The Rise of Aetius

[Neonanocyborgasm]

The problem was not that there weren't any capable men in the late empire. There were plenty of them. The problem was that the empire had become so dysfunctional that no great man could rescue it.

 

[Masada]

If you´d bothered to actually check it out, you might have noticed some discrepancies between what historians think and Dachs asserts about the end of the Western empire. (It´s that easy.)

I don´t see the problem; anybody can have an opinion.

I guess if we're admitting Gibbon as evidence, I might as well claim Christ did it in Palestine with Christianity. Equal opinions and all that rubbish.

But please, don´t let me stop you from spamming; I quite enjoy your attempts at broken English.

It's called speaking down and it has a venerable tradition in the English language.

 

[Yui108]

If you´d bothered to actually check it out, you might have noticed some discrepancies between what historians think and Dachs asserts about the end of the Western empire. (It´s that easy.)

But please, don´t let me stop you from spamming; I quite enjoy your attempts at broken English.

Wikipedia is a horrible source for examining the historiography of anything

 

[vogtmurr]

But even these successes have to be tempered significantly. Aetius bought his victories against the Burgundiones by mortgaging the future of western Gaul; his government was the first to agree to a treaty of equals with the Goths (as opposed to a 'treaty' negotiated at swordpoint, as Constantius had done during the height of his power) and it is incontrovertible that a semiautonomous Gothic kingdom was established in Aquitania and Novempopulana from that point onward. It was a Gothic kingdom that saw its interests chiefly aligned with Rome's, to be sure; one that was beholden to provide troops and supplies for the Roman war machine, and one ruled by men who considered themselves part of the community of Gallo-Roman landowners. But it was an important and devastating development nonetheless.

... If you're looking for a real late-Roman hero-general, try Constantius III.

Constantius also came a lot earlier, much before Adrianople even, and the Goths survived many like him. EDIT: my mistake I was thinking of another Constantius.

Your other points on Africa, etc. are taken but there seems to be a bit of contradiction here. Do you think at this stage of the game, the Roman Empire could continue to bully warlike tribes like the Goths, and still survive intact ? A rapport with the Goths and Franks turned out to be considerable foresight. Stilicho seemed willing to accept the Goths as foederati with some kind of homeland entitlement. After Stilicho's murder, the Romans were lucky enough to convince the Goths to leave Italy after sacking their city. I think it is a foregone conclusion in Aetius' time, that no magister in the west would again convince the Goths to completely surrender their autonomy, for any length of time. Is that a devastating development ? As you pointed out "government through punitive expedition" was ultimately counter-productive.
Semi-domesticated tribes like the Goths might have been the key to survival of the 'empire' as a looser but still aligned federation methinks. The Franks actually turned out to be a bigger and more immediate threat to Roman continuity in western Europe, before the end, did they not ?

 

[Agent327]

I think you have a valid point here. (Several actually.)

I guess if we're admitting Gibbon as evidence, I might as well claim Christ did it in Palestine with Christianity. Equal opinions and all that rubbish.



It's called speaking down and it has a venerable tradition in the English language.

Well, at least you´re trying... Let´s give you points for that.

Wikipedia is a horrible source for examining the historiography of anything

Since I´ve studied history, I can honestly say that in this case you´re quite wrong. (BTW, I already knew about the historiography of the late Roman empire period, but apparently some people didn´t. Since not everybody owns the works of such authors, a Wiki link´s the easiest way to check; various authors of the period are mentioned, and if you´re interested, it´s easy to check out their works.)

 

[Dachs]

The problem was not that there weren't any capable men in the late empire. There were plenty of them. The problem was that the empire had become so dysfunctional that no great man could rescue it.

So incredibly dysfunctional that it died a mere thousand years later.

Your other points on Africa, etc. are taken but there seems to be a bit of contradiction here. Do you think at this stage of the game, the Roman Empire could continue to bully warlike tribes like the Goths, and still survive intact ?

Yes, I do. As I noted in the other thread JEELEN is blithering about, the Romans had an insanely good military record against "foreign" foes even during the fifth century. The Roman army virtually never lost when it actually fought against "barbarians". If one adjusts for extrema such as small detachments being overwhelmed, the Romans look even better. (The relevant study is Elton (1998).) There is simply no evidence to support the notion that the Western Roman military was tactically equivalent to - let alone outclassed by - its external opponents. And in overall terms...the Empire possessed an army with well over a quarter of a million active soldiers. Even the most generous modern scholarly estimates of the "peoples" migrating into Roman territory (something that requires a series of unsustainable assumptions, but never mind) places their aggregate numbers between the late fourth century and 476 as well under half that number.

Furthermore, the Goths were not actually a "warlike tribe" for any meaningful sense of the word "tribe". Alareiks' Goths were a unit of the Roman army. Ethnically, many of them may very well have been Goths (Claudianus, at least, seems to have been set on that, although he's not exactly the best source in the world, being a rhetorician, not a historian) but they were unavoidably mixed in with soldiers born inside the Roman Empire who spoke Latin and had names like Heraclianus. The numbers simply don't add up, because the number of Alareiks' "Goths" vastly outclasses the number of Tervingi and Greuthungi that crossed the Danube in 376-8, much less the number of them that were finally left in 382 when Theodosius I beat them into submission; Alareiks' army cannot have been a "people on the move". This was not an instance of "monolithic ethnic group moves into the Empire, stays cohesive, creates unified political leadership, is accepted into the Roman military in toto, executes coherent century-long plan to settle in Roman territory and eventually destroy the Roman Empire from within".

Out of curiosity, where do you think the contradiction arises? Did you mean that you simply disagreed with the way I characterized the Roman military's fighting capability?

A rapport with the Goths and Franks turned out to be considerable foresight. Stilicho seemed willing to accept the Goths as foederati with some kind of homeland entitlement. After Stilicho's murder, the Romans were lucky enough to convince the Goths to leave Italy after sacking their city.

Nah, Stilicho was smarter than that. He knew that, at most, the Rhine invaders and Radagaisus had maybe thirty to forty thousand fighting men. He knew that his Roman troops outclassed them in combat power. They were comparatively bush league. Stilicho concentrated on fighting his Roman enemies - the Eastern Empire, Alareiks, Constantinus "III" - instead. They were the ones who actually possessed armies that could do real damage.

The "Goths" of Alareiks were the exception to this "barbarians are weak, Roman forces are strong" rule because they were not, in fact, a "barbarian" enemy at all in any meaningful sense. And Stilicho dealt with them accordingly. He was, at one point, induced to give Alareiks a military command in Noricum, where Alareiks seems to have stayed, with his army, for quite some time. The region was prima facie unsuited for the settlement of a "people on the move"; it was mountainous, had poor infrastructure, and wasn't good for much agriculture. However, it made great sense for a Roman officer on the make to try to become a military commander in the region. Noricum bordered both on the territories of Constantinus "III" in Gaul and on the passes into northern Italy. Alareiks, with command of Roman forces there, was extremely well placed to influence the conflict between Constantinus and the forces loyal to Honorius' Italian regime. He could play kingmaker, a very old Roman tradition. Even more egregiously, this agreement by which Alareiks and his army moved to Noricum was never an actual foedus, a treaty with a separate polity. Alareiks' transfer was handled as an administrative matter within the Roman army. The first foedus that is unequivocally attested with the Goths was signed in 439 by Aetius.

I think it is a foregone conclusion in Aetius' time, that no magister in the west would again convince the Goths to completely surrender their autonomy, for any length of time. Is that a devastating development ? As you pointed out "government through punitive expedition" was ultimately counter-productive.

It was a deleterious development, not a "devastating" one. "Devastating" was the conquest of Africa. The Goths, by comparison, remained pretty well tied to the Italian regime until the late 460s with relatively little effort on Ravenna's part. But at the same time, it clearly was not a long-term solution. If the Roman Empire were to recover all its territory - which should have always been the ultimate goal (maybe getting a pass on Britain) - the Goths could not remain autonomous. Giving them a breathing space in which to do so was bad. It was semi-necessary due to the situation in the Spains and Aetius' inability to fight everything and everybody at once, but it was still bad in the long term.

Semi-domesticated tribes like the Goths might have been the key to survival of the 'empire' as a looser but still aligned federation methinks. The Franks actually turned out to be a bigger and more immediate threat to Roman continuity in western Europe, before the end, did they not ?

The Franks were effectively irrelevant to the survival of the Western Empire. They do not appear as anything approaching a unified political entity until the 450s. Much like Alareiks' "Goths" were basically a polity built around an army, the "Salian Franks" were constructed around the Roman field army on the Loire River. Many of its soldiers may have been ethnically Frankish; many were unequivocally not. It did not play a role in the final struggles of the Western Empire with the Vandals in the late 450s and the 460s that ultimately doomed it, and seems to have stood by during the Empire's last dice-roll, in 471, with the general assault on Evareiks' Goths. (The Emperor's son Anthemiolus led a field army into Arelate, probably to operate in conjunction with the British(?) forces of Riothamus, but Evareiks seems to have defeated them each in turn.) The events that led Evareiks into conflict with the central Roman authorities had little to do with the presence or lack thereof of the Loire army breathing down his neck, and he seems to have picked a fight with Childeric I around that time anyway.

 

[vogtmurr]

Furthermore, the Goths were not actually a "warlike tribe" for any meaningful sense of the word "tribe". Alareiks' Goths were a unit of the Roman army. Ethnically, many of them may very well have been Goths (Claudianus, at least, seems to have been set on that, although he's not exactly the best source in the world, being a rhetorician, not a historian) but they were unavoidably mixed in with soldiers born inside the Roman Empire who spoke Latin and had names like Heraclianus. The numbers simply don't add up, because the number of Alareiks' "Goths" vastly outclasses the number of Tervingi and Greuthungi that crossed the Danube in 376-8, much less the number of them that were finally left in 382 when Theodosius I beat them into submission; Alareiks' army cannot have been a "people on the move".

Out of curiosity, where do you think the contradiction arises? Did you mean that you simply disagreed with the way I characterized the Roman military's fighting capability?

The contradiction appeared to be that you said; like Constantius, Aetius could, and should have, continued to dominate the Goths by beating them in to submission. But elsewhere you seemed to imply those measures would have been wasteful, as in:
"Stilicho, unlike Aetius, seems to have been more prone to picking fights he definitely couldn't win...." and "The decrease in Roman power in Iberia was partly a consequence of military operations...but more a consequence of a badly flawed strategy", which after all he only had a year to correct. But anyway, the contradiction is more because of our two interpretations of these events.

The 'Goths' had to be more than just a division of the Roman army in mutiny, they were a people already well established in two branches of long standing. There was definitely a significant tribe that either accompanied or supported Alarik. Sure they may have been multi-ethnic, but if others joined their tribal society it was still under the leadership of the 'Goths'. Even if the 'Romans' had on paper a quarter-million soldiers, of different nationalities, scattered across their frontiers, under different regimes; the 'empire' was already disintegrating in to regional chaos. As you said it - Aetius couldn't be everywhere doing everything to everybody at once.

Nah, Stilicho was smarter than that. He knew that, at most, the Rhine invaders and Radagaisus had maybe thirty to forty thousand fighting men. He knew that his Roman troops outclassed them in combat power. They were comparatively bush league. Stilicho concentrated on fighting his Roman enemies - the Eastern Empire, Alareiks, Constantinus "III" - instead. They were the ones who actually possessed armies that could do real damage.

It seems there were rarely enough soldiers in the late empire (post 400) when and where they were needed, and who could be relied upon to crush a barbarian force completely.

Even more egregiously, this agreement by which Alareiks and his army moved to Noricum was never an actual foedus, a treaty with a separate polity. Alareiks' transfer was handled as an administrative matter within the Roman army. The first foedus that is unequivocally attested with the Goths was signed in 439 by Aetius.

Well even if it wasn't official and unequivocal, they served as foederati nonetheless. And even if some Romans didn't want to acknowledge the de facto settlement in these terms, Stilicho was prepared to give it to them in principal anyway.

The Franks were effectively irrelevant to the survival of the Western Empire. They do not appear as anything approaching a unified political entity until the 450s. Much like Alareiks' "Goths" were basically a polity built around an army, the "Salian Franks" were constructed around the Roman field army on the Loire River. Many of its soldiers may have been ethnically Frankish; many were unequivocally not. It did not play a role in the final struggles of the Western Empire with the Vandals in the late 450s and the 460s that ultimately doomed it, and seems to have stood by during the Empire's last dice-roll, in 471, with the general assault on Evareiks' Goths. (The Emperor's son Anthemiolus led a field army into Arelate, probably to operate in conjunction with the British(?) forces of Riothamus, but Evareiks seems to have defeated them each in turn.) The events that led Evareiks into conflict with the central Roman authorities had little to do with the presence or lack thereof of the Loire army breathing down his neck, and he seems to have picked a fight with Childeric I around that time anyway.

well on that - I would say the Frankish incursion definitely weakened, and in most parts removed Roman rule from Gaul, isolating Spain.
But yes it was only in the very late stages - after 476, that Clovis put a nail in it, along with removing the Visigoths who would have been Roman allies in their last efforts to hold Gaul, and some semblance of control over Spain.

 

[Dachs]

The contradiction appeared to be that you said; like Constantius, Aetius could, and should have, continued to dominate the Goths by beating them in to submission. But elsewhere you seemed to imply those measures would have been wasteful, as in:
"Stilicho, unlike Aetius, seems to have been more prone to picking fights he definitely couldn't win...." and "The decrease in Roman power in Iberia was partly a consequence of military operations...but more a consequence of a badly flawed strategy", which after all he only had a year to correct. But anyway, the contradiction is more because of our two interpretations of these events.

The 'Goths' had to be more than just a division of the Roman army in mutiny, they were a people already well established in two branches of long standing. There was definitely a significant tribe that either accompanied or supported Alarik. Sure they may have been multi-ethnic, but if others joined their tribal society it was still under the leadership of the 'Goths'. Even if the 'Romans' had on paper a quarter-million soldiers, of different nationalities, scattered across their frontiers, under different regimes; the 'empire' was already disintegrating in to regional chaos. As you said it - Aetius couldn't be everywhere doing everything to everybody at once.

Ah.

You're making one colossal assumption, or rather, two related, colossal assumptions, neither of which stands much scrutiny, by describing the "Goths" as "a people already well established in two branches [???] of long standing".

The first assumption is that the references to "Goths" in Roman period writings (letters, addresses to the Senate, annals, histories, and the odd saint's life) are consistent ones, and that multiple authors all mean the exact same thing in referencing them. Not only that, but these references to "Goths" all mean a specific ethnic group, which also happens to be politically unified, whose inhabitants all originated from the same place, namely, not within the Roman Empire. That doesn't hold much water, which should be obvious. Never mind the fact that Alareiks' forces are not consistently described as "Goths" by contemporary writers - Claudianus, as noted, repeatedly referred to them as such, but he was the only one. Only after the mythologizing had begun, after men like Iordanes had been commissioned to invent a Gothic founding myth to provide the new monarchies with an illustrious past (with Eastern Roman writers and spin-doctors equally stringent in attempting to segregate the Ostrogothic regime of Thiudareiks from the Italian landowners that backed it), did "Goth" acquire a specific and consistently employed meaning, and only after that did Alareiks' army acquire the universal label of "Goth".

The second, related, assumption is that references to a "Gothic" gens by Roman ethnographers are meaningful for our purposes and that they indicate a coherent entity of any kind (whether linguistic, ethnic, or political). That, if anything, is even less passable. Roman ethnography was trope-loaded, caricatured, and generally abysmal in all facets. The uninventive trends of classical historical writing basically locked any author into lifting passages, sometimes wholesale, from previous works, regardless of their applicability. So when Ammianus Marcellinus wrote his oft-quoted description of how the Huns came to the shores of the Black Sea (a description that clashes with modern migration theory in virtually every sense), he reused descriptive language and tropes that authors going back to Herodotos had used to describe the inhabitants of the steppe, combined with the related trope that, the further one got away from Rome's borders, the uglier, less lettered, and less civilized the locals became - so to emphasize his point that the Huns were practically from another universe, Ammianus made them fantastically ugly, barely able to vocalize, and so soft-skulled that they'd only recently mastered the concept of "fire".

What I am trying - and apparently, in your case and more egregiously that of the Dutchman, failing - to get across is that this tendency to think of the "Goths" as a "people on the move", a mass of organized, ethnically related, consistently led, mostly armed "Germanic" savages moving like birds across Europe to finally end up smack dab in southern France, is based almost wholly on preconceptions. If you approach the sources without that preconception in mind, a radically different picture emerges. And if you approach the sources without that preconception in mind, and simultaneously aware of the ritualized, stultified, and wrong way in which Roman authors talked about the non-Romans...

Incidentally, what you have to say about the Roman army is kind of my point. The Romans might have had over three hundred thousand soldiers, yeah. And those three hundred thousand soldiers might have comprised the best army in the entire world at that time. But those three hundred thousand soldiers spent pretty much all of the time between 380 and 435 fighting each other. After fifty years, there weren't three hundred thousand of them left, not by a damn long shot. Many of the rest were also, as you say, serving alternative regimes: the Goths in Aquitania, the Suebi in Gallaecia, the Vandals and Alans in Africa, the Burgundiones in Gallia, and the assortment of AWOL soldiers-turned-bandits, peasant warbands, and local landowners that were lumped together under the term bacaudae. That's the whole reason the Roman Empire ceased to exist in the first place. The systemic and brutal civil wars that it spent decades fighting pretty much wiped out the Western Roman army and created the conditions for alternatives to imperial power to set themselves up.

Of course, you know my opinion about the civil wars. Apparently even the Dutchman is convinced of their import, although his opinion on such matters isn't coherent enough (if and when he ever gets down to specifics, which is almost never, leading me to believe that he doesn't know anything at all about what he's saying) for me to really care about it. What bemuses me is his refusal to assign the civil wars between Gaul and Italy any sort of agency, possibly on the grounds that fratricide was endemic to Roman government since the dawn of time. The problem is that those specific civil wars were not simply a recurrence of the same old, same old. They had a specific medium-term cause, and that specific medium-term cause was never effectively remedied before the Western Empire ceased to exist. I mean, if you're looking for causation, that's as good as it gets, right?

Well even if it wasn't official and unequivocal, they served as foederati nonetheless. And even if some Romans didn't want to acknowledge the de facto settlement in these terms, Stilicho was prepared to give it to them in principal anyway.

No, they didn't. Foederati is a very specific term, not a loose catchall for "people that I think were 'barbarians' who were working for, in, or under the Roman military". Foederati forces were supplied to the Roman army by an allied (i.e. non-Roman) polity under the terms of a foedus. Therefore, in order for Alareiks' Goths to have been such, they would have to have belonged to a non-Roman polity (unproven) and there would have to be some sort of foedus to bind them that way (no data available).

Since even a migrationist would admit that the references to Alareiks' army were, prior to the move to Noricum, made as part of a regular Roman force, and that Alareiks' command at the Battle of the Frigidus River was specifically stated to not be foederati (whether this command can be exactly lined up with Alareiks' army during the subsequent decade is doubtful, but still), the burden of proof is on you to find references to an Alareiks-Stilicho treaty.

Again, you need to stop approaching this from the point of view of somebody who has already made up his mind about these having been a "people on the move". Alternative explanations fit the evidence much better.

 

[Agent327]

Of course, you know my opinion about the civil wars. Apparently even the Dutchman is convinced of their import, although his opinion on such matters isn't coherent enough (if and when he ever gets down to specifics, which is almost never, leading me to believe that he doesn't know anything at all about what he's saying) for me to really care about it. What bemuses me is his refusal to assign the civil wars between Gaul and Italy any sort of agency, possibly on the grounds that fratricide was endemic to Roman government since the dawn of time. The problem is that those specific civil wars were not simply a recurrence of the same old, same old. They had a specific medium-term cause, and that specific medium-term cause was never effectively remedied before the Western Empire ceased to exist. I mean, if you're looking for causation, that's as good as it gets, right?

No. Civil wars were endemic to the Roman empire. Check your literature for once. (And if you can´t be bothered to read someone´s posts, statements like ´isn´t coherent enough´ lack any substance.) Apparently these civil wars now had ´a specific medium-term cause´, which shall remain unexplained? It is interesting to see how you turn the facts around: when asked for details, it is you who remain silent, or simply cease your argument when presented with facts. If these particular civil wars played indeed a major part, they still weren´t the cause, but rather the catalyst. There´s a difference.

Foederati is a very specific term, not a loose catchall for "people that I think were 'barbarians' who were working for, in, or under the Roman military". Foederati forces were supplied to the Roman army by an allied (i.e. non-Roman) polity under the terms of a foedus. Therefore, in order for Alareiks' Goths to have been such, they would have to have belonged to a non-Roman polity (unproven) and there would have to be some sort of foedus to bind them that way (no data available).

Incorrect. The Goths are at least named as foederati twice: once after they entered the Eastern empire, and once they settled in Aquitaine, where Aetius asked (not: demanded) their assistance against the Huns invading Gaul.

Since even a migrationist would admit that the references to Alareiks' army were, prior to the move to Noricum, made as part of a regular Roman force, and that Alareiks' command at the Battle of the Frigidus River was specifically stated to not be foederati (whether this command can be exactly lined up with Alareiks' army during the subsequent decade is doubtful, but still), the burden of proof is on you to find references to an Alareiks-Stilicho treaty.

Alarik wasn´t mentioned until after the Goths entered the (Eastern) Balkans. His history does not necessarily coincide with the Goths itinerant. Also, P. Heather, a specialist on the Goths´ history in this era diasgrees with your view. Apart from that, the entry of the Goths into the Roman empire can hardly be described as ´a regular Roman force´ crossing the borders. The idea that they were part of the Roman regulars was the official view of the Empire, which you are now only repeating.

Again, you need to stop approaching this from the point of view of somebody who has already made up his mind about these having been a "people on the move". Alternative explanations fit the evidence much better.

The ´people on the move´ theory is unfortunately widely popularized. There is more to be said, but apparently it´s hard to face someone who´s already has made up his mind with the facts, and when presented with these, simply stops arguing.

 

[vogtmurr]

It seems to be a thought-provoking discussion with some high stakes on both sides. My points are fairly simple by comparison.

You're making one colossal assumption, or rather, two related, colossal assumptions, neither of which stands much scrutiny, by describing the "Goths" as "a people already well established in two branches [???] of long standing".

The first assumption is that the references to "Goths" in Roman period writings (letters, addresses to the Senate, annals, histories, and the odd saint's life) are consistent ones, and that multiple authors all mean the exact same thing in referencing them. Not only that, but these references to "Goths" all mean a specific ethnic group, which also happens to be politically unified, whose inhabitants all originated from the same place, namely, not within the Roman Empire. That doesn't hold much water, which should be obvious. Never mind the fact that Alareiks' forces are not consistently described as "Goths" by contemporary writers - Claudianus, as noted, repeatedly referred to them as such, but he was the only one. Only after the mythologizing had begun, after men like Iordanes had been commissioned to invent a Gothic founding myth to provide the new monarchies with an illustrious past (with Eastern Roman writers and spin-doctors equally stringent in attempting to segregate the Ostrogothic regime of Thiudareiks from the Italian landowners that backed it), did "Goth" acquire a specific and consistently employed meaning, and only after that did Alareiks' army acquire the universal label of "Goth".

Lack of consistently defined meaning doesn't negate the reality of two distinct tribes, separated by circumstance, who called themselves collectively Goths. I don't know there is any reason to doubt these were descendants of the same people who seriously threatened a fragmented Roman Empire in the 3rd century, and who subsequently established kingdoms in their names two centuries later. Certainly any kinship between them was diffuse by then (though their kingdoms remained more or less allies over their short mutual life span).

But back to 395 - Alaric's forces didn't spontaneously appear by diffusion from within the Roman army. They entered it as a semi-autonomous unit, from among the Gothic peoples who had been allowed to settle in the empire. After losing half of his army helping Theodosius win back his empire, he was effectively dismissed, but raised to be king by the tribe known as the Visigoths, his people. The next 15 years of course he was neither foederati nor Roman subject, plundering throughout Greece, Illyricum and Italy; occasionally hampered by a vast entourage of their families and camp followers. Stilicho never completely crushed him, but endeavoured and nearly succeeded in making him an autonomous ally within the Imperial system. That isn't too controversial - it fits well accepted historical narrative.

Incidentally, what you have to say about the Roman army is kind of my point. The Romans might have had over three hundred thousand soldiers, yeah. And those three hundred thousand soldiers might have comprised the best army in the entire world at that time. But those three hundred thousand soldiers spent pretty much all of the time between 380 and 435 fighting each other. After fifty years, there weren't three hundred thousand of them left, not by a damn long shot. Many of the rest were also, as you say, serving alternative regimes: the Goths in Aquitania, the Suebi in Gallaecia, the Vandals and Alans in Africa, the Burgundiones in Gallia, and the assortment of AWOL soldiers-turned-bandits, peasant warbands, and local landowners that were lumped together under the term bacaudae. That's the whole reason the Roman Empire ceased to exist in the first place. The systemic and brutal civil wars that it spent decades fighting pretty much wiped out the Western Roman army and created the conditions for alternatives to imperial power to set themselves up.

For sure there was attrition and divided loyalties in the late Roman army, but over the course of those fifty years, a functioning empire would have been sufficient to replace all of those losses easily. So the real debate is over why it wasn't functioning. Civil wars certainly had a big part to play, but I can't ignore the fact that a large proportion of the imperial units by that time were made up of barbarians, no longer auxillaries, but paid foederati. Even if you ignore the mixed composition of the comitatenses, the foederati already outnumbered them in many field armies. The political machinery, economy, and training apparatus to generate new armies from Imperial subjects had broken down in the 4th century. Rhetorically speaking - the empire had lost the societal backbone (aka 'moral fibre' by your outdated mythmongers) to defend itself. Coincident with plagues, famines, and civil wars; barbarian invasions must have left citizens preoccupied more with the act of survival. It was easier for emperors to hire these same barbarians to turn on each other. The fact they were good at doing this delayed the inevitable crunch a long time.

Of course, you know my opinion about the civil wars. Apparently even the Dutchman is convinced of their import, although his opinion on such matters isn't coherent enough (if and when he ever gets down to specifics, which is almost never, leading me to believe that he doesn't know anything at all about what he's saying) for me to really care about it. What bemuses me is his refusal to assign the civil wars between Gaul and Italy any sort of agency, possibly on the grounds that fratricide was endemic to Roman government since the dawn of time. The problem is that those specific civil wars were not simply a recurrence of the same old, same old. They had a specific medium-term cause, and that specific medium-term cause was never effectively remedied before the Western Empire ceased to exist. I mean, if you're looking for causation, that's as good as it gets, right?

Yes - the civil wars undoubtedly played havoc with Roman authority in widespread areas, but that alone wouldn't lead to the empire fatally weakening and fragmenting. It was the unfortunate timing - while 'barbarian' hordes each strong enough to challenge regional authority, inundated the empire. It would be reasonable to say some of these same 'causal' civil wars were partially in response to the opportunities or exigencies these invasions created (Constantine III), and in some cases, stimulated by 'barbarian' interests (Arbogast). So at the very least I assign mutual cupability to civil wars and the barbarians for the demise of the Roman empire.

No, they didn't. Foederati is a very specific term, not a loose catchall for "people that I think were 'barbarians' who were working for, in, or under the Roman military". Foederati forces were supplied to the Roman army by an allied (i.e. non-Roman) polity under the terms of a foedus. Therefore, in order for Alareiks' Goths to have been such, they would have to have belonged to a non-Roman polity (unproven) and there would have to be some sort of foedus to bind them that way (no data available).

I'm essentially saying that its irrelevant whether it was a formal foedus, or what the late Romans chose to consider a foedus for propaganda reasons of their weak emperors. The term foedus is more appropriate up to the late Constantinian dynasty when it still actually meant something in reality.

Since even a migrationist would admit that the references to Alareiks' army were, prior to the move to Noricum, made as part of a regular Roman force, and that Alareiks' command at the Battle of the Frigidus River was specifically stated to not be foederati (whether this command can be exactly lined up with Alareiks' army during the subsequent decade is doubtful, but still), the burden of proof is on you to find references to an Alareiks-Stilicho treaty.

Every reference I've read considers the Goths acting as foederati at various times, if not in actual name than in all essential characteristics. As you implied, in the subsequent decades after Frigidus, the formal term foederati becomes practically meaningless. Stilicho made de facto accommodations and lobbied for more before he was killed, that the imperial throne(s) were reluctant to acknowledge (more of that crippling rivalry and civil strife you refer to). What about the 30,000 'Gothic' foederati who flocked to Alaric after their families were butchered or enslaved by order of Honorius ? They were only a subset of his host. Alaric subsequently negotiated the release of 40,000 Goth slaves before he sacked Rome.

Again, you need to stop approaching this from the point of view of somebody who has already made up his mind about these having been a "people on the move". Alternative explanations fit the evidence much better.

I don't know what alternative explanations are better, when there is empirical evidence of a Visigothic kingdom and an Ostrogothic kingdom after the Roman empire ended.

If these particular civil wars played indeed a major part, they still weren´t the cause, but rather the catalyst. There´s a difference.

Incorrect. The Goths are at least named as foederati twice: once after they entered the Eastern empire, and once they settled in Aquitaine, where Aetius asked (not: demanded) their assistance against the Huns invading Gaul.

For sure the civil wars were a major factor. I don't know how to differentiate which was cause or catalyst, but I wouldn't dismiss the Germanic migrations as bunk.

And yes - Valens accepted the Visigoths as foederati in Moesia. Apparently they lost that 'status' after killing the emperor and most of his army at Adrianople.

 

[Dachs]

It seems to be a thought-provoking discussion with some high stakes on both sides.

It's not a discussion, and there are no stakes. He seems to think that there is some sort of reason for me to engage in dialogue with him, when he refuses to change his mind regardless of what I say. Since this is a consistent trend with him - just look at the Ask a Theologian thread - I elected not to waste my time. I honestly don't even read his posts anymore.

Lack of consistently defined meaning doesn't negate the reality of two distinct tribes, separated by circumstance, who called themselves collectively Goths. I don't know there is any reason to doubt these were descendants of the same people who seriously threatened a fragmented Roman Empire in the 3rd century, and who subsequently established kingdoms in their names two centuries later. Certainly any kinship between them was diffuse by then (though their kingdoms remained more or less allies over their short mutual life span).

But back to 395 - Alaric's forces didn't spontaneously appear by diffusion from within the Roman army. They entered it as a semi-autonomous unit, from among the Gothic peoples who had been allowed to settle in the empire. After losing half of his army helping Theodosius win back his empire, he was effectively dismissed, but raised to be king by the tribe known as the Visigoths, his people. The next 15 years of course he was neither foederati nor Roman subject, plundering throughout Greece, Illyricum and Italy; occasionally hampered by a vast entourage of their families and camp followers. Stilicho never completely crushed him, but endeavoured and nearly succeeded in making him an autonomous ally within the Imperial system. That isn't too controversial - it fits well accepted historical narrative.

Of course, it's not as though you're really paying attention to what I have to say either. I give you reasons to doubt the notion that the Goths were a "tribe" or a "people on the move", and you come right back and say "I don't know that there is any reason to think [otherwise]". I tell you that there is no record of Alareiks' army having continuity with the Tervingi and Greuthungi, much less being a "people on the move" directly descended from that group (not to mention the very good arguments against that army having such continuity), and you come back and say "Alaric's [sic] forces [...] entered [the Roman army] as a semi-autonomous unit". This is increasingly unprofitable. After this, I'm done here.

For sure there was attrition and divided loyalties in the late Roman army, but over the course of those fifty years, a functioning empire would have been sufficient to replace all of those losses easily. So the real debate is over why it wasn't functioning. Civil wars certainly had a big part to play, but I can't ignore the fact that a large proportion of the imperial units by that time were made up of barbarians, no longer auxillaries, but paid foederati. Even if you ignore the mixed composition of the comitatenses, the foederati already outnumbered them in many field armies. The political machinery, economy, and training apparatus to generate new armies from Imperial subjects had broken down in the 4th century. Rhetorically speaking - the empire had lost the societal backbone (aka 'moral fibre' by your outdated mythmongers) to defend itself. Coincident with plagues, famines, and civil wars; barbarian invasions must have left citizens preoccupied more with the act of survival. It was easier for emperors to hire these same barbarians to turn on each other. The fact they were good at doing this delayed the inevitable crunch a long time.

Yes - the civil wars undoubtedly played havoc with Roman authority in widespread areas, but that alone wouldn't lead to the empire fatally weakening and fragmenting. It was the unfortunate timing - while 'barbarian' hordes each strong enough to challenge regional authority, inundated the empire. It would be reasonable to say some of these same 'causal' civil wars were partially in response to the opportunities or exigencies these invasions created (Constantine III), and in some cases, stimulated by 'barbarian' interests (Arbogast). So at the very least I assign mutual cupability to civil wars and the barbarians for the demise of the Roman empire.

You know, the argument that the Roman army was comprised chiefly of "barbarians", whether foederati or simply recruits from across the Rhine organized into regular formations, was demolished decades ago. The Notitia Dignitatum alone ought to have put paid to that. Indeed, the Notitia Dignitatum almost certainly includes more "barbarian" units than were actually in the army. Many numeri are assigned names of foreign tribes, and the assumption by some historians has been that this indicated some sort of ethnic heritage and that the units were recruited en masse from those tribes like Gurkhas in the modern British army. But this is a ridiculous assumption: most of the names of the tribes are of groups either explicitly gone by the late fourth century or ones that had gone unmentioned in Roman history since Tacitus or Julius Caesar. In all probability, such numeri retained their name and unit identity while altering their recruitment base (if indeed their recruitment base had ever been made up of men from a given tribe in the first place).

Here is the real reason that the Roman state was unable to completely replenish its losses: it ceased to control most of its territory, and rather quickly. To wit: Britain and Gaul ceased to be viable manpower draws from the 380s onward, although southern Gaul intermittently was able to supply recruits up to probably about the 460s. The Spains fell out of central control when Gerontius invaded them; apart from the coastal regions, the imperial government did not regain control of them, either, and even then it's doubtful they were able to do a whole lot of recruiting. Africa, not a particularly strong manpower base to begin with, was contested with the Eastern Empire in the last two decades of the fourth century and fell out of imperial control progressively in the 420s and 430s. Pannonia is a mystery - we don't really know when it fell out of imperial control - but was lightly populated in any case and certainly could not have taken up the slack. Dalmatia, too, never had the kind of population base to contribute meaningfully to the rehabilitation of the army. So we are left with Illyricum and Italy. As noted before, Stilicho spent considerable political and military capital on attempting to secure Illyricum; he seems to think it would've helped, and it probably would have, had it been under Western and not Eastern control. And Italy by the fourth century was not the colossus it was under the Republic; during the real Migration Era, the first century AD, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of its inhabitants left for the imperial periphery, and they were probably not replaced. It could sustain an army, yes, but not to the extent that the rest of the Empire could have. There is no need to employ devices like "societal backbone", whatever the cock that's supposed to be.

Compare the situation to the third-century crisis. The Gallic Empire lasted for fourteen years, and the Palmyran state for even less than that; when Aurelianus conducted his blitz in east and west, he had relatively little ground to make up. (The Palmyran state also did a really piss-poor job of creating an alternative locus of legitimacy to the Emperor, and did not have the advantage that the Empire's opponents in the fifth century did, namely that the Emperors had begun to delegitimize themselves in their western holdings.) Whereas the Western Empire of 425 had been out of business in Gaul and the Spains for some decades longer than that, with a brief and arguably meaningless interlude in the earliest part of Honorius' reign. Aurelianus also possessed more territory (and good recruiting territory at that) than the Western Empire of the fifth century did, although, to be fair, he also had a somewhat greater military commitment. His opponents were relatively well-organized and kept their territories comparatively stable; there was no comparison to the unholy mess that Gaul and the Spains were in when Aetius (the subject of the thread!) seized control at Ravenna.

Every reference I've read considers the Goths acting as foederati at various times, if not in actual name than in all essential characteristics. As you implied, in the subsequent decades after Frigidus, the formal term foederati becomes practically meaningless. Stilicho made de facto accommodations and lobbied for more before he was killed, that the imperial throne(s) were reluctant to acknowledge (more of that crippling rivalry and civil strife you refer to). What about the 30,000 'Gothic' foederati who flocked to Alaric after their families were butchered or enslaved by order of Honorius ? They were only a subset of his host. Alaric subsequently negotiated the release of 40,000 Goth slaves before he sacked Rome.

The term foederati was anything but meaningless. It had a specific meaning that could be applied to specific groups at given times. After 439, for instance, the Goths of Gaul supplied foederati to the Roman army fighting in the Spains, and again during the effort to resist Attila. That one was not made before that point is significant, and not merely a case of some mass conspiracy by Roman letter-writers, annalists, and historians contemporary to Alareiks to present imperial actions in a 'better' light (as though a foedus with Alareiks would have made anybody look bad).

The fact that the term 'Goths' is applied to Radagaisus' group - a group which actually does seem to fit the "people on the move" stereotype, and which notably was wiped out by the Roman military at Faesulae - would seem to rather dramatically undermine your belief that 'Goth' applied to two (still wondering where you pulled "two" from here, and hoping for your own sake that you don't mean "Visigoths" and "Ostrogoths") distinct ethnopolitical units.

I don't know what alternative explanations are better, when there is empirical evidence of a Visigothic kingdom and an Ostrogothic kingdom after the Roman empire ended.

"Visigoth" and "Ostrogoth" were Roman shorthand for groups that had nothing to do with each other before the late fifth century. Thiudareiks Amal, for instance, would never have called himself an "Ostrogoth", and Evareiks - let alone Alareiks - would have never called himself a "Visigoth".

According to migrationist historians of the Goths like Peter Heather and Herwig Wolfram, the group that eventually became the "Visigoths" was an amalgam of people, mostly Gothic-speakers, some of whom had been part of Alareiks' group, some of whom had been part of Radagaisus' group, and some of whom had been part of a hypothetical and unattested group (to make up for the numerical disparities) that eventually coalesced under the leadership of Athaulf and Wallia and settled in southern Gaul in 418. They also hold that "Ostrogoths" were a group of Goths, also unrelated, that coalesced in the ERE under Thiudareiks Strabo in the 470s and 480s, most of which came into the Empire after the collapse of the Hunnic "polity" and were welded into a "supergroup" by Strabo and his successor/rival Amal.

According to other historians, like Guy Halsall and Michael Kulikowski, the "Visigothic" identity was slowly constructed over the course of the fifth century by, effectively, elements of the army striking out on their own. It certainly had little to do with the identity that Goths beyond the Roman frontier held to. Some of the soldiers in that army may have been "Gothic" anyway, and for them it was simply an exercise in adjusting the layers of their ethnicity - the opposite of how Americans decreasingly thought of themselves in terms of what state they lived in over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But for many others, the assumption of "Gothic" ethnicity was a situational response, conditioned partly by the later Roman army and aristocracy's tendency to pretend to be 'barbarian' as a method of make themselves seem more badass ("barbarian chic" has been written up all over the place; the most famous example is the fact that what used to be thought of as "Gothic" aristocratic dress is actually a north African Roman design from ~350). The Ostrogoths, effectively a welded-together mishmash of Eastern Roman federate and regular infantry under the command of Amal, fit into much the same category. (Thinking of the "Ostrogoths" as a "people on the move" would require explaining how and why this "people" packed up and moved from the Balkans across the Hellespont to Anatolia for several years, and then moved back across the Straits and all the way into Italy. I suppose it's not impossible if you're really set on this "people on the move" thing, but it really doesn't make much sense.)

For sure the civil wars were a major factor. I don't know how to differentiate which was cause or catalyst, but I wouldn't dismiss the Germanic migrations as bunk.

I do not dismiss migratory activity in fifth-century Europe as "bunk". I think it's very clear that a lot of people were moving around at that time. The problem is that a lot of people were moving around in Europe at any time, and almost certainly more of them had done it in the first century AD than were doing it in the fifth. I disagree primarily with the characterization of most of the classical "people(s) on the move" as such. And I think that the migratory activity, while relevant to European history, was not the main reason the Roman Empire in the West ceased to exist.

Referring to the migrations as "Germanic" opens up a whole other historiographical nest of vipers that would be stretching this thread's already-too-elastic topic to the breaking point.

 

[Traitorfish]

Out of interest, if the level of migration was as limited as that, what happened it Britain that it actually ended up with a widespread Germanic language? Was it just about who ended up in power, or was there actually a higher level of immigration to the Isles than other parts of Roman Europe?

 

[Yui108]

Out of interest, if the level of migration was as limited as that, what happened it Britain that it actually ended up with a widespread Germanic language? Was it just about who ended up in power, or was there actually a higher level of immigration to the Isles than other parts of Roman Europe?

afaik that is something of an ongoing controversy in the scholarship right now.

 

[vogtmurr]

It's not a discussion, and there are no stakes. ...
- I elected not to waste my time. I honestly don't even read his posts anymore.

I'm unaware and uninvolved in this drama. But to me some good points are being raised, and I am learning from it. This turned out to be a much greater investment of my time than I was prepared for. as well.

Of course, it's not as though you're really paying attention to what I have to say either. I give you reasons to doubt the notion that the Goths were a "tribe" or a "people on the move", and you come right back and say "I don't know that there is any reason to think [otherwise]". I tell you that there is no record of Alareiks' army having continuity with the Tervingi and Greuthungi, much less being a "people on the move" directly descended from that group (not to mention the very good arguments against that army having such continuity), and you come back and say "Alaric's [sic] forces [...] entered [the Roman army] as a semi-autonomous unit". This is increasingly unprofitable. After this, I'm done here.

You may have cast doubt on it - but that isn't the same as proving it unlikely. No I can't provide forensic evidence or uncontested family trees of Gothic lineage and etymology linking Alaric to these peoples - which Jordanes as you mention, claims. I know the Romans did not have a consistent understanding, let alone nomenclature of the various tribes that morphed and reformed between the 3rd and 5th centuries, but when they spoke of Goths (as opposed to Gutones) they had a more precise definition in mind than say 'Sarmatians'. You don't need a lesson in this but it appears I have to state it to make my point. Goths had already been recruited in to the Roman army for the Persian Wars, before their massive land and sea invasions of the eastern half of the empire 250-270, which opened with the death of emperor Decius at Abrittus. What happened to them after that ? Since the 3rd century Tervingi and Greuthungi, supposedly divided by the Dniester River, came from the same general area as these Goths = who had to be of some historical import - I have no reason to doubt the words of Claudius Mamertinus in 291, one of the earliest references to the "Tervingi, another division of the Goths". It is true the Greuthungi aren't actually named till much later, but it is still accepted is it not, that many of these same Goths moved to the Danube, where they had the s**t beat out of them by Constantine's armies, but nonetheless founded a thriving kingdom under Ermanaric, before it was overrun by the Huns c. 370. Subsequently one group left and became refugees within Roman borders. Wolfram, P. Heather and Roger Collins seem to be content in assigning these the new term Visigoths - even though it didn't enter common nomenclature till much later to differentiate them from the Ostrogothi. Furthermore, Alaric's forces are described by Wolfram and Collins as a collection of federate armies, "composed of largely Tervingi with Greuthungian and other barbarian contingents".

Why are you so bloody opposed to the idea that Alaric's ~20,000 man force entered the Roman army before Frigidus as a semi-autonomous unit ? Although partially Romanized, these Visigoths had only recently settled - a mere 16 years after crushing Valens. Alaric may have served in the Roman army for a spell, but that doesn't mean Alaric's Goths or whatever-you-want-to-call-them only entered as anonymous recruits in numerii or auxillary habit under Roman standards. Some did for sure, but the Empire in 394 was at a point where they engaged whatever resources were at hand - and these were often barbarians on the frontier in their own independent units, sometimes foederati, sometimes not. I can see there are numerous pitfalls and leaps of logic in trying to describe a coherent cultural history of these tribes, and if I step in to one of them on the way, correct me but don't dismiss the argument entirely. Shooting holes in long accepted theories is not the same as replacing them with more viable new ones.

You know, the argument that the Roman army was comprised chiefly of "barbarians", whether foederati or simply recruits from across the Rhine organized into regular formations, was demolished decades ago. The Notitia Dignitatum alone ought to have put paid to that. Indeed, the Notitia Dignitatum almost certainly includes more "barbarian" units than were actually in the army. Many numeri are assigned names of foreign tribes, and the assumption by some historians has been that this indicated some sort of ethnic heritage and that the units were recruited en masse from those tribes like Gurkhas in the modern British army. But this is a ridiculous assumption: most of the names of the tribes are of groups either explicitly gone by the late fourth century or ones that had gone unmentioned in Roman history since Tacitus or Julius Caesar. In all probability, such numeri retained their name and unit identity while altering their recruitment base (if indeed their recruitment base had ever been made up of men from a given tribe in the first place).

Here is the real reason that the Roman state was unable to completely replenish its losses: it ceased to control most of its territory, and rather quickly. To wit: Britain and Gaul ceased to be viable manpower draws from the 380s onward, although southern Gaul intermittently was able to supply recruits up to probably about the 460s....

Demolished ? You seem to have no hesitation in making that black and white statement, when usually the disagreement is only a matter of degree. I never actually said it was composed chiefly of barbarians (if I may use that term for foreign and loosely allied migrants within the empire), and such a statement would only refer to a specific time frame anyway, not a general characterization of the entire army from 380 to 460. But you can't ignore the ample accounts that 'barbarian' contingents played an increasingly important role, both in frontier garrisons and the major campaign armies in this period. That Notitia Dignitatum is an interesting list for sure but I wasn't relying on that. Those frontier regiments must have included a lot of 'barbarian' auxillaries both from within and outside the empire, but any correspondence between the old unit names/heritages and the enlistees at the beginning of the 5th century would be purely coincidental. It is the sizable barbarian contingents that would not be listed in the Notitia Dignitatum I am considering. At what point did they dominate the western 'Roman' army ? Certainly before Aetius' small imperial force invited the Franks and Visigoth 'foederati' to join him at Catalonian Fields. That in itself isn't a sign of impending weakness, since the early Byzantine armies of Belisarius and Narses relied heavily on barbarian and foreign contingents like Huns, Gepids, Herules, even Goths, hired or recruited from peoples who only paid temporary lip service to the Imperium, at best.

Ultimately, it was as you say the gradual occupation of the empire's recruiting grounds by barbarians that spelled the end of the Roman army. But I maintain there were systemic problems long before that, which allowed that occupation to happen.

There is no need to employ devices like "societal backbone", whatever the cock that's supposed to be.

I was being deliberately provocative, to illustrate that before well-educated know-it-alls dismiss the literary devices of writers like Gibbon, or assume others have bought in to it hook and sinker; they should seek to understand the kernels of truth behind those statements. Its not a value judgement on the mores or indiscipline of late Roman society, but recognition of the less than ideal state Imperial subjects were in before 400, and the centuries they had come to rely on professional imperial police forces.

Compare the situation to the third-century crisis. The Gallic Empire lasted for fourteen years, and the Palmyran state for even less than that; when Aurelianus conducted his blitz in east and west, he had relatively little ground to make up. (The Palmyran state also did a really piss-poor job of creating an alternative locus of legitimacy to the Emperor, and did not have the advantage that the Empire's opponents in the fifth century did, namely that the Emperors had begun to delegitimize themselves in their western holdings.) Whereas the Western Empire of 425 had been out of business in Gaul and the Spains for some decades longer than that, with a brief and arguably meaningless interlude in the earliest part of Honorius' reign. Aurelianus also possessed more territory (and good recruiting territory at that) than the Western Empire of the fifth century did, although, to be fair, he also had a somewhat greater military commitment. His opponents were relatively well-organized and kept their territories comparatively stable; there was no comparison to the unholy mess that Gaul and the Spains were in when Aetius (the subject of the thread!) seized control at Ravenna.

No disagreement here. It is an illustration that under similar circumstances a century and a half earlier, the Roman empire could still cope with barbarian invasions, even while dealing with civil strife and break-away states. What happened by Aetius' time is a huge difference in magnitude, combined with the rot that set in Imperial administration. The barbarian tribes had gathered too much momentum and made too many inroads, to be dealt with in the same conditioned way as they had in the past, and the 'Romans' adapted and improvised for awhile.

The term foederati was anything but meaningless. It had a specific meaning that could be applied to specific groups at given times. After 439, for instance, the Goths of Gaul supplied foederati to the Roman army fighting in the Spains, and again during the effort to resist Attila. That one was not made before that point is significant, and not merely a case of some mass conspiracy by Roman letter-writers, annalists, and historians contemporary to Alareiks to present imperial actions in a 'better' light (as though a foedus with Alareiks would have made anybody look bad).

Yes I believe we've beat this topic to death. The Romans wanted to call the Goths foederati when it suited them, but how did the Goths see it ? They wanted to be in alliance with the Romans when it suited them, foedus or not. At least you're acknowledging they were in fact foederati at times, rather than just a unit within the Roman army.

The fact that the term 'Goths' is applied to Radagaisus' group - a group which actually does seem to fit the "people on the move" stereotype, and which notably was wiped out by the Roman military at Faesulae - would seem to rather dramatically undermine your belief that 'Goth' applied to two (still wondering where you pulled "two" from here, and hoping for your own sake that you don't mean "Visigoths" and "Ostrogoths") distinct ethnopolitical units.

"Visigoth" and "Ostrogoth" were Roman shorthand for groups that had nothing to do with each other before the late fifth century. Thiudareiks Amal, for instance, would never have called himself an "Ostrogoth", and Evareiks - let alone Alareiks - would have never called himself a "Visigoth".

Yes I am. We need some recognizable nomenclature just to have a discussion. Now we are really talking about what the dominant ethno-political makeup of the groups were, not assuming they were some monolithic block. Cassiodorus only coined the term Visigoths to refer to the Spanish Goths - because the Ostrogoths were still commonly referred to as simply 'Goths'. Although Collins says no contemporary accounts directly link the Tervingi and Vesi in Alaric's time, the two are almost always mentioned in conjunction with two pairings that are used to distinguish them in primary accounts that span more than a century: either the Tervingi and Gruthungi or Visi and Austrogothi; and the two pairs are never mixed, though rarely all 4 are mentioned together. Very simply - I refer to those who entered the Roman Empire early as Visigoths, associated with Alaric's people who eventually settled in southern France then Spain. Those who became the Ostrogoths are the ones that remained behind and endured Hun overlordship until after Chalons, then moved in to Italy. Their dominant origin appears to have been the Gruthungi, but of course there was some cross-mixture and other elements involved Now if you have an alternate theory that not only explains the fate of the earlier named groups, but the origin of the latter named groups, please have a go. Just how many faux-Goths were wandering around at the time to confuse the issue ? Furthermore Wolfram argues, the terms 'Vesi' and 'Ostrogothi' were used by the peoples to boastfully describe themselves - so don't rule out that the terms had some recognizable meaning among the Goths at the time.

According to migrationist historians of the Goths like Peter Heather and Herwig Wolfram, the group that eventually became the "Visigoths" was an amalgam of people, mostly Gothic-speakers, some of whom had been part of Alareiks' group, some of whom had been part of Radagaisus' group, and some of whom had been part of a hypothetical and unattested group (to make up for the numerical disparities) that eventually coalesced under the leadership of Athaulf and Wallia and settled in southern Gaul in 418. They also hold that "Ostrogoths" were a group of Goths, also unrelated, that coalesced in the ERE under Thiudareiks Strabo in the 470s and 480s, most of which came into the Empire after the collapse of the Hunnic "polity" and were welded into a "supergroup" by Strabo and his successor/rival Amal.

According to other historians, like Guy Halsall and Michael Kulikowski, the "Visigothic" identity was slowly constructed over the course of the fifth century by, effectively, elements of the army striking out on their own. It certainly had little to do with the identity that Goths beyond the Roman frontier held to. Some of the soldiers in that army may have been "Gothic" anyway, and for them it was simply an exercise in adjusting the layers of their ethnicity - the opposite of how Americans decreasingly thought of themselves in terms of what state they lived in over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But for many others, the assumption of "Gothic" ethnicity was a situational response, conditioned partly by the later Roman army and aristocracy's tendency to pretend to be 'barbarian' as a method of make themselves seem more badass ("barbarian chic" has been written up all over the place; the most famous example is the fact that what used to be thought of as "Gothic" aristocratic dress is actually a north African Roman design from ~350). The Ostrogoths, effectively a welded-together mishmash of Eastern Roman federate and regular infantry under the command of Amal, fit into much the same category. (Thinking of the "Ostrogoths" as a "people on the move" would require explaining how and why this "people" packed up and moved from the Balkans across the Hellespont to Anatolia for several years, and then moved back across the Straits and all the way into Italy. I suppose it's not impossible if you're really set on this "people on the move" thing, but it really doesn't make much sense.)

Ok this is useful, and for the most part doesn't directly contradict me. I am surprised that historians today have the wherewithal to detect an apparent disparity of numbers, and surmise the presence of a 'hypothetical and unattested' group. We also have to consider Claudianus accounts as including various war bands that split off from the fold and dispersed or rejoined. Sometimes 'Goths' appears in reference only to their armies on the move, or even just mercenaries in the Roman army, rather than the mass migration of their people.

Referring to the migrations as "Germanic" opens up a whole other historiographical nest of vipers that would be stretching this thread's already-too-elastic topic to the breaking point.

I'm a bit old fashioned. Germanic is just the somewhat dated term that still recognizes the specific language group of most but not all of the tribes in question. (A notable exception being the Alans - did they evolve in to Circassians ?) 'Germanic' is not intended to glorify, villify, or identify them with past and present people of German extraction.

 

[Yui108]

EDIT: I was misreading you

 

[ParkCungHee]

Out of interest, if the level of migration was as limited as that, what happened it Britain that it actually ended up with a widespread Germanic language? Was it just about who ended up in power, or was there actually a higher level of immigration to the Isles than other parts of Roman Europe?

One factor might have been lack of language coherence before the arrival of the Germans. The Britons never fully Latinized, while Latin did manage to severely reduce the use of Celtic languages in England. The result is German might have been in a relatively strong position.

 

[Dachs]

Out of interest, if the level of migration was as limited as that, what happened it Britain that it actually ended up with a widespread Germanic language? Was it just about who ended up in power, or was there actually a higher level of immigration to the Isles than other parts of Roman Europe?

Try this blog post, with special emphasis on the comments.

 

[innonimatu]

Without wanting to comment at any length on the main discussion going on here, I just wanted to point out about the Visigoths that there seems to be no evidence of any cultural break in the Iberian Peninsula at the time of the breakup of the Western empire.
The economy declined, some cities lost importance, some others hastily put up walls which means insecurity around the 5th century, but there was no sudden abandonment of cities, no differences in burials of the same period signaling a split culture, no abrupt change in the elites (with bishops and the local church continuing their rise in influence started back during the late empire).
In other words, no evidence of either a noticeable migration of a different people into the peninsula, nor even of the installation of a local elite distinct from the late imperial one. The wars against the byzantines in the south at that time might well be viewed as mere continuations of the roman civil wars.
The real break among the elites came only with the african/arab invasion of the 8th century, and even then there was a lot of continuity as the invaders were not large in number.

 

[vogtmurr]

Well that is interesting. I'm not sure what I'd expect - they weren't a large tribe relative to the settled population, but they were a tribe and Arian christians for awhile. I don't think they destroyed much, or built much when they settled in France and Spain. Is there no difference in population centers, weapon or burial finds, coins etc. between 425-525 ? I don't know a lot about their subsequent activities in Spain, other than they had most of Iberia under their rule for awhile.

 

[Murky]

From listening to this podcast, reading what I can on the subject and from my own reasoning, The Fall of the Roman Empire isn't really all the complicated. The Late Roman Empire became an easy target because it was in a state of decline. There was a softening of it's policies against the barbarian tribes, many were used as tools of war as often as being enemies. The barbarian kings grew more ambitious and confident but also had the advantage of their tribes being born into a harsh a world as you could imagine. The Vandals took on the role that the Carthaginians had earlier in North Africa and the Huns took on the role of northern barbarian invaders. Couple that with the other invading tribes you end up with more than the weakened empire could handle. The ancient Romans that would just get right back up after getting their butts kicked (by the likes of Hannibal) were no longer around. In the end, the empire was just was overwhelmed by a stronger force.