IN THE SUMMER OF 172 AD, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius found himself in dire straits. The fires of war had been blazing all along Rome’s European frontiers since 166, especially in the Middle Danubian sector where Marcus was now embroiled. One of his key commanders, the praetorian prefect Vindex, had already been killed north of the Danube, fighting the Germanic Marcomanni of Bohemia. The Emperor was himself leading a second Roman thrust against the Quadi of Slovakia. It was a burning-hot summer and the Romans, advancing through hostile territory, had no choice but to endure full battle order in heavy armour. The Quadi knew the country and knew that the Romans were coming. Rather than giving battle, they lured them up country, ever further from their supply train. Then they sprang the trap. The Romans were caught without supplies, and without water too; the Quadi were all around them, with no need to fight:
They were expecting to capture [the Romans] easily because of their heat and thirst. So they posted guards all about and hemmed them in to prevent their getting water anywhere; for the barbarians were far superior in numbers. The Romans as a result were in a terrible plight from fatigue, wounds, the heat of the sun and thirst, and so could neither fight nor retreat, but were standing in the line . . . scorched by the heat.
The situation looked set for disaster
[w]hen suddenly many clouds gathered and a mighty rain, not without divine intervention, burst upon them . . . At first all turned their faces upwards and received the water in their mouths; then some held out their shields and some their helmets to catch it, and they not only took deep draughts themselves, but also gave their horses to drink. And when the barbarians now charged upon them, they drank and fought at the same time.
The water energized the Romans and forced the Quadi to fight, since it ruined any hope of capitulation from thirst and heat exhaustion. Thunder and lightning – some of the bolts reportedly hitting the barbarians – completed the scene and Marcus emerged from the trap, with his army intact and a famous victory under his belt.
The rain miracle of Marcus Aurelius, as this moment of deliverance has been known ever since, was taken in antiquity as yet another proof that divine power sustained the Roman Empire. It was also squabbled over. Dio Cassius, our main source, attributes the divine intervention to the efforts of Arnuphis, an Egyptian mage, but Christian writers claimed that the prayers of a Christian legion from Syria had worked the trick. Whoever was responsible, the thunderstorm got the Emperor out of jail, and he was duly grateful. He went on to win the war and restore order on Rome’s European frontiers, though it did take pretty much the rest of the decade. The rain miracle, along with other events of the war, was immortalized on the carvings of the celebratory column raised by the Emperor in the imperial capital (Plate 5).1 But why did Marcus Aurelius find himself locked in this death struggle in the first place?
Rome’s expansion into largely Germanic-dominated temperate Europe ground to a halt in the first century AD more or less along a line marked by the Rivers Rhine and Danube, but this did not mean that the Empire had moved into purely defensive mode. As we saw in the last chapter, Rome’s general military superiority was backed by an aggressive diplomacy, which turned the political entities closest to the frontier into Roman client states. Raiding, threats, military demonstrations and barbarian submissions were standard items in the repertoire, but head-on confrontation highly unusual. Harsh experience reinforced the lesson that open conflict with technically superior Roman armies usually ended in disaster. By the mid-second century, the Marcomanni and Quadi had both belonged to this class of frontier clients for over a century, which makes the war in which Marcus Aurelius so nearly lost his life all the more puzzling. Why were longstanding clients, after a hundred years of fairly minor squabbling, now trying to destroy the Emperor and his army in a full-scale military encounter?
The rain miracle occurred in the middle of a sequence of disturbances which are collectively known as the Marcomannic War. But they involved many groups other than the Marcomanni of Bohemia, even if the latter did star in some of the war’s most notorious episodes. Reconstructing the war is also far from straightforward. The historian Dio Cassius originally wrote a full account of the action, including a considerable amount of circumstantial detail, but his narrative survives only in fragments, and our other sources are very limited. The result is a series of episodic moments of action, whose relationship to one another is often unclear. Above all, the related issues of the scale of these wars and their underlying causation are particularly puzzling. Our Roman sources naturally concentrate on violence in the frontier zone and the ways in which it spilled over into the Empire itself. Historical and archaeological sources make it clear, however, that one of the factors destabilizing the frontier zone was the arrival there of new groups of Germanic outsiders.
The Marcomannic War
Marcus Aurelius came to power in 161 AD, and the early years of his reign were spent dealing with the Parthian menace on Rome’s Mesopotamian frontier. Amongst other measures, during these years he had to transfer to the east three full legions – notionally 18,000 men – from the Rhine and Danube, but by the middle of the decade trouble was brewing in the west. In winter 166/7, reportedly six thousand Langobardi and Ubii raided the Roman province of Pannonia – modern Hungary, south of the River Danube, and south and west of the Carpathian Mountains. These raiders were defeated, but trouble continued in this same Middle Danubian region. In 168 the Marcomanni and the Victuali, long-time Roman clients on this part of the frontier, demanded admission into the Empire. As we saw in the last chapter, it was not unheard-of for outside groups to ask to be admitted into the Empire, and sometimes these requests were granted. This time, however, Marcus refused. Perhaps he was not militarily in control of the situation. He was determined, however, to become so.
In 170, the Emperor gathered his forces in Pannonia. There are hints in the sources that he had it in mind formally to annex the territories of the Marcomanni and Quadi at this point. But the resulting campaign was disastrous. The Roman army was outflanked by the Marcomanni and, since many intermediate strongpoints had been stripped of troops for the projected assault, the rampant barbarians were able to break through into Italy itself. Uderzo was sacked and Aquileia besieged. Roman Italy suffered its worst disaster since the third century BC, and the invaders were not fully repelled until the end of 171. Meanwhile, unrest spread the full length of the Danube. Nomadic Sarmatian Iazyges and the Germanic Quadi were causing trouble on the Middle Danube plain west of the Carpathians, while two Vandal groups, the Astingi and the Lacringi, menaced the northern frontiers of Transylvanian Dacia (Map 4). The Costoboci, from the north-east of Dacia, also raided Thrace, Macedonia and Greece, having presumably moved south along the eastern rather than the western slopes of the Carpathians. At the same time, serious raiding was affecting the northern Rhine frontier. Countering all these different threats delayed the Emperor’s plans for retribution, and it was not until 172 that Marcus could return to the offensive. Two years of intense campaigning on the Middle Danube, punctuated by the rain miracle, brought the Marcomanni, the Quadi and the Iazyges to heel. Bohemia, Slovakia and the Great Hungarian Plain had been pacified, but much of the rest of the decade was taken up with a complex mix of military and diplomatic countermeasures, designed, as ever, to turn immediate military victory into a longer-lasting peace.2
The surviving fragments of Dio give something of their flavour, but are not comprehensive. Nonetheless, the parallels with the stratagems pursued in the same region two centuries later by Constantius II are striking. Hostile kings were replaced with more pliant ones, particularly among the Quadi and Sarmatians, where the removal of the Emperor’s previous nominees (Furtius and Zanticus, respectively) had marked the adoption of an openly hostile policy towards the Empire. The Marcomanni and Quadi were forced to accept the stationing of twenty thousand Roman soldiers in a series of forts upon their lands. All this, of course, is a further reminder that, for all the subsidies and blandishments that might accompany the status, becoming a Roman client was often not a freely chosen position. Some groups were allowed to move into new territories (the Asdingi), others prevented from doing so (the Quadi), and some were even received into the Empire (the 3,000-strong Naristi). All this was done according to the Emperor’s wishes and his assessment of what would best serve the Empire’s interests. The Naristi were a much smaller group than the Marcomanni, and Marcus Aurelius was now dictating terms on the back of a military victory, so that, this time, he was happy enough to receive them. Trading privileges, likewise, were granted or removed according to the Emperor’s estimation of a group’s loyalty, and neutral zones of differing sizes re-established. The dangerous Sarmatian Iazyges, like the Limigantes in 358, for instance, were forced to move twice as far away from the river as before. Where the Emperor was particularly suspicious, Roman garrisons were established and the normal assemblies by which tribes conducted political business were banned. As order was restored, and more pliant kings firmed up their authority, conditions were relaxed. The Iazyges were eventually allowed to return to the old neutral zone and to pass through the province of Roman Dacia to resume their normal relations with their fellow Sarmatians, the Roxolani. The far-reaching military campaigns of Marcus Aurelius thus underpinned a complex web of diplomatic settlements and alliances, which resonated to long-established rhythms of Roman client management. As Dio commented, such had been the scale of the problem – much greater than that faced by Constantius in 358 – that the work was still not finished on the emperor’s death in 181.3
But we are still left with the most fundamental question of all. What caused the trouble in the first place?
According to one of our major sources, the underlying cause was a bout of expansionary activity – involving some migration – on the part of several Germanic groups from north-central Europe:
Not only were the Victuali and Marcomanni throwing everything into confusion, but other tribes, who had been driven on by the more distant barbarians and had retreated before them, were ready to attack Italy if not peaceably received.
In the old Grand Narrative, this passage was naturally seized on as evidence that the Marcommanic War marked the first stage of a largescale migration out of Germania that would eventually destroy the Roman Empire. But the extract is from the Historia Augusta, whose testimony is always problematic. Although it contains much historical information, particularly when dealing with the more distant, second-century, past, the text is in overall terms a fake: a creation of c.400 AD, written in Rome probably by someone of senatorial rank, masquerading as one of c.300. It is impossible to know how much weight to give its testimony at any particular point, since it is difficult to tell what is based on authentic information and what the author has just made up. And an author writing at that time, as we shall see in the next chapter, would have had in front of him an excellent contemporary example of Gothic barbarian immigrants who had entered the Empire in large numbers, on the run from ‘more distant barbarians’ in the form of the Huns. It is entirely reasonable, therefore, to be highly sceptical of the Historia Augusta’s account of the origins of Marcus’ difficulties, and one recent commentator has argued that its large-scale vision of the causes and broader significance of the war needs to be rejected entirely. In this view, all thoughts of the fourth century should be put to one side. The Marcomannic War should not be seen as the first onrush of a rising Germanic tsunami which would eventually deluge the Roman world. On the contrary, having just wrapped up the Parthian War, Marcus Aurelius wanted to re-establish Rome’s authority on its European frontiers, where the removal of troops to the east had allowed some increase in raiding, but nothing beyond the spectrum of the ordinary. In this view, it was the ferocious nature of the Emperor’s projected counterstroke – Roman aggression, in other words – that inflamed the frontier. Panic caused the Marcomanni and Quadi to get their retaliation in first.4
Some aspects of this reconstruction are fair enough. It is necessary to be wary of possible anachronisms, but fear of Roman aggression would certainly have been an element in barbarian calculations. Rome expected to dictate matters on its frontiers on the back of military domination, and its barbarian clients can have been under few illusions that the Empire’s take on any deserved retribution would be ‘fair’ or ‘proportionate’. Emperors needed to be seen to be tough on barbarians and tough on the causes of barbarism. But, all that said, I do not find at all convincing the argument that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on in the 160s and 170s. It is important not to veer from one simple vision of the war – that it was the start of the great Germanic counterstroke against Roman imperialism – to another: namely, that it was just a normal frontier tiff. Even putting possibly misleading parallels with the fourth century aside, the war involved frontier conflict on an unprecedented scale, and what we can reconstruct of its causation does suggest that major forces were at play.
First of all: scale. The geographical range of the attacks was extraordinary. By the early 170s, there was serious trouble afoot on the northern Rhine frontier, the Middle Danubian plain, and both the northern and eastern fringes of Dacia – pretty much the entire length of Rome’s European frontiers. Even the most serious of first-century revolts had never simultaneously disturbed more than the Rhine and Middle Danube, and this is obviously a very different kind of crisis, again, from that generated by Chnodomarius’ ambitions in the fourth century, which, as we saw in the last chapter, disturbed only one sector of the frontier. Also, the war lasted the best part of fifteen years. In the fourth century, most of the well documented frontier conflicts never took longer than two or three years to work themselves out, and even that involving Chnodomarius no more than about five. Geography and chronology are both enough, then, to indicate that something serious was under way.
The hardest aspect of the war to grasp is its numerical scale. Just how many people became involved in it over this decade and a half? The direct evidence is minimal. The only figure we have is Dio’s report that six thousand Langobardi and Ubii were involved in the initial attack on Pannonia. If at all correct, this would represent a large but not massive force (judged, say, against the numbers mustered by the Alamanni at Strasbourg). Otherwise the evidence is implicit and/or impressionistic. The number of Roman troops involved in some at least of the Middle Danubian campaigns was clearly substantial; for the start of his major counteroffensive, for instance, Marcus Aurelius raised two entirely new legions (twelve thousand men).
Some of the damage done was serious, too, not only in Italy but also west of the Lower Rhine frontier, from the Belgian coast to the Somme, where Roman cities such as Tarvenna (Thérouanne), Bagacum (Bavay) and Samarobriva (Amiens) were reduced to ashes. The involvement of enough Marcomanni and Quadi to kill a prefect and pose a serious threat to the Emperor’s life, likewise, indicates major warfare, as does the fact that Marcus Aurelius could plausibly put up a huge monument to himself in Rome as its victor. The self-aggrandizing propaganda of the column is unmistakable, but previous columns, such as Trajan’s, had been used to publicize victories in major wars (in his case, the conquest of Dacia). The fact that Marcus could put up such a major monument to himself without attracting ridicule is again significant. If you are really determined to play down the scale of the action, it is possible to explain your way past these pieces of evidence individually, but collectively they do make the conclusion inescapable that the Marcomannic War represented something entirely out of the ordinary in relations between Rome and its barbarian neighbours.5
The same is also suggested by the element of geographical displacement – sometimes clearly in the form of migration – that forms such a striking sub-theme of the war. Here again, it differs markedly from frontier conflicts of the first century. The Langobardi and Ubii whose attack on Pannonia opened proceedings, for instance, apparently moved about eight hundred kilometres south from the Lower Elbe, where both are located by Tacitus at the end of the first century and by Ptolemy in the middle of the second, only half a generation before the war began. Their journey south is undocumented, but the most natural route would have taken them down the Elbe, one of central Europe’s main north–south arteries, to Bohemia, before passing through the Morava valley and on to the Middle Danube plain (Map 4). If so, they followed one of central Europe’s great thoroughfares, and the same path trodden two hundred and fifty years earlier by the Cimbri and Teutones. We don’t know whether these Langobardi and Ubii were raiders who always intended to return home with their booty, or whether they intended to resettle more permanently in the frontier region. For some other groups, the desire for a permanent move is much clearer. This is certainly true of the Vandal groups who also moved south in the course of the war, in this case over a shorter distance from central Poland, and who attempted, with a degree of Roman collusion this time, to seize the territory of the Costoboci on the fringes of Dacia. As a move towards defusing the crisis, as we have seen, the Romans likewise received the Naristi into the Empire, and the Marcomanni and Victuali had earlier asked for similar treatment. Not that all the projected resettlement had the Roman frontier region in mind. Marcus moved decisively at one point to prevent the Quadi from moving as a body northwards into the territory of the Semnones on the Middle Elbe.6
It is important not to go overboard here. None of this suggests that there was some unstoppable tide of barbarian migration blowing in from the north, and the Marcomanni, Quadi and Iazyges surely did exploit the advent of trouble to pursue their own wealth-gathering agendas. Some of the outsiders who moved into the frontier zone also came only to raid. Even so, there is enough here to indicate that the Germanic groups of the frontier region, for the most part semi-subdued client kingdoms of the Empire rather than its sworn enemies, became caught up in the war at least in part because of the appearance of intrusive population groups, and to some extent did actually require – as they claimed – Roman assistance. Ballomarius, king of the Marcomanni, at one point stood up before the Emperor Marcus Aurelius as spokesman for delegations from a total of eleven frontier groups whose accustomed haunts were being threatened by pressure from the north.7 If we had to leave the Marcomannic War at this point, and up to about 1970 we would have, it would all be very intriguing, but ultimately frustrating. By themselves the historical sources cannot give us any real sense of the scale of the bigger picture of which Marcus’ quarrels with the Marcomanni and Quadi formed just a part. In the last scholarly generation or so, however, a vast new body of archaeological evidence has come to light, which has added dramatically to our knowledge of what was afoot in northern Germania in the second century.
The fact that this evidence exists at all is a fascinating by-product of the Cold War. Numerous sites had been excavated in central and eastern Europe before 1939, but so many of the finds were lost in the conflagration of war that scholarship more or less began again from scratch afterwards, when much of the impetus, manpower and funding came from a particular quarter: the eastern bloc states that emerged under Soviet hegemony. These states managed to combine two interests, which, on the face of it, should have been incompatible. On the one hand, they were vigorously nationalistic. This expressed itself archaeologically in the desire to prove that the present inhabitants were the latest descendants of an indigenous population that had continuously occupied the same piece of territory with distinction far back into the distant past. This was combined with a healthy interest in demonstrating the truth of the processes of ancient historical development as outlined in the nineteenth century by Messrs Marx and Engels, despite the fact, as we have already seen, that for Marxists any kind of national identity could only be a false consciousness. For both these reasons, investigating the deep past was regarded as the height of chic behind the Iron Curtain, and the result was a huge state-sponsored growth industry. When you read them now, the ideological overtones of some of the publications generated by all this work, particularly those from the 1950s and 1960s, make your hair stand on end. But there were many scholars who steadfastly refused to surrender to the extraordinary weight of the official Marxist-nationalist expectations of the past, and, whether by just paying lip-service to official lines or by ignoring them entirely, pursued their research with integrity. Some tremendously important work was already being done on the basis of all the new finds, even in the Stalinist era, and by the 1970s and 1980s many East European academic communities had won almost complete intellectual freedom.8
One direct result is a much clearer picture of the major material cultural systems of Germanic-dominated Europe in the Roman period, and in particular the identification of the Wielbark culture of northern Poland as an entity recognizably distinct from its immediate Przeworsk neighbour to the south, which had been identified and relatively fully investigated between the wars. There are many similarities between the two, but differences both in detail – for example, pot decoration, weapon construction – and on a larger scale distinguish them. Wielbark males were never buried with weapons, whereas Przeworsk males often were, and Wielbark cemeteries often produce a mixture of cremation and inhumation rites, whereas Przeworsk populations only ever cremated. Such differences indicate substantially different beliefs about any afterlife.
What makes these identifications so important for the Marco-mannic War is that the plethora of new finds has also made it possible to evolve much more reliable archaeological dating systems for the remains. Kossinna – dread founder of culture history – had started the job using the intersection of two elements. First, he and his peers established the principle of using stylistic development to establish relative dates within a particular ‘culture’. The appearance of more developed designs of a particular object, or more sophisticated forms of the same kind of decoration, was – reasonably, as it turns out – presumed to be subsequent to simpler, therefore earlier, forms. In principle, this approach can be taken with any type of object, but the method was originally applied largely to pottery. Early researchers then attempted to use occasional finds of more precisely datable objects, often Roman coins in Germanic remains, to calibrate the stylistic sequences against a more absolute chronology. If a coin of 169 AD was found with a particular type of pottery, then that type was clearly being made after that date. This was fine as far as it went, but the time lag between the production and final deposition of datable objects was always guesswork, and could generate deeply erroneous conclusions, since we now know good-quality first- and second-century Roman silver coins were still circulating widely in barbarian Europe, for instance, in the fourth century.
Applying this basic approach to the much larger body of material that had become available by 1970, scholars were able to establish sequences of stylistic development for a much wider range of items: weapons, buckles, jewellery and combs, amongst others. This put the dating of finds on a much firmer footing, since it could be based on all the materials in a given cache, not just on one item, and, as a result, the chronology of these major Germanic-dominated cultural systems can now be broken down into distinct phases, each typically defined as consisting of an association of particular weapon types with certain forms of brooch, buckle, pot and comb. In particular, this has made it infinitely easier to spot the occasional rogue item that had continued in use from an earlier period and whose inclusion in a later burial would previously have thrown dating estimates out.9
All this is relevant to the Marcomannic War because it emerged from the new work that dramatic transformations began to unfold in the configuration of Germanic, or Germanic-dominated, material cultural systems on the territory of what is now Poland from about the middle of the second century AD. In particular, the Wielbark cultural system started to spread southwards from Pomerania into the north of Greater Poland (between the Rivers Notec and Warta), and south-eastwards across the Vistula into Masovia (Map 4). In the past, the identity of the population groups behind this set of remains generated acrimonious debate because of their potential relevance to the highly vexed question of Slavic origins, but it is now generally accepted that the Wielbark culture incorporated areas that, in the first two centuries AD, were dominated by Goths, Rugi and other Germani, even if its population had not originally been (or still was not) entirely Germanic-speaking. The new territories into which Wielbark remains began to spread from c.150, however, had previously been occupied by a population whose material remains belonged to the Przeworsk system. This has traditionally been associated with the Vandals, but certainly encompassed other population groups besides. Like most of these cultural areas, it was so large that it must have included several of the small first- and second-century Germanic groupings mentioned by Tacitus and Ptolemy.
What really matter, however, are not the detailed identifications, but the brute fact of Wielbark expansion. The chronological coincidence here is much too striking to be dismissed. Wielbark expansion – indicating a major upheaval of some kind in northern Poland – occurred at more or less the same time as the Marcomannic War. It must have been connected with it in some way, and shows that the frontier disturbances that appear in the Roman sources were linked to a wider set of convulsions affecting a broader tranche of Germanic-dominated Europe. What the archaeological evidence cannot make clear at this point is whether this link was one of cause or effect. Even the improved stylistic chronologies cannot date remains more closely than phases of twenty-five years or so, and there are always considerable chronological overlaps between adjacent phases. In this case, a twenty-five-year window is large enough for Wielbark expansion to have been either cause or effect of the Marcomannic War. More precise carbon-14 or dendrochronological dates will be needed for greater clarity on this point, and will no doubt become available, but for the moment we have to leave the issue open.10
It is also unclear how we should envisage the human history behind the expansion of the Wielbark system. Archaeological zones are the material remains of systems, not things, so an expansion in the geographical area of one system at the expense of another need not represent an act of conquest, as Kossinna would automatically have assumed. In principle, expansion might be the effect of a number of different kinds of development: conquest or annexation certainly, but also extensions of trading patterns, belief structures and so forth. In this instance, it does seem clear that Wielbark expansion to an extent represented the acculturation of existing Przeworsk populations to new Wielbark cultural norms, rather than their complete replacement by Wielbark immigrants. AsMap 4 shows, at some cemeteries Wielbark-type remains replaced Przeworsk predecessors with no intervening gap, and no obvious signs of discontinuity in use. Here we may well be dealing, therefore, with a Przeworsk population taking on new Wielbark burial habits with regard to weaponry and inhumation, and presumably also, therefore, the particular patterns of belief that underlay them. But even this much change did not occur in a vacuum. Something must have led these Przeworsk populations to change some long-established life – or rather, death – habits. What this may have been, the archaeological evidence does not say. In my view, some new degree of political influence is much the likeliest answer, since even cultural imitation usually follows political prestige.
Equally important, and operating alongside any acculturation, Wielbark expansion also involved some population displacement southwards from northern Poland. This is reflected in the historical sources. By c.200 AD, for instance, the Roman army was able to recruit into its ranks Goths – one of the old Wielbark groups – from the fringes of Dacia. A hundred years before, Gothic territories had been too remote from the frontier for this to happen. But the archaeological material is itself also highly suggestive. The general density of Wielbark sites had been growing apace since the start of the millennium. Individual settlements were short-lived, falling in and out of use relatively quickly in the first and second centuries, reflecting the population’s inability to maintain the fertility of its fields in anything but the short term. But there is also a broader pattern. Within each twenty-five-year period after the birth of Christ, there was a larger total number of settlements in use in Wielbark areas. On the face of it, this suggests population growth, which would help explain both the displacement southwards to the Carpathians, which allowed the Romans to pick up Gothic recruits, and the general Wielbark pressure being applied on its more immediate Przeworsk neighbours in central Poland. As we have seen, the evidence on agricultural production from Germanic Europe does indeed suggest that its population grew substantially in the Roman period, so that this picture is far from implausible. If so, a growing Wielbark population was perhaps posing some of its Przeworsk neighbours a stark choice – between being absorbed into the Wielbark system and finding alternative domains.11
There is much more, of course, that we would ideally want to know, and it’s particularly frustrating that we cannot be sure whether Wielbark expansion preceded or followed Marcus Aurelius’ woes on the frontier. Nonetheless, history and archaeology combine well enough here both to show that the war was highly unusual in its scale and duration and to suggest that one of the causes of this was the role being played by intrusive population groups moving into the frontier region from further afield. It is not just the rather ropy evidence of the Historia Augusta that suggest that the events of the Marcomannic War involved large numbers of people on the move. Some of the much more trustworthy fragments of Dio’s History suggest the same, with Wielbark expansion adding a further dimension to our understanding of what was afoot. All of this is enough to show that the Marcomannic War cannot be understood as a slightly more violent than usual frontier spat. And the case for seeing it as a watershed is only strengthened when we turn our attention to the third century, when Wielbark expansion increased in momentum and further Germanic migration entirely remade Rome’s frontier world.
To the Black Sea and Beyond
The countermeasures of Marcus Aurelius defused the immediate crisis of the 160s effectively enough, and peace returned to Rome’s European frontiers for the best part of two generations. The third century, however, was to witness trouble on a still greater scale. The problems were made all the worse by the fact that the same era saw the rise to prominence of the Sasanian dynasty, which turned the Near East, largely equivalent to modern Iraq and Iran, into a superpower to rival Rome. The Sasanians were much the greatest threat, destroying the armies of three Roman emperors – even capturing the last of them, Valerian, and leading him in chains behind Shapur I, Sasanian Shah-an-shah, ‘King of kings’. When Valerian died, they flayed his corpse and pickled his skin as a victory trophy. This new threat naturally forced Roman military resources eastwards, and events on the Rhine and the Danube have to be seen in this context. If the Sasanians had not exploded into history simultaneously, Rome’s third-century European antagonists would never have enjoyed such freedom of action.12
In western Europe, on the Rhine and the Upper Danubian frontiers, the third-century crisis involved a moderate amount of migration and a larger dose of political reorganization. This was precisely the era in which the new Germanic confederations we examined in the last chapter began to appear. The Alamanni appear as enemies of Rome for the first time in 213, when the Emperor Caracalla launched a punitive or pre-emptive campaign against them. The Alamanni were presumably already posing some kind of threat at that point, but our sources, limited as they are, indicate that it increased dramatically from the 230s. One particularly large Alamannic attack occurred in 242, and such raids were then apparently more or less continuous through the 240s and 250s, although this picture emerges from a scatter of fragmentary historical, archaeological and above all coin-hoard evidence, since no continuous narrative sources survive. But by about 260, at the very latest, the Alamanni and other groups in the region were causing seriously substantial difficulties. Some were already receiving Roman subsidies, and a famous votive altar, recovered from Mainz, records a Roman counterstrike in which thousands of prisoners taken in a raid on Italy were recovered. Most arresting of all, in 261 or thereabouts (the Roman state never trumpeted its defeats) the so-called Agri Decumates, land that had been occupied since early in the first century (Map 5), was abandoned.
As far as we can tell, this wasn’t exactly an Alamannic conquest. It was more a question of the then Emperor in the west, Postumus, deciding to withdraw much-needed troops from the region for the defence of strategically more important areas. It is testimony, nonetheless, to the level of pressure being exerted on the frontier, and the withdrawal failed to solve the problem. More Alamannic assaults are recorded in the late 260s and mid-270s, vivid evidence of which has come to light in the form of the unlucky thirteen individuals who were brutally killed, dismembered and partly scalped before the remains were thrown down the well of their farm at Regensburg-Harting. The situation on the new frontier was finally stabilized by further Roman campaigning in the late third and early fourth centuries under the Tetrarchs and the Emperor Constantine, which initiated the more stable pattern of fourth-century client-state relations that we observed in Chapter 2.13
Although much of this crisis was clearly stimulated by the extra military power that was one result of overall Germanic development and the new political confederations it generated, two bouts of migration also played a significant role. First, following the Roman withdrawal, the Alamanni moved into the Agri Decumates, which is where they were happily ensconced in the fourth century. They had not come from far. What exactly it meant to be an Alamann in the third century is much disputed, and we will return to the issue later in the chapter. But all the physical evidence from the Agri Decumates – of jewellery, ceramic types and modes of burial – indicates that its new Germanic masters had their origins not very far to the east, in the lands of the so-called Elbe-Germanic triangle, west of the River Elbe from Bohemia in the south to Mecklenburg in the north (Map 5).
Second, established just to the rear of the Alamanni in the fourth century, but still within occasional reach of Roman diplomacy, lay the territory of the Burgundians. Unlike the Alamanni, who were an entirely new political formation of the late Roman period, Burgundians were already known to Tacitus and Ptolemy in the first and second centuries. At that point, they held lands much further to the east (now occupied by modern Poland). They were one-time members of the Vandalic world, living somewhere between the Oder and the Vistula. Thus, by the fourth century some Burgundians had moved around five hundred kilometres westwards. The historical evidence indicates that at this point they were established somewhere on the middle stretches of the River Main, and there is some archaeological confirmation. Materials are not plentiful, but a cluster of sword burials have been excavated in broadly the same area. The materials found in these graves resemble items found earlier in east Germanic territories, and are quite distinct from materials associated with groups from the Elbe-Germanic triangle. It is important, though, to acknowledge the limitations of the evidence. Up to the third century and indeed beyond, east Germanic populations universally cremated their dead, and the Main sword burials are inhumations. The historical evidence also locates fourth-century Burgundians most firmly in the Kocher valley, but no east Germanic materials have been unearthed there. Some migration is clear enough, then, on the part of both Alamanni and Burgundians, but its nature, scale and causation need to be examined with care.14
If the third-century crisis was serious enough on the Rhine, the action was much more explosive further east. Where the Marcomannic War had unfolded largely on the Middle Danube plain, this time the worst of the fighting occurred to the east of the Carpathians, in the wide stretches of territory bordering the northern shores of the Black Sea. It began in 238, with a recorded attack by some Goths on the city of Histria, close to the point where the River Danube runs into the Black Sea (Map 6). This inaugurated an initial run of largely Gothic attacks upon the Roman Empire, all launched across its Lower Danube frontier between the Carpathians and the Black Sea. It’s impossible to reconstruct anything like a full narrative of these assaults, but they peaked around the year 250. In 249, the east Balkan city of Marcianople was ransacked by the Gothic followers of two leaders – Argaith and Guntheric – and the violence escalated quickly.
In the spring of 250, another Gothic leader by the name of Cniva broke through the Roman frontier and crossed the Danube at the old legionary fortress of Oescus, which guarded one of the river’s easiest crossings. He then marched into the heart of the Balkans, capturing the city of Philippopolis (modern Plovdiv in Bulgaria) south of the Haemus Mountains, where he overwintered. The following year, the Emperor Decius attempted to intercept the then retreating Goths, but was himself defeated and killed at Abrittus.15This was a huge disaster. On one level, it was even worse than the more famous defeat in the Teutoburger Wald. For the first time, a reigning emperor had been cut down in a battle with barbarians. On another, however, the situation was less serious than it might appear. At the time of Decius’ death, the Empire was in the midst of immense internal political upheaval, one knock-on effect from the huge crisis stimulated within the Roman system by the emergence of the rival Sasanian superpower. Decius was the ruler of only part of Roman Europe and North Africa, and had led into battle only a relatively small percentage of the imperial army. It was a major defeat, but troop losses were not so huge as to pose a structural threat to imperial integrity. This shows up clearly in subsequent events. Some further attacks followed across the Danube in 253 and 254, but they achieved little, and the Goths then abandoned the Danubian line of attack. The natural conclusion is that Decius’ successors had effectively closed it off.
Shortly afterwards, mixed groups of raiders exploited a second line of attack, crossing the Black Sea to Asia Minor by ship in three successive years, 255–7.16 The first expedition, unsuccessful, was directed at Pityus on the south-eastern shore of the Black Sea. The second successfully sacked both the previous year’s target and the city of Trapezus (modern Trabzon). These initial raids were undertaken by what our main source calls ‘Boranoi’, a name that perhaps just means ‘northerners’. The third, seemingly much more substantial, expedition of 257, this one explicitly including Goths, caused widespread devastation in Bithynia and the Propontis, inflicting damage on the cities of Chalcedon, Nicomedia, Nicaea, Apamea and Prusa. There is then a gap in our sources – which, for all their problems, again probably reflects a cessation or lessening in the intensity of the attacks – until 268, when an enormous maritime expedition left the northern shores of the Black Sea. It was composed again partly of Goths but also of some other Germani, notably Heruli. The new expedition did not sail straight across the Black Sea but moved along its northern and western coasts, keeping within sight of land and raiding some coastal cities, such as Anchialus, as it went. Other assaults on Tomi, Marcianople, Cyzicus and Byzantium were beaten off. The raiders then forced the Dardanelles, and spilled out into the Aegean. For the first time, northern sea raiders had broken into Rome’s Mediterranean lake. There the expedition divided into three main groups. These attacked, respectively, the northern Balkans around Thessalonica, Attica, and the coastal hinterland of Asia Minor. The Emperor Gallienus began the counterattack in the Balkans, but it was his successor Claudius who inflicted a massive defeat on the Balkan groups in 269, winning the sobriquet ‘Gothicus’ – ‘victor over the Goths’ – for his efforts. The struggle against the Heruli around Athens was led amongst others by the historian Dexippus, while the third group, led by the chieftains Respa, Veduc and Thuruar, was eventually driven back into the Black Sea in 269, but not before it had wreaked havoc. The islands of Rhodes and Cyprus were devastated, as were the cities of Side and Ilium on the mainland. The raid’s most dramatic casualty was perhaps the legendary temple of Diana at Ephesus.17
The Roman response was fierce. Not only was each of the individual groups defeated, but no major raid ever again broke through the Dardanelles. As with the Danube after the defeat of Decius, one can only presume that effective countermeasures were put in place to seal off the line of attack. Not that this was the end of the Gothic problem. A further attack across the Danube occurred in 270, when Anchialus and Nicopolis were sacked, but the new Emperor Aurelian then led his forces north of the river in 271 and thoroughly defeated a Gothic leader called Cannabaudes, who had presumably been responsible for the latest outrages. Aurelian’s counterattack nipped the new threat in the bud. The mid-270s saw some further sea-borne raids, which plundered the Pontus in particular, but no further assaults over the Danube into the Roman Balkans. Not only had the Emperor’s defeat of the Goths brought some relief, but he had also organized, more or less simultaneously, a planned evacuation of Transylvanian Dacia.18
As with the parallel withdrawal from the Agri Decumates in the west, our information about the abandonment of Dacia is limited. But both narrative evidence and the coin hoards indicate that most of the attacks of the third century had skirted Dacia’s frontiers and entered the Balkans proper, or crossed the Black Sea into Asia Minor, rather than directly affecting the province itself. This withdrawal would again appear to have been more by strategic design, therefore, than a headlong retreat from direct military disaster. On one level, Aurelian probably had it in mind to shorten his frontier lines. Dacia was a projecting salient north of the Danube, which needed defending on three sides. By evacuating it, the Roman frontier in south-eastern Europe could be reduced by something like eight hundred kilometres. It also gave the troublesome outsiders a new prize to squabble over, diverting them from making further attacks on Roman territory. Writing in the fourth century, Eutropius notes that Dacia was ‘now’ (369) divided between the Taifali, Victohali and Tervingi. Aurelian’s combination of military success and strategic withdrawal took much of the steam out of the cross-border attacks, but it was to be another generation before order was fully restored on Rome’s Danube frontier.19 As on the Rhine, further campaigns by the Tetrarchs and Constantine were required fully to force the Goths and others into the semi-client status in which we encountered them in the last chapter.
But who exactly were the Goths who feature so strongly in the third-century action, and what underlay these two or three generations of large-scale disturbance on the east European frontiers of the Roman Empire?
There is no doubt at all that the emergence of Gothic domination represented a complete revolution in the nature of the threat facing the Roman Empire across its Lower Danube frontier. In the first and second centuries, Rome had mostly faced a mixture of nomadic Iranian-speaking Sarmatians and settled Dacian-speakers in this theatre of operations. By the fourth century, groups labelled ‘Goth’ had become the main focus of Roman campaigning and diplomacy in the region. The Gothic Tervingi, as we saw inChapter 2, became the Empire’s main client beyond the Lower Danube, and as the events we have just summarized demonstrate so clearly, the intervening century had seen a huge increase in the military threat posed to the Empire across both its land and its water frontiers. There had been no attacks via Dacia, across the Black Sea or through the Dardanelles on anything like a similar scale in the first and second centuries.
The traditional response to these observations has always been to suppose that Germanic migration was a key ingredient of this strategic revolution. ‘Goths’ were nowhere a presence north of the Black Sea in the first and second centuries AD, when Sarmatians and Dacians are the only two groups to be mentioned in the region. The only Goths we hear about at this time were established in northern Poland. So, game, set and match, you might think, to migration? Well, not exactly. It has recently been argued by Michael Kulikowski that the traditional view of the developing situation north of the Black Sea is a ‘text-hindered’ fantasy. This is a term borrowed from the jargon of archaeologists (although Kulikowski is himself not one), and is used to describe a situation where the interpretation of archaeological evidence has been bent out of shape by a determination to make it conform to the available historical evidence. In this instance, among the range of far from wonderful historical materials available to us for the third century is a sixth-century Gothic history, written by a man called Jordanes, which records the migration of Goths to the Black Sea under a certain King Filimer. This account, Kulikowski argues, not only has little credibility in itself, but has also unduly influenced how historians and archaeologists have looked at the other evidence. Without it, in his view, the other archaeological and historical evidence would not make anyone think in terms of migration. What really underlay the troubles of the third century, and the emergence of Gothic domination in the fourth, was not migration at all but sociopolitical reorganization among the region’s existing population: in fact, of broadly the same kind that produced the new Germanic confederations of the late Roman west.20 Is he correct?
Two elements of the argument are convincing. First, there’s not the slightest doubt that socioeconomic and political reorganization – ‘development’ – were an important dimension of the story. The Gothic Tervingi of the fourth century had a complex, confederative political structure, developed social hierarchies, and an economic profile both in production and exchange that went far beyond the norms of first-century Germania. Their political structures were based on hereditary power, and robust enough both to survive major defeats and to develop coherent strategies for overturning their worst consequences. Second, Kulikowski is right enough that little reliance can be placed on Jordanes. Jordanes was writing three hundred years after the event, and can be shown to have produced a completely anachronistic view of the Gothic world of the fourth century, on which more in a moment.21 If he can be so wrong about fourth-century Gothic history, this must call his account of the third century into question, even if we don’t have enough contemporary sources to be able to check it systematically. Even conceding these points, however, there is still more than enough good-quality evidence to establish that Germanic migration from the north was a major factor in the strategic revolution of the third century.
It does need to be emphasized, first of all, that the change in the nature of the forces Rome was facing across its Lower Danube frontier was much more profound than a mere change in labels. In the first two centuries AD, the eastern foothills of the Carpathian range – modern Moldavia and Wallachia – were occupied by a number of Dacian groups who had not been brought under direct Roman rule at the time of Trajan’s conquest of Transylvania. In the course of the third century, they generated a new degree of political unity among themselves and came to be known collectively as the Carpi. The main Sarmatian group immediately north of the Black Sea was the Roxolani, who, together with the Iazyges, had dismantled the dominance of the Germanic-speaking Bastarnae in the region at the start of the first century AD. Where the Iazyges had subsequently moved on to the Great Hungarian Plain, west of the Carpathians, the Roxolani stayed east, exercising hegemony over the ancient Greek cities of the Pontus, which retained some independence into the third century. Both Sarmatians and Dacians became at least semi-subdued Roman clients after Trajan’s conquest of Transylvanian Dacia, even though they were not formally incorporated into the Empire. The sudden dominance of Goths and other Germanic-speakers in the region represented, therefore, a major cultural shift. And there is no doubt that the new Gothic masters of the landscape were Germanic-speakers. The Gothic Bible translation was produced for some of them by Ulfila, the descendant of Roman prisoners captured by the Goths from Asia Minor, and its Germanic credentials are irrefutable. The appearance of the Goths thus represents a massive change in the complexion and identity of the forces lined up on Rome’s north-eastern frontier.22
This, of course, was not the first time that Germanic-speakers had provided the dominant population stratum in the region. The Bastarnae, subdued by the Sarmatians around the beginning of the first millennium, had also been Germanic. So in theory it might be possible to explain the rise of Gothic domination north of the Black Sea in the third century as the re-emergence of those Germanic groups who had been subordinated here in the first. However, a pretty extensive range of evidence suggests, on the contrary, that the immigration of new Germanic-speakers played a critical role in the action.
In the period of Dacian and Sarmatian dominance, groups known as Goths – or perhaps ‘Gothones’ or ‘Guthones’ – inhabited lands far to the north-west, beside the Baltic. Tacitus placed them there at the end of the first century AD, and Ptolemy did likewise in the middle of the second, the latter explicitly among a number of groups said to inhabit the mouth of the River Vistula. Philologists have no doubt, despite the varying transliterations into Greek and Latin, that it is the same group name that suddenly shifted its epicentre from northern Poland to the Black Sea in the third century. Nor was it the only group name to do so at this time. Goths get pride of place in our sources and in scholarly discussion, but other Germanic groups participated in the action too. We have already encountered the Heruli, and late third-and early fourth-century sources record the presence in and around the Carpathians, in addition, of Germanic-speaking Gepids, Vandals, Taifali and Rugi. The Rugi, like the Goths, had occupied part of the Baltic littoral in the time of Tacitus, and the likeliest location for Vandals in the same period is north-central Poland, to the south of the Goths and Rugi. The presence of Vandals and Rugi in the Carpathian region, alongside Goths, represents a major relocation of some kind on their part, and all were moving south and east from Poland towards the Pontus. The Heruli are not mentioned by Tacitus, but in the fourth and fifth centuries a second, non-Danubian, group of Heruli again lived far to the north-west, suggesting, again, that our Danubian Heruli may have got there via some kind of migration. The Gepids and Taifali, like the Heruli, are first encountered at the end of the third century, and we will return to the significance of these ‘new’ Germanic-speaking groups later in the chapter.
There is, of course, more that we would like to know, but despite obvious deficiencies the historical evidence in its entirety strongly indicates that a wave of Germanic expansion – moving broadly northwest to south-east – underlay the strategic shift that led Aurelian to abandon upland Transylvania. This has to be deduced. There is no explicit description of Germanic migration in contemporary Roman sources, which confine themselves to accounts of its effects – attacks by these new groups across the Roman frontier. If ‘Goth’ was the only Germanic group name from north-central Europe to shift its location in these years, you might get away with the argument that it’s a case of accidental resemblance, but, as we have just seen, it isn’t only ‘Goth’. This being so, there is no reason not to accept what the historical evidence is prima facie telling us. In a reversal of the effects of the arrival of the Sarmatian nomads in the first century AD, the hegemony of Germanic-speakers east of the Carpathians, lost in the overthrow of the Bastarnae and their allies, was restored by the migration of Goths, Rugi, Heruli and other Germanic-speaking groups in the third century.23
This interim conclusion is only strengthened by two broader aspects of the historical evidence. First, the rise of Gothic power north of the Black Sea eventually led some indigenous groups to evacuate the region entirely. As we shall soon see in more detail, large numbers of Dacian-speaking Carpi (but not all of them) from the Carpathian foothills were admitted into the Roman Empire in the twenty-five years or so after 290 AD. An increased level of competition between groups already indigenous to the region might conceivably have generated such an exodus, but it is much more consistent with the after-effects of substantial Germanic immigration. Second, the new Gothic populations of the region remained highly mobile, even after moving into the plains south and east of the Carpathians following the exodus of the Carpi. In the 330s, the Gothic Tervingi contemplated moving lock, stock and barrel to the Middle Danubian region, and from the 370s, as we will explore in the next chapter, relocated along with their fellow Gothic Greuthungi to new homes in the Roman Empire. This later mobility is relevant, because, as we have seen, comparative studies have consistently shown that migration is a cultural habit that builds up in particular population groups. Finding Gothic populations mobile in the fourth century provides a further reason for accepting the evidence that they – or their ancestors – had been so in the third. Neither of these points would be conclusive by itself, but both reinforce the historical evidence that Gothic migration played a large role in recasting the strategic situation north of the Black Sea in the third century.24
The archaeological legacy of the Cold War, moreover, again allows us to expand the discussion beyond the limits of the historical sources. Between c.150 and c.220/230 AD, there occurred a further large-scale south-eastern expansion of the Wielbark cultural system into Polesie and Podlachia first of all, and then on into Volhynia and northern Ukraine. This entirely dwarfed in its geographical scale the earlier Wielbark expansion from around the time of the Marcomannic War. At the same time, Wielbark sites and cemeteries in western Pomerania were falling out of use, so the shift in the Wielbark centre of gravity was huge (Map 6). Given that certainly the Goths and probably at least the Rugi, too, among the newly dominant Germanic groups of the Black Sea region had their origins within the Wielbark system in the first and second centuries, these finds are highly suggestive, in fact, of the route followed by some of the Germanic-speakers who ended up by the Black Sea. A ribbon of Wielbark cemeteries of more or less the right date has been traced south along the upper reaches of the River Vistula, and then on to the Upper Dniester (Map 6). These certainly tie in chronologically with the sudden appearance of Gothic attackers outside the walls of the city of Histria in 238.25
The really striking development in the north Pontic archaeology of this period, however, was not the further spread of the Wielbark system per se, but the generation of a series of new cultural systems incorporating some Wielbark features. The most important of these was the Cernjachov, which by the middle of the fourth century had spread over a huge area between the Danube and the Don (Map 6). This is another case where the date and identity of the system used to be much fought over, but its basic characteristics are now well established. Over five thousand settlements have been identified, and many large bi-ritual cemeteries excavated, the remains showing beyond doubt that the system flourished from the second half of the third century down to the year 400, or just a bit later. Chronologically, as well as geographically, its remains coincide with Gothic dominion in the late Roman period as described in trustworthy contemporary sources, and it is now universally accepted that the system can be taken to reflect the world created by the Goths – and probably our other Germanic-speakers too – north of the Black Sea.
Some elements of the new system strongly recall, or are identical to, their counterparts in the Wielbark system to the north-west, but it is important to recognize that the latter did continue on in its own right; there was nothing like a total evacuation of northern Poland. Some of the pottery is identical, with handmade bowl-shaped Wielbark ceramics being particularly prevalent in early Cernjachov levels. Otherwise, many of the fibula brooch types, and the style of female costume (brooches worn as a pair on each shoulder), are identical with those found in Wielbark areas. Some house-types, particularly the longhouses shared by both humans and animals (German Wohnstallhäuser), are likewise common to certain areas, at least, of both systems. It is also striking, although at present a full comparative study is lacking, that the two customs which distinguish Wielbark cemeteries from those found in surrounding areas of north-central Europe are also found in Cernjachov territories. In cemeteries of both systems, two types of burial ritual coexisted: inhumation and cremation. Likewise, the population of Wielbark areas did not bury weapons (or any other iron objects) with their male dead, and the absence of this habit was also a feature of Cernjachov burial ritual.
Other features of the Cernjachov system had different origins. While handmade Wielbark ceramics were commonly used early on, a more sophisticated wheel-made pottery, broadly analogous to provincial Roman types, quickly became characteristic of the system. And if the longhouse certainly had its origins in the Germanic-dominated cultures of north-central Europe, another characteristic dwelling in many Cernjachov areas was the sunken or semi-sunken hut (in German, Grübenhaus). These, by contrast, had long been indigenous to the eastern foothills of the Carpathians and beyond, and are not found in Wielbark or any other northern Germanic settlements of the first and second centuries. Excavators have also found occasional examples within Cernjachov cemeteries of a distinctive Sarmatian burial practice: placing possessions on a shelf cut within the grave. A Sarmatian population group thus apparently continued to play its part in the new mix generated by northern Germanic immigration towards the Black Sea.26
The interpretation of these remains was for a long time contentious. As soon as the first Cernjachov materials were recovered in 1906, their obvious similarities to characteristically Germanic materials from north-central Europe, especially in terms of metalwork, were duly spotted, long before the Wielbark system had been identified. They were quickly linked to the migration of Goths known from historical sources, and in the Nazi era cited in grotesque justification of territorial demands in Eastern Europe. Nazi bureaucrats went so far as to rename towns of the Black Sea region after great Gothic heroes, Theoderichshafen – ‘the harbour of Theoderic’ (a great Gothic leader of the fifth and sixth centuries, Chapter 7) – being suggested for Sevastopol in the Crimea. In short, the ‘invasion hypothesis’ was applied to the material with unadulterated vigour. Metalwork of the same type had been found beside both the Baltic and the Black Seas, so population groups from the former must have taken over the latter, driving out the indigenous population – a view that found some support, to be fair, in records of the departure of the Carpi.
But, even aside from the politics, this was much too simple a response to the complexities of the evidence. Although its imprint is clear enough, the remains of the Cernjachov system contain many non-Wielbark elements as well, and objects and customs can certainly be transferred from one area to another without the need for a substantial movement of population – migration – as the mechanism. Objects can be traded, and technologies and habits adopted or even evolved separately. The creation of the Cernjachov system, despite the obvious similarities to its Wielbark neighbour, cannot, therefore, by itself prove that that there had been any migration. And, as we have seen, it is a key element in the anti-migration argument that the identified parallels between Wielbark and Cernjachov remains would not be strong enough to make anyone think in terms of migration, if Jordanes’ account of the Goths’ trek in particular did not exist.
In my view, however, not only is the historical evidence – even apart from Jordanes – more than strong enough to support the idea that migration was a key factor in the refashioning of the Pontic littoral, but the archaeological evidence is more compelling than the anti-migrationist reading suggests. Before looking at the material, it is important first of all to remember what we might expect to find. Unless you’re dealing with the rare situation of an intrusive population driving out the existing one more or less in its entirety, or where land is being colonized for the first time, then the archaeological traces left by migration are unlikely to be that impressive. Where migrants were mixing with an indigenous population it will only be a few, possibly very few, elements of their material culture – those consciously or unconsciously linked to deeply encoded belief or behavioural patterns – that will necessarily be transferred. In other areas of life, migrants are likely enough to adopt convenient elements of indigenous cultural origin (as many modern migrants do), or become an unidentifiable component in new cultural amalgams created by the collision of migrant and host populations. In short, you’re never likely to get more than an ambiguous reflection of migration from archaeological evidence, so that archaeological ambiguity can itself never disprove the possibility of a migration having occurred.
But in the case under discussion, in fact, the archaeological evidence suggesting migration is far from insubstantial. This is not just my opinion, I hasten to add, but also the unanimous verdict of the experts who have been working in detail on the materials in the last generation. It is also worth emphasizing that these experts have no ideological axes to grind. The two most influential figures here are Kazimierz Godlowski and Mark Shchukin, the former Polish, the latter Russian. Both had to fight hard battles in their early years against one-party intellectual establishments that were deeply committed to points of view different from their own. Godlowski’s work was instrumental in undermining an old orthodoxy (which we will return to in Chapter 8), that ‘submerged’ Slavs had always occupied Polish territory. And it was Shchukin who conclusively redated the Cernjachov system to the late third and fourth centuries and established thereby its link to the Goths, against entrenched Soviet establishment opinion which also for a long time was determined to appropriate its relatively advanced remains for early Slavs. In the aftermath of the Second World War, likewise, neither Poles nor Russians have had the slightest ideological interest in exaggerating the role of Germanic-speakers in central and south-eastern Europe, so neither can reasonably be accused of playing intellectual games for the purposes of self-advancement. The reasons behind their unanimity in asserting deep links between the Wielbark and Cernjachov systems are not, in fact, difficult to find.
When the developing Wielbark system of the first and second centuries AD is compared with the new systems generated east of the Carpathians and north of the Black Sea in the third century, the similarities that emerge are striking. We are dealing not with the transfer of isolated objects or technologies but with much more distinctive cultural traits, comprising customs expressive of social norms (female costume), socioeconomic life strategies (longhouses) and even deeply held belief systems (burial rites). It is also striking that Wielbark ceramics are prevalent in the early stages of Cernjachov development, and that the Wielbark system had been expanding dramatically in a south-easterly direction in the preceding generations, right up to the boundaries of the region where its Cernjachov counterpart would come into existence.27
None of this is to say that there isn’t more to do here. A full-scale monograph comparing the prevalence of cremation with that of inhumation in the cemeteries of the two systems, with proper emphasis on regional variation, would be nice; not to mention, eventually, a detailed regionally based discussion of varying farming strategies within the huge territories of the Cernjachov system. Where do we find longhouses, and where do sunken huts prevail? Given the way that migration tends to operate only in channelled form until a large body of information builds up among potential migrations, my suspicion is that both of these lines of inquiry might help identify the denser concentrations of immigrants, and hence, by inference, other areas where indigenous populations were in the majority. Even with the current state of our knowledge, however, the parallels are strong enough, and run deeply enough, to conclude that the archaeological material does indeed support the historical evidence in indicating that migration from the north-west played a major role in the third-century revolution north of the Black Sea.
As with the Marcomannic War, the evidence base for the third-century migrations is not everything you would like it to be, and the validity of some of the individual items can certainly be challenged. Nonetheless, an entirely anti-migrationist reading smacks of special pleading, given the weight of both historical and archaeological indications that migration played a key role in the action. There is more than enough, overall, to establish that Germanic migration in the general direction of Rome’s riverine frontiers began to play a role in disturbing the status quo in barbarian Europe from the mid-second century, and gathered still further momentum in the third. There was some migration in the west, and more in the east, and in both cases migratory phenomena were operating alongside the other political and socioeconomic transformations that generated the new confederations of fourth-century Germania. But to accept this is merely to open the inquiry. Migration can take many forms and have many and interlocking causes. What was the nature and scale of this third-century Germanic migration, how did the minutiae of its processes work themselves out, and what, ultimately, generated it?