Empires and Barbarians Read online

  It is on this level, the stability of the overall confederation, that a comparison between the first century and the fourth is so telling. The outcome of the battle of Strasbourg was a thumping defeat for the Alamanni:

  There fell in this battle on the Roman side two hundred and forty-three soldiers and four senior officers . . . But of the Alamanni there were counted six thousand corpses lying on the field, and heaps of dead, impossible to reckon, were carried off by the waters of the river [Rhine].

  Chnodomarius himself was captured as he tried to flee back across the river. The Caesar Julian, ruling in the west in the name of his cousin Augustus Constantius II, then exploited victory to impose terms of his own choosing on the various Alamannic kings who survived the engagement; and, in fact, Chnodomarius had only been able to assemble his forces with such freedom because a Roman civil war had generated a power vacuum in the Rhine frontier region in the first place. Nonetheless, and this is where the fourth century is completely different from the first, the defeat of Chnodomarius did not mean the total destruction of the alliance at whose head he had stood, as the defeats of his first-century counterparts such as Arminius and Maroboduus had done three centuries before. Not only were many of the lesser Alamannic kings who had participated in the battle left in place by Julian’s diplomacy, but, within a decade of the battle, a new pre-eminent leader, Vadomarius, was worrying the Romans. He was skilfully removed by assassination, but then a third appeared in his place: Macrianus. Ammianus records three separate attempts by one of Julian’s successors, Valentinian I, to eliminate Macrianus by capture and/or assassination, but eventually, pressed by events further east, the emperor gave in. Roman and Alamann met in the middle of the Rhine for a water-borne summit, where the emperor acknowledged Macrianus’ pre-eminence among the Alamanni.5 Unlike in the first century, even major military defeat was not enough to destroy the larger, Alamannic confederation.

  This suggests that the confederation had a political identity that was much more firmly rooted than its first-century counterparts, in the sense that it did not rise and fall with the careers of single individuals. As circumstances changed, one canton king or another might rise to pre-eminence, but the confederation as a whole could survive the vagaries of individual political careers more or less intact. The strength of these ties is also suggested by some of the nuggets of information Ammianus preserves, not least about the canton king Gundomadus who was overthrown by a faction of his own followers for not participating in the larger group action that led up to Strasbourg. For these men, at least, group identity could at times be a more powerful determinant of political behaviour than loyalty to their local king. How this group identity worked, Ammianus does not tell us. He does report that the kings of the Alamanni feasted each other, and that ties of mutual support bound together at least some of the kings who fought at Strasbourg. In the details of such agreements and of royal feastings would lie the information we would require to understand the fourth-century Alamanni properly, but Ammianus, unfortunately, does not tell us what we need to know.

  Like many late antique and early medieval confederative entities, the Alamanni had, I suspect, an established repertoire of political and diplomatic conventions which defined and bound together their various kings in positions of overking and underking, the latter owing allegiance and some duties to the former, while still retaining direct day-to-day control of their own cantons. In these kinds of systems, political continuity could never be absolute. No overking exactly replicated, nor could he usually directly inherit, the patterns of power enjoyed by a predecessor; but, once a new pecking order had been established, there was an accepted type of relationship between kings of varying statuses that could be used to orchestrate and define the rights of both parties – senior and junior – to any new agreement. Such a system was clearly operating, in my view, among the fourth-century Alamanni, and a visible sign of its overall importance is the general ‘shape’ of Roman diplomatic policy on this part of the frontier. Whenever Roman attention was distracted, usually by events on the Empire’s Persian front in Ammianus’ time, an Alammanic overking would duly emerge, and Roman policy on the Rhine was largely directed towards removing the succession of such figures who appeared in the course of the period he covers.6

  Unfortunately, again, Ammianus does not give us any indication whether similar systems operated among the other large entities of the Rhine frontier – Franks, Saxons and Burgundians. Like their Alamannic neighbours, the fourth-century Franks certainly had a plethora of kings, but we simply do not see them in action often enough to know whether a Frankish political identity could, likewise, act as the basis of collective action even after the shock of heavy defeat. And there is no reason to suppose that all fourth-century Germanic groups had to operate on exactly the same basis, any more than their predecessors of three hundred years earlier had done, when, as Tacitus records, some groups had kings and others did not. Confirmation that broader and politically more solid group identities were not confined merely to the Alamanni in the fourth century is provided by the Tervingi, a Goth-dominated confederation which operated at the other, eastern extreme of Rome’s European frontiers in the foothills of the Carpathians. The Tervingi are the one other group amongst Rome’s Germanic neighbours, apart from the Alamanni, about whom the sources preserve a substantial amount of information.

  In its political operations and durability, the confederation of the Tervingi shows three characteristics which strongly resemble the Alamanni and firmly distance it from any first-century ancestor. First, central control of the Tervingi seems to have been handed down through at least three generations of the same dynasty between c.330 and c.370, and their official title was ‘judge’. As was the case with the kings of individual cantons among the Alamanni, therefore, power in this eastern Germanic world had become much more hereditary. Second, also like the Alamanni, the judges of the Tervingi ruled a confederation, which involved a number of kings and princes. And third, the Tervingi confederation was bound together by ties strong enough to survive even heavy defeat. We first encounter the coalition in the early 330s, when a massive defeat was inflicted upon it by the Emperor Constantine. Not only did it survive that defeat, but the same dynasty retained power and, a generation later, plotted to overthrow the most burdensome aspects of the terms that Constantine had imposed.7 It is important to stress that the Alamanni and Tervingi are the only two fourth-century Germanic entities about whom we are at all informed, and that you cannot just assume that every large Germanic grouping of the period worked the same way. Between them, however, the two cases provide excellent evidence that larger and more coherent group identities had emerged in fourth-century Germania than could have been found anywhere within its limits three hundred years before.

  How had this come about?

  The Rise of Military Kingship

  This is not a story that can be told directly. No major narrative sources survive between the first and fourth centuries to give a detailed account of any aspect of Romano-German relations in the crucial intervening period. Even such a major convulsion as the second-century Marcomannic War has to be reconstructed from fragmentary evidence. In any case, it is doubtful that any – even lost – Roman historian would have covered a broad enough time frame to be able to chart the long-term transformation that culminated in the Alamanni and their contemporaries the Tervingi. The first-century sources document plenty of power struggles between tribes. We even hear of whole tribes being created and destroyed. The Batavi, for instance, were originally an offshoot of the Chatti, while Roman observers witnessed the destruction of the Bructeri, and Tacitus tells us about a fight to the death between the Chatti and the Hermenduri and the eventual destruction of the exiled and unfortunately landless Ampsivarii.8 Sometimes, too, if less frequently, we even hear of power struggles within tribes, not least that between Arminius and Segestes for control of the Cherusci. But there’s nothing in these bits and pieces of information that would lead you to think that G
ermanic political structures were heading off on a journey towards greater size and coherence. The most dramatic clue as to the kinds of process that really underlay their appearance emerged from one of the least likely places imaginable.

  In 1955, a group of Danish workmen were cutting a drainage ditch at Haderslev in the northern Schleswig region of southern Jutland. Their work quickly came to a halt, however, when one small stretch of their ditch produced an astonishing haul of six hundred metallic objects, many datable to the Roman period. The low-lying meadow where they were working had in ancient times been a lake, if not a particularly deep one. Over the next nine years 1,700 square metres of meadow were carefully excavated, the site producing a whole series of startling finds, not least the remains of a boat. All of these materials had been dumped in the lake at different points in the Roman period, the clustering of objects showing that, on occasion, literally mounds of them were deposited at one go, emptied out from bags or baskets. This was by no means the first Germanic dumping-ground to be excavated. In the later nineteenth century a whole series of north European, particularly Danish, bogs had produced similar clusters of material. But Ejsbøl Mose, to give the Haderslev site its proper name, was the first of these sites to be excavated using modern archaeological methods. This made it possible to answer the big question left unanswered by the earlier digs. Had these dumping-grounds been created by successive small deposits, or a few much bigger ones?

  With careful attention to stratigraphic detail, the answer emerged loud and clear. The items found at Ejsbøl Mose had been deposited at several different moments, but, occasionally, huge amounts of material had been sunk at one time. In particular, the excavators were able to identify as a single, unitary deposit, the entire military equipment of a small army of about two hundred men, which had been submerged in the waters at one go somewhere around the year 300 AD. Amounting to many hundreds of individual items, the equipment turned out to belong to a coherent, well-organized force with a clear leadership hierarchy. It comprised close to two hundred spearmen, each armed with a barbed throwing javelin and a lance for thrusting; the excavators found 193 barbed spearheads and another 187 barbless ones. Something like a third of the men also had side-arms. The excavators found 63 belt buckle sets, with 60 of the swords and 62 of the knives that the belts had originally housed. The military force had been led by ten or more commanders on horseback. Ten bridles and seven sets of spurs were all part of the swag.

  Interestingly, all of this equipment had been ritually destroyed before being sunk in the lake. The swords had all been bent out of shape, and many fragments of wood came from smashed spear hafts. The obvious violence of the process makes it impossible not to associate the remains with the kinds of ritual act occasionally reported in the historical sources, whereby the weapons of an enemy were offered as a sacrifice to the gods.9 One or two horsemen may have escaped on foot, or maybe the missing spurs were just lost. Essentially, though, the excavators had found the last material remains of a military force wiped out in some long-forgotten, entirely unrecorded Vernichtungsschlacht (battle of annihilation) from the turn of the fourth century.

  As an archaeological set-piece, Ejsbøl Mose is fantastic, but the finds have a broader significance. The clear image that emerges from them – of a professional, well-organized force with a well-structured hierarchy – coincides with a considerable body of literary evidence that, by the fourth century, Germanic leaders of royal rank – kings – had personal and permanent establishments of household warriors, on precisely this scale of magnitude. When the Romans eventually cornered him after Strasbourg, Chnodomarius’ retinue surrendered as well as their leader himself. Coincidentally, it also numbered two hundred men. These retinues had an obvious military function, but a few precious indications confirm what you would otherwise have to suppose, that they were also employed more generally as an instrument of social power. When the leaders of the Tervingi decided that they would attempt to enforce uniformity of belief among their subjects in the early 370s, retinue members were sent round to Gothic villages to demand compliance. The key point here is that Tacitus reports the existence of no institution of this kind for the first century. Retinues and warbands existed at that time, but they were not permanent, and prominent individual leaders received only occasional voluntary donations of food for the upkeep of the men in their service. Archaeological material from this earlier era has also thrown up nothing like the professional, variegated weaponry uncovered at Ejsbol Mose. In the intervening two centuries, Germanic kings had begun to dispose of an entirely new level of permanent military muscle.10 This immediately explains, of course, why they themselves should appear in our fourth-century sources as a much more permanent and prevalent fixture of Germanic society than their counterparts from the time of Tacitus.

  Further striking testimony to the importance of this development has also emerged from a totally different quarter. One of the more exotic and demanding disciplines within the field of humanities is comparative philology – the study of the linguistic origins of words and meanings, together with their transfer between different language groups. As a recent study has demonstrated, all Germanic languages derived their terms for ‘king’ or ‘leader’ from just three root words: thiudans (‘ruler of a people’), truthin and kuning. Of these, thiudans is certainly the oldest, being the only one with parallels in other Indo-European languages, but the pattern of its distribution across the different branches of the German language family also shows that it was falling, or had fallen, out of use by the late Roman period, when it was being replaced by truthin. Kuning came into currency only later. The striking point is that truthin originally meant ‘leader of a warband’, but by the late Roman period had come into use as the main term for ‘king’ or ‘leader’ right across the Germanic world. There is much more to this than merely a change of name. Thiudans meant ruler of a people, for whom any military function was only part of the job profile, and perhaps only a relatively small part. Famously, Tacitus remarks of Germanic societies of the first century that ‘they chose kings for their nobility, war leaders for their courage’, which seems to imply as much. By the fourth century, the new leadership terminology indicates that this distinction had disappeared, and that military command had become the primary function of contemporary Germanic leaders. It is hard to think of better testimony to the overwhelming importance of the rise, by the late Roman period, of a new kind of leader, who owed the strength of his position to having at his beck and call a permanent body of warriors.11 Archaeology, literary sources and philology all come together to bring to light the roots of the more solidly founded form of kingship that we meet in the fourth century.

  What transpired between the first and fourth centuries, then, was broadly this: a class of military leaders developed a new kind of military muscle, and used it to put greater distance, in terms of social power, between themselves and everyone else. It doesn’t take more than a moment’s reflection to realize that this could never have been an entirely consensual process, since a small elite was busy asserting its dominance over everybody else. And this, of course, provides one possible context for the events that culminated in the weapons deposition at Ejsbøl Mose. What the archaeologists found there was the weaponry of an entire military retinue. And since the weapons themselves had been so thoroughly destroyed, it’s a pretty safe bet that this fate was shared by the men who had wielded them. In establishing their social dominance, the new military kings were playing for high stakes, and Ejsbøl Mose serves as a reminder that for every group that succeeded, another, or several others, failed. Two possible scenarios for this failure immediately suggest themselves. The warrior group unintentionally immortalized there may have been destroyed by another, rival warrior band, or by a group of ordinary, less military Germani, who didn’t appreciate the kind of dominance that the warriors’ leader had in mind. In Hollywood terms, we might be thinking Godfather – the ancient lake having been used by a dominant king to send to any rivals the mes
sage that they were likely to end up sleeping with the (in this case freshwater) fishes; or Magnificent Seven – a band of peasants having found enough military effectiveness to rid themselves of at least one predatory warband. There’s no way to be sure, although the fury of the destruction might suggest Yul Brynner rather than Al Pacino, since in some later instances we know of, victorious warband leaders tended to absorb the troops of a defeated rival to increase their own power.12 But this is a detail. The fundamental point is that the rise of the military kings can only have come about through a periodically violent process whereby rivalries both between different warband leaders and between that class of leader and those they sought to dominate, slowly worked themselves out.