Of these only the Goths are already mentioned in early Roman sources. So these other tribes simply spontaneously emerged out of nowhere? Or perhaps they were formed from previously unknown federations?
That's a rather ridiculous way to look at things. These are
tribal structures. They have little to no permanence. Elements of the group leave and join almost constantly; new groups form and old groups cease to be. Political continuity in the extra-Roman world did not, to all intents and purposes, exist, unless you're really charitable about the Boii (and even then, they didn't have continuity for very long).
Long-extant groups like the Yancai or Sweboz, if they actually
were politically continuous (see below), were so not because of some sort of institutionalized political structures but because of contingent events.
Further complicating things is the Roman tendency to anachronistically classicize references to
everything. Historians referring to Attila's armies, for instance, mentioned legit groups that had decent chances of taking part in the fighting (e.g. Goths, Sciri, Burgundiones) and also groups that had ceased to exist centuries before (Bastarna, Bructeri, Bellonoti).
It suffices to say that taking Greco-Roman ethnography at face value is foolish.
JEELEN said:
As per German ´constitution´ - I don´t recall me mentioning any such anachronism; I specifically referred to Germanic tribes adopting Roman military methods and weapons, nothing else. All of which are attested.
I apologize. It was a mistake to attribute to you an internally consistent position held by reputable historians (admittedly ones with whom I disagree).
JEELEN said:
Interesting. Yet these ´defeated´ barbarians established their own kingdoms on former Roman territory. Odd result there. And the (Visi-)Goths weren´t Romans - although very briefly they were recognized as foederati. (And there were ofcourse Goth slaves - being slave to a Roman doesn´t make you a Roman though.)
You cannot speak of 'kingdoms' established on Roman soil until the 460s, by which point the empire's Italian field army had virtually ceased to exist and the other field armies in Gaul, Spain, etc. had decided to strike out for themselves. For instance, the Frankish state of the Merovingians descended from the Roman field army on the Loire River, whose soldiers were mostly Roman but which seem to have included some people of Frankish descent. The 'Frankish' ethnicity that the soldiers adopted was a constructed identity and had no relationship to ancestry or where the soldiers had actually lived before they joined up with Rome. Even a cursory look at the Salian Frankish law code will show that the definition of a Frank had nothing to do with language and everything to do with his legal ability to wield arms.
The Goths of Alareiks were self-evidently Roman. He seems to have clearly been a regular Roman officer, just like Sarus, Gainas, and Tribigild; unlike those three (but rather like Constantinus "III" or Marcellinus), he used his troops against imperial forces in order to improve his position within the Roman military hierarchy. At no point attested in the sources during his period of semi-independent dueling with the Ravennate authorities was he ever explicitly described as being solely in command of allied federate formations, nor were the federate soldiers operating under him ever described as completely ethnically Gothic. Suggestions that he was in charge of a 'people on the move', such as those of Peter Heather, can be dismissed out of hand; they rely on descriptions of Alareiks' troops being accompanied by wagons, women, and children, but that was true of every Roman army in the period, regardless of its ethnic status. (Indeed, concerns over not being able to move with their spouses and families had sparked the revolt of 361 that put Iulianus Apostata on the throne.)
Perhaps the most decisive element in refuting the notion that Alareiks' Goths were a 'people on the move' constituted of the defeated Tervingi and Greuthungi settled in the Balkans after Theodosius' victories is that in order for them to have been these Goths, they would have exceeded the attested numbers of settled Goths in the area. So during the intervening ten to fifteen years, these Goths would have had to undergo a completely unattested and illegal population explosion by further migratory activity (unless you can figure out a way to breed thousands of soldiers in fifteen years). Furthermore, Alareiks' Goths
were not the only group of Goths in the Empire. We must deal with the Gothic elements that Sarus had under his command, and those of Tribigild, and the Goths that Gainas brought to Constantinople...there are simply too many 'Goths' to be made up by the defeated and resettled Tervingi and Greuthungi. Clearly, then, many, if not most, of these Goths were in fact not Goths by descent at all, but men who adopted a 'Gothic' identity, perhaps as part of a sort of unit esprit de corps (the discussion of the late Roman army and self-identification is a whole other beast).
JEELEN said:
Which clearly suggests that the imperial military was still able to do so after these supposedly lethal internal struggles - effectively undermining the point you try to make...
Your lack of familiarity with the period you're attempting to argue about does not undermine my point.
As noted, in the late 410s Constantius III (who hadn't become co-emperor yet, but who was on his way) beat the living **** out of everybody in Gaul, forced the army units that had been following Alareiks before his death back into line, and was beginning to attack the
Sweboz Suebi, Hasdings, Silings, and Alans in Iberia. The initial campaigns were apparently so devastating that the latter three groups were gutted, and forced to join together in order to retain any sort of military power. It was at that point that, as Masada, noted, Constantius III died of pleurisy while on the cusp of victory, setting off another fifteen years of civil war (involving figures such as Iohannes, Bonifacius, and the overrated Aetius) that further gutted the Roman army and permitted the Vandals to cross into Africa and capture Carthage. It is only with the loss of Carthage that we can even begin to start talking about Roman fiscal collapse: not a cause, but a symptom, of the vicious fratricidal conflict.
JEELEN said:
Then you should have no trouble pointing out one.
Sure thing, champ.
What was new however, was the appearance of larger conglomerates of German tribes at its borders. The 4th century sees a whole range of new peoples´ names appearing, a good deal of which had been before referred to as mere tribes.
This is wrong. Previously noted.
JEELEN said:
So while the East had been presented with one new superpower (the adjustment to which placed a huge strain on the imperial structure), all along the Rhine-Danube front, numerous larger local powers emerged, whose military were all a par with the Romans.
Similarly wrong. Worst offender is bolded. Underlined segment is the part where you insinuated some sort of political institutional development in the extra-Roman world that I (apparently mistakenly) thought was a reference to something real historians were actually talking about.
JEELEN said:
Instead of being incorporated within the military, they were now allowed to occupy their own land within the empire and under their own leaders.
This is a gross simplification, moving a process that mostly happened during and after the 460s (when Rome was already kinda screwed) to much earlier in the century. Walter Goffart destroys this.
JEELEN said:
They no longer effectively became romanized then, and after a while, as it turned out, they were in fact germanicizing the areas they occupied - to a degree, that is, as these ´peoples´ were never that numerous as to reverse what the Romans had done for centuries.
Speaking Latin, serving in the Roman army, conversion to (Chalkedonian) Christianity...not the hallmarks of "Romanization" I guess?
JEELEN said:
But they did cut in on the Roman taxbase, as huge tracts of, indeed, arable land, no longer payed its surplus to the imperial treasury. So, in a way, the Romans were paying for their own demise.
Directly contradicted by yourself earlier in your post when you agreed with me.
...lot of repetition in this post...
JEELEN said:
As to ´fratricidal civil war´ leading to these events, I don´t see any proof for this, nor has it been effectively presented. Yes, the East intervened in the West, but this was a matter of dynastic policy usually, and yes, there was intrigue in Rome, in Constantinople, and in the military, but this also might be termed as endemic to the Roman polity since the early days of the res publica.
The fact that civil war itself had happened before does not mean that the specific civil wars of the late fourth and fifth centuries were not the proximate causes of the demise of the WRE. It just changes the cause from a long-term Great Big Trend to contingent events.
With that said, the civil wars of the late fourth and early fifth centuries were systemic: they represented a clash between Gallic interests and imperial ones. Even after one civil war was won, more of the same for the same causes popped up afterwards because the underlying problem - elite management - was never dealt with. Eventually, the emperors began to deal with that problem, but by that time, the Roman army had ripped itself apart and much of the remainder was increasingly convinced that the imperial government was no longer able to provide for their needs.
