The histories of all the major groups who crossed into the Empire at the two moments of frontier collapse followed a similar course. Their initial – overwhelmingly uninvited61 – penetrations of Roman territory were followed by periods of armed struggle. They had to force the Empire to accept that they could not be defeated, and that its normal policies for the subjugation and integration of immigrants could not be imposed upon them. For the Tervingi and Greuthungi, these initial struggles lasted for about six years until the negotiation of a compromise peace agreement with the Roman state, which came into force on 3 October 382. That the Empire was willing to agree to such a deal was entirely due to the Goths’ military capacity, in particular their successive defeats of two Roman emperors – Valens, most famously, at Hadrianople on 9 August 378, then Theodosius in Macedonia in the summer of 380. Other, smaller migrant groups of the period – Taifali, Sarmatians and isolated Gothic subgroups – who failed this initial military test received much harsher treatment, their defeats being followed by total loss of identity, as group members were distributed as unfree labour to Roman landowners.62
The history of the migrants involved in the crisis of 405–8 is similar. Again uninvited, they had to fight, initially, to carve out new homes for themselves. Some failed. Many of the followers of Uldin and Radagaisus, as we have seen, met with disaster, killed or distributed again as unfree labour, though some elements of each group managed to do a deal with the Roman authorities. Initially at least, the Vandals, Alans and Sueves were more fortunate. After a career of wild violence in Gaul, in 409 or 410 they forced their way over the Pyrenees into Roman Spain, which offered them new opportunities. In 412, six years after their initial crossing, they divided up the bulk of its provinces between them. The Siling Vandals took Baetica, the Hasdings most of Gallaecia, the Sueves north-western Gallaecia, and the Alans, underlining that they were the largest component of the force at this stage, the richer provinces of Lusitania and Carthaginensis (Map 9). There is no evidence that this partition was authorized by the central Roman authorities, but it would seem to represent a more ordered exploitation of economic assets, beyond mere looting.63 The time lag between invasion and eventual settlement, whether we’re talking 376 or 406, is entirely understandable. No large surge of armed, unexpected immigration could ever have come to an immediate modus vivendi with the populations at its point of destination.
What does need explanation, however, is that some time after these initial settlements – 382 and 412 respectively – both sets of immigrants apparently took to the road again. The Goths settled in the Balkans in 382, as the story traditionally goes, broke into open revolt under the leadership of Alaric in 395 and spent much of the next two years in a Greek odyssey, accompanied by their families and a vast wagon train, which took them as far south as Athens, round the Peloponnesus and then back north again to Epirus beside the Adriatic. After a brief rest, they moved into Italy in 401/2 before returning to the Balkans until 408, when they headed west, spending 408 to 411 in Italy again before taking off for Gaul, where they finally settled down. Likewise, the Vandals and Alans: after a Hispanic interlude which lasted until 429, they took ship across the Straits of Gibraltar and moved east, in two stages, towards the richest provinces of Roman North Africa. They briefly acquired land by treaty in Mauretania and Numidia in 437, before establishing two years later a more permanent home for themselves by capturing Carthage and the cluster of provinces around it.
Looked at in this longer term, the immigration pattern of those who fled the Huns thus takes on a distinctly stop-start character. In the past, these narrative gaps were never seen as an obstacle to viewing the secondary migrations as the further history of the same groups that had made the original crossing. More recently, however, it has been suggested that the secondary migrations look much more like the activities of mobile armies than of the mixed population groups that made the original frontier crossings, and were indeed undertaken by what were essentially different groups – warbands on the make – who drew only marginally on manpower from the original migrants. This suggestion has been particularly well received among those sharing the conviction that ancient social units such as the invaders of 376 and 405–8 could never have had a strong enough sense of group identity to hold together through repeated upheavals, over such a long time-scale.64
So, armies or peoples? And can migration studies help us comprehend the renewable mobility of Vandals, Goths and others?
The fact that major disagreement can exist on such a basic point of interpretation will tell you instantly that, once more, the sources are not all they might be. They are, however, much fuller for the post-382 history of the Goths, at least for certain years, and they make the better test case. In the Gothic instance, the key initial question is whether those who rebelled under Alaric in 395 really did represent further movement on the part of all or most of the Goths settled under the treaty of 382. This was never doubted in the past, but new expectations that barbarian identity will always have been fluid have fuelled demands in recent years that the correspondence between the Goths who made peace with the Roman state in 382 and Alaric’s rebellious following should be proved. Can it be?
In simple terms, the answer has to be no. No Roman commentator lists in detail the manpower resources drawn upon by Alaric in 395, or describes exactly how he mobilized support. On the other hand, we are talking about the middle of the first millennium, so this is not surprising, and it is important not to use unsatisfiable demands for an inappropriate degree of certainty as an excuse for denying what is in fact the very reasonable probability that in 395 Alaric did indeed lead a major revolt on the part of the treaty Goths of 382. The argument is not that all those settled under the treaty necessarily participated in the revolt, but rather that there was sufficient overlap in manpower between those Goths settled under the agreement of 382 and Alaric’s initial followers for the basic point to hold.
The first plank of the argument is that the better source material indicates strongly that this was in fact the case. Our two earliest, least problematic, entirely contemporary and independent Roman commentators on the rebellion, Claudian in the west and Synesius in Constantinople, describe Alaric’s following precisely as the 382 Goths in revolt. To discredit their testimony, convincing reasons would need to be found for both commentators – writing in separate halves of the Empire, for different audiences and for different purposes – substantially to have misrepresented the action, and none has yet been offered.65 Moreover, this basic observation – powerful in itself – can be strengthened. Synesius and Claudian have sometimes been rejected in recent years on the basis of a passage in the Greek historian Zosimus that reports Alaric as having originally revolted during the Eugenius campaign because Theodosius had only given him the command of some barbarian auxiliaries, rather than a proper Roman command. From this it has been supposed that his ambitions, and hence his revolt in 395, did not originally encompass the mass of the Goths of 382. There are three major problems here.
First, what was originally the historian Eunapius’ contemporary account of Alaric has become demonstrably mangled at the hands of the sixth-century Zosimus. To put the contemporary Claudian and Synesius to one side on the strength of three lines (literally) of the much later Zosimus, whose account is anyway problematic, with no further argument about why they should both have distorted the action in the same way, is simply unsound methodology.66 Second, rewriting Alaric as having purely Roman ambitions runs into the problem that, just four years after his revolt began, an east Roman general of barbarian origins, one Gainas, took the opportunity of the revolt of some Gothic auxiliary troops to lever himself into power in Constantinople. Alaric à la Zosimus would be an analogous figure, as those who take that route acknowledge, but of the two authors Synesius had no problem in describing Gainas accurately (Claudian doesn’t even mention him).67 Why would either be likely to have misrepresented Alaric when, if certainly hostile to Gainas, he could describe his activities straightforwardly? Third, we can be certain that from the beginning Alaric’s following amounted to a major military force, surely ten thousand-plus warriors, since already in 395 it was able to face down a full Roman field army. If we don’t accept what Claudian and Synesius tell us, that it was the treaty Goths in rebellion that Alaric was leading, we also have to find a large alternative source of military manpower for him. This is not easy, given that the western generalissimo Stilicho had both eastern and western field armies under his command at this point.68
The second plank of the argument, quite simply, is that it is entirely plausible that the Goths of 382 had maintained sufficient continuity of political identity over the intervening period to mount such a revolt. We are talking only thirteen years. Another generation will have matured in that time, but many adults active in 382 will still have been so in 395. And though woefully ignorant of many of its details, the point of the 382 treaty – for contemporary supporters and critics alike – was that it allowed an unprecedented degree of autonomy to continue among the Goths concerned. Although guilty of rebellion and the death of an emperor, they had not been broken up and widely distributed across the Empire, which is why Themistius, spokesman and propagandist for the Emperor Theodosius, had to work so hard to sell the peace to the Senate of Constantinople. This makes it entirely plausible that the same Goths could have acted in concert again, just thirteen years later.69
That original treaty had also left unresolved two big issues in Gotho-Roman relations, and it was these that came to a head in Alaric’s revolt of 395. First, the Romans had recognized no overall Gothic leader in the peace of 382. This was in line with established Roman policies for limiting the political cohesion of groups they perceived as potential threats – it was standard policy towards Alamannic overkings, as we have seen, in the fourth century. Also, it was facilitated by developments within the confederations of the Tervingi and Greuthungi themselves. In both, the decision to move into Roman territory had been accompanied by political turmoil at the top and the removal of established leaderships, whether by death in battle or political overthrow.70 In the run-up to the battle of Hadrianople, Fritigern had tried to fill the gap, and there is good evidence both that the struggle had continued after 382 and that Alaric, too, had had to overcome rivals for the overall leadership of the Goths. It is certainly possible that his position was evolving in 394/5. Although attributable more to Zosimus’ garblings of Eunapius’ original, it may be the case that Alaric originally had ambitions for a more Roman career. But in the event he chose the Gothic option, and there is one excellent – if indirect – piece of evidence that he elbowed at least one rival out of the way to do so. Alaric’s later career, and that of his brother-in-law and successor Athaulf, were dogged by the interventions of a Roman general of Gothic origins by the name of Sarus, who waged a one-man war with a view to undermining any peace deal the two were looking to negotiate with the west Roman state, into whose service Sarus had moved. What’s so interesting here is that Sarus’ brother Sergeric eventually organized the coup in which Athaulf and his immediate family were killed, and made himself – briefly – ruler of Alaric’s Goths. So Sarus clearly came from a family grand enough to compete for the overall leadership of the Goths, and his unrelenting hostility suggests that Alaric’s rise was responsible for his departure for Roman service.71
Alaric’s broader political success among the Goths, moreover, was intimately linked with the line he took on the second unresolved issue of the treaty of 382: the military obligations owed by the semi-autonomous Goths to the Roman state. As noted earlier, it was normal Roman policy in peace agreements imposed upon outsiders to extract drafts of young males for its armies. This may well have happened in 382, creating Gothic auxiliary units in the regular Roman army. But as had previously been the case with the Tervingi north of the Danube from 332, the treaty stipulated in addition that the Goths should provide irregular military service in the form of larger, autonomously led contingents for specific campaigns. Contingents from the Tervingi had fought on four occasions for Rome against Persia, between 332 and 360, and similar demands of the treaty Goths were made by the east Roman Emperor Theodosius I for his two civil wars against the western usurpers Maximus and Eugenius.72
There is compelling evidence that this military service was resented by the Goths. On each of the campaigns against the usurpers, the participation of the treaty Goths was accompanied by revolts of some kind. Theodosius’ decision to seek assistance on the second occasion prompted a vicious quarrel among the Gothic leadership over how they should respond to his request.73 The fate of the Gothic forces on the second expedition also shows precisely why it was problematic. At the battle of the Frigidus in September 394, they found themselves in the front line on the first day and suffered heavy casualties. One contemporary Roman historian commented that the battle saw two victories for Theodosius: one over the usurper Eugenius and a second over the Goths. Given that the Goths’ semi-autonomy was tolerated by the Roman state only because they couldn’t be properly defeated, there was a real danger that such casualties would change the balance of power sufficiently to allow the Romans to rewrite the terms of the treaty. It is not in the least surprising, therefore, that almost as soon as they got home from the Frigidus campaign, sometime in winter 394/5, the treaty Goths rose in revolt under a leader committed to rewriting the terms of 382.74
Much of what we would like to know about the treaty, and the pattern of Gotho-Roman relations it dictated, is beyond recovery. But as with so many diplomatic agreements, it was clearly a working compromise that left some of the more contentious issues to be resolved later. But it is entirely reasonable to suppose that Alaric’s revolt of 395 was of the nature that our two contemporary commentators describe. He was the leader of the bulk of the 382 Goths in revolt, the treaty having left them autonomous enough to be capable of rewriting their terms of agreement by collective action, and losses at the Frigidus had given them a real reason for discontent. This interim conclusion then prompts another set of questions. Why did the Goths’ rebellion in search of better terms involve further migration? It is, after all, perfectly possible to revolt without picking up the family and taking to the road again, lock, stock, and two smoking barrels.75
The fact that they had an established migration habit has to be one element in the explanation. As its history shows, this was a population grouping prone to solving its difficulties by moving on to pastures new. The descendants of those who had moved from Poland to the Black Sea in the third century and into Wallachia in the early fourth, who had attempted to migrate west of the Carpathians in the 330s and who eventually crossed the Danube in 376, were a population group that knew a great deal about the practicalities of large-scale, long-distance movement, and had shown themselves ready to use it as a strategy for solving their problems. And, of course, some of those who crossed the Danube in 376, would certainly still have been alive in 395. But even groups with well-established migration habits do not move without excellent reason, and the travels of Alaric’s Goths, after the revolt, played a specific role in an unfolding strategy aimed at rewriting the unsatisfactory elements of the treaty of 382.
One of the motives was simply to plunder Roman communities en route. In 395, Alaric was a new Gothic leader and had to secure his power base. Putting his followers in the way of funds answered this need, and we have no reason to suppose that our sources are lying when they describe the Goths’ slow trot south into and around Greece as an extended booty raid.76 But that was only part of its purpose. Alaric also needed to force the Roman state into accepting revisions to the treaty in the Goths’ favour. Mostly we hear little of the substance of these negotiations, but where the sources are more detailed, as they are for Alaric’s second sojourn in Italy between 408 and 410, it emerges that the key issues were full recognition of his leadership, possibly symbolized by granting him some kind of Roman office, the degree of economic support that the Goths would receive from the Roman state, and the finding of a suitable settlement area. Underlying this was a concern to extract a truly unconditional acceptance of the Goths’ basic right to exist as a semi-independent entity on Roman soil. In 382, the Roman authorities clearly had at least one pair of fingers crossed behind their backs. When the imperial spokesman Themistius rose to justify the treaty in front of the Senate in January 383, he closed his speech by looking forward to the time when all signs of separate Gothic identity would disappear.77
All of these Gothic prerequisites for a lasting peace agreement had to be dragged unwillingly from a Roman state that, for centuries, had enjoyed sufficient military hegemony never to have to accept long-term coexistence with a barbarian power on its own soil. Winning concessions was never easy, therefore, as the better-documented episodes of diplomatic exchange again show. Repeatedly between 408 and 410 Alaric appeared on the verge of a settlement, only to see it torpedoed by imperial intransigence. He showed enormous patience, famously reducing his demands to an absolute minimum before allowing his forces to sack Rome when even these lesser demands were rejected. This time, migration had the purpose both of inflicting damage on imperial assets so as to pressure the Empire into an agreement, and of moving the Goths to the location that offered the best chance for longer-term diplomatic success. The Grecian holiday that Alaric took in 395–7 was an attempt to force the eastern Empire to negotiate, and eventually he succeeded. In 397, the ruling regime in Constantinople, headed by the eunuch Eutropius, cut him a suitable deal. But making these concessions was extremely unpopular in some elite imperial circles, and one of the issues that contributed to Eutropius’ own downfall in 399. A sequence of regimes followed that had in common the determination not to negotiate with Alaric, whose concessions were withdrawn.78 This closing-off of the east sparked Alaric’s next migratory venture: the Goths’ first intrusion into Italy, in 401/2. This used further migration as a means of pressuring the western half of the Empire into doing a deal. But Stilicho was able to fend off Alaric’s advances militarily, and the Goths, caught in limbo, returned to the Balkans with neither half of the Empire willing to negotiate.
The situation was changed only by the intrusion of outside factors. The impending collapse of his central European frontier left the western generalissimo Stilicho desperately in need of military manpower. Having already confronted a Vandal threat to Raetia in the winter of 401/2, he was aware that a highly explosive situation was building up in the Middle Danube, as Goths, Vandals, Alans and other refugees from the Huns moved west of the Carpathians. This made him turn towards Alaric’s Goths as possible allies.79When Stilicho was eventually deposed in the summer of 408, essentially because of his failure to deal with the mixture of invasion and usurpation that from 405 had ripped the western Empire apart, Alaric had already negotiated an understanding with him, and now pushed his followers back on the road to Italy, ostensibly to collect what he was owed. More fundamentally, the current disarray in the west made it much more likely that he would be able to extract a suitable deal there than in the east.
The Goths stayed in Italy for the next three years, and got close to agreement at certain points. In the end, however, imperial intransigence starved them out, and now under Alaric’s brother-in-law and successor Athaulf they headed off to Gaul, again in search of the right combination of circumstances to force a lasting settlement. There, finally, between 416 and 418, the bare bones of a new agreement emerged. The Goths were given a prosperous area for farming and settlement in the Garonne valley of Aquitaine, much richer than any part of the Balkans but more distant from the imperial centres of power in northern Italy, and their leader received full Roman recognition. But they were given none of the gold payments or appointments to high office within the political structure of the Roman state that had featured in Alaric’s most ambitious proposals between 408 and 410. Physically and politically they had been banished to the fringes of the Roman world. The Goths agreed to fight on occasion, as before, for the Roman state, and were employed in Spain against the Rhine invaders.80
Strange as such behaviour might appear from a modern perspective, the punctuated migrations of Alaric’s followers after 395 had their own logic. There is nothing in any of this – and certainly not the final form of the 418 agreement – that requires us to see the core of his support as having been drawn other than from the 382 Goths. They had been attempting to force the Roman state, or one half of it, into a lasting agreement, and their relocations were designed to manoeuvre them into the kind of political and geographical context from which a suitable settlement could be negotiated. What we are witnessing again, in fact, is the inescapable influence exercised by Roman state structures on the Goths’ migratory process. Throughout this long period of movement, lasting for nearly twenty years, they were twisting and turning in an attempt to gain sufficient leverage to force the Empire to change centuries-old policies. In the end, it took the crisis of 405–8, and above all the Rhine invaders’ annexations in Spain, to make the west Roman authorities receptive to the Goths’ advances.
In the emergence of this agreement, one development in particular played a role of special importance. Within the Goths’ extended odyssey, stretching from the Balkans to Aquitaine, there were some lengthy periods of relative stability: during 397–401 and again during 402–7 in the Balkans, during 408–11 in Italy, and during 412–15 in southern Gaul. In total, then, maybe only about five and a half of the twenty-odd years from original revolt to settlement in the Garonne were spent in long-distance relocation. Nevertheless, this was an extraordinarily testing and stressful period, and, as you might expect, Alaric’s force did not just proceed unchanged from point of departure to final destination. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that this extended odyssey ended satisfactorily enough. But facing hard marches and food shortages – especially in Italy in 410/11 and again in Gaul in 414/15 – and the constant threat of Roman counterattack (not least in confrontations with its field armies in 395, 397, and twice in 402) the Goths did not know that the end result was all going to be worth such a huge effort.
Whereas older narratives took the existence of Alaric’s original force for granted, more recent accounts have emphasized, rightly, that its membership changed substantially between 395 and 418. The idea that it rose and fell according to his followers’ estimates of Alaric’s likelihood of success, indeed, has now become something of a commonplace. In reality, the evidence for a steadily increasing membership is much better than that for its supposed decline. A trawl through the sources throws up a handful of individuals of high status who switched their allegiance to Rome, probably accompanied by their personal military retinues, on being defeated in the ongoing struggles for political pre-eminence that periodically preoccupied the Goths. Sarus and Fravittas, whom we have already met, fall into this category, as, seemingly, does a certain Modares. These men belong to a very specific category, however, providing no evidence that the substantial membership of the group ebbed and flowed. Otherwise, the only reference we have to Alaric losing support is from a Roman spin doctor working for Stilicho, desperate to find some way of salvaging his employer’s reputation when the latter had failed to defeat the Goths in battle in 402. His airy claim that Alaric’s followers were abandoning him in droves can carry little weight.81
Even so, the evidence for renegotiated identity is incontrovertible. To start with, the immigrants of 376 had come across the Danube in two separate groups: Tervingi and Greuthungi. This distinction disappeared, in my view by 395, in another by 408. But the date is a matter of detail. North of the Danube, the Greuthungi and Tervingi had been entirely separate political entities. Within a generation of crossing the Danube, the distinction disappeared.82 Two had become one, and further additions of manpower followed. Outside Rome in 409 Alaric received two major reinforcements. After the overthrow of Stilicho, a major body of barbarian soldiery from the Roman army of Italy, closely allied to the generalissimo, threw in their lot with Alaric when their families, quartered in various Italian cities, were massacred in a pogrom. It is overwhelmingly likely that these were in large part the men who had, just four years before, followed Radagaisus to Italy before swapping sides in the diplomatic coup that led to their former leader’s downfall and death. Alaric’s Goths were also joined outside Rome by a very large number of slaves. I suspect many of these had the same origin, given that so many of Radagaisus’ less fortunate followers had been sold into slavery in 406. But no doubt there were others, from a variety of origins, besides.83 We are a very long way here from the old billiard-ball view of Gothic migration explored in Chapter 1.
In the course of Alaric’s career, then, a new and much larger political unit was created on the hoof in the years of renewed movement after 395. Why this happened is straightforward, I think, even if the negotiations behind the process are nowhere reported for us. The former military allies of Stilicho joined Alaric simply because of Roman hostility. They had been prepared to contemplate a long-term future as Roman allies, having abandoned Radagaisus with this in mind. Stilicho had offered them an attractive deal, perhaps something like the terms Eutropius had granted Alaric in 397. But on Stilicho’s fall, inherent Roman hostility towards ‘barbarians’, manifested in the attacks on their families, led to a change of mind. The necessary preconditions for the unification of the Tervingi and Greuthungi, likewise, were created by their joint campaigns against the Roman state from 376. Again, the process was not a smooth one. After their joint victory at Hadrianople, the groups split up again in the winter of 379/80, not least because feeding the united force was proving problematic, but probably also because each had its own leadership that was not about to give way to the other – which any definitive unification would necessarily have entailed.84 But as the narrative makes clear, this new and much bigger military-political entity was primarily created to fend off Roman power, and without imperial pressure would surely never have emerged. Not only did the cracks in Roman political structures direct the precise moves made by the Goths between 395 and 418, but the pressure of Roman military power had the effect of pushing a number of originally separate immigrant groups together just to survive. There are many complementary examples of those who failed to learn the lesson, and suffered as a consequence. Isolated Gothic raiding parties were destroyed in the course of the Hadrianople campaign, while whole breakaway subgroups were subdued and resettled on more normal Roman terms.85 The only way to prosper on Roman territory was to hang together in sufficient numbers and with sufficient political cohesion to prevent the Roman state from hanging you individually.
Alaric’s Goths provide us, therefore, with an excellent example of contingent group identity in action. Most of the constituent elements of the force seem to have been Gothic, but a shared Gothic cultural identity, if this really existed in the fourth century – and it may have – was not a prerequisite for group membership. We know at least of some Huns whose membership of the new group appears to have been permanent, and the origins of the slaves who joined Alaric outside Rome is a thoroughly moot point.86 But none even of the Gothic contingents had formed part of the same political unit before their entry on to Roman soil. It was Roman military pressure that had brought the Tervingi and Greuthungi together at Hadrianople, and that made Radagaisus’ more fortunate followers conclude that their initial choice of a Roman option was a mistaken one so that their interests would be better served by attaching themselves to Alaric’s command. On the other side of the imperial frontier, Roman aggression was not so fierce nor so sustained as to cause such a large group to form, but on Roman soil all these Goths had to unite so as to survive as an independent entity. This is, in fact, a classic pattern. Outside pressure often provides the necessary catalyst for active group identities to form.
We have no information on the negotiations between the groups that preceded their unification, but given their previously separate political histories these can’t always have been easy, as the number of high-status Goths forced out of the group and into Roman service confirms. But this, of course, is why outside pressure was required to make it happen at all, and doesn’t mean that the resulting group identity, forged in the fires of war, was fundamentally weak. If it had been, the Roman state would have been able to prise it apart (as it did with the forces of Uldin and Radagaisus); but even the subsequent diplomatic setback, then famine, and the extinction of its initial leadership line were not enough to cause the new group’s unity to collapse. And in this crucial point we find a second reason why the Roman state was willing in the end to do a deal. The Gothic force assembled in Gaul in the 410s was much larger, and, thanks to continued conflict with the Roman state, more cohesive than any Gothic political unit previously seen.87The Romans were forced to accept by 418 that a deal had to be done, therefore, not least because the force Alaric had created was now too large to be destroyed.
For all the problems of the evidence, then, the action that unfolded from the outbreak of Alaric’s revolt down to the settlement in Aquitaine in 418 is best understood as the immigrants of 376 taking to the road again in search of a better future and picking up en route reinforcements from some of the migrants of 405–8. As we have seen before when discussing Germanic society in this era, army versus people is a false dichotomy. In a world whose economic and political structures could support only restricted numbers of specialist warriors, recruiting for any enterprise that required large armed forces automatically brought freemen and their families into the picture. To have any chance of success, Alaric had to convince large numbers of Goths that it was in their interests to up sticks and move again. But, as we have also seen, the immigrants’ aims were destined to be fulfilled only when they were able to recruit from a still wider body of support. The new political identity thereby created may have drawn in part on preexisting cultural similarities among the various Gothic groups who joined the new enterprise, but cultural similarity was by no means crucial. The Vandal–Alan alliance shows that entities with a strong political identity could be built out of constituent groups with utterly different backgrounds. Much more important than cultural similarity was the hostile presence of the Roman state.
The analysis offered above satisfactorily explains, I think, all the oddities of the action, which the alternative proposition simply cannot. The sophisticated political agendas on display and, above all, Alaric’s need for a settlement area do not sit well with the mercenary-band model. Adopting it would also raise the question of where Alaric might have found such a massive reservoir of specialist warriors.
Many of these points also apply to those other great practitioners of repeat migration: the Rhine invaders of 406. You’ll be relieved to know that there’s no need to rehearse the army-versus-people argument again in relation to their history after their initial settlement in Spain in 412. This would be trying the reader’s patience, and the sources are anyway less informative. Whatever view you form of Alaric’s Goths, therefore, will tend to spill over into your understanding of the Vandals, Alans and Sueves. Suffice to say that the one detailed, broadly contemporary source with any claim to authority that we have does picture the Vandals and Alans moving on to North Africa with wives and families in tow.88 And, for similar reasons to those explored in the case of the Goths, there really are no good grounds for doubting it.
In other more precise respects, however, the migration processes of both Goths and Rhine invaders correspond more closely with what comparative migration studies might lead us to expect. Logistics, naturally enough, played a key role in shaping the individual moves. Alaric’s Goths hit the road with a huge wagon train. This meant that they were confined to land routes and the Roman road network, which, particularly in the Balkans, greatly restricted the choices of route and helped dictate, for instance, the Goths’ circulatory itinerary between 395 and 397. An inability to secure sea transport also nipped in the bud Alaric’s plans to ship his force to North Africa after the sack of Rome in the autumn of 410, and eventually made it possible for the Romans to blockade his people in southern Gaul and cut them off from food supplies. The Vandals and Alans also moved with wagons while on land, but fared better than Alaric’s Goths in their eventual bid to cross to North Africa. Part of the reason for this lay in the fact that they had had longer to prepare. Alaric considered moving to North Africa only when his sieges of Rome failed to bear fruit in the form of a diplomatic settlement. But he dropped the plan within just a few months, in the late summer and autumn of 410. The Vandals and Alans, by contrast, had been mounting wide-ranging campaigns right across the Iberian peninsula for over a decade before taking ship to North Africa. This gave them plenty of time to organize the necessary shipping, and, again unlike Alaric in 410, in 429 they were not facing the imminent possibility of an imperial counterattack. This meant that they could afford to move themselves across the straits of Gibraltar piecemeal, and hence needed fewer ships, since there was no danger of those left behind being attacked while waiting to be transported.
Fields of information, too, played their part. Participating in the two campaigns against western usurpers made possible the Goths’ later intrusions into the western Empire. Hitherto, their understanding of European geography and of the proximity to their Balkan holdings of relatively rich and vulnerable lands in northern Italy would have been minimal. No doubt, too, their three years in Italy around the sack of Rome in 410 also made it possible for them to contemplate moving on to Gaul. The same must have been even more true for the Vandals and Alans. They clearly knew where Rome’s Rhine frontier was located in 406, but can have had only the haziest understanding of where Spain might be found; and perhaps no sense at all, at that point, that from the southern tip of Spain it was a short hop to Morocco. Their extended stay in Spain made it possible not only for them to arrange shipping, no doubt from local Roman traders, but also to gather the basic intelligence, likely from the same quarter, that made the move to North Africa possible. As preparation for that fateful crossing, indeed, they had experimented with a few maritime adventures, not least a sea-borne raid on the Balearic Islands in 425.89
On a broader canvas, likewise, the motivations underlying the Vandals’ and Alans’ repeat migrations make sense from a comparative perspective. The combined group made their way out of Spain and on to North Africa for many of the same of reasons that brought Alaric’s Goths out of the Balkans and into the west. They were certainly interested in the region’s wealth. The central provinces of Roman North Africa – Numidia, Byzacena and Proconsularis – were the bread basket of the city of Rome, and North African traders spread their wares far and wide across the Mediterranean, not least to Spain (as distribution patterns of North African pottery show), where the Vandals’ interest in this prize would have been aroused. At the same time, North Africa offered them the hope of much greater security. Whereas the Goths engaged in repeat migration as part of a strategy to extract diplomatic concessions, before they left Spain the Vandals and Alans had never had a treaty with the central western Roman authorities at all. This did not matter much in 409, since the west was busy dealing with Alaric and a succession of usurpers. By the mid-410s, however, stability had returned to the western Empire; the usurpers had been suppressed and the Goths brought on board via their new treaty. At this point, the Rhine invaders became public enemy number one, and a series of punishing campaigns were launched against them in Spain, mounted by imperial and Gothic forces in combination – this being the particular form of military assistance that the Roman state was looking for from the Goths. Between 416 and 418, the Siling Vandals and Alans were savaged to such an extent that they gave up their independent provinces, the survivors attaching themselves to the leadership of the Hasding Vandals. Central political stability collapsed again in the west in the 420s and the pressure eased once more, but the respite was always likely to be only temporary.
Alongside its wealth, then, North Africa offered hopes of much greater security for surviving Vandals and Alans. Once settled there, any future imperial attacks on them would have to come by sea, which was an exponentially more difficult type of military operation, as subsequent events would show. The Empire mounted three large expeditions against them in North Africa from the early 440s to the late 460s, all of which failed.90 Like the Goths, the Rhine invaders were operating with mixed political and economic motives, and, again like the Goths, used repeat migration to manoeuvre their way to safety and prosperity between the cracks in the Roman Empire’s political and military structures. Repeat large-scale migration was of the essence of continued existence for barbarian groups on Roman territory, and attempts to minimize its importance are thoroughly unconvincing.
For the Rhine invaders, as with Alaric’s Goths, revisionist views on evolving group identities contain much more mileage. The force of Vandals and Alans who captured Carthage in 439 had not made it there from the Rhine without a major renegotiation of their respective identities, as its individual members struggled for survival on Roman soil. In this case, the restructuring went still further. Whereas Alaric’s force was assembled from components that, at elite levels at least, seem to have been mostly Gothic, the Rhine invaders were of a very different composition. The two groups of Vandals, the Hasdings and Silings, may have shared some cultural similarities, but the Sueves were Germanic-speakers from a different region; and the Alans, who had provided the largest block of manpower in 406, were Iranian-speaking nomads with an entirely different economy and social structure from the Germanic agriculturalists with whom they were now allied. In 406, this force had still been held together by only the loosest of alliances, as is shown by the great Spanish share-out of 412, when the groups took separate provinces under their own leaders.
The much tighter unification that followed had the same basic cause as the unification of Alaric’s Goths. Once again, the hostile power of the Roman state made it clear to many of the invaders that their best interests would be served by operating together. And again, they were brought to this realization by force: the brute reality of the joint Gotho-Roman campaigns which destroyed the Siling Vandals (whose king was hauled off to Ravenna in the aftermath of defeat) and smashed the independence of the Alans, who, after the death in battle of their king, threw their remaining strength behind Hasding leadership. Without this application of Roman force, there is no sign that the unification would have occurred at all, and even in the face of Roman pressure not all the invaders signed up to the new confederation. The Sueves resisted subsequent attempts by the Hasding monarchy to bring them under its control by force, and some Alans preferred to stay put and accept Roman domination, being settled eventually in Gaul.91
The hostility of Roman state power, then, forced those who wished to preserve their independence to renegotiate their original group identities so as to create a larger and more cohesive force that stood some chance of survival on Roman soil. Alongside migration, therefore, a particular kind of group-identity evolution played a key role in the ability of immigrant barbarians to survive.
As for many of the protagonists themselves, reconstructing the story of the migrants of 376 and 405–8 involves an extensive journey. Fortunately for us, these migrants, reasonably well documented for parts of their history, provide a key test case, and some fundamental points have already been established that will not require such lengthy exploration again. Their history shows that migrants into the Roman Empire could – and did on occasion – come in large blocks of organized military manpower with their families in tow. If they entertained ambitions that went beyond mere integration into the Roman system as military cannon fodder or agricultural labour, this kind of migratory unit was essential. Only by recruiting well outside military retinues could enough military manpower be put together for expeditions likely to stand any chance of success. Equally important, the better evidence indicates that the immigrants could and did engage in repeat migrations. The vast majority had a well-established tradition of movement even before they crossed into Roman territory, and repeat migration, alongside a renegotiation, under Roman pressure, of group identity which steadily increased overall numbers, provided a two-pronged strategy for long-term survival on Roman soil.
But if organized block migration does need to be retrieved from the revisionist dustbin as a major theme of the thirty years after 376 and placed alongside the population flow of increasing momentum observed in the last chapter as an important migratory phenomenon of the first millennium, it did not take the form traditionally envisaged. The groups who crossed into the Empire derived from a barbarian world that was already politically, economically and culturally complex. They were not ‘peoples’, at least not in the sense of culturally homogeneous, more or less equal population groups whose departure emptied the landscape from which they came. Nonetheless, we are still looking at mass migrations in two senses of the term. Even if they still encompassed only an elite, the inclusion of freemen warriors and their social and familial dependants made for major migrant groups numbering several tens of thousands of individuals. The migrations were also mass in the qualitative sense used in migration studies, in that the flow administered a distinct political shock at its points of departure or arrival, or indeed both. The migrants who brought down Rome’s east and central European frontiers quickly stacked up between them one emperor dead on a battlefield along with his army, a forced reversal of standard imperial policies towards migrants, and the extraction of some key provinces from full imperial control. The shock in the lands they left behind is equally marked. It is to this subject, the age of the Völkerwanderung beyond the Roman frontier, that we must now turn our attention.