Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (48 page)

rial court had long been designed to impress on these possible future

rulers of Rome’s borderlands the power and prestige of the empire,

which could act as a deterrent to future misbehavior should the now

former hostages ever come to power as adults.20

Frontier Defense 233

Less positive measures were also available. If a particular barbarian

leader’s ambitions threatened to destroy or distort the peace arrange-

ments, then imperial commanders were regularly ordered to resort to

kidnap or assassination. In just the twenty-four years covered by the

dense contemporary narrative of the late Roman historian Ammianus

Marcel inus (354–78), these techniques were deployed on no less than

five separate occasions.21 Whether al these tactics amounted to a grand

strategy is contestable, but their existence shows the late empire operat-

ing on far more than a merely defensive footing. Rather, what emerges

with great clarity is that the later empire turned its immediate neighbors

into junior client members of a Roman world system, exerting mili-

tary power to order their affairs in the manner that best suited the em-

pire’s interests. The narrative suggests that each major intervention led

to diplomatic settlements with an average life span of some twenty to

twenty-five years—more or less a political generation. On the Rhine, for

instance, the Tetrarchic emperors mounted one major intervention in

the 290s, Constantine mounted another in the 310s, and there then seems

to have been substantial stability down to the 350s. The Tetrarchs were

again busy on the Middle Danube in the decade after 300 AD, Constan-

tine intervened with a major campaign in the early 330s, and peace then

prevailed again until the later 350s. The pattern on the Lower Danube

was again similar, with the Tetrarchs and Constantine mounting cam-

paigns in the 300s and early 330s, but this time the peace deal—perhaps,

among other reasons, because of the special trading privileges granted

the Gothic Tervingi—lasted until the mid-360s.22 This does not amount

to an unblemished record of frontier security, but, especial y for a pre-

modern state operating at such slow speeds over such vast distances,

getting twenty to twenty-five years of peace from each bout of major

campaigning represents a decent return on its military investments, and

no bad overal record of keeping its possessions secure.

To understand Roman–barbarian relations fully, however, and to

grasp the relationship between Roman frontier policies and the even-

tual processes of imperial collapse, it is necessary to explore one further

dimension of the empire’s approach to client management and fron-

tier security. In the short term, any particular round of campaigning-

followed-by-diplomacy was geared toward generating as much stability

234 Heather

as possible on a particular sector of the frontier. Looked at in the long

term—and by the fourth century, these rhythms of Roman frontier

management had been in operation along the Rhine and Danube for the

best part of 400 years—these techniques had had powerfully transfor-

mative effects on the empire’s neighbors across the border. Diplomatic

subsidies and trading privileges, backed up by imperial diplomatic in-

terference, such as providing political and military support for favored

barbarian rulers, tended to put money and power in the hands of par-

ticular kings. Played out over 400 years, the longer-term effect of this

approach was to help concentrate power more generally in the hands

of an entirely new type of king. The Germanic world of the first cen-

tury AD was populated by a host of small-scale sociopolitical units. Well

over fifty appear in the pages of Tacitus’s
Germania
covering Central

Europe, for the most part between the Rhine and the Vistula. By the

fourth century, this multiplicity of smaller units had given way to a

much smaller number of larger ones, perhaps no more than a dozen.

These were certainly confederative overkingships, so that estimates of

the degree of political revolution they represent need to be kept within

reasonable bounds. But whereas in the Roman period larger confedera-

tions disappeared with the defeat of their leaders, these fourth-century

counterparts could survive even substantial defeat. The immediate

rulers of the Alamanni of the Upper Rhine frontier were a series of

canton kings and princes. Periodically, however, these banded together

under an overking of particular power, especially when expansionary

warfare (against Rome or a neighbor) was in the offing. Even after mas-

sive military defeats, such as that at Strasbourg in 357, which brought

down the Alamannic overking Chnodomarius, the confederation re-

tained its cohesion and could quickly reform under the leadership of

new overkings, of whom Rome faced a sequence in the course of the

fourth century. The durability of the larger political structures of the

fourth century marks them out their earlier counterparts.23

Equally important, the nature of political power had changed out of

all recognition. A much stronger hereditary element had invaded the

top end of politics. Among the Alamanni the overkingship tended not

to be hereditary, not least because Roman policy was geared toward

eliminating a succession of its holders. But the canton kings do seem

Frontier Defense 235

to have been hereditary, whereas royal status among the early Germani

(not all of whom recognized kings at all) was personal and could not

be easily transmitted to an heir. Among the Gothic Tervingi, further to

the east, even the position of confederation leader seems to have been

hereditary, being passed through three generations of the same fam-

ily.24 Entirely concomitant with this development, a new royal ideology

became current in the Germanic world between the early and later

Roman periods. By the fourth century, all the current terms then in

use for “king” were extensions of words meaning military commander.

In the early Roman period, by contrast, military leadership had often

been separate from kingship.25

That it was precisely this much-enhanced military role that lay at

the heart of these new kings’ hereditary power is suggested by the

range of evidence for the importance of military retinues in the late

Roman period. By the fourth century, kings maintained personal mili-

tary support in the form of professional retainers. Ammianus Marcel-

linus mentions that Chnodomarius had his own force of 200 men, and

archaeological evidence of a destroyed warband also of some 200 men

has been excavated from Ejsbøl Mose, where the defeated group’s

weaponry was ritually interred. These kinds of professional military

forces were new to the Germanic world from the third century on,

and kings employed them not just to fight wars but also to act as en-

forcers of their policies.26

There is no doubt that this fundamental transformation of politi-

cal power in part reflected the long-term impact of all the wealth that

the empire had directed toward particular princes and kings among its

immediate neighbors in the many centuries of the empire’s existence.

Not only was this new wealth to the Germanic world, it was also not

received merely passively. Its arrival set off struggles for power among

Germanic political elites whose consequences show up particularly in

a body of evidence for internal political disturbance in the Germanic

world from the third century on. In this era, ritual deposits of weap-

ons, such as that found at Ejsbøl Mose, suddenly became reasonably

common, and exterior Germanic groups started to expand their power

toward the Roman frontier, precisely to seize some of the wealth con-

centrated there.27

236 Heather

Other transformations, of course, also played an important role

within this broader revolution. The early centuries AD saw the advent of

new farming regimes in Germanic-dominated Central Europe, which

generated large increases in food production and hence in population.

The overall power of the Germanic world, at least in demographic

terms, clearly increased in relation to its imperial Roman neighbor, and

the new kings presumably used some of this surplus food to support

their retinues. Again, Roman economic demand and transfers of Ro-

man technical know-how appear to have played a significant role in this

agricultural revolution, and in accompanying economic expansions in

some areas of manufacture and trade.28 I also strongly suspect that the

generally aggressive, not to say humiliating, nature of the Roman ap-

proach even to its favored client kings—where, after the fashion mas-

tered by the Sarmatian prince Zizais in the presence of Constantius

II in 358, groveling accompanied by gentle sobbing while begging for

favor was the generally favored protocol for barbarian kings in the im-

perial presence29—likewise played a major role in the ability of the new

class of hereditary military kings to build up their control. If this sce-

nario seems far-fetched, one need only remember that part of Roman

frontier policy was to burn down the villages of its neighbors once per

generation, and that several of the princes taken hostage clearly came

back none too enamored of the Roman way.30 Indeed, one gain that

might be had in return for paying the dues necessary to support the

new kings’ military retinues was surely the hope that belonging to a

powerful confederation of the new kind might help fend off the worst

effects of Roman imperial intrusion. In short, all the different kinds of

relationship—positive and negative, political and economic, diplomatic

and military—that had naturally sprung up between the empire and its

originally very much less developed neighbors combined to accelerate

the transformative processes that turned the large number of small so-

ciopolitical units occupying the imperial hinterland in the first century

AD into the much smaller number of more powerful ones that had re-

placed them by the fourth. And what gave these relationships so much

transformative power was the fact that each stimulated its own autono-

mous response among the Germani. It wasn’t just that imperial Rome

did things that transformed Germanic society—although it certainly

Frontier Defense 237

did—but that elements within Germanic society took full advantage

of the new opportunities that emerged from the various new relation-

ships with the empire to create dynamic new political structures.

By the mid-fourth century, the overal extent of these transforma-

tions had not yet reached obviously dangerous proportions. None of

the new units then in existence was a threat to overal imperial integrity.

At most, even the most ambitious barbarian military king of the fourth

century could hope to make only very limited territorial gains from the

empire, or—more usually—to limit the intrusiveness of Roman eco-

nomic or diplomatic demands. Chnodomarius was laboring in the 350s

to annex a perhaps 50-km-wide strip of Roman territory along part of

the Rhine, while the overkings of the Tervingi were trying to limit the

extent to which Roman emperors could demand recruits from them for

their wars, and to resist demands that Christian missionaries from the

now Christian empire be let loose in their lands. None of this threat-

ened imperial survival.31 Indeed, having a smal er number of diplomatic

partners to deal with perhaps simplified the operation of Roman fron-

tier management techniques, since there were fewer competing political

claims to be balanced out on the other side of the frontier. Where the

new order that Rome itself had inadvertently generated on its European

frontiers final y became a problem, however, was when an outside force

imparted an involuntary unity to a substantial number of these new and

larger Germanic sociopolitical units.

In the late fourth century and early fifth century, the Huns, a group

of Eurasian nomads who were probably attracted westward by the

amount of wealth that could be liberated from Rome’s frontier clients,

revolutionized the overall strategic situation on Rome’s European fron-

tiers. In two discrete phases separated by a generation, they first es-

tablished their dominance north of the Black Sea in the 370s, and then

shifted their center of operations into the Great Hungarian Plain at the

heart of Europe about the year 410. The first effect of each of these

moments of large-scale migration was to throw several of the larger

Germanic groups that had been generated in Rome’s frontier region

across the border onto imperial territory. This is explicitly documented

in the case of the Huns’ first move into the northern Black Sea region,

which pushed two separate large groups of Goths, the Tervingi and

238 Heather

the Greuthungi, and a series of smaller groups across Rome’s Lower