Contact with Rome on many levels, all operating simultaneously and often in overlapping fashion, drove the transformation of the Germanic world. The economic demands of the frontier, combined possibly with transfers of technique and technology, stimulated the intensification of agricultural production upon which all the other changes rested. Many individuals served as auxiliary troops in the Roman army and brought their pay or their retirement bonuses home with them, while, at least at times and places enjoying settled relations, Roman coins were adopted as an efficient mechanism for encouraging exchange. New trade networks grew up, carrying perhaps a substantial trade in iron ore and certainly significant ones in slaves and amber. And just as important as all the new wealth rolling around in the Germanic world was the fact that these latter two trades required much more complex forms of organization. It wasn’t simply a case of Roman buyer meets Germanic producer. The northern Amber Route and the violent networks of the slave trade both emphasize that the new wealth did not gently wash over Germanic society in an all-embracing fashion. Particular groups organized themselves, often militarily, to extract disproportionate advantage from the new opportunities presented by the legionaries’ advance to the Rhine and the Danube. Diplomatic and political contacts generated new wealth flows, too, and kings organized military power through their retinues so as to benefit disproportionately from the extra trading rights and annual subsidies that came their way.
At the same time, a range of other contacts with the Empire were also driving change forward. Annual subsidies came with a price tag attached, being one strand in a much broader repertoire of Roman techniques for managing the frontier. As well as receiving subsidies, sometimes frontier groups of Germani came under heavy military assault from the Empire. They also felt the weight of intrusive manipulation, which dictated where they lived, who they could be allied with and ruled by, and regularly demanded goods, services and even people. Their public life was required to operate within a framework of overt and demeaning subservience to Roman authority. The resentment of these client states showed itself in endemic small-scale raiding across the frontier. In my view, it also had the more profound effect of legitimizing the new type of military kingship that came to the fore among the Germani at this period, and which provided the bedrock of the greater political consolidation observable in the new confederations. Military kings had the muscle to demand more resources from their own societies, and to take greater benefits from the new wealth flows, but they also offered greater protection for their followers from the excesses of imperial intrusion.
In other words, the ‘positive’ and the ‘negative’ types of contact that grew up between the Germanic world and its imperial neighbour – although the use of such words always begs the question: positive or negative for whom? – had the same overall effect. As relations intensified, both pushed forward the process of political consolidation. What we’re observing, in effect, is an early example of globalization. A thoroughly undeveloped, essentially subsistence agricultural economy with little diversification of production, trade or social stratification suddenly found itself alongside the highly developed economy and powerful state structures of the Roman Empire. Both the new wealth, and the struggles to control its flows and to limit Roman aggression, then, produced the more stratified social structures upon which the new political entities could come into existence. Between them, Empire and indigenous response generated the new Germania of the late Roman period.
Not, of course, that pre-Roman Germanic society had existed in some state of primeval bliss. As we have seen, there already existed a great differential in development between largely Germanic-dominated Jastorf north-central Europe and largely Celtic-dominated La Tène western Europe long before the legions pushed out from the Mediterranean rim. And, as we have also seen, relatively undeveloped Jastorf societies had already begun to reorganize themselves to gain a greater share of the wealth of their more developed La Tène neighbours even before the legions arrived on their doorstep. The figure of Ariovistus nicely illustrates the transformative effects that tend to follow when neighbouring societies are marked by very different levels of wealth, and these were already beginning to work themselves out before Rome came to the party. But in the early centuries AD, La Tène Europe was replaced by the still richer, politically more monolithic and militarily much more powerful Roman Empire. As a result, the power both of the original outside stimuli, and the resulting internal responses to those stimuli (‘agency’), increased dramatically.
It is likely that prevailing disparities amongst the Germani themselves would have eventually generated larger, more consolidated political units even without the arrival of Rome. But the dynamic interaction with the Empire accelerated that process by many centuries. Even this much, however, tells less than the full story of how contact with the Empire transformed ancient Germania. We also need to explore the migratory phenomena that were unfolding simultaneously in some corners of Germanic society, alongside social and political transformation.