Europe: A History (49 page)

Despite Western conventions, it is important to view the barbarian migrations as a whole. They were
not
confined to the Germanic peoples, nor to the Roman frontline in the West. What appeared in the West as a sudden deluge at the end of the fourth century was just one act in a drama that was far more extensive both geographically and chronologically.

The first sign of the coming deluge occurred in 376, when the Ostrogoths, pressed by the Huns, petitioned the Emperor Valens to settle in Moesia. Some of them were allowed to cross the Danube, but were required to surrender both their arms and their children. Two years later, in August 378, they fought a pitched battle at Hadrianopolis (Edirne) in which the Emperor was killed. Thanks to the heavy cavalry of the Goths’ allies, the Sarmatian Alans, Rome’s invincible legions were decisively beaten. (In military history, that demonstration of the power of Sarmatian-style lances and their oversize chargers marks the debut of the most characteristic features of medieval warfare.) Four years after that it was the turn of the Visigoths. Their king and war-leader, Alaric, cannot have been indifferent to the Ostrogoths’ success. He was given the title of
magister militum illyricorum
as a sop. But in the course of a thirty-year adventure his imperial office did not restrain him from sacking first Athens (396) and then Rome (410). The immediate cause of Alaric’s wrath lay in the Empire’s refusal to accept the Visigoths for settlement in Noricum. Thereafter, he conceived a plan to take them to Africa. But his death at Cosenza caused yet another change of direction. Alaric’s successor, Athaulf, married the captured stepsister of the Emperor Honorius, whilst his brother Wallia gave the Visigoths respite by settling them in Aquitaine. The Visigoth kingdom of Tolosa (Toulouse) was short-lived. But it provided the springboard from which, some time after 507, the Visigoths set out to create their most enduring legacy in Spain.

The rampage of the Visigoths provided an opening for three more huge invasions. When the legions of Gaul were withdrawn to protect Constantinople from Alaric, the garrison of the Rhine was dangerously thinned. Some time around 400 the Burgundians took their chance to move into the area at the confluence of Rhine and Main. Thirty years later they were challenged by the Roman general Aetius, whose Hunnish auxiliaries drove them off. But in 443 they were back to settle permanently in the vicinity of Lyons. Henceforth the Burgundian Kingdom developed in the valleys of the Rhone and Saône, controlling the principal Alpine passes, [
NIBELUNG
]

At Christmas 406 a vast horde of barbarians crossed the frozen Rhine near Coblenz. Vandals, Suevi, and Alans poured into Gaul. The Vandals took a roundabout route to Alaric’s original destination in Africa. They crossed the Pyrenees in 409, the Straits of Gibraltar in 429, and the gates of Carthage in 439. They took 33 years to cover the 2,500 miles from the Rhine. From their Carthaginian base they took to the sea, seizing the Balearic Islands and Sardinia. In 455, under Genseric, they imitated Alaric and sacked Rome. The Vandal kingdom in Africa remained a major force until the restoration of imperial power in the following century. The Vandals parted company with their original companions, the Suevi
and the Alans, in Spain. The Suevi created a kingdom in the far north-west, in Galicia; the western Alans went for the valley of the Tagus.

In Britain, the departure of the legions in 410 gave a signal for the onslaught of the sea raiders. For more than a century, the Roman governors had sought to hold the forts of the ‘Saxon Shore’. Now the Romano-Britons were left to their own devices. Some Roman troops may possibly have returned for a decade or two after 418; but a vain appeal for assistance was made to Aetius in 446. Soon afterwards, all regular contact between Britain and the Empire was severed. Henceforth, the Anglo-Saxon longships brought not just raiders but mercenaries and colonists. In 457 Kent was surrendered to Hengest’s Jutes, a tribe that had worked its way from ‘Jutland’ in Denmark via Frisia. The Angles, who left a sign of their earlier abode in the district of ‘Angeln’ in Schleswig, took over Britain’s eastern coastlands. They sailed into the Humber, founding communities which underlay the expansive kingdom of Mercia, meaning the March or ‘Frontier’. The Saxons, under Aelle, first landed on the south coast, laying the foundation of the kingdom of the south Saxons (Sussex). Others—the middle Saxons (Middlesex) and the east Saxons (Essex)—moved up the valley of the Thames.

Thus began the long conquest and settlement of eastern Britain which resulted in the emergence of ‘England’. For three centuries and more, hundreds of local
chieftains controlled their own minuscule statelets, until by a process of merger and annexation the larger groupings emerged. The most powerful of the later Anglo-Saxon principalities, that of the West Saxons (Wessex), did not eliminate its rivals until 940—five hundred years after the first Anglo-Saxon raids. In the meantime the hard-pressed Britons struggled to stem the tide. Their victory under the semi-legendary King Arthur at Mons Badonicus c.500 served to hold the Anglo-Saxons back, and to preserve the Celts of the West, [
TRISTAN
]

Whilst the Germanic tribes overran the Empire’s western provinces, the instigators of the cataclysm, the Huns, finally made their appearance in Pannonia. They built their tented capital on the plains of the Tisza (Theiss) in 420. In 443 they came under the rule of Attila (c.404–53). His was a name that became a byword for wanton destruction: ‘The grass never grew where his horse had trod.’ For several seasons this ‘Scourge of God’ wreaked havoc in the Empire’s Danubian provinces. In 451 he rode to the north and west, collecting assorted barbarian allies, including Gepids and Burgundians. He spared Paris, protected by the prayers of St Geneviève. But on the Catalaunian Plains near Châlons, on grassland well suited to his cavalry, he met bloody defeat at the hands of a coalition formed by Aetius from Theodoric’s Visigoths and the Salian Franks under the ‘Sea-born’ Merovech. ‘His retreat beyond the Rhine comprised the last victory achieved in the name of the western Empire.’
⁶
Attila then turned on Italy. Turin, Padua, and Aquileia suffered the earlier fate of Metz. ‘The succeeding generation could scarce discover the ruins of Aquileia.’ At Milan, Attila was offended by a mural in the royal palace which showed the princes of Scythia prostrate before the imperial throne. He commanded a painter to reverse the roles. In 452, on the shores of Lake Bolsena, he was somehow persuaded to withdraw by the Patriarch of Rome, Leo I. Suitably enough, having retired to the Tisza with an item of female loot called Ildico, he expired during the nuptial night from a burst artery, ‘suffocated by a torrent of blood … which regurgitated into his stomach and lungs’. The horsemen of the Hunnic horde dispersed as quickly as they had appeared. Shattered by the treacherous attack of their former allies, they were forced to cede their hold on the Pannonian station to the Gepids and the Ostrogoths, [
CSABA
]
[
EPIDEMIA
]

Attila’s death gave the Ostrogoths the chance to assert their independence to the full. Advancing from Pannonia, they launched into a campaign of rapine in the Eastern Empire which did not cease until Theodoric received the usual prize, together with the titles of
magister militum
and
patricius
of Italy. Unfortunately for him, another barbarian warlord was in the field. Having casually deposed the last of the Western emperors, Odoacer had won his position at the head of a mercenary army operating in Sicily, Dalmatia, and even beyond the Alps. A fight to the finish was inevitable. The end came after a three-year siege of Ravenna and Odoacer’s murder by Theodoric. It was 493. The way was now open for the establishment of an Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy.

Similarly, Merovech’s grandson, Hlodwig or Clovis (c.466–511), king of the Salian Franks, was able to exploit his status as a Roman
foederatus
and to multiply his dominions in the disputed province of Gaul. Starting from the old Salian
at Tournai, Clovis defeated the last ‘Roman’ general of Gaul, Syagrius, before conquering the rival Riparian Franks (in modern ‘Franconia’), the Alamanni, the Burgundians, and in 507 the Visigoths of Aquitaine. Putting all the lesser Frankish princes to death, and taking a Christian wife, Clotilda, he was baptized at Rheims, possibly at Easter 496. The result was a huge ‘Merovingian’ realm stretching from the Pyrenees to Bavaria. Clovis reputedly received a diadem from the Emperor in Constantinople, together with the honorific title of Consul. He died in his new capital, Paris, after a reign of thirty years. Without knowing it, he had founded what Lavisse called ‘not a nation, but a historical force’—a force which was destined to give rise both to France and to the German Empire.