Empires and Barbarians Read online

  EMPIRES AND BARBARIANS

  EMPIRES AND BARBARIANS

  The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe

  PETER HEATHER

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  Copyright © 2009 by Peter Heather

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  First published in 2009 in Great Britain by Macmillan, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Heather, P. J. (Peter J.)

  Empires and barbarians : migration, development, and the birth

  of Europe / Peter Heather.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index

  ISBN 978-0-19-973560-0

  1. Migrations of nations. 2. Europe—History—To 476.

  3. Europe—History—476 – 1492. 4. Culture diffusion—

  Europe—History. 5. Civilization, Medieval. 6. Rome—History—

  Empire, 284—476. I. Title.

  D135.H436 2010

  940.1—dc22 2009044770

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  Printed in the United States of America

  on acid-free paper

  To my Father and Father-in-Law

  ALLAN FREDERICK HEATHER

  28.2.1923–14.1.2008

  RICHARD MILES SAWYER

  30.7.1917–3.9.2007

  PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  AKG Images: 4, 6, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 26

  Bodleian Library: 14

  Bridgeman Art Library: 5, 7, 8, 16, 22, 25

  British Museum: 13

  British Museum Press: 19, 20

  (from The Early Slavs by P. M . Barford, 2001, pp. 333, 335.

  After V. D. Baran and O. M. Prikhodniuk.)

  Corbis: 15

  Getty: 1, 2, 3, 21, 23, 24, 28, 29

  Mary Evans Picture Library: 9

  Oxford University Press: 27

  (from The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings, ed. P. Sawyer, 1997, p. 154)

  Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of photographs reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make restitution at the earliest opportunity.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  PROLOGUE

  1. MIGRANTS AND BARBARIANS

  2. GLOBALIZATION AND THE GERMANI

  3. ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME?

  4. MIGRATION AND FRONTIER COLLAPSE

  5. HUNS ON THE RUN

  6. FRANKS AND ANGLO-SAXONS: ELITE TRANSFER OR VÖLKERWANDERUNG?

  7. A NEW EUROPE

  8. THE CREATION OF SLAVIC EUROPE

  9. VIKING DIASPORAS

  10. THE FIRST EUROPEAN UNION

  11. THE END OF MIGRATION AND THE BIRTH OF EUROPE

  MAPS

  NOTES

  PRIMARY SOURCES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  PREFACE

  This book has taken me an extremely long time to write. I signed the original contract when my son William was in the womb. He will be taking GCSEs when the book is finally published (for those of you not familiar with the British education system, this means he’s sixteen . . .). In part, it has taken so long because I have being doing other things as well in the meantime, but this project has of and in itself consumed four separate periods of academic leave, which is more time than I have ever spent on anything else, and this does reflect the real difficulties of the task as it evolved. To start with, it covers a huge range in time and space, and consequently a number of entirely separate specialist literatures. There are several of these which I make absolutely no claim to have mastered in full, not least Slavic history and archaeology, where I am exceedingly grateful for the long-standing habit of its major scholars to publish versions of their key arguments in Western European languages. Here, and in many other intellectual contexts in what follows, I am often rushing in where no self-respecting angel would be seen dead. This, of course, is a second reason why the project has taken so long.

  But treating so many different contexts in such a thoroughly comparative fashion is central to the design of the project. My original design involved writing about the transformation of barbarian Europe in the first millennium from two separate perspectives. First, it seemed to me that similar patterns of development could be observed in Germanic societies around the fringes of the Roman Empire in the first half of the millennium, and in Slavic societies around the fringes of the Frankish and Byzantine Empires in the second. This could surely not be accidental. Second, I felt that some modern approaches to the phenomenon of barbarian migration in the same period had reacted too strongly to a previous overemphasis on its importance, and were now taking an overly reductive line. To help myself think again about first-millennium migration, it then seemed a good idea to read about its more modern and better-documented counterparts, and from that reading the outline of the book as it now stands eventually took shape. What gradually dawned on me from my reading in the comparative literature on migration is that, first, its patterns and forms are usually intimately linked to prevailing patterns of social and economic development, and, second, that they are also often decisively shaped by the political context(s) in which they are operating. In other words, although it took me a long time to realize it, the two separate strands of my original approach to barbarian Europe in the first millennium were not separate strands at all, but mutually dependent aspects of one broader process of transformation. The patterns of barbarian migration in the first millennium were bound to be dictated by the broader socioeconomic and political transformations of barbarian society in the same period, and shaped, too, by the ways in which those societies were interacting with the imperial powers of their day. This is the central argument of the book, and it could only emerge from the very broadly comparative approach that the project has eventually taken. It is of course for the reader to judge whether the overall gains from adopting such a strategy compensate for the deficiencies in detail that have undoubtedly been generated in its wake.

  Otherwise, I would like here only to acknowledge with great pleasure and gratitude all the help that I’ve had with this project over the many years I’ve been pursuing it. There are some straightforwardly institutional debts. The Classics and History departments of Yale University provided me with a year-long refuge in 1999–2000, during which I acquired much of my understanding, such as it is, of patterns of modern migration. The AHRC awarded me an extra term’s study leave for autumn 2004, giving me some eight months off in total, during which time I was able to draft most of the later chapters of the book. Part of this time was also spent in the extremely pleasant surroundings of Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC, where it is so wonderfully easy to work su
rrounded by so many books and such stimulating company. It gives me great pleasure to thank the Director and Trustees for the award of a fellowship for the Fall Term of 2004. A small grant under the AHRC’s Migrations and Diasporas project also allowed me to run a series of seminar sessions on Migration and the First Millennium in spring and summer 2005, which proved extremely fruitful for myself, and, I hope, for the other participants as well.

  The more particular academic debts I have built up over the past sixteen years are enormous, and I can’t thank everyone individually. In my initial years of thinking about the topic, I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in one of the sub-groups of the Transformation of the Roman World project, funded by the European Science Foundation. It remains a formative intellectual experience for me, and I cannot even begin to lay out how much I owe to the many exchanges of ideas and information that both occurred at the time and have flowed from it subsequently. I am particularly grateful, however, to Urban-czyk who subsequently invited me to Poland and allowed me to take my understanding of the early medieval Slavs beyond the highly superficial level at which it then stood. Otherwise, I would also like to thank everyone who made the AHRC-funded Migration seminars such a stimulating and enjoyable experience. And among the many scholars who have helped me more particularly along the way with gifts of their thoughts and publications, I would like to thank especially Paul Barford, Andrzej Buko, James Campbell, David Dumville, Guy Halsall, Wolfgang Haubrichs, Lotte Hedeager, Agnar Helgason, Christian Lübke, Walter Pohl, Mark Shchukin, Mark Thomas, Bryan Ward Perkins, Mike Whitby, Mark Whittow, Chris Wickham, Ian Wood, and Alex Woolf. This is a far from exhaustive list, but these names can at least stand as a symbol of the intellectual debt to others that I know to be enormous.

  At a still more immediate level, I would like to thank my editor Georgina Morley, my copy-editors Sue Philpott and Nick de Somogyi, together with my editorial manager Tania Adams. I know I’ve not made life easy for them, but they have all contributed hugely to the project, and I am immensely grateful for every incoherence, error, and infelicity identified and corrected. Those that remain, of course, are certainly my own responsibility. Thank you too to Neil McLynn and other particular friends and colleagues who have read so much of what follows for me in various drafts. I am deeply grateful for their patience, encouragement and correction. I also owe everyone at home, as usual, a huge debt of gratitude for putting up with me during these last few months. Bongo and Tookey have endured the lack of exercise with patience, and William and Nathaniel have generously forgiven my distraction and bad temper. Above all, though, I want to thank Gail, who, alongside an enormous amount of logistic and emotional support, has also laboured long and hard on the final stages of this book’s production. If my debts here are too great to measure, then so, at least, is my love and gratitude in return.

  PROLOGUE

  IN THE SUMMER OF AD 882, close to the Hungarian Plain where the River Danube flows between the Alps and the Carpathians, Zwenti-bald, Duke of the Moravians, and his men captured Werinhar, ‘the middle of the three sons of Engelschalk, and their relative Count Wezzilo, and cut off their right hands, their tongues, and – horrible to relate – their genitals, so that not a trace of [the genitals] could be seen’. Two aspects of this incident stand out against the broader backdrop of European history in the first millennium AD.

  First, the Moravians were Slavic-speakers. Moravia lay north of the Danube largely in the territory of what is now Slovakia, and from a modern perspective it seems unremarkable to find Slavic-speakers dominating this part of central Europe. They still do. But at the start of the first millennium and for all of the next five hundred years, Slovakia, and much else around it, was controlled by Germanic-speakers. Where had the Slavic-speaking Moravians come from?

  Second, the incident itself. Despite the fact that we hear about it only from a non-Moravian, Frankish commentator, and despite the appalling mutilations, our source is not unsympathetic to the Slavs. The Moravians took such drastic action, we are told, out of a mixture of pre-emptive strike and revenge. Revenge because of the way in which Werinhar’s father Engelschalk and his uncle William had treated them when the two had earlier been in joint charge of the Frankish side of the same frontier. But pre-emption too, because they were trying to prevent Engelschalk’s sons from seizing their father’s old job from a new appointee. If certainly ferocious, the Moravians were not motiveless barbarians, therefore, and even a Frankish commentator could recognize a defined and coherent agenda behind the brutality. They wanted their part of the frontier to be run in a way acceptable to them. Archaeological evidence helps put this demand in perspective. Moravia was the first Slavic state of any size and cohesion to appear in the late first millennium, and its physical remains are impressive. At , its capital, excavators uncovered a series of massive stone-built enclosures and the remains of a fabulous cathedral covering an area of 400 square metres: as big as anything being constructed anywhere else, even in areas of Europe supposedly more advanced at this date.1 Again, all this is hugely arresting when set against a bigger first-millennium picture. Not only was Moravia run by Germanic-speakers at the birth of Christ, but these populations customarily organized themselves only in small chiefdoms, and never built anything more substantial than slightly larger – as opposed to slightly smaller – wooden huts.

  A frontier incident of the late ninth century thus beautifully captures the problem that lies at the heart of this book: the fundamental transformation of barbarian Europe in the first millennium AD. ‘Barbarian’ is being used here and throughout this book in a very specific sense, one which incorporates only part of the meaning of the original Greek barbaros. For Greeks first and then imperial Romans, ‘barbarian’ carried huge connotations of inferiority, in everything from morals to table manners. It meant the opposite, the ‘other’, the mirror image of the civilized imperial Mediterranean which the Roman Empire united. It is in a limited sense, denuded of its moral connotations, that I am using the word. Barbarian Europe for this study is the non-Roman, non-imperial world of the east and north. For all the Mediterranean’s astonishing sophistication in everything from philosophy to engineering, it was also a world happy to feed people to wild animals in the name of entertainment, so I would anyway have no idea of how even to begin comparing imperial with non-imperial Europe in moral terms.

  When this story opens at the birth of Christ, the European landscape was marked by extraordinary contrasts. The circle of the Mediterranean, newly united under Roman imperial domination, hosted a politically sophisticated, economically advanced and culturally developed civilization. This world had philosophy, banking, professional armies, literature, stunning architecture and rubbish collection. Otherwise, apart from some bits west of the Rhine and south of the Danube which were already beginning to march to the tune of a more Mediterranean beat, the rest of Europe was home to subsistence-level farmers, organized in small-scale political units. Much of it was dominated by Germanic-speakers, who had some iron tools and weapons, but who worked generally in wood, had little literacy and never built in stone. The further east you went, the simpler it all became: fewer iron tools, less productive agricultures and a lower population density. This was, in fact, the ancient world order in western Eurasia: a dominant Mediterranean circle lording it over an undeveloped northern hinterland.

  Move forward a thousand years, and the world had turned. Not only had Slavic-speakers replaced Germanic-speakers as the dominant force over much of barbarian Europe, and some Germanic-speakers replaced Romans and Celts in some of the rest, but, even more fundamentally, Mediterranean dominance had been broken. Politically, this was caused by the emergence of larger and more solid state formations in the old northern hinterland, as exemplified by the Moravians, but the pattern was not limited to politics. By the year 1000, many of the Mediterranean’s cultural patterns – not least Christianity, literacy and building in stone – were also spreading north and east. Essentially, patterns of human organizati
on were moving towards much greater homogeneity right across the European land-mass. It was these new state and cultural structures that broke for ever the ancient world order of Mediterranean domination. Barbarian Europe was barbarian no longer. The ancient world order had given way to cultural and political patterns that were more directly ancestral to those of modern Europe.

  The overall significance of this massive shift of power shows up in just how many of the histories of modern European countries trace themselves back, if at a pinch, to a new political community which came into existence at some point in the mid- and later first millennium. Sometimes the pinch is pretty severe, but it would be absolutely impossible for most of Europe’s nations to think of stretching their sagas back further, to the birth of Christ and beyond. In a very profound sense, the political and cultural transformations of the first millennium really did witness the birth pains of modern Europe. For Europe is fundamentally not so much a geographic as a cultural, economic and political phenomenon. In geographical terms, it is just the western portion of the great Eurasian landmass. What gives Europe its real historical identity is the generation of societies that were all interacting with one another in political, economic and cultural terms on a large enough scale to have certain significant similarities in common, and the first emergence of real similarity was one direct consequence of the transformation of barbarian Europe in the first millennium.

  For the very reason that it marks such a crucial point of both national and regional emergence, this period has long attracted the attention both of academics and of the general public. Versions of the narrative sweeps in which the ancestral national communities were thought to have emerged have generally been taught at school, and since the institution of general public education there can be few modern Europeans who have not some familiarity with at least the outlines of their own national sagas. It is precisely at this point, however, that the plot starts to thicken.