Empires and Barbarians (33 page)

So what was it? None of the factors relating to developments internal to the Roman Empire satisfactorily account for this major concentration of armed groups and their dependants in the Middle Danube region before 405–8, though they certainly help explain what
happened next – why the west received no eastern help before 409/10, and why attacking through Gaul proved a better option than invading Italy. In 1995, I argued that it was the second stage of Hunnic movement into Europe that had prompted this gathering of the clans west of the Carpathians, and to my mind this still provides much the likeliest explanation. Not only does the chronological correlation between their advance to the heart of Europe and the departure of our invaders from the Middle Danube plain suggest it, but, as we will explore in the next chapter, a close look at the migratory patterns of the Huns themselves provides two strong planks of further support. First, the Huns had pressing reasons of their own to want to move into central Europe, making it highly unlikely that they were merely exploiting a power vacuum that had already been created there by the departure of the Vandals and others. Second, the Huns’ treatment of neighbouring populations who got in their way made it reasonable for those neighbours to want to escape. It is thus entirely comprehensible that a second westward shift in the centre of Hunnic operations from the Black Sea to the Middle Danube, which clearly did occur in the early fifth century, should have had the effect we observe in the run-up to 405–8: causing potential new subjects to move out of its way. Not only is this the simplest explanation for the build-up of immigrants west of the Carpathians, it is also the most cogent and compelling. The proposed alternatives utterly fail to explain what the bulk of the invaders of 405–8 were doing west of the Carpathians in the first place.

Given such a strong likelihood that this crisis was a rerun of that of 376, only this time west rather than east of the Carpathians, we should not be surprised that the sources suggest some similar observations about the detailed operation of the migration processes involved in the later case. Many of this second wave of migrants, like the fourth-century Goths before them, had an established history of relocation. The one exception, it would seem, were the Sueves (assuming, again, that this term does designate various subgroups of the Marcomanni and Quadi), who had not moved anywhere before participating in the Rhine crossing. The Alans, on the other hand, were originally nomads – but this needs a bit more comment. Nomads, contrary to the received images of random movement over vast distances, typically make relatively restricted and cyclical moves between well-established blocks of summer and winter pasture. This is
an entirely different phenomenon from the geographical dislocation witnessed in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, when families and flocks were moved hundreds of kilometres from long-established haunts. As with the late second- and third-century Goths, an inherent capacity for movement, engendered by the less rigid attachment of their agricultural economy to any particular territory than we are generally used to in the modern world, will also have been a factor in making this relocation possible. And in any case, by the time the various Alanic subgroups involved in the Rhine crossing had reached the Middle Danube, the jumping-off point for the events of 406, they had recently made one long trek from east of the River Don, so that a properly migratory – rather than merely nomadic – habit had already gathered momentum amongst them.
⁵⁶

The same is also true of Radagaisus’ Goths. They will have shared some of the past experiences of the Tervingi, being another of those concentrations of Germanic-dominated military power generated by the third-century migrations to the Black Sea. Since Goths are not found west of the Carpathians in the fourth century, the Gothic followers of Radagaisus must have made at least one move in the recent past from the Pontus to the Middle Danube, on the eve of what was to prove their ill-fated journey to Italy. The Vandals had not moved as far as the Goths in the third century, but did extend their control, from the time of the Marcomannic War onwards, south from northern and central Poland to parts of former Roman Dacia in upland Transylvania. They, again, must also have made an initial move west from this region to the fringes of the Alps, where their presence was noted in 402. In large measure, therefore, round two of the
Völkerwanderung
encompassed population groups with firmly entrenched migration habits, who were more likely to respond to major threats and opportunities by moving again.

The range of motivations in play among these later migrants, likewise, was probably similar to those of the Goths of 376. What we cannot reconstruct, since the date of the Huns’ entry en masse into the Middle Danubian region is uncertain, is how immediate a threat they faced. Whether they needed to leave their old abodes in more of a hurry than had the Tervingi in 376 is unclear, but this doesn’t change the fact that their motives for moving were substantially political and negative. They too were looking for new and safer homes. The influx of substantial numbers of Goths, Alans and Vandals on to the Middle
Danubian plain would have been enough in itself, of course, quite apart from any Hunnic pressure, to generate political problems within the region itself. If the return of one relatively small Sarmatian subgroup to the frontier area was enough to destabilize the situation in 359, a mass influx of outsiders can only have caused political chaos.

But, as was also the case in 376, this does not deny that the immigrants also had their eye on the potential economic and other gains that might come their way from a well-organized relocation on to Roman soil. If increased pressure from the Huns made it imperative to move somewhere, then, as in 376, perceptions of its likely advantages turned the migrants’ thoughts towards the Empire. Two further observations are also worth making. First, finding a new home outside the Empire would not have been easy. The smaller concentration of Tervingi who retreated from the Danube in 376 rather than pursue their Roman visa applications further, for instance, relocated themselves in upland Transylvania or its western fringes. But to secure this new territory, they had to expel some Sarmatians already in residence. These latter, in turn, spilled on to Roman soil.
⁵⁷
Similarly, while en route for the Rhine in 406, the Vandals, as we have seen, had a bruising encounter with some Franks, in which they are said to have lost the unbelievable figure of twenty thousand dead – which we can reasonably take as representing a genuine memory of a hard fight. Germania was not full of fertile land ready for the taking, and given that you would have to fight for a new home wherever you went, at least Roman territory had the attraction of greater economic development. And, like the Tervingi in 376, most of the second wave of migrants had enough knowledge of the Empire to be well aware of these potential advantages. An active field of information, in other words, may have turned the discussions of our later migrants towards an imperial option, just as, even in 376, hopes of economic predation were operating alongside the Goths’ genuine fear of the Huns. Second, there is every reason, as we have seen, to suppose that the survival of the Goths of 376 as a semi-autonomous unit on Roman soil provided a further incentive for the displaced groups of the early fifth century to try the Roman option.

None of these immigrants should have been in any doubt, though, that their ambitions for a place in the Roman sun would meet with heavy resistance. If doubt there was, the fate of Radagaisus’ force must have quickly defused it. Given that their migration was an attempt to
force the Roman Empire into making concessions in their direction, then each group needed to field a powerful military force. This meant, again as in 376, that freemen (or their Alanic equivalents)
⁵⁸
had to be recruited. For the same reasons as in 376 (and in the later stages of the third-century Germanic and the ninth-century Viking expansions), the only possible migration unit was the large grouping of ten thousand-plus warriors, many accompanied by their families. The immigrants’ clear perception of the dangers of their enterprise is also visible in some of the alliances they put together for the purpose. The Sciri footsoldiers sold as slaves and distributed as
coloni
(farmers) in the aftermath of Uldin’s defeat probably had no choice, and the sources on Radagaisus’ following are not good enough to make comment worthwhile.
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But the massive alliance of Vandals, Alans and Sueves was an entirely new combination of groups that had not even been near-neighbours in the fourth century. At this point it was clearly still a loose alliance, but even this much cooperation must have taken a great deal of brokering. And not everyone seems to have been persuaded that it was the right move. It has been suggested that enough Siling Vandals stayed put to give their name to modern Silesia, and, more convincingly, that Sueves in large numbers still inhabited the Middle Danube region long after the migrant Suevi of 406 had reach northwest Spain.

So determined and so thoroughgoing was the Empire’s resistance to these new migrants that some of them altered their initial strategies. Uldin’s force was picked apart by diplomacy, when the east Roman negotiators managed to win over some of his key supporters without a fight. These were offered attractive positions in the Roman military, one presumes, while many of the less fortunate Sciri were consigned to servitude on Roman landed estates. The fate of Radagaisus’ force was similar. Again, some of his higher-status supporters abandoned ship, doing a deal whereby they were drafted into the Roman army. This time, however, the scale was different. The twelve thousand ‘of the best’ of Radagaisus’ warriors who were drafted into Stilicho’s army may have had it in mind from the beginning that being part of a larger migrating group might be a useful means of eventually cutting their own deals with the Roman authorities. But, just as likely, side-swapping was a stratagem employed only when the brute reality of overarching Roman military power became clear, as Stilicho and his field army approached.
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Like the Danube crossing of 376, the demographic displacement associated with the collapse of Rome’s central European frontier only partially fits the image of the traditional Germanic
Völkerwanderung
. The crisis of 405–8 did see massive mixed groupings cross the frontier for reasons that had more to do with factors external to the Empire than anything happening within it. And even if some of these groups were too well organized to resemble the floods of refugees sometimes seen in the modern world, their activities are often explicable in terms of the principles behind modern migration patterns, not least the web of negative and positive motivations driving the migrants, and the massive influence of existing political structures and flows of information. That said, the groupings were complex political associations, not ‘peoples’ in the traditional sense of the term. Some of the groups caught up in the action do seem to have had long histories. Hasding Vandals, for instance, figured in the second-century Marcomannic War. But like all Germanic groups of the late Roman period, they had been through several centuries of dynamic transformation generated by intense interaction with each other and with the Roman state, which meant that they encompassed a wide range of social classes and rights. This internal group complexity was then increased by the inter-group alliances that were forged, such as that between two separate Vandal groups, and Alans and Sueves in order to increase their chances of survival on Roman soil. This added to the picture much greater size, new political ties, and sometimes massive cultural disparity (in the case of the nomadic Iranian-speaking Alans). Even if some of their component units had well-established links, therefore, the entities that crossed the frontier were improvised political alliances, not long-standing aggregates of population.

We should not wonder, then, that the Roman authorities were able to destroy some of them precisely by targeting the joins in their fabric, notably by attracting away elite military followers of both Radagaisus and Uldin at the expense of the group leader and the less favoured rank and file. But the internal disunity that might naturally be generated by social complexity and improvised alliances is only part of the story. Another striking characteristic of those groups that managed to survive their initial encounters with the Roman state was an apparent capacity to repeat the migratory process.

The histories of all the major groups who crossed into the Empire at the two moments of frontier collapse followed a similar course. Their initial – overwhelmingly uninvited
⁶¹
– penetrations of Roman territory were followed by periods of armed struggle. They had to force the Empire to accept that they could not be defeated, and that its normal policies for the subjugation and integration of immigrants could not be imposed upon them. For the Tervingi and Greuthungi, these initial struggles lasted for about six years until the negotiation of a compromise peace agreement with the Roman state, which came into force on 3 October 382. That the Empire was willing to agree to such a deal was entirely due to the Goths’ military capacity, in particular their successive defeats of two Roman emperors – Valens, most famously, at Hadrianople on 9 August 378, then Theodosius in Macedonia in the summer of 380. Other, smaller migrant groups of the period – Taifali, Sarmatians and isolated Gothic subgroups – who failed this initial military test received much harsher treatment, their defeats being followed by total loss of identity, as group members were distributed as unfree labour to Roman landowners.
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The history of the migrants involved in the crisis of 405–8 is similar. Again uninvited, they had to fight, initially, to carve out new homes for themselves. Some failed. Many of the followers of Uldin and Radagaisus, as we have seen, met with disaster, killed or distributed again as unfree labour, though some elements of each group managed to do a deal with the Roman authorities. Initially at least, the Vandals, Alans and Sueves were more fortunate. After a career of wild violence in Gaul, in 409 or 410 they forced their way over the Pyrenees into Roman Spain, which offered them new opportunities. In 412, six years after their initial crossing, they divided up the bulk of its provinces between them. The Siling Vandals took Baetica, the Hasdings most of Gallaecia, the Sueves north-western Gallaecia, and the Alans, underlining that they were the largest component of the force at this stage, the richer provinces of Lusitania and Carthaginensis (
Map 9
). There is no evidence that this partition was authorized by the
central Roman authorities, but it would seem to represent a more ordered exploitation of economic assets, beyond mere looting.
⁶³
The time lag between invasion and eventual settlement, whether we’re talking 376 or 406, is entirely understandable. No large surge of armed, unexpected immigration could ever have come to an immediate modus vivendi with the populations at its point of destination.