. But we need to remember that – probably – most of the Vandal warriors who sacked Carthage in 439 had almost all been born, and had grown up, in the Roman Empire. Only those older than 33 would have been born in
Barbaricum. How many actually had any meaningful memory of life outside the Empire? Geiseric, the arch-Vandal of so many narratives, was almost certainly born on Roman soil. So, probably, were all the leaders of the (Visi)Goths after Athaulf. By 414 that group of Goths – if, that is, they were related to those who crossed the Danube in 376, though perhaps not all of them were – had been in the Empire for thirty-eight years. Theoderid, killed in battle in 451, is unlikely to have been older than seventy-five at the time. The warriors who followed Euric in the late 460s and 470s, as well as being born in Gaul, were probably the children of Goths born in Gaul, and grandchildren of people born either in the Balkans or en route across Italy or Spain. The Burgundian warriors famously mocked by Sidonius, if young warriors, had probably been born in Sapaudia, likely sons of men born elsewhere in Gaul. And who were their mothers? Likely provincial Romans. These men, of these generations, Burgundians, Vandals, Goths, are those referred to as ‘immigrant powers’ or ‘outside groups’ by Peter Heather on p.435 of
The Fall of Rome. What assumptions lead one to call a second-, third- or even fourth-generation provincial Roman, even one also deploying a Gothic, Burgundian or Vandal identity, an
immigrant or an
outsider? Referring to such people, still, as immigrants or outsiders might well of course be simply lazy rather than ominous, a basic failure to remember the biographical details of such ‘barbarians’ (just as Heather forgets the biography of Emperor Honorius, whom he calls an 'infant' in 406, when he was actually 21). That however is all the more reason to emphasise them, when assessing the role of soldiers and leaders who held non-Roman identities in the fragmentation of the Empire (an issue of such contemporary importance). Identities are not entities; they are not essential or immanent. As I argued
recently, they are wagers; the section on identity is another part of
Barbarian Migrations in need of a rewrite.
Growing out of that is another point that needed developing in the first edition: that the Fifth-Century Crisis is not about Barbarian Invasions but above all about factions and civil war. Those factions are regional alliances between soldiers and their commanders, with barbarian identities – as many of the fourth-century Roman army had already deployed – and provincial Roman aristocrats. We need to rethink the assumptions that bedevil the discussion of provincial politics: that the barbarian soldiers had the whip-hand and were the leaders, that they were seeking to create independent kingdoms, and that people knew or even thought that the western Roman Empire was dying in the fifth century. A key change I will make to the book is abandoning the idea that in the 470s people knew the Empire had fallen. They clearly hadn’t, and they didn’t until Justinian’s Wars in the mid-sixth century. People very clearly, I think, knew something had gone badly wrong in the 470s and that the
pars occidentalis was no longer functioning as such, but I can see no reason to think that they knew it was never going to make a come-back. What exactly was a ‘king’ in the fifth-century west? We need to stop thinking about this through a medieval lens and think harder about what the ‘courts’ of barbarian ‘kings’ meant in the fifth century. As I have said before, kingdoms were for losers. The intention of all the factions that we can identify, was to gain control of the Empire, on the fourth-century model and, for generals, barbarian and Roman, on the model of Stilicho. Those that managed to control the imperial centre – Ricimer and Gundobad for example – did not use the title king. Wherever we can make the comparison, military and civilian elites are in cahoots and evidently equals.
