Empires and Barbarians (19 page)

The same is also suggested by the element of geographical displacement – sometimes clearly in the form of migration – that forms such a striking sub-theme of the war. Here again, it differs markedly from frontier conflicts of the first century. The Langobardi and Ubii whose attack on Pannonia opened proceedings, for instance, apparently moved about eight hundred kilometres south from the Lower Elbe, where both are located by Tacitus at the end of the first century and by Ptolemy in the middle of the second, only half a generation before the war began. Their journey south is undocumented, but the most natural route would have taken them down the Elbe, one of central Europe’s main north–south arteries, to Bohemia, before passing through the Morava valley and on to the Middle Danube plain (
Map 4
). If so, they followed one of central Europe’s great thoroughfares, and the same path trodden two hundred and fifty years earlier by the Cimbri and Teutones. We don’t know whether these Langobardi and Ubii were raiders who always intended to return home with their booty, or whether they intended to resettle more permanently in the frontier region. For some other groups, the desire for a permanent move is much clearer. This is certainly true of the Vandal groups who also moved south in the course of the war, in this case over a shorter distance from central Poland, and who attempted, with a degree of Roman collusion this time, to seize the territory of the Costoboci on the fringes of Dacia. As a move towards defusing the crisis, as we have seen, the Romans likewise received the Naristi into the Empire, and the Marcomanni and Victuali had earlier asked for similar treatment. Not that all the projected resettlement had the Roman frontier region in mind. Marcus moved decisively at one point to prevent the Quadi from moving as a body northwards into the territory of the Semnones on the Middle Elbe.
⁶

It is important not to go overboard here. None of this suggests that there was some unstoppable tide of barbarian migration blowing in from the north, and the Marcomanni, Quadi and Iazyges surely did exploit the advent of trouble to pursue their own wealth-gathering agendas. Some of the outsiders who moved into the frontier zone also came only to raid. Even so, there is enough here to indicate that the Germanic groups of the frontier region, for the most part semi-subdued client kingdoms of the Empire rather than its sworn enemies, became caught up in the war at least in part because of the appearance of intrusive population groups, and to some extent did actually require – as they claimed – Roman assistance. Ballomarius, king of the Marcomanni, at one point stood up before the Emperor Marcus Aurelius as spokesman for delegations from a total of eleven frontier groups whose accustomed haunts were being threatened by pressure from the north.
⁷
If we had to leave the Marcomannic War at this point, and up to about 1970 we would have, it would all be very intriguing, but ultimately frustrating. By themselves the historical sources cannot give us any real sense of the scale of the bigger picture of which Marcus’ quarrels with the Marcomanni and Quadi formed just a part. In the last scholarly generation or so, however, a vast new body of archaeological evidence has come to light, which has added dramatically to our knowledge of what was afoot in northern Germania in the second century.

The fact that this evidence exists at all is a fascinating by-product of the Cold War. Numerous sites had been excavated in central and eastern Europe before 1939, but so many of the finds were lost in the conflagration of war that scholarship more or less began again from scratch afterwards, when much of the impetus, manpower and funding came from a particular quarter: the eastern bloc states that emerged under Soviet hegemony. These states managed to combine two interests, which, on the face of it, should have been incompatible. On the one hand, they were vigorously nationalistic. This expressed itself archaeologically in the desire to prove that the present inhabitants were the latest descendants of an indigenous population that had continuously occupied the same piece of territory with distinction far back into the distant past. This was combined with a healthy interest in demonstrating the truth of the processes of ancient historical development as outlined in the nineteenth century by Messrs Marx and Engels, despite the fact, as we have already seen, that for Marxists
any kind of national identity could only be a false consciousness. For both these reasons, investigating the deep past was regarded as the height of chic behind the Iron Curtain, and the result was a huge state-sponsored growth industry. When you read them now, the ideological overtones of some of the publications generated by all this work, particularly those from the 1950s and 1960s, make your hair stand on end. But there were many scholars who steadfastly refused to surrender to the extraordinary weight of the official Marxist-nationalist expectations of the past, and, whether by just paying lip-service to official lines or by ignoring them entirely, pursued their research with integrity. Some tremendously important work was already being done on the basis of all the new finds, even in the Stalinist era, and by the 1970s and 1980s many East European academic communities had won almost complete intellectual freedom.
⁸

One direct result is a much clearer picture of the major material cultural systems of Germanic-dominated Europe in the Roman period, and in particular the identification of the Wielbark culture of northern Poland as an entity recognizably distinct from its immediate Przeworsk neighbour to the south, which had been identified and relatively fully investigated between the wars. There are many similarities between the two, but differences both in detail – for example, pot decoration, weapon construction – and on a larger scale distinguish them. Wielbark males were never buried with weapons, whereas Przeworsk males often were, and Wielbark cemeteries often produce a mixture of cremation and inhumation rites, whereas Przeworsk populations only ever cremated. Such differences indicate substantially different beliefs about any afterlife.

What makes these identifications so important for the Marco-mannic War is that the plethora of new finds has also made it possible to evolve much more reliable archaeological dating systems for the remains. Kossinna – dread founder of culture history – had started the job using the intersection of two elements. First, he and his peers established the principle of using stylistic development to establish relative dates within a particular ‘culture’. The appearance of more developed designs of a particular object, or more sophisticated forms of the same kind of decoration, was – reasonably, as it turns out – presumed to be subsequent to simpler, therefore earlier, forms. In principle, this approach can be taken with any type of object, but the method was originally applied largely to pottery. Early researchers
then attempted to use occasional finds of more precisely datable objects, often Roman coins in Germanic remains, to calibrate the stylistic sequences against a more absolute chronology. If a coin of 169
AD
was found with a particular type of pottery, then that type was clearly being made after that date. This was fine as far as it went, but the time lag between the production and final deposition of datable objects was always guesswork, and could generate deeply erroneous conclusions, since we now know good-quality first- and second-century Roman silver coins were still circulating widely in barbarian Europe, for instance, in the fourth century.

Applying this basic approach to the much larger body of material that had become available by 1970, scholars were able to establish sequences of stylistic development for a much wider range of items: weapons, buckles, jewellery and combs, amongst others. This put the dating of finds on a much firmer footing, since it could be based on all the materials in a given cache, not just on one item, and, as a result, the chronology of these major Germanic-dominated cultural systems can now be broken down into distinct phases, each typically defined as consisting of an association of particular weapon types with certain forms of brooch, buckle, pot and comb. In particular, this has made it infinitely easier to spot the occasional rogue item that had continued in use from an earlier period and whose inclusion in a later burial would previously have thrown dating estimates out.
⁹

All this is relevant to the Marcomannic War because it emerged from the new work that dramatic transformations began to unfold in the configuration of Germanic, or Germanic-dominated, material cultural systems on the territory of what is now Poland from about the middle of the second century
AD
. In particular, the Wielbark cultural system started to spread southwards from Pomerania into the north of Greater Poland (between the Rivers Notec and Warta), and south-eastwards across the Vistula into Masovia (
Map 4
). In the past, the identity of the population groups behind this set of remains generated acrimonious debate because of their potential relevance to the highly vexed question of Slavic origins, but it is now generally accepted that the Wielbark culture incorporated areas that, in the first two centuries
AD
, were dominated by Goths, Rugi and other Germani, even if its population had not originally been (or still was not) entirely Germanic-speaking. The new territories into which Wielbark remains began to spread from c.150, however, had previously been occupied by a
population whose material remains belonged to the Przeworsk system. This has traditionally been associated with the Vandals, but certainly encompassed other population groups besides. Like most of these cultural areas, it was so large that it must have included several of the small first- and second-century Germanic groupings mentioned by Tacitus and Ptolemy.

What really matter, however, are not the detailed identifications, but the brute fact of Wielbark expansion. The chronological coincidence here is much too striking to be dismissed. Wielbark expansion – indicating a major upheaval of some kind in northern Poland – occurred at more or less the same time as the Marcomannic War. It must have been connected with it in some way, and shows that the frontier disturbances that appear in the Roman sources were linked to a wider set of convulsions affecting a broader tranche of Germanic-dominated Europe. What the archaeological evidence cannot make clear at this point is whether this link was one of cause or effect. Even the improved stylistic chronologies cannot date remains more closely than phases of twenty-five years or so, and there are always considerable chronological overlaps between adjacent phases. In this case, a twenty-five-year window is large enough for Wielbark expansion to have been either cause
or
effect of the Marcomannic War. More precise carbon-14 or dendrochronological dates will be needed for greater clarity on this point, and will no doubt become available, but for the moment we have to leave the issue open.
¹⁰

It is also unclear how we should envisage the human history behind the expansion of the Wielbark system. Archaeological zones are the material remains of systems, not things, so an expansion in the geographical area of one system at the expense of another need not represent an act of conquest, as Kossinna would automatically have assumed. In principle, expansion might be the effect of a number of different kinds of development: conquest or annexation certainly, but also extensions of trading patterns, belief structures and so forth. In this instance, it does seem clear that Wielbark expansion to an extent represented the acculturation of existing Przeworsk populations to new Wielbark cultural norms, rather than their complete replacement by Wielbark immigrants. As
Map 4
shows, at some cemeteries Wielbark-type remains replaced Przeworsk predecessors with no intervening gap, and no obvious signs of discontinuity in use. Here we may well be dealing, therefore, with a Przeworsk population taking on new
Wielbark burial habits with regard to weaponry and inhumation, and presumably also, therefore, the particular patterns of belief that underlay them. But even this much change did not occur in a vacuum. Something must have led these Przeworsk populations to change some long-established life – or rather, death – habits. What this may have been, the archaeological evidence does not say. In my view, some new degree of political influence is much the likeliest answer, since even cultural imitation usually follows political prestige.

Equally important, and operating alongside any acculturation, Wielbark expansion also involved some population displacement southwards from northern Poland. This is reflected in the historical sources. By c.200
AD
, for instance, the Roman army was able to recruit into its ranks Goths – one of the old Wielbark groups – from the fringes of Dacia. A hundred years before, Gothic territories had been too remote from the frontier for this to happen. But the archaeological material is itself also highly suggestive. The general density of Wielbark sites had been growing apace since the start of the millennium. Individual settlements were short-lived, falling in and out of use relatively quickly in the first and second centuries, reflecting the population’s inability to maintain the fertility of its fields in anything but the short term. But there is also a broader pattern. Within each twenty-five-year period after the birth of Christ, there was a larger total number of settlements in use in Wielbark areas. On the face of it, this suggests population growth, which would help explain both the displacement southwards to the Carpathians, which allowed the Romans to pick up Gothic recruits, and the general Wielbark pressure being applied on its more immediate Przeworsk neighbours in central Poland. As we have seen, the evidence on agricultural production from Germanic Europe does indeed suggest that its population grew substantially in the Roman period, so that this picture is far from implausible. If so, a growing Wielbark population was perhaps posing some of its Przeworsk neighbours a stark choice – between being absorbed into the Wielbark system and finding alternative domains.
¹¹

There is much more, of course, that we would ideally want to know, and it’s particularly frustrating that we cannot be sure whether Wielbark expansion preceded or followed Marcus Aurelius’ woes on the frontier. Nonetheless, history and archaeology combine well enough here both to show that the war was highly unusual in its scale and duration and to suggest that one of the causes of this was the role
being played by intrusive population groups moving into the frontier region from further afield. It is not just the rather ropy evidence of the
Historia Augusta
that suggest that the events of the Marcomannic War involved large numbers of people on the move. Some of the much more trustworthy fragments of Dio’s History suggest the same, with Wielbark expansion adding a further dimension to our understanding of what was afoot. All of this is enough to show that the Marcomannic War cannot be understood as a slightly more violent than usual frontier spat. And the case for seeing it as a watershed is only strengthened when we turn our attention to the third century, when Wielbark expansion increased in momentum and further Germanic migration entirely remade Rome’s frontier world.