IT WAS 800 YEARS SINCE Romulus had given his name to the Eternal City; and she was tiring. Trajan’s wars had been especially strenuous. Despite Hadrian’s tours of inspection, his pep-talks, his efforts to keep the soldiers on their toes with drills, manoeuvres and the building of defensive works, the army began to relax. The 2nd century would be among military history’s most complacent; almost without improvements in defensive works, weaponry or tactics. Though still largely dormant, the Barbaricum’s size and the profusion of its people meant that any policy which did not guarantee military superiority must eventually lead to ruin.
Central to this self-deception was the imperial frontier, with its supposition that the army’s proximity would suffice to make the outside world behave. It had taken strength and watchfulness to make and maintain clear borders, without grey areas or debatable lands; to create a world which was either Roman or not Roman, a division so distinct and so zealously guarded that it would be as safe to plough the first field behind the front line as any in Latium. None the less, for all its majesty and authority, the peace imposed by Rome will not long outlive the 2nd century. Time reveals it as an extended truce, a respite from the gruesome norms of human conduct. Though two predominantly peaceful centuries were a formidable achievement, the effect would be to pond up external pressures which must one day overflow. In any case it had been optimistic to believe that Mediterranean standards of stability could indefinitely be imposed north of the Alps and in – or beyond – the Balkans. Iron Age man had little taste for order. Indeed it remains questionable whether even his post-atomic counterpart has the skill or the will to do better.
Human nature is slow to change; as may be seen in our language. A glance at that indispensable work of reference, Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, shows how unequal are the vocabularies of peace and war; from which we may deduce which of those pursuits has most exercised minds and bodies. The vocabulary of peace occupies five lines of synonyms on the printed page, that of war twenty-eight. Searching further: under ‘harmony’, ‘concord’, ‘mediation’, ‘passivity’ and related meanings there are forty-five lines; while ‘discord’, ‘disunity’, ‘combat’, ‘armament’, ‘retaliation’ and so on, yield no less than 287! So, in one major language at least, there are five-to-six times more words available to hawks than doves; a telling comment on our dedication to violent solutions during the millennia in which English and its parent tongues evolved, not to mention the ample additions from the warlike, cold-warlike and terrorist jargons of recent years. Returning from words to facts: though Rome’s emperors tried their best to do so, no age or country can insulate itself from eternal verities. It is one of the strangest developments in military history that a state, summoned from mid-Italian obscurity by the trumpet of Mars, should have ended by devising a strategy dedicated to passivity and a tactic based on sitting and waiting; though the techniques of war wait for no one.
In short a single defensive line, without secondary or in-depth support, would prove progressively vulnerable as the empire weakened. Subdividing the army and posting it in penny packets along a 4,000-mile perimeter not only promoted the habit of dispersal but also blinded the high command to the importance of centrally held reserves. Rome had spun a web round western Europe, the Near East and Mediterranean Africa, yet neglected to put a spider in the middle. The empire’s geography, the moral importance of Italy at its heart, the middle Danube and upper Rhine as the likeliest and deadliest points of entry: all indicated a need for counterstrike provisions based on northern Italy. There the Alps would perhaps have dictated a twofold grouping, with a powerful army at each end: one in north-western Italy or at Basle and another in north-eastern Italy or at Ljubljana. However, the implementation of anything resembling a centralized strategy would be postponed until the western empire’s dotage, when it was too late to be decisive. The truth is that large clusters of legions were unwelcome to a regime founded in suspicion and obsessed with fear of usurpation and conspiracy. The caesars slept more soundly in the knowledge that their regiments were scattered.
It will not be till the 3rd or 4th centuries that meaningful improvement occurs; albeit erratically, with each autocrat imposing an often contradictory view. Positive developments will include enlargement of the imperial bodyguard into a rapid-response force and conversion to heavy cavalry, with mounted regiments deployed behind each major front. Rome will cease to be the empire’s military headquarters and subsequent capitals will be more realistically positioned in relation to external dangers. Finally there will be division of command within a partitioned empire: first, experimentally, into four; then, more permanently, into two. But despite modernization and increased flexibility, Rome will never assemble a united force. More typically, she will continue to improvise and compromise, mustering armies in reaction to news of attack and punching with fingers rather than fist.
However, till the late 2nd century, perimetric defence continued to seem valid simply because no crisis arose to prove it otherwise. Unlike the Maginot Line, which was tested within a decade, the imperial frontier was not placed in serious question for a century-and-a-half. Prior to the Marcomannic War of AD 167–75, the absence of deep fortification or strategic reserves was disguised and seemingly made unnecessary by developmental factors: Rome’s forwardness and unity contrasted with barbarian backwardness and bickering. As Tacitus had put it:
Nor have we weapon stronger against the strong than this: that they share no common purpose.1 Long may it last this – if not love for us – at least detestation of each other. Fortune grants us nothing greater than our enemies’ disunity.2
Rome’s strength lay in diplomacy, breadth of experience and staying power; barbarian weakness in divisiveness, myopia and transience, as well as ignorance of organization, logistics and siege techniques. Yet all was changing and the long span of peace, supposedly braced by the girders of Roman vigilance and readiness, would sag surprisingly soon.
First, however, with the resplendent reign of Hadrian’s successor, Antoninus Pius (139–61) the empire reached the watershed of its well-being and stability. The Augustan dream of a benign balance between emperor, senate and army; the Hadrianic hope of a creative correspondence between provinces and centre, city and country, Roman and barbarian, seemed at last to be working. Economic penetration of the outside world and the outward spread of Romanization were proceeding. Three questions nevertheless persisted. Had the Romans matured sufficiently to value peaceful objectives? Could the office of emperor, so subject to the quirks and swings of each incumbent, provide continuity for the achievement of such goals? And would the European Barbaricum, with its dark currents of disturbance, allow time for the improved relationships to root? The answer to all three questions will be in the negative and would soon be given. Under Antoninus’ successor, Marcus Aurelius (161–80), the European theatre erupted. The Marcomannic War had its epicentre in today’s Czech and Slovak lands, anciently part of Germany, postulated by archaeology as the least hostile of all frontier stretches. Here was a region rich in cross-frontier activity; a sector most penetrated by mercantile and diplomatic effort; with nearly forty known Roman or part-Roman sites reaching up to a hundred miles beyond the Danube.3 They are thought to have included commercial depots and military or diplomatic missions, whose mixture of south Germanic and Roman-style buildings points strongly to coexistence. These findings confirm what Tacitus had written (in the context of Marcomannia) of ‘divers Roman businessmen, coaxed abroad by the hope of some franchise; seduced into staying first by the money to be made and finally by oblivion of their own homeland’.4 In short, here were the beginnings of a Romano-Germanic co-operation which might in time have reduced economic and cultural differences to the point of peaceful merger.
This possibility was exploded for ever by the Marcomannic conflict. Not only was north-eastern Italy invaded but, more ominously, the attacks spread along the entire front between Black Sea and North Sea. Though Marcus eventually won the war, it revealed two unfavourable developments. First, the tribes had learned to sense Roman adversity and act together. Curiously, the disturbances were in some cases discontinuous, with one warlike tribe apparently responding to another across gaps of several hundred miles.
The second fact was that the frontier failed: its thin membrane punctured in a dozen places, wherever strong force had been applied. Events revealed it as overstretched and undermanned. Its forts were outdated; with castella in no way matching what the Middle Ages would call castles. The entire system had been evolved against weak, divided and demoralized enemies during the 1st century and never upgraded during the 2nd.
Neither defensive works nor strategic thinking would find remedy in Marcus’ son and heir, the idle and dissolute Commodus (180–92) of whose accession Cassius Dio lamented: ‘My history now descends from realms of gold to those of iron and rust, as did Rome’s fortunes on that day.’5 Henceforward, despite noble exceptions and striking recoveries, the state will begin to stumble in the face of its own weaknesses: the absence of a reliable rule of succession, excessive power in unworthy hands and inability to control the army. The milestones on this descending path would include assassination, coup and counter-coup, civil war, appeasement of the barbarians with gold and employment of barbarians to fight barbarians, culminating in the eventual loss of Roman control.
Returning, however, to the War: its abiding question is why Marcomannia (Czechoslovakia), so propitious for cross-border friendship, should have detonated with such abruptness and violence. Did it signify a backfiring of the slave trade and a breakdown of the three-tier model of Roman control through ‘prestige goods dependency’? An explanation better matched to outcomes is perturbation, caused by disturbances in the Eurasian living space, outside the Roman view. The deep Barbaricum of Eastern Europe and beyond, was a seismic zone of unpredictable tendency. Age-old impulses to flee from hunger or danger by migrating, usually in a westward or southward direction, had been long frustrated by the Roman empire’s presence.
More specifically, responsibility for transforming the middle Danubian tribes from friends to foes may lie with the Goths. This Germanic confederacy originated in southern Sweden, where names like Gothenburg and Gotland survive. They crossed the Baltic, and Claudius Ptolemy, writing around AD 150, locates them on the lower Vistula. A hundred years after the events of Marcus’ reign they would arrive on the north Pontic coast; and though their route between is guesswork, it probably lay through today’s southern Poland, passing close outside the Sudeten Mountains, adjacent to today’s Czech and Slovak Republics. It is therefore probable that the transit of this powerful nation displaced east-German groups like the Vandals and Langobards, who in turn drove the Marcomans and neighbouring Quadans hard against the Danube; overwhelming Rome’s intelligence network, brushing aside her diplomatic screen, forcing the river and putting her extended army to the test of all-out conflict. Without reserve regiments, reinforcement of the middle Danube could only be made by transfers from other frontier sectors, weakening them and inciting yet more tribes to attack. If there is substance in these surmises, the Marcomannic War was a remarkable preview of 4th and 5th-century calamities.
Before moving on to the late period we must attempt to answer a crucial and difficult question: how did the transformation from Roman to barbarian dominance come about? From the Augustan to the Antonine Age we have seen a majestic Rome facing divided, bewildered and largely passive tribes. The Celts were still reeling from Caesar, the Germans dazed by Drusus and Germanicus. On the rare and probably minor occasions when Roman territory was infringed, it was on a raid-and-return basis, like boys daring an orchard wall; though from Marcus onwards, the view is of growing menace and ever more damaging raids. In the 4th century, however, the character of incursion changes from raids to migrations, and the barbarian goal from loot to land: a wish to be part of the empire and partake of its wealth and security.
In fact the emergence of barbarian power has never been satisfactorily explained; and the absence of a clear answer has clouded the long-standing conundrum of why the western empire succumbed. Our two impressions – of the earlier and later barbarian – are bewilderingly disconnected, for we have little knowledge of the outside peoples during the period of change which might explain their dramatic gain in strength. Indeed we are seldom sure of the extent to which we are witnessing gains in barbarian or losses in Roman strength. One of the blackouts in the written sources most crippling to ancient history occurs during the 3rd century. It is especially irksome for the fifty years from 235 to 285, though never so total that the gravity of events cannot be guessed. Indeed, these were sufficiently serious to merit history’s description: the ‘Third Century Crisis’. Its characteristics were a seething army, provinces defecting and emperors or pretenders averaging one a year. Though these weaknesses – and the raids upon imperial territory which they invited – shocked the Roman command into improvement and drew a heroic response from soldier-emperors like Claudius II, Aurelian and Pro-bus, more meaningful in the long run was the readiness to buy off the barbarian so that Roman could be left in peace to fight Roman. This folly would not end with the 3rd century; for in Kiplings words, ‘once you have paid him the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.’ On the other hand, the drain on hard currency was less decremental than might appear. Owing to his taste for Roman trade goods, the barbarian and his money were easily parted; and what governments gave, businessmen could sometimes win back. Be this as it may, an even more dangerous change in barbarian military capability was now afoot.
In the 3rd century unfamiliar names begin to appear opposite much of the European frontier: seemingly new tribes, but in fact new names for combinations of the old. They are exemplified by the Alamans of south-western Germany, meaning ‘all men’ and signifying a fusion of the Suebian tribes into a coalition, so long and vividly remembered that allemand will enter the future French language, meaning ‘German’. At a time of internal weakness it is improbable that the Roman army was sufficiently aggressive to provoke such alliances. It seems more feasible that interruptions to cross-border trading, caused by the commotions within the empire, upset the tribal equilibrium, promoting unstable conditions in which the formation of one coalition would almost certainly be followed by others. In this event we have the irony that commercial relationships, created to ensure the loyalty of puppet chiefs, should recoil on Rome as soon as her merchants and officials failed to keep their part of the bargain.
More widely, it is arguable that whenever Rome sneezed the Barbaricum caught a cold; for stoppages in commercial traffic between large partners and small (as between the empire and individual tribes; or between Rome and China, in which barbarians were middlemen6) were so destructive to the smaller economies that trouble was virtually guaranteed. M. G. Raschke7 has proposed that bolts of Chinese silk became, as it were, the cash of the Asian steppe, on whose existence basic transactions came to depend; and it is likely that interruption to the silk traffic aggravated all problems in the vast space between China’s western and Rome’s eastern approaches. Similarly a faltering in Roman bribery payments, or hitches in the wine and slave trades, would not only create headaches for Quisling chieftains but also filter-down effects of grave consequence for the tribes as a whole. The seriousness of mercantile matters is born out by the little we know of cross-frontier treaties, in which the granting or withholding of access to markets was evidently a prime diplomatic lever, as in the peace terms of AD 175:
The Quadans were refused the right to attend markets for fear other tribes might mingle with them and spy out the Roman disposition8 [and] Marcus restored to the Marcomanni half the neutral zone along their frontier, allowing them to settle up to five miles from the Danube. He established places and days for markets and exchanged hostages …9
In view of barbarian commercial addiction we may imagine the empire’s neighbours under acute stress, with Rome comparable to a drug dealer who becomes so involved in gang feuds that he forgets to supply his customers. The Third Century Crisis must therefore have been critical for the barbarians too: a time of trouble in the empire, but of even more fateful upheaval outside it. These commercial upsets, the scenting of Roman weakness, the impulse toward coalition and finally migration, would be the ingredients of the western empire’s destruction. Overextended, with declining wealth and her technical lead over the outside peoples eroding away; an ageing state, whose civilian majority had forgotten how to fight, now faced an unhinged barbarian world in which all had learned to be warriors from childhood.
However, the migratory fluxes, which signalled the destabilization of central and eastern Europe required an outside push to give them irreversible motion. We have already noted their origins, on the extreme wings of the empire’s European horizon: in the Scandinavian and Black Sea regions. Jordanes, chronicler of the Gothic nation, would refer (in the late 6th century) to Scandinavia as ‘the Scandza Peninsula: a man-manufactury, a womb of nations’.10 The Goths would be neither the first nor last to emerge from this hungry corner. It is possible that they were responding to even larger folk movements, comparable to those impelling the steppe peoples, a thousand miles to their south-east. The relationship (in the Ural-Altaic language group) between Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish – and all of them with Mongol – demonstrates that there was more than one route for wanderers from Asia. It is therefore possible that the northernmost Germans were already being squeezed by arriving Finns; though a more common explanation is that crop failure promoted the Scandinavian exodus. Migrating south-eastwards and encountering Ukrainian winters even colder than those of their homeland, the Goths pushed on, reaching the Black Sea by the 4th century. There, in the last and greatest misadventure of European prehistory, they would collide with the next arrivals on the inexorable conveyor belt of the Eurasian steppe.
The Huns entered Europe’s south-eastern approaches in the 370s. Their arrival was disastrous for the Goths who, disastrously for the Romans, were driven into the Balkans. A catastrophic Roman defeat at Hadrianople (Edirne, western Turkey) in 378, led to a Gothic takeover of the Danubian provinces and attempts on Italy via the eastern Alpine passes. Meanwhile the Huns, who had based themselves in Hungary, conquered northwards into eastern Germany and today’s Poland. This displaced further people, notably of the Vandalic coalition, who fled westwards, appearing on the Rhine in 405. Theirs was another portentous name: from the German wandeln, to wander. A sweeping left hook, through Gaul, Spain, across the Straits of Gibraltar and along the northern coast of Africa to Carthage (in due course followed by the seaborne invasion of Rome) put the Vandals among military history’s immortals and presaged the end for Italy. By the mid 5th century, Ravenna, the western empire’s last capital, had become so flooded with barbarian officers, bodyguards, opportunists and refugees that Romanity was quietly drowning in Germanity; to the extent that Goths were able, almost absentmindedly, to take charge of the governmental machine. Throughout the West, Roman provinces were dissolving into Germanic kingdoms and the hazy outlines of medieval Europe beginning to emerge. The Romans and the outside peoples, who had clashed and mingled during the empire’s creation, did so again during its disintegration, producing new aptitudes, releasing new energies and reaping an immediate peace dividend. With the end of the centuries-old Roman-barbarian conflict, the tax burden ceased and a defensive commitment, whose crushing cost was all but destroying town and country, was lifted at last. Land-sharing and other accommodations between Frank and Gaul, Visigoth and Spaniard, Ostrogoth and Italian, appear to have been accomplished amicably. The Church was at once a salve, a cement and an agency for continuity. In any case, because the barbarian brought few institutions or ideas, he would need to draw deeply on those of conquered Rome. Because his confederations embodied mixtures of dialects and customs, they would make no unified impact on classical culture; demonstrated by the survival of Romance language throughout western Europe. Only in Noricum (Austria) is there evidence for an evacuation of the Roman population in the face of Alamanic attack, resulting in a German language gain. Only in post-Roman Britain was there a fight to the death between native and invader, leading to an eradication of Romanity from the entire east and centre of the island; though roads and other infrastructure remained.
It is revealing to think back upon the bad press given to the outside tribes by Roman authors. Naturally this had worsened with the military situation. Barbarians were seen to be gripped by Schadenfreude and intent on destruction; as repeatedly stated or implied by Ammian (c. 325–95), greatest of late Roman historians:
It is as if bugles were blowing all round the Roman world [ … ] the cruellest tribes awoke and burst the nearest frontiers [ … ] the barriers were down and savagery pouring like lava-streams from Etna [ … ] the caged beasts had broken their bars and were rampaging over Thrace [ … ] numberless peoples, long assembling to put a torch to the Roman world and encompass its destruction [ … ] this ravening age, as if the Furies had incited the world and madness was spreading into every corner.11
Similarly St Jerome (c. 340–420), from a different standpoint:
How many mothers, Christian virgins and gentlewomen have become the sport of these wild beasts? Bishops held to ransom, clerics murdered, churches sacked, horses stabled at the altar, holy relics scattered?12
This was perhaps true of earlier attacks. The Huns were especially to be feared; and the fourteen-day sack of Rome by the Vandals, which gave birth to the term ‘vandalism’, darkened the image further. By contrast, the evacuation of Noricum and the trek of its citizens across the eastern Alps shows a kinder barbarian face. The Italy to which they were retreating was already an Ostrogothic kingdom. With the exception of Britain, as successive parts of the empire fell into barbarian hands, the hands became gentler. It was not the conquerors’ intention to destroy their new home. By the 5th century the invaders had adopted a ‘promised land’ view of Rome, more comparable with a Mexican view of America today.
Most early 20th-century historical work on the so-called migrations period was French or German, giving us the equivalent but different expressions, invasions barbares and Völkerwanderungzeit, each reflecting its own national experience. The French emphasizes the onslaught and horror; the German implies readjustment, as Europe sought to resume the natural patterns of flow and resettlement which the imperial frontier had so long obstructed. With the passing years our century has presented us with a far wider choice of interpretations than was offered by these early labels. After all, we are still not far removed from the migrational storm which followed the New World discoveries; and well placed to understand that our own restless age is largely a product of its disturbances. The making of countries like the United States reminds us how stimulating demographic upheaval can be.
A further, almost comparable human commotion followed the Second World War, prompted by the collapse of colonialism, the fall and rise of ideologies and the burgeoning of aspirations; with the spread of communications tempting aspirants to move and of cheap transportation, bringing temptation within reach. Countries not affected by these 20th-century migrations are rare. To a degree they are fortunate. On the other hand, there are economic miracles related to movement into places like California, West Germany, Hong Kong and Taiwan which confirm yet again that migrations need not be destructive, for it is usually true that incomers work harder than incumbents.
With this complex human tide, released since 1945, has come a new vocabulary of flux: refugees, job-seekers, guest workers, foreign advisers, brain-drainers, expatriates, displaced persons, illegal aliens, unlawful immigrants, gate-crashers, tax exiles, Zionists, pursuers of the American dream and so on. In some cases there is no parallel with late antiquity, in others the resemblance is marginal. However, two of our late 20th-century categories of vagrancy do seem to fit 5th-century circumstances, namely ‘economic opportunists’ and ‘asylum seekers’: those seeking a better life and those fearing for life itself. Both imply civilian rather than military impulses and neither suggests destructive intent. A place to settle, land to till, safety from the great churning of tribes which attended the close of the Iron Age: we may guess that food and fear were uppermost in barbarian minds, as they are for the needy and desperate of our own day.
Was this the reality of the barbarian invasions? Is it closer to the truth than the essentially martial 19th-century image of sword-waving hordes, hurling themselves against the empire’s defences? Were the Angles and Saxons, with a drowning coast in front and frightened tribes behind, a military conspiracy against Britain; or were they a sort of ‘boat people’? Did the Vandals plan their sensational march from the Rhine to Carthage; or were they refugees, set into motion by terror and hunger, who merely stumbled against doors which chanced to be unlocked? Of course, while today’s migrants tend to respect the strength of their host countries, the barbarians came armed and ready to fight for their promised lands. And yet our own century is not without its homeland seekers (like the creators of the Boer Republics, Pakistan and Israel), prepared if necessary to go to war. One way and another, we are well placed to understand the migrations period.
Perhaps not surprisingly the view of Rome as a noble flame, quenched by barbarism, is no longer in fashion. The ‘Dark Ages’ have been replaced by a creative merger in which Roman and barbarian combine with unexpected ease and (except for Britain) proceed with relative calm into the ‘post-Roman’ or ‘sub-Roman’ era. On the contrary, we now accept that the 5th century’s most destructive event was the Byzantine reconquest of Ostrogothic Italy. Today, more aware of other cultures, accustomed to exotic faces and foreign languages on the street and at school, striving for solutions of togetherness, we are readier to allow the outside nations a hearing. So we should be; for the Romano-barbarian mergers of the 5th century made Europe; Europe made the New World; and all Western peoples are their children.