IN 476 AD, ONE HUNDRED YEARS after the Goths first asked its ruler for asylum, the eastern half of the Roman Empire was still a going concern, running much of the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Near East, Egypt and Cyrenaica as a unitary state. Some migrants had found their way into its Balkan territories as the Hunnic Empire collapsed, but most were incorporated on the kinds of terms that the Roman Empire had always offered. They may well have retained some low-level autonomy, but after the departure of the Amal-led Goths for Italy in 488 they were made part of the Balkans’ military establishment only in such small concentrations that they posed no substantial political or military threat to the integrity of central imperial control.
The situation in the old western Empire was entirely different. In the fourth century, it continued to dominate its traditional territories from Hadrian’s Wall to the Atlas Mountains of North Africa, as it had for the past three hundred and fifty years, or, if you leave Britain out of the equation, four hundred and fifty. By 500 this long-standing unity had vanished. In its place stood a series of successor kingdoms, most of which, some small exceptions in the western British Isles apart, were built around military forces whose ancestors had lived beyond the imperial frontier before 376. Vandals and Alans built a kingdom centred on the richest provinces of former Roman North Africa, Sueves another in north-western Spain, Visigoths a third in south-western Gaul and the rest of Spain, while Franks in northern Gaul, Burgundians in south-eastern Gaul, Anglo-Saxons in Britain and the Amal-led Ostrogoths in Italy had all done much the same.
This book is about migration and development, not a fully fledged exploration of the collapse of the western Empire. It is no part of its subject matter to consider the internal evolution of the Roman state over its five hundred-year history, or how this contributed to eventual imperial collapse, which it certainly did. It is to the point, however, to take stock of the migratory phenomena examined in the last three chapters, and their overall contribution to one of the great revolutions in European history. Traditionally these kingdom-forming groups from beyond the frontier were thought of as ‘peoples’: culturally homogeneous entities, mixed in age and gender and with strong senses of group identity, who reproduced themselves over time largely by endogamy rather than by taking in new recruits from outside. In more romantic visions, the action was also given a strongly nationalist spin. The vast majority of these kingdom-forming groups were Germanic-speaking, and if you crossed your fingers firmly enough behind your back the fifth century could be presented as the culmination of four hundred years of Germanic resistance to Roman oppression, which had begun with Arminius’ destruction of Varus and his legions in the Teutoburger Wald in AD 7.
Recent revisionist views have sought to overturn such interpretations in a number of key areas. First, the kingdom-forming groups were not ‘peoples’, but improvised coalitions of manpower with neither cultural homogeneity nor any strong senses of identity. Second, so the argument goes, their manpower was literally that: manpower. There may have been some women, but not many, and the groups resembled armies much more than peoples. More radical revisionists have even argued that our Roman sources are infected with a migration topos that turned all outsiders on the move in Roman territory into ‘peoples’. Less radical ones would prefer that while some barbarians certainly moved, the more important story, given the lack of strong group identities holding these barbarian groups together, was the way in which manpower gathered around new leaderships once a few people had moved. Third, the period was marked by no straightforward hostility between Romans and outsiders; in one influential view, the fall of the western Empire has been characterized as a ‘surprisingly peaceful’ process, where the Romans showed a marked willingness to come to terms with outsiders, and the outsiders lacked any intention of bringing down the Roman state. Rather than the violent cataclysm traditionally portrayed, the Empire disappeared by mixture of accident and consensus as barbarian outsiders were invited inside it, and some of the greater Roman landowners eventually preferred to come to terms with them rather than continue to pay the amounts of taxation that the imperial state had required to support its armies.1
So how do the processes of migration we have been observing in the late fourth and fifth centuries shape up in the light of both traditional and revisionist conceptions of the fall of the Roman west? Equally important, what part did Roman imperial collapse play in transforming patterns of political and economic organization – development, in other words – right across the European landscape?
Some of the revisionist arguments have real substance. There was no barbarian conspiracy to bring down the Roman Empire. The vast majority of the immigrants we have been examining did not cross the frontier and march hundreds of kilometres with that as their express intention. For the most part, too, the different immigrants operated independently of one another, and were just as likely to fight one another as they were the Empire. The Visigoths were happy to be employed by Rome to fight Vandals, Alans and Sueves in Spain in the 410s, and in the 420s Vandals and Alans fought their erstwhile Suevic partners. Later on, Franks fought Visigoths; and in their conquest of Italy, the Amal-led Ostrogoths, the various refugees from the collapse of Attila’s Empire who had become incorporated into Odovacar’s army. Even as late as 465, most groups south of the Channel still had no idea that the western Empire was about to end. Their political agendas even at this late date were focused on securing a beneficial alliance with the rump west Roman state, while seeking to prevent other groups from doing the same.2 There is also much evidence of immigrant leaders and Roman elites forming new political bonds that cut across the old divides between Roman and barbarian. As early as the 410s, Alaric’s successor at the head of the Visigothic coalition, Athaulf, rallied Roman support to his cause in Gaul, and the Vandals had some Hispano-Romans in tow when they conquered North Africa. This type of alliance continued right down to the deposition of the last western emperor in 476, but perhaps found its archetypical expression in the attempt by Goths, Burgundians and Gallo-Roman aristocrats to construct their own imperial regime behind the figure of Eparchius Avitus in the mid-450s.3 Other elements of the revisionist case, however, are much less convincing.
Peace in our Time?
The idea, in the light of such observations, that the transition of the Roman west from unitary Empire to multiple successor states was a largely peaceful process, for one thing, will not stand comparison with the evidence. Its initial premise that the outside groups who eventually founded the successor states had originally been invited across the frontier rests on the flimsiest of bases. There is no shred of evidence that any Roman official invited in Radagaisus’ Goths, the Rhine invaders (Vandals, Alans and Sueves), the Burgundians, or Uldin the Hun. In other words, every intrusive outsider involved in the crisis of c.405–8 was an uninvited guest, and all were resisted with might and main. The same is true of all the smaller components of the earlier frontier crisis of c.375–80: the Taifali, Farnobius’ Goths, the Sarmatians, and the Huns and Alans who allied with the rebellious Goths in the autumn of 377. And similarly with one of the two major Gothic groups who crossed the Danube in late summer or early autumn 376, the Greuthungi of Alatheus and Saphrax. They were originally excluded by force, but took advantage of an opportunity presented by increasing tension between the Roman state and the Gothic Tervingi to get across the river.
The only outsiders in this entire saga that actually crossed into the Empire with imperial permission were the Gothic Tervingi, and even here it is very likely that Valens had no real choice. The Emperor was fully committed to war with Persia in the summer of 376 when the Goths arrived on the Danube and asked for asylum. You’d have to think him a complete idiot to suppose that he would have been happy to see one major frontier go up in flames when he was already at war – with most of his army – on the other. As one source reports, the decision to admit the Tervingi was taken only after rancorous debate, and it looks, in the circumstances, like damage limitation. The emperor did not have enough troops to hope to exclude both the Tervingi and the Greuthungi, and was looking to divide and rule by letting one in and excluding the other. The point is confirmed by the various contingency plans that were put in place to neutralize any military threat the Tervingi might pose, especially the strategic control of food supplies and orders to attack the Tervingi’s leadership in case of trouble. It is true that in the fourth century (and before) emperors had periodically used contingents from their Gothic and other client kingdoms in their wars, even civil ones, but this provided no motive for admitting large groups of armed men permanently on to Roman soil – a much more dangerous proposition than recruiting armed bands from across the frontier and sending them home again once a campaign had finished.4
If it is demonstrably not true that the barbarians who made their way across the imperial frontier in the late fourth and fifth centuries did so at Roman invitation, a more sophisticated version of the idea has been proposed for the crisis of 405–8. This argues that the Empire issued a kind of implicit invitation by loosening its hold on the relevant frontier regions. It’s a bit like the argument heard at the time of the Falklands War in the early 1980s, in which the British decision to scrap the minesweeper Endeavour on financial grounds was read by the Galtieri junta as a sign that Britain would not resist an Argentine takeover. The ship had previously spent its time flying the flag in the South Atlantic. Applying this kind of analogy to 405–8 makes for a much more possible and interesting argument, but not in the end a persuasive one. In particular, the precise triggers of barbarian invasion are argued to have been the withdrawal of Roman military forces from the frontier region of northern Gaul, and the end of, or a substantial reduction in, subsidies paid to its frontier clients. The problem with this, however, is that the invasions of 405–8 were not for the most part mounted by those living on the immediate frontier, the prime recipients of such subsidies, but by other entities from outside the frontier region – sometimes, like the Alans, from far beyond it. There were also enough Roman forces in Britain and northern Gaul to propel the usurper Constantine III to within a cat’s whisker of controlling the entire western Empire in the autumn/winter of 409/410, and, in any case, the first attack (that of Radagaisus) didn’t target the supposedly semi-evacuated area. In short, there is no reason to think that the unprecedented pulses of barbarian intrusion had anything to do with a Roman invitation, explicit or implicit. The outsiders moved on to Roman soil in acts of violent self-assertion.5
What followed on from the original invasions was nothing very different. The hundred years separating the arrival of the Goths on the Danube in 376 from the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476 witnessed the working-out of many different political processes, within which there was certainly no underlying aim of bringing down the Empire. But all of these processes involved periodic violent confrontation, often substantial, between the intruders and the Roman state. Looking at it from the immigrants’ perspective, the politics of this century had two main stages. The first consisted of putting up a good enough fight to prevent the Roman authorities from destroying your group’s independence at the initial point of contact. The Tervingi and Greuthungi managed this between 376 and 382. Military might and the capacity to run away to North Africa were central to the ability of the groups who crossed the Rhine in 406 to survive their initial clashes with Roman (and Visigothic) forces in Spain. The Burgundians, on the other hand, were resettled further into Roman territory in the 430s by consent, it seems, but only after they had been devastated by the Huns, and the Roman general Aetius seems to have had a role in sponsoring those attacks.
If these groups managed to survive their first encounters with Roman might, many others did not. A number of Gothic subgroups were destroyed piecemeal between 376 and 382, Radagaisus’ force was bodily dismantled in 405 and many of its members sold into slavery, though some of the survivors later rejoined Alaric. The Rhine invaders suffered such heavy casualties between 416 and 418, likewise, that, as we saw earlier, three previously separate groups – Hasding Vandals, Siling Vandals and Alans – combined into one. However you look at it, surviving an initial encounter with the Roman state was no cakewalk. On my count, between 376 and their eventual establishment in Gaul in 418, the Goths that combined to create the Visigoths had between them fought eleven major campaigns and a host of smaller ones.6
This overall level of violence was central to two specific features of the migratory activity characteristic of this first stage. On the one hand, it helps explain why immigrant groups tended to engage in repeat migration. Continued movement was part of a survival strategy as they either manoeuvred for a compromise with the Roman state (the moves of Alaric’s Goths, for instance, from the Balkans via Italy to Gaul), or looked for safer and more prosperous venues from which to continue to defy it (the Vandal coalition’s move to North Africa). Second, it is impossible to explain why, without continued large-scale conflict, so many different immigrant groups came to operate together in a smaller number of larger confederations. The new political units formed on Roman soil – the Visigoths, the Vandal–Alan coalition, the Ostrogoths – all had in common the fact that they represented larger units that were better able to confront the military power of the Roman state, both to ensure their members’ survival and to extract from it more advantageous terms.7
More violence was central to stage two of migrant political activity: maximizing their position once they had ensured initial survival. These two stages tended to elide into one another, since not even the first Gothic immigrants of 376 entered the Empire without a range of ambitions that went beyond mere survival, but the second is distinct enough to be worth identifying. It can be characterized as the emergence of a framework of Roman–barbarian diplomatic relations, which had moved beyond any possibility of the particular immigrant group’s destruction. In the case of Alaric’s Visigoths, this stage was reached somewhere between 395 and 418, and is highly visible in the nature of the group’s subsequent diplomatic contacts with the Roman state. From 418, diplomacy focused only on how much territory the Visigoths were going to dominate, and on what terms: not, any longer, on whether their existence was going to be tolerated or not. Even so, stage two was still marked by repeated military conflict: first in southern Gaul – where the regional capital at Arles provided an attractive target for the Goths in the 420s and 430s – and then more widely between the Loire and Gibraltar in the late 460s and 470s, when the Goths under Euric (467–84) founded a huge and independent kingdom. The Vandal–Alan coalition, by contrast, only began to reach the second stage from the mid-440s, when the west Roman state was forced to acknowledge its North African conquests, and, in fact, never enjoyed it as securely as the Visigoths. The death throes of the western Empire involved two serious attempts to reconquer the Vandal kingdom in 461 and 468. The Franks and Anglo-Saxons, on the other hand, never had to confront the Roman state head-on, and so in a sense moved direct to stage two. Nonetheless, they still pursued their ambitions by a violence-fuelled mixture of conquest and expropriation.8
Switching the perspective now to that of the Roman state, the connection between immigrant violence and the collapse of the western Empire could not be more direct. In simple terms, Rome taxed a comparatively developed agricultural economy in order to fund its armies and other structures. There were other sectors to the economy, but no one thinks that agriculture constituted anything less than 80 per cent of Gross Imperial Product, and many scholars would put that figure higher. In this context, the activities of the immigrants had direct effects on imperial tax revenues, and in so doing materially diminished the state’s capacity to survive. Any loss of territory to an immigrant group, such as the Spanish provinces to the Rhine invaders in the 410s, meant that the area concerned was now no longer contributing to central imperial coffers. Additionally, provinces caught up in any fighting, even if not conquered outright, were also much less able to pay their taxes. Nearly a decade after they had been occupied for only two years by Alaric’s Goths, the provinces around the city of Rome were still being assessed at only one-seventh of the normal tax rate. A similar rebate was also granted to two North African provinces which were not part of the Vandal–Alan kingdom of the 440s, but had been occupied by them for three years in the mid-430s. A six-sevenths reduction was perhaps generally granted, therefore, to provinces that had been heavily fought over.9
Once you start adding up the tally of lost and damaged provinces with the western Empire’s landed tax base in mind, the extent of the problem posed by immigrants quickly comes into focus. As early as 420, Britain had been definitively lost to central Roman control, along with the Garonne valley granted to the Visigoths. In addition, most of Spain had been taken or fought over by the Rhine invaders, and much of central and southern Italy damaged in the course of the Visigoths’ stay there between 408 and 410. The reduction in tax revenues caused by all these losses shows up beautifully in a late Roman resiger of military and civilian officals called the Notitia Dignitatum, which includes a listing of the western Empire’s armies dating to the early 420s. By this point, about half of the field army regiments, as constituted in 395, had been destroyed in the intervening quarter-century. But over half of the replacement units now incorporated into that army – 62 out of 97 – were simply old garrison troops upgraded on paper to field army status. Not only had field army losses not been replaced with troops of top quality, but neither is there any sign that the upgraded garrison forces had been replaced at all. Quality and quantity had both declined drastically as a direct effect of the erosion of the Empire’s tax base.10
Worse was to follow. By 445, the western Empire’s richest provinces – Numidia, Byzacena, and Proconsularis in North Africa – had succumbed to the Vandals, and part of Pannonia (modern Hungary) to the Huns, while Burgundians and some other Alans had been granted smaller areas in Gaul in the mid-430s. At this point, something close to 50 per cent of the western Empire’s tax base had been eroded, and the money was running out. Not surprisingly, this is the era in which western legislation both complained about the unwillingness of landowners to pay their taxes and attempted to claw back existing tax breaks. Any disinclination on the part of landowners to pay up is obviously an important phenomenon, especially since there is good reason to suppose that normal tax rates were having to increase at this time. Furthermore, new taxes were being invented. But to argue from this that the unwillingness of the rich to pay their taxes was a central cause of western imperial collapse, as has sometimes been done, is to put the cart before the horse. Tax privileges for the rich and well connected had always been part of imperial politics: enriching your friends was one reason why they backed you to win power. The phenomenon assumed an unwonted importance in the 440s only because so many provinces had already been lost to immigrants, or so damaged by warfare, that the western Empire’s revenues had shrunk to dangerously low levels.11
This aggregate loss in the state’s military and political effectiveness in turn contributed to a new strategic situation that allowed the immigrants further to expand the areas under their control, and dramatically so from the mid-460s. By that date the western army, bled dry by declining tax revenues, was a shadow of its former self and unable to confront with any chance of success the Visigoths, Vandals and others, particularly the Franks, who had just started or were finishing carving out power bases on former western territory. Looked at in terms of its effects upon tax revenues, and hence upon the Empire’s military establishment, there is no mistaking the direct line of cause and effect that runs from the immigration of armed outsiders to the collapse of the Roman west.
Against this backdrop, the increasing tendency of local Roman aristocrats to do deals with the various immigrants as the fifth century progressed can only be considered, like aristocratic unwillingness to pay high taxes, a very secondary phenomenon in the story of Roman collapse. Again, it is important to put these deals in context. The local aristocrats involved in them were all essentially landowners, whose estates, the fundamental source of their wealth, were for the most part situated in one locality. These physical assets could not be moved. So if that locality started to fall within the expanding sphere of influence of one of the immigrant groups, the relevant landowners had little choice. They had either to come to some accommodation with the immigrants’ leadership, if they could, or risk losing the land that was the source of all their wealth and status. Such accommodations were not automatic. In lowland Britain, as we have seen, the old Roman landowning class completely failed to survive the Anglo-Saxon takeover.12
Attempts to make the end of the western Empire into a largely peaceful process, carried forward by the withdrawal of the local elite from continued participation in central state structures, are unconvincing. On the contrary, all the various political processes of the fifth century were implemented by violence. Those elites were caught in the middle, with little choice but to make accommodations with the new powers in their lands, whether they wanted to or not, and if they could. A key distinction sometimes missed here is that between the central Roman state and local Roman landowner. Looking at just the latter, it is possible to document many stories of accommodation. These occurred, however, only after, and because, immigrant groups had fought their way across the frontier, and so stripped the western Empire of its tax base that it no longer had sufficient revenues to keep worthwhile armies in the field, leaving provincial landowners completely exposed.
Know Your Barbarians
When it comes to the immigrants of the late fourth and fifth centuries, there is again real substance to some of the revisionist arguments. Most of these groups were new political entities, not ‘peoples’. Ostrogoths and Visigoths, the Franks of Clovis, the Vandal and Alan alliance, and the Sueves of Spain: all were new entities forged on the march. A new political order was created among Anglo-Saxons, likewise, during their takeover of Britain. Of all the kingdom-forming groups who established successor states to the western Roman Empire, it is only the Burgundians for whom we lack explicit evidence of a major sociopolitical reconfiguration on the move, and even this may be due to a lack of information rather than any smooth continuity in their fifth-century history, which was pretty chequered.13
But if the immigrant groups weren’t ‘peoples’, neither does it fit the evidence to take an equally simple, if opposite, point of view and write them off as small-scale will-o’-the-wisp entities of little historical significance. Many were substantial. The few plausible figures we have, confirmed by their capacity to stand up to major Roman field armies, all suggest that the largest groups were able to put into the field forces numbering over ten thousand fighting men and sometimes over twenty thousand, especially after the amalgamation processes of the fifth century had run their course. The group identities operating within these large assemblages were not as straightforward as old nationalist orthodoxies imagined. Not even all the fighting men enjoyed the same status. At least in the larger alliances, there were two distinct status groups among warriors, and quite probably a third, of non-militarized slaves, besides. How many slaves there might have been is impossible to know, but we can’t just assume that they were few in number. Some of the kingdom-forming groups even crossed major cultural boundaries, the long-time alliance of Germanic Vandals and originally Iranian-speaking nomadic Alans being the classic case in point. What exactly happened when Vandal met Alan in the Middle Danube in the run-up to 31 December 406 is extraordinary to contemplate.14
But to conclude from these undoubted truths that the new group identities meant little is mistaken. Full participation was not allowed to all group members, as the existence of lower-status warriors and slaves within the new group identities makes clear. Neither of these lesser-status groups had as much invested in the identity of the group as its higher-status warriors. But neither was full participation the preserve of just a few individuals. Royal families came and went much too easily for us to characterize group identity as short-term loyalty to a particular dynasty. Even after deposing their last Amal ruler, the Ostrogoths retained their identity. I would argue that the prime carriers of, and beneficiaries from, the group identities being negotiated and renegotiated during this period were precisely the higher-status warrior groups. Some indications suggest that these may have comprised something like a fifth to a third of all armed males. And even if subject to periodic renegotiation – essentially political, perhaps, rather than cultural – nothing suggests that the kinds of group identities these men constructed were easy to destroy. Among the larger groups, the Ostrogoths did not, as has recently been argued, easily fade away into the Italian landscape after 493; while, amongst the smaller, Heruli and Rugi both showed considerable capacity to survive, in their different ways, even major defeats. Though not ‘peoples’ in the classic sense of the word, then, the immigrant groups were substantial not only in size but in structural resilience. Here again, the degree of violence characteristic of the era had an important role to play.15
When social scientists started thinking about group identity, they generally assumed that human population groups became politically and culturally distinct from one another as a result of physical separation. One major advance since the Second World War is the insight that active group identities are regularly generated out of precisely the opposite scenario: intense contact in the form of competition.
Developing a group identity is often about becoming part of an entity strong enough to protect a particular set of interests. And you don’t have to look very far in the events of the later fourth and the fifth century to find violence – the epitome of competitive contact – brokering the renegotiations of identity that produced the new kingdom-forming barbarian alliances. Some of the new identities (particularly those of the Visigoths and the Vandal–Alan coalition) were formed by migrants who needed to operate on Roman soil in larger groupings so as to preserve their independence against traditional imperial policies designed to dismantle threatening concentrations of outsiders. Others were born out of the collapse of Attila’s Empire which again generated fierce competition, this time among the many armed groups gathered by the Huns on the Middle Danubian plain. And yet a third was generated among groups looking to take over the landed assets of the collapsing western Empire. The Visigoths and Vandal–Alan coalition were well placed to play this more profitable game, having united originally so as to survive, but new groups formed to participate in the same land-grabbing exercise – particularly the Ostrogoths, Franks and Lombards. On a smaller scale, the Anglo-Saxons moving into lowland Britain also fall into this category.
All of these new group identities were born in violence, and even if recently renegotiated they were reasonably durable, at least among the higher-status warriors who were the prime beneficiaries of the ambitions they had been formed to pursue. That does not mean, of course, that every member of the group, even those higher-status warriors, was equally committed to the new identities, or that they were indestructible. Neither of these is true of any modern group identity, either. But those forged in the later fourth and the fifth century were real political phenomena, not mere ideologies or dynastic fantasy.16
The migrations undertaken by these groups were correspondingly substantial. As we have seen, some of the historical evidence for large, mixed population groups taking to the road with massive wagon trains is much too weighty to be dismissed. Ammianus on the Goths of 376, in particular, is too well informed and demonstrably capable of describing a variety of barbarian activities for us to dismiss his account as migration topos. As the revised notions of group identity would suggest, the large kingdom-forming concentrations of population did not move from point A to point B untouched by the process. They recruited extra manpower as they went, which they slotted in, as appropriate, to the various positions available within the group: in Germanic-dominated groups, it would seem, either as higher-status free warrior, freed lower-status warrior or non-militarized slave. But accepting this does not license us to dismiss their migrations as relatively small-scale phenomena. While certainly different from migration units you find today, large mixed population groups do make sense in their own context, given the general level of development of contemporary non-Roman society and the kinds of enterprise being undertaken.
Three principal types of migration emerge from the narrative. The first comprises those mixed groups of outsiders who moved across the imperial frontier because of the direct or indirect threat posed to their existing territories by the build-up of Hunnic power. The Tervingi and Greuthungi of 376 fall into this category, as do, in my view, the Goths of Radagaisus who invaded Italy in 405/6; and the Vandals, Alans and Sueves who moved over the Rhine shortly afterwards. The many different strands within these two pulses of migration eventually reorganized themselves into two large confederations: the Visigoths and the Vandal–Alan coalition, as noted earlier. These could each field something in the region of ten to twenty thousand warriors, and both had women and children along besides, not to mention slaves. The motivation for all these groups was essentially political and negative – fear of the Huns – but they were also busy calculating, increasingly from direct experience, what it would take for them to carve out a profitable niche within Roman territory. The constituent groups behind the Visigothic alliance, moving from Ukraine to southern France via the Balkans and Italy, the others from central Europe (or from much further east in the case of the Alans) to North Africa via Spain, also provide the most spectacular examples of long-distance movement. Their treks took the form of discrete jumps, with considerable pauses in between, rather than one continuous movement, because migration was part of a developing survival strategy. The chronological gaps also reflect the distances involved in these treks, since information had to be acquired at each jumping-off point about the new options that were opening up. The Vandals – from modern Hungary or thereabouts – can have had little sense of how to get to North Africa from Spain when they first set out, or even perhaps that you could.17
The second category consists of those groups, many again involving women and children, who moved out of the Middle Danubian heartlands of the Hunnic Empire in the chaos following Attila’s death. Again, some of these were substantial. The Amal-led Goths from Pannonia comprised over ten thousand fighting men, besides women and children. The Sueves, Heruli and Rugi who made their way into the army of Italy or joined the Amal bandwagon certainly mustered at least a few thousand warriors each, and of these the Heruli and Rugi, at least, were again moving with women and children.18 These groups’ motivation was, again, partly political and negative: fear of the other parties involved in the competition unleashed by Hunnic collapse. At the same time, there was a powerful element of opportunism. The Amal-led Goths took calculated decisions first to throw themselves into east Roman territory, and second, having united with the Thracian Goths, to move on to Italy. In both cases, their decisions were based not only on the limitations and difficulties of their current situation but also at least as much on the greater degree of prosperity potentially available at the projected destinations. This category is distinguished from the first not only by a greater element of opportunism, but also by the distances involved. The long march of Theoderic’s Goths from Hungary to Thessalonica, to Constantinople, to Albania and then on to Italy is impressive, but it was not quite of the same order as the epic trek of the Vandals, or the trials and tribulations of the Visigoths.
Frankish and Anglo-Saxon migration into north-eastern Gaul and lowland Britain, respectively, took a third and different form, although there were some significant variations between the two. Distances were shorter; and the characteristic migration unit within the flows, smaller. The archaeological evidence suggests that the most intensive Frankish settlement happened in areas of Roman Gaul within a radius of only a hundred kilometres or so from the limits of their previous holdings. Anglo-Saxon groups obviously had to cross the Channel and/or the North Sea, but this too was a relatively short hop. The range of motivations in play was also different. The North Sea may at this time have been eroding some continental coastlands, making some long-cultivated areas unusable.
For the most part, however, the motivations behind Frankish and Anglo-Saxon settlement were positive and predatory. Both followed the elimination of effective Roman state power at their respective destinations; for both, previously, the Empire’s armies, fleets and fortifications had made it impossible for them to do anything more than raid. Both flows were filling power vacuums in fairly adjacent landscapes, attracted by the relative prosperity of the target area’s more developed economy and the fact that landed wealth was easier to access there. Franks and Anglo-Saxons had no need to operate in migration units on anything like the scale of those in the other categories, therefore, although it does seem likely, since conquest and settlement were simultaneous in Britain, that the Anglo-Saxon migration groups were larger than their Frankish counterparts. Both migration flows certainly also included women and children as well as warriors. These positively motivated expansions, carried mostly by smaller units over shorter distances, stand in marked contrast to the more spectacular, longer-distance moves made by larger concentrations of population whose motivations were much more mixed.19
Brave New Worlds
All of these migrants represented minorities in the new kingdoms they created. In those generated by longer-distance migration, the minorities were tiny. The Ostrogoths weighed in at some tens of thousands, but no more than a probably generous maximum of one hundred thousand, though this might be an underestimate if slave numbers were substantial.20 The population of late Roman Italy is normally reckoned at a few million. If we estimate it for the sake of argument at five million, then the immigrant Ostrogoths would have amounted to no more than 2 per cent of the total. You could fiddle endlessly with these figures, but the basic ratio won’t change very much. Ostrogothic immigration generated only a fractional increase in the total population of post-Roman Italy. The same was true of the Vandal–Alan coalition and the Burgundians, both of whom (the latter certainly) seem to have been second-rank powers compared to the Ostrogothic kingdom. From the perspective of the Italian, North African and Gallic populations, these migrations would have been experienced not even as elite replacements but as partial elite replacements. Within the kingdoms the newcomers created, many of the indigenous landowners of Roman descent remained in place, along with much of their Roman culture and even some Roman governmental institutions. The Visigothic kingdom of Gaul and Spain also falls into this category, although its origins were different. On being settled initially in just the Garonne valley in 418, the Goths must have represented a greater addition to the local population, even if still a minority. Within the larger kingdom created by Euric’s campaigns, which stretched from the Loire to Gibraltar, Gothic immigrants probably represented an even smaller minority than the Amal-led Goths in Italy.
The Franks in northern, especially north-eastern, Gaul, and especially the Anglo-Saxons in what became England, represented a bigger influx of population in percentage terms, though they were still very much a minority. Even so, it is hard to get their numbers much above 10 per cent of the total population in the areas affected, and, in some places it may have been considerably less. Here, the new landowning elites that had emerged by the second half of the sixth century, and especially in Gaul, may again have included some genetic descendants of the old indigenous Gallo-Roman and Romano-British populations. But this must not obscure the point that north-eastern Gaul and lowland Britain represent an entirely different case from Italy, North Africa, Spain and the rest of Gaul. In the old Roman north-west, the elite class and its cultural norms were completely remade between 400 and 600 AD, and the landed assets upon which elite status was based completely reallocated, as the old villa estates were broken up into different-sized parcels. If the migrations involving Goths, Vandals and Burgundians were experienced at the receiving end as no more than comparatively unrevolutionary partial elite replacements, those of the Franks in north-eastern Gaul and the Anglo-Saxons in lowland Britain represented mass migration with profound social, political and cultural consequences for the areas concerned. If we take these different types of case together with the complete elite replacement represented by the Norman Conquest, there are actually three types of situation that need to be differentiated: partial elite replacement, elite replacement that doesn’t disturb major socioeconomic structures, and the mass migration of Franks and Anglo-Saxons.
But even if discussion were to be confined just to the cases of partial elite replacement, there remain levels on which the population movements of the late fourth to the early sixth century would still have to be considered, both individually and in aggregate, as mass migrations. To start with, there is the fact that, between them, the migrants destroyed the long-standing Roman imperial edifice, or at least the western half of it. The Empire was always hampered by its economic, political and administrative limitations, but there is not the slightest evidence that it would have ceased to exist in the fifth century without the new centrifugal forces generated by the arrival within its borders of large, armed immigrant groups. Collectively the immigrants must be ‘credited’, if that is the correct word, with administering a huge political shock to the Roman world, or at least to the central state, even if some Roman landowners and even some more local and regional Roman institutions were left intact after the state’s collapse. This state was a powerful organism that had shaped life within its borders for five hundred years on every level from culture and religion to law and landownership. The point is easily overlooked, because the Roman Empire was large and ramshackle, operating with frankly pathetic communications and bureaucratic technologies, which meant that it could not run its localities with anything approaching close day-to-day control. Nevertheless, its structures had long set the macro conditions within which particular social, economic and cultural patterns evolved. A comprehensive listing would require another book, but the existence of the Pax Romana and state-generated transport systems dictated particular patterns of economic interaction, its legal structures defined property ownership and hence social status, its career structures – demanding a sophisticated elite literacy – underpinned an entire education system, and so on. Even religious institutions were largely dictated by the state. As Christianity matured into a mass religion in the fourth and fifth centuries, its authority structures became closely intertwined with those of the Empire. Given all this, the consequences of imperial extinction could not but be profound, setting local society and culture in western Europe off in quite new directions, some of which we will explore briefly in the second half of this chapter.21 In the qualitative sense used in migration studies, the overall impact of Hunnic-era migration qualifies in all respects as mass migration.
The impact of the Franks in northern Gaul and of the Anglo-Saxons in lowland Britain also counts as mass migration, in the same qualitative terms but at a more local level. Reallocating the landed resources of these regions from scratch among intrusive elites caused many more cultural, economic and political transformations, which again qualify for the ‘mass’ label. Within the other successor kingdoms which saw only partial elite replacement, the local shock experienced was much less, but there was still some transfer of economic assets. Scholars of earlier generations were pretty much unanimous that this took the form – as in Britain and northern Gaul – of landed property passing from its previous Roman owners to at least some of the immigrants. This is another dimension of the barbarian issue that has come in for substantial revision in the last scholarly generation, again as part of the general tendency to downplay the significance of the fall of the Roman west. In this case, the revisionist view argues that, initially at least, incoming barbarians were rewarded not with landed estates taken from their former Roman owners, but with a share of the tax revenues raised from these estates – a type of exchange that would have generated much less friction than actual land seizures.22There is no space here for a full discussion of the technical evidence relating to this issue, but in my view the revisionist case remains substantially unproven. There were important local variations, and adjusting the tax regime was probably one measure that sometimes came into play. Nonetheless, I am confident that a transfer of landed assets – as the most recent restatement of the revisionist position partly concedes – was at the heart of paying off the newly dominant immigrant element in all the major successor kingdoms.
That is not to say that every member of each immigrant group received the same degree of remuneration, or even, necessarily anything at all. Doomsday Book, to draw again on the better-documented Norman analogy, shows that William’s more important supporters received much bigger payouts than their lesser peers, and that there were many rank-and-file Norman soldiers who received no land at all. As this parallel emphasizes, in general terms immigrants will surely have been rewarded in proportion to their pre-existing importance within their groups. But even if the big rewards were given at first only to the most aristocratic among them, they will in turn have had their own chief supporters to reward (just as the tenants-in-chief did after 1066). Among the immigrant groups of the late fourth and the fifth century direct landed rewards from the king may well not have gone further down the social scale than leading members of the higher-grade (free?) warrior class, though its lesser members and even some or all of the lower-status warriors are likely, on the Norman Conquest model, to have received something from the higher-status warriors to whom they were attached.23 The detailed evidence also suggests that land transfers within the kingdoms created by partial elite transfer were restricted to specific localities.
While the Vandal–Alan takeover of the richest provinces of Roman North Africa (Proconsularis, Byzacena and Numidia) represented a substantial shock for the political systems of the entire region, any deeper socioeconomic shock was geographically much more limited. After the conquest, Geiseric expelled some of the larger Roman landowners of the region and appropriated their estates to reward his important followers. This disruption at the local level, however, was confined to the province of Proconsularis. In Byzacena and Numidia, indigenous landowners seem to have been left in place; and any shock there was, limited to the operation of the new kingdom’s central political systems. Much of the land in Proconsularis was owned by absentee Italo-Roman senatorial families, so this was probably a good place to find land at minimum cost in terms of political hostility provoked. Strategically, too, Proconsularis faced towards Sicily and Italy, from where any significant Roman counterattack was likely to come.24
The Amal-led Ostrogothic takeover of Italy was as much of a political shock as the Vandal–Alan takeover of North Africa, but perhaps less of a social one, since on the whole Theoderic pursued a more conciliatory policy towards the Roman landowners of his new kingdom, although this should not just be taken for granted. At one point during the conquest, he threatened Romans who did not support him with the loss of their lands. After the conquest, though, he devoted much of his reign to establishing good relations with them, and many preserved their elite status under his rule. Like Geiseric, Theoderic – it seems – endowed his important followers with substantial landed estates, together with rights to annual donatives, but this process of enrichment seems to have been accomplished without the kind of expropriations seen in Proconsularis.
Gothic settlement was clustered in three particular areas of the Italian peninsula (Picenum and Samnium on the Adriatic coast and between Ravenna and Rome, in Liguria on the north-west of the north Italian plain, and in the Veneto in the east), and what appears mainly to have been transferred was the ownership of landed estates, quite likely from public as much as from private sources. The tenant farmers who had customarily done the work may well have been left in place. As far as we can tell, these transfers caused no massive socioeconomic dislocation. The size of Theoderic’s Italian kingdom perhaps made it easier to find the requisite portfolio of estates, in fact, than would have been the case in a smaller one. Nonetheless, the immigrant Gothic military elites did form a new, politically dominant force. Some Roman elites participated in court politics, but, to judge by our narrative sources, the migrant Gothic contingent remained dominant in such crucial political areas as royal succession and war-making. The Ostrogothic seizure of Italy seems to have had only a limited socioeconomic impact, then, even if its political effects were much larger.25
In the Visigothic and Burgundian kingdoms the position was similar, but with one important variation. Laws issued in the Burgundian kingdom indicate that affected Roman landowners had to hand over two-thirds of their estates, whereas the corresponding figure in the Visigothic kingdom was one-third. Again there is much about this evidence that requires careful discussion – too much to engage in here – but one especially relevant factor is that, at its fullest extent from the mid-470s, the Visigothic kingdom ran from the banks of the Loire to the Straits of Gibraltar. It was many times larger, in other words, than the Burgundian kingdom centred on the Rhône valley. If you stop to think about it, it is hardly surprising that more expropriation was required to satisfy the incoming outsiders in a smaller kingdom, where there was a more restricted range of landed assets available. That variation aside, however, the evidence suggests that broadly comparable patterns prevailed everywhere outside of Britain and north-eastern Gaul. In all the successor kingdoms created by partial elite replacement, the immigrants generated a dramatic enough political shock as the given territory passed under new management, but the indigenous population would have experienced these immigrations as ‘mass’ only in distinct and limited areas, where substantial amounts of land passed into migrant hands: Proconsularis, for instance, and the three clusters of settlement in the Ostrogothic kingdom. For the Visigothic and Burgundian kingdoms, the best we can do is guess as to the areas of densest settlement on the basis of place names and/or archaeological evidence.26
From the perspective of the immigrants themselves, moreover, sanitary terms like elite transfer, partial or otherwise, entirely fail to capture the nature of the action. Even where they were ultimately successful in establishing themselves in conditions of prosperity, there is no mistaking the scale of dislocation and trauma that preceded settlement. Between 406 and 439 the Vandal–Alan coalition moved in two stages, first from the Great Hungarian Plain to southern Spain (2,500 kilometres), then a further 1,800 kilometres south and west, before their eventual capture of Carthage, the latter involving crossing the Straits of Gibraltar. The Alans amongst them, of course, had made an earlier, westerly, trek of 2,000 kilometres sometime between c.370 and 406, from east of the River Don to the Great Hungarian Plain. These distances are huge and would have been punishing for the groups’ weaker members – the old, the young and the sick – especially since they tended to be covered in great leaps: the Don to Hungary, Hungary to Spain, and – if perhaps less of an ordeal – Spain to North Africa. Each of these leaps was a traumatic event that would have caused substantial loss just in itself. In aggregate, such journeys may even have distorted age profiles within the groups, killing off old and young in disproportionate numbers. Among modern political migrants forced to move long distances, exhaustion combines with the propensity for disease generated by overcrowding to make the experience a deadly one. Close to 10 per cent, or a staggering hundred thouand, of the refugees from Rwanda in 1994 succumbed en route to cholera and dysentery. Most of our first-millennium migrants were making more calculated moves and were probably better prepared, but modern comparisons warn us not to underestimate the degree of loss inherent in movement alone.
These losses were greatly increased by conflict with the Roman state. The initial Rhine crossing, for instance, may have caused more losses to the indigenous populations of Gaul and Spain than to the migrants. But, as we have seen, in the late 410s Roman counterattack destroyed one of the two Vandal groups as an autonomous unit (the Silings), and so savaged the Alans – up to that point the most powerful of the invaders – that they submitted to Hasding leadership. The subsequent Vandal–Alan conquest of North Africa, to judge by the admittedly sparse sources available, probably did not involve losses on the same scale, but in its early stages, at least, was hard fought.27 Sheer distance and heavy military conflict combined to make the process traumatic in the extreme for the migrants, even if they were ultimately able to insert themselves as a new elite in the richest provinces of Roman North Africa.
Similarly with the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths and the Burgundians. Take particularly the Ostrogoths, who ended up, of course, as conquerors of Italy. This staggering achievement laid open to them the region’s wealth, which they proceeded to enjoy. It is not so obvious, at first sight, that their migration involved anything much in the way of trauma, but between 473 and 489 they (or at least the original Amal-led Pannonian group) first had to trek almost a thousand kilometres south, from Hungary to Thessaly. By 476, they had notched up a further 500 kilometres, moving north-east to the banks of the Danube. In 478 and 479 they then moved another 1,200 kilometres, first south to Constantinople, then west again (past Thessalonica) to Dyrrhachium on the Adriatic coast. As part of an agreement with the east Roman state in 482/3, they appear to have been resettled six hundred kilometres to the north-east, on the banks of the Danube again. The mid-480s then saw a contingent of Gothic soldiers campaign for the Emperor Zeno against the usurper Illus in Asia Minor (another 1,100 kilometres each way), before the whole group first besieged Constantinople (400 kilometres from the Danube) and then made its 1,500-kilometre trek to Italy. If Jordanes is to be believed, all of this was prefaced in the mid-450s with the small matter of a 700-kilometre journey from east to west of the Carpathians.
There was also plenty of conflict. The group suffered no defeats on the scale that savaged the Vandal–Alan coalition in Spain, but the Amal-led Goths variously fought the east Romans, the Thracian Goths (initially) and the usurper Illus – in 473/4, 476/8, 478–82 (including, in 479, the loss of a baggage train), 484, 486/7 and 489–91. All in all, the trauma was still severe.
The experiences of the Visigoths were similar, in terms of distances covered, to those of the Ostrogoths (from the eastern Carpathians to south-western Gaul), and they also suffered substantial losses. The moves undertaken by the Burgundians were much more modest: from southern Germany to the Rhine, and then south into the Lake Geneva region and beyond. But this relative absence of geographical drama was more than compensated for by much larger losses, particularly at the hands of the Huns in the 430s. All the migrants suffered huge dislocation to the pattern of their lives, and whatever the view from the Roman side of the fence, their experiences can only be characterized as mass migration.28
Migration and Development
The interconnections between migration and prevailing patterns of development in the period of Roman collapse were multifaceted and profound. Straightforwardly, the greater wealth of Roman provincial economies exercised an enormous pull on both of our main sets of shorter-distance migrants, the Franks and the Anglo-Saxons. To judge by the fortifications already required to keep them out in the fourth century, this wealth disparity had been calling from across the Rhine and the North Sea for some time. And once the power of the central Roman state collapsed, what was in many ways its natural consequence simply worked itself out. Militarized outsiders, previously excluded from Roman territory by force of arms, were able to take possession of the more developed economic zones within their vicinity, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Disparities of development also partly explain the choices of the longer-distance migrants. Their motives were often highly complex, involving a large negative component, since they were regularly moving into territories of which they had little direct knowledge and where the Roman state was still alive and kicking, so that they were facing a much greater military threat. This being so, it took an extraordinary kind of stimulus – that provided by the dramatic events surrounding the rise and fall of the Hunnic Empire – to get them moving. In both of the main initial pulses of Hun-generated migration, 375–80 and 405–8, the motivation was political and negative: the desire to avoid coming under Hunnic domination. Later on, as the Hunnic Empire unwound, motivations remained equally political, if now more positive. The Amal-led Goths in the 470s in particular, but also Lombard groups slightly later on, moved on to or towards Roman territory to secure a larger share of the greater wealth available there. But even for the initial migrants of 375–80 and 405–8, the pull of Roman wealth had some role to play. Hunnic aggression may have prompted their initial decision to leave their established homelands, but at that moment it was open to them to seek new homes either inside the Roman Empire or somewhere outside of it. The fact that most chose the former again reflects the pulling power of greater Roman wealth. One predominant feature of the period can reasonably be understood as barbarian outsiders from beyond the limits of imperial, developed Europe using immigration as a device by which to access a share – for good and ill – of its greater economic wealth.29
Equally important, prevailing levels of development explain what at first appears to be the very peculiar nature of the migration units undertaking at least the longer-distance moves. Because contemporary non-Roman European societies could field specialist warrior retinues only in their hundreds, any migration that involved taking on the Roman state would necessarily include women and children as well. As we have noted for earlier eras, only by recruiting from a broader range of militarized manpower, some of which naturally came with families, could military forces of sufficient size be generated for these ambitious enterprises. The families’ participation was itself facilitated by another feature of economic development in barbarian Europe. Prevailing agricultural regimes, at least among Germanic groups east of the River Oder – those falling within the areas of Przeworsk and Cernjachov cultures – meant that central and south-eastern European populations retained an inherent tendency to shift settlement site. Shifting settlement every generation or so in search of more fertile fields was obviously a completely different kind of movement from the major migratory episodes of the fourth and fifth centuries. Comparative migration studies suggest, however, that this would still have made them more open to being persuaded to participate in the large, carefully organized expeditions that were required to move into Roman territory with any hope of success.
There is also, I think, one further level on which an interaction between migration and development profoundly shaped the action. What in the end made it possible for some of the first, longer-distance migrants of 375–80 and 405–8 to succeed on Roman soil was their capacity to renegotiate their group identities quickly enough to create new groupings that were too large for the Roman state easily to destroy. The Tervingi and Greuthungi who appeared on the Danube in the summer of 376 were each substantial in their own right, and they clearly got very lucky at the battle of Hadrianople two years later. No other confrontation of the era produced anything like such a one-sided result, and it bought the Goths breathing space in the form of the semi-autonomy granted them in the treaty of 382. At that point, the Roman state had by no means renounced hopes of renegotiating these terms at the point of the sword sometime in the future, so as to bring them much more into line with its traditional treatment of immigrants. One key element in frustrating these hopes was the unification brokered in Alaric’s reign between both of the original Gothic groups of 376 and the survivors of Radagaisus’ later attack on Italy – the process that created the Visigoths. In a subsequent treaty negotiated with this enlarged force in 418, the Roman state was forced to acknowledge that it could not seriously hope to destroy it in its present configuration – as a unified and autonomous Gothic grouping on the Roman side of the frontier line. Similar processes of unification, likewise, made it possible for the Vandal–Alan coalition and the Amal-led Ostrogoths to survive and flourish. In all of these cases, had the unifications not happened, the Roman state could have mopped up piecemeal a more motley collection of smaller groups, as was the fate of many smaller groupings even in this era. The capacity of immigrants to reconstitute themselves into entities capable of fielding 10–20,000 warriors, or just a touch more, was critical to survival.30
This means that the longer-term transformation of Germanic society examined in Chapter 2 is entirely relevant to the migration processes of the fourth and fifth centuries. If the Huns had arrived in the first century instead of the fourth, and pushed the kinds of Germanic group that then existed across the Roman frontier, the overall result would have been very different. Because of the smaller size of the primary political units that existed in the first-century Germanic world, too many of them would have had to become involved in too complicated a process of political realignment to make the creation of entities capable of mustering twenty thousand or more warriors at all likely. The kingdom-forming groups of the fifth century were created out of no more than half a dozen, sometimes only three or four, constituent units. Precisely because these base units were by this date so much larger, the twenty thousand-plus warriors that long-term survival in the face of Roman power broadly required could be rounded up much more easily. To get that many Germanic warriors facing in the same direction in the first century, you would have had to unite maybe a dozen of the smaller and highly competitive units that then existed, and the political problems would have been correspondingly huge.
Even so, the processes of political unification which unfolded among the immigrants in the late fourth and fifth centuries were anything but plain sailing. Each of the new kingdom-forming supergroups was generated out of something like four or five constituent units, and each had its own pre-existing leadership. This meant that there were always at least four or five potential leaders for these new confederations, all but one of whom had to be eliminated in some way. The threat of Roman violence played a huge role in generating broad acceptance of the need to create the new confederations, and some of the potential contenders were willing, it seems, to resign their claims on that basis. Among the Ostrogoths, Gesimund (or Gensemund) the son of Hunimund was remembered as an independent Gothic warband leader who decided to support the Amal dynasty from whom Theoderic came, rather than press his own claims. But other contenders were much less amenable and had to be suppressed. Other members of the Hunimund line pressed their own claims with vigour, in addition to which the Amal line had to defeat that of another Gothic king, Vinitharius, before the group entered east Roman air space in 472/3, and the rival Triarius line at the head of the Thracian Goths after that. Clovis’ unification of the Franks, likewise, involved eliminating at least seven rival kings. It is not possible to explore parallel leadership struggles in the same kind of detail for some of the other new confederations, but they certainly occurred.31
Furthermore these struggles for power among the newly united supergroups were themselves interacting with patterns of development, because they too were dependent upon the greater resources that were available in the Roman context. The smaller size of barbarian political units beyond the Roman frontier was not accidental, but structural, reflecting the amount of redistributable wealth available for kings to build up loyalty among their followers; and even much of this, as we have seen, usually came from Roman sources. But the greater wealth available on Roman soil, whether extracted directly or indirectly, changed the parameters of political possibility among the barbarians, enabling their leaders to conciliate and control much larger groups of followers. Even the only seeming counter-example, when you examine it, isn’t one. One large supra-regional power was constructed in non-Roman Europe in late antiquity: the fifth-century Empire of Attila the Hun. But even this could not support itself from the resources of the non-Roman economy. Rather, it was dependent on broad flows of Roman wealth in the form of plunder and tribute, and collapsed when these were cut off. Non-Roman levels of economic development by themselves were insufficient to sustain political structures of the scale necessary for carving out a successor state on Roman soil.32
Prevailing disparities in development thus dictated both the westerly and southerly directions taken by most of the migrants, once the Huns or the decline of Roman power had set them on the move, and the nature of the migratory units themselves. And all this, of course, is exactly what modern migration studies would lead us to expect. As we have seen, patterns of migration are intimately linked to patterns of unequal development. In the case of the late fourth and the fifth century, however, the migratory processes not only reflected existing inequalities of development across different parts of the European landscape, but also caused their substantial rearrangement. This was true both for the different migrant groups as they coalesced into the new state-forming supergroups, and also right across the European landmass.