Empires and Barbarians (42 page)

The narrative of the Hunnic Empire’s collapse – complimenting the evidence for its creation and maintenance – confirms just how important these internal identities were, even if further reconfigurations were again part of the process. The Empire was destroyed from within, when its various subject peoples reasserted their independence militarily after Attila’s death. If they had all been subsumed voluntarily into an equal Hunnic identity, why should this have happened? Acting collectively, they had been able to extract from the Roman Empire the huge sums of gold that show up in the Middle Danubian burials. This was a level of predation which, separately, they were quite unable to match, as is underlined both by the general absence of gold in earlier Germanic remains and the capacity of the east Roman Empire to rebuild its control of the Balkans in the later fifth century after Hun-inspired unity had collapsed.
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Indeed, the energy the non-Huns put into escaping from Hunnic rule demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that the lower status and the scope for exploitation inherent in their position meant that the costs for them of being part of the Empire were not generally compensated for by the gains flowing to some of them because of the greater predatory capacity generated by its existence.
When the chance presented itself on Attila’s death, a scramble for independence quickly followed.

Like their initial incorporation, the process of breaking away from Hunnic control involved further renegotiation of group identities. If all, or even many, of the denser concentrations of subjects had had their overall leaderships suppressed as part of their incorporation into the Hunnic Empire, then a rush for position and power of the kind that brought Edeco and the Sciri together would have ensued right across Attila’s domain. And certainly, Valamer, as we have seen, had to unite what became the Amal-led Goths by defeating other dynasts, and may well have been recruiting non-Gothic manpower in addition. Aside from the large named population units that emerge as successor states to the Hunnic Empire in the later 450s and early 460s, many smaller groupings also figure fleetingly in our sources, like the Sorosgsi, Amilzuri, Itimari, Tounsoures and Boisci mentioned in different fragments of Priscus’ history. Several of these found their way on to Roman soil as the Hunnic Empire collapsed, and something of the chaotic nature of the action as they were resettled by the Roman state is reflected in their subsequent line-up, as reported by Jordanes:

The Sarmatians and the Cemandri and certain of the Huns dwelt in Castra Martis . . . The Sciri together with the Sadagarii and certain of the Alani . . . received Scythia Minor and Lower Moesia . . . The Rugi, however, and some other races asked that they might inhabit Bizye and Arcadiopolis. Hernac, the younger son of Attila, with his followers, chose a home in the farthest reaches of Scythia Minor. Emnetzur and Ultzindur, kinsmen of his, won Oescus, Utus and Almus in Dacia.
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These groups were each assigned to just one or to a few Byzantine military bases in the northern Balkans, so none of them can have been particularly large. Similar groups, presumably, were also being subsumed into the bigger kingships which began to emerge from Hunnic imperial collapse. Among the descendants of Theoderic the Amal’s following in Italy in the late 540s, for instance, were Bittigure Huns. These had previously been commandeered by the sons of Attila in the 460s to fight Theoderic’s uncle Valamer, and must have renegotiated their political allegiance at some point in the meantime.
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This could have happened on any number of occasions, of course, but the
reshuffling of the Hunnic imperial pack in the aftermath of Attila’s death is an obvious possibility.

In the slightly longer term and larger scale, this was very much the fate of the Rugi. They formed one of the initial successor kingdoms to the Hunnic Empire, but then threw in their lot with Theoderic after Odovacar had destroyed their independence. The Gepids and Lombards carried on this tradition of gathering fragments under their wing. Defeated Heruli joined the former (although, at first at least, they didn’t like the terms they were offered), and by the time the Lombards left for Italy in the late 560s they took with them, according to Paul the Deacon, Sueves, Heruli, Gepids, Bavarians, Bulgars, Avars, Saxons, Goths and Thuringians. The first three names on this list, at least, represent human flotsam and jetsam from the post-Hunnic Middle Danube.
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The adjustments in political identity involved in creating the successor kingdoms after Attila’s death should not be underestimated. Some, perhaps all of them, were not culturally homogeneous groupings, closed to outsiders and replicating themselves over time through in-marriage, but new kingships stitched together out of a variety of remnants who shared a basic interest in breaking away from Hunnic control. Even the Gepids, who were seemingly less under the Hunnic cosh in Attila’s lifetime and already had their own king, may have been picking up new recruits as the Empire collapsed. But this was all the more true of groups like the Sciri and Amal-led Goths, who found – or refound – their unity at this point, and it is entirely likely that others about whom we have no information – such as the Rugi, Sueves and Heruli – had equally messy origins.

Nor were these kingships ‘peoples’ in a second important sense of the term as it has traditionally been used. As we have seen, three hundred years of growing economic complexity had created, or greatly reinforced, social inequalities in the Germanic world. For the Amal-led Goths among Attila’s former subjects, we have explicit evidence that this meant that their populations contained warriors of two unequal statuses, probably to be equated with freemen and freedmen. The same is true of the Lombards who intruded themselves into the Middle Danubian region in force only after Attila’s sons had given up the struggle. When it comes to understanding group identity, this adds an important extra dimension. Only higher-status warriors benefited fully from the existence of the group to which they belonged, via the rights and privileges it conferred upon them, and only they can be supposed
to have been completely committed to that group’s identity. The significance of this shows up in the historical narratives. At one point, in the course of the Byzantine conquest of Ostrogothic Italy, all the higher-status warriors in a Gothic force in Dalmatia were killed. The remaining, lower-status, warriors immediately surrendered. And throughout Procopius’ narrative of that war, losses among the higher-status group were a particular cause of alarm and despondency among the Goths.
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At least the bigger entities to emerge from the Hunnic Empire, then, were not ‘peoples’ in the traditional sense of the word. Neither culturally nor hierarchically homogeneous, they were a complex of political alliances and statuses that, as well as the two strands of militarized manpower, probably incorporated unarmed slaves. That said, it would not be right to go from one simplistic extreme to another: from the old view of these entities as entirely closed population groups, to the opposite – that they were mere flags of convenience with no internal structure or stability. This is not the place for a full discussion, but two important observations are worth making. First, group identities were not dependent on royal families, which, in one line of research, have been seen as providing social cement for highly disparate improvised groupings in the form of a mere pretence of ethnic belonging. The Lombards took kings from a variety of dynastic lines, not from one uniquely royal one, and even managed to continue to exist as Lombards without any kings at all in certain periods. This is a well-known point, but it has sometimes not been recognized that the Gothic evidence is much more similar than it initially appears to be. In the 520s, when he was seeking to secure the Italian throne for his minor grandson against a series of rivals – some from within the dynasty, some from without – Theoderic the Amal, Valamer’s long-lived nephew, issued a huge amount of propaganda stressing that his was a uniquely royal line, the only one fitted to rule these Goths. Cassiodorus also helped him ‘prove’ the point from Gothic history, by producing a genealogy which showed that the grandson was the seventeenth generation of kingship within the family. But kings are always saying this kind of thing, and should not be believed, especially when, in this case, Theoderic’s claims about the past do not hold up when compared with what can be learned from more contemporary sources. Cassiodorus’ Amal genealogy, likewise, was cobbled together from a mixture of Gothic oral history and Roman written history, with touches of biblical
inspiration thrown in. Amal domination had in fact been built up over these Goths in stages from as recently as c.450. Hence it ceases to surprise that, when Theoderic’s line failed to produce a suitable male heir, it was simply axed: almost literally, when his nephew Theodahad was murdered for his leadership failings in 536, just a decade after the great king’s death.
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Second, for all the messiness of the post-Attilan political process from which they emerged, some of these larger group identities were not so easy to destroy. Despite becoming part of Theoderic’s following in 487/8, for instance, the Rugi maintained their independence over two further generations down to c.540, when they were still a recognizable entity in the Italian landscape. For all their travails and splits, likewise, the Heruli retained a significant sense of their group identity for another forty-odd years after their defeat at the hands of the Lombards in 508. Without it, they would never have sought a leader of the traditional ruling house from among those of their number who had moved north to Scandinavia.
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To judge by their histories, both the Rugi and Heruli were ‘medium-sized’ entities. They were clearly not as militarily powerful, say, as the Gothic, Lombard or Gepid confederations which generated much longer-lived political entities, and into which elements of the Rugi and Heruli were eventually absorbed. In both cases, the evidence has been questioned. The mission of the Heruli to Scandinavia has been labelled a ‘fairy story’, and the resurfacing of the Rugi in 540 no more than an invention of the historian Procopius, who had – it is claimed – such a strong tendency to view any barbarian grouping as a ‘people’ that he ought not to believed. Both are stories recounted in detail in only the one source, and where that is the case, it is always possible to deny their validity. But is there any real substance to these arguments?

In my view, there isn’t. In the case of the Heruli, the Scandinavian mission is told in great circumstantial detail in the middle of what adds up to a full account of their fortunes after their defeat by the Lombards. Other parts of this story are confirmed in other sources, and what Procopius describes, in total, is the effective destruction of Herulic identity. When two contingents of Heruli end up fighting each other, as they did in 549 when one was fighting for the Gepids and the other (via the east Roman Empire) for the Lombards, then you have to conclude that the Herule label had ceased to mean much as a determinant of human behaviour. The account is entirely plausible,
there are no inconsistencies or obvious errors. There are of course other things one would like to know, but the narrative satisfies all the normal criteria for basic credibility that ancient and medieval historians usually employ. In the case of the Rugi, likewise, different sources record the extent to which they played an independent hand during Theoderic’s conquest of Italy in the early 490s. They swapped sides twice in fact, first to join Odovacar and then going back to the Goths. So we should not wonder at finding them – or some of them – with their identity preserved for a further generation or so after the conquest of Italy.

The only reason to doubt either of these stories is that they fail to fit in with the preconceptions about identity held by the modern scholars doing the doubting. Heavily influenced by the ideas of Barth, both are proponents of the idea that Germanic groups of the mid-first millennium could not have had strong group identities. But Barth, as we have seen, represents only one strand in modern research into identity, which lends no overwhelming support to the preconception that group identities ought always to be highly malleable. According to circumstances – the precise nature of any individual situational construct – group identity can be weaker or stronger, and, in the case of the Rugi, Procopius even offers a mechanism as to how identity was maintained: namely, by a voluntary ban on marriage outside the group.
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Given its coherence and detail, I am happy to accept what the evidence is telling us. The Heruli and Rugi probably were not ‘peoples’ in the classic nineteenth-century sense of the term. There is no evidence that either possessed within them strong cultural commonalities (though none either, to be fair, that they didn’t), and they may have incorporated outsiders through various alliance systems as Attila’s Empire broke up. They surely also, like all the other Germanic groups known from the period, incorporated strong status divides. But nonetheless they were bound by group identities capable of exercising a strong hold over significant numbers of their constituent populations.

And although you can more easily conceive of this being true among such smaller and less diverse groupings, it seems to have been true even of some of the larger group identities as well. When the Byzantines decided to conquer the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy in 536, their arrival sparked a sequence of defections from subgroups who preferred to make their peace with the invaders rather than continue
with their independent Gothic allegiance. One surviving papyrus beautifully illustrates the plight of a Gothic estate owner called Gundilas, who twisted and turned, swapping sides repeatedly in a desperate attempt to hold on to his land, as the fortunes of war fluctuated around him over the next twenty years. But neither the defectors nor Gundilas can have reflected the majority response to Byzantine invasion among Theoderic’s supporters and their descendants. If they had, those twenty years of warfare would not have followed in which the Goths attempted to maintain their political independence, especially since the Byzantines offered them a peace deal that would have allowed them to keep their lands in return for political submission. What really emerges from both Procopius’ narrative and a wider range of evidence is that a core body of higher-status warriors who had the most invested in Gothic group identity was slowly destroyed in the war years as more and more of them fell in battle.
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These were the men who had most to gain from maintaining the group identity that gave them their high social status, and these were the men most willing to fight for its continuance. My best guess is that such higher-status warriors, both among the Goths and among other Germanic groups of this era, were the real building blocks of group identity, and that the relative robustness – or otherwise – of any particular group depended upon their allegiances and attitudes. That does not mean, of course, that even among these higher-status individuals all felt the same degree of group allegiance. This doesn’t happen in the modern world, and it’s hard to see why it should have been any different in the ancient.