Empires and Barbarians Read online

  Expansion and Development

  But this is only part of the story. The kind of military retinue destroyed at Ejsbøl Mose, or employed by Chnodomarius, was a high-maintenance item. Not producing their own foodstuffs, professional warriors required feeding, and all the evidence evocative of Germanic warbands at play – mostly deriving, admittedly, from later heroic poetry, but bolstered by hints in Ammianus and anthropological parallels from better-documented but analogous contexts – suggests that we are talking about feeding literally on a heroic scale: lots of roasted meat and alcohol as brought to the big screen recently in Hollywood’s Beowulf. Military equipment was also not cheap. Admittedly, there is no sign of any body armour in the Ejsbøl Mose finds, and that was the single most expensive item of personal military hardware in the ancient and medieval worlds. Ammianus comments, for instance, that Chnodomarius was easily distinguishable on the battlefield because of his armour, suggesting that even in the fourth century it was not generally being worn by Germanic warriors. Nonetheless, swords were possessed by maybe one-third of the Ejsbøl Mose force. Most of the rest of a warrior’s distinguishing equipment was also made by highly skilled craftsmen from expensive raw materials.13 In other words, the retinues that made the new military kings such a powerful feature of the fourth-century Germanic landscape could not come into being without two preconditions. First, there had to be surpluses of foodstuffs and/or other forms of negotiable wealth being produced by the economy around them, and second, the kings had to be able to turn these surpluses, or a significant portion of them, to their own purposes.

  This straightforward observation draws real historical bite from the fact that, up to the birth of Christ, substantial food surpluses and other forms of negotiable wealth were in short supply right across Germanic Europe. The place to start unravelling this story is agricultural production. The economy of Germanic Europe – as indeed that of Roman and every other kind of Europe in the first millennium – was fundamentally agricultural. There are, however, more and less productive types of agricultural economy. Archaeological research undertaken since the Second World War has demonstrated that Germanic Europe went through its own agricultural revolution during the four hundred years when the Roman Empire was its closest western and southern neighbour.

  At the start of the period, agricultural practice east of the Rhine was generally ‘extensive’: ‘extensive’, that is, as opposed to ‘intensive’. This meant that a relatively large area was required to support a given population unit, because yields were low. It was entirely characteristic of this kind of farming regime that settlements tended to be small, widely dispersed, and to last for no more than a generation or two on any one site. Essentially, the populations of Germanic Europe did not, or did not have to, maintain the fertility of their fields so as to maximize crop production in any given year, or keep the same field in use over anything but the short to medium term. Once yields began to decline below a level that they found acceptable, they would move on to a new area. The evidence underpinning this interpretation comes in many and varied forms.

  In large parts of central-northern Europe, the boundaries of the then widely prevalent ‘Celtic field’ system are still visible in the form of stone walls constructed out of debris cleared from the fields in the course of cultivating them. The fields are extremely large, reflecting the sheer amount of land that was required to keep a single family in business. Known settlement patterns confirm the point. Before 1945, few Germanic settlements belonging to the first two centuries AD had been identified; the early Germani were largely studied, in archaeological terms, from their cemeteries. That situation has now been reversed, with the ratio of settlements to cemeteries standing at 7:1 and growing fast, but the reason for the earlier imbalance has also become evident. All of the settlements now known from these early centuries were small and short-lived. Knowing that any settlement had only a limited life expectancy, in no instance did the inhabitants invest much time or effort in their construction. Therefore, the settlements were both large in overall number and were originally difficult to find. The little direct evidence of prevailing agricultural techniques that happens to survive confirms the point. The well-excavated Germanic-period cemetery at Odry in modern Poland, for instance, was established right on top of an old ‘Celtic field’. From underneath one of the excavated barrows emerged evidence of the ploughing and fertilization regimes employed. Both were rudimentary. Ploughing took the form of narrow, criss-crossed scrapings. This means that the soil was not being turned over, and hence that weeds and crop residues were not rotting back into the soil to restore its vital nutrients, particularly nitrogen. The only form of additional fertilization in evidence was some ash. Employing these kinds of techniques, arable fertility could not long be maintained.14

  Conclusive evidence that something changed dramatically in Germanic agricultural practice over the course of the Roman period has emerged since the 1950s, starting in the muddy fields of coastal areas of modern Holland and Germany. By this time, when Ejsbøl Mose was being excavated to such good purpose, archaeological interest was turning generally to settlement, and techniques had advanced to such an extent that really useful results could be obtained. The first major excavations of early Germanic settlements focused on the characteristic manmade mounds of these coastal areas – called terpen in Dutch and Wierde in German – formed by many years of sequential settlement on the same, originally low-lying, site. Over the years rotted refuse, house timbers and other human debris caused the ground level of the settled area to rise. This made these sites an obvious target for archaeological excavation, but local farmers had also long realized that the mounds were piled high with fertile topsoil, so many had been fully or partially grubbed out before the archaeologists got there.

  The most detailed work was done at a site that has become celebrated in the field, if little known outside it: Feddersen Wierde. Careful stratigraphic excavation over the best part of a decade, from 1955 to 1963, allowed the full evolution of the settlement to be established. It began in the middle of the first century AD, when five families established themselves there. They comprised a total of maybe fifty people at maximum and practised a mixed agriculture, with much effort put into the rearing of cattle. From the number of animal stalls constructed in the first phase, the five initial families possessed about a hundred cows. But this was only the beginning. The settlement prospered over the next three centuries, reaching its maximum extent in the later third century AD, by which time it numbered as many as three hundred inhabitants who, between them, possessed upwards of four hundred and fifty cows. Many detailed studies have been done of myriad aspects of daily life there, but, for our purposes, the key point is the settlement’s size and longevity. What these indirectly reflect is a revolution in agricultural practice. Under the old extensive agricultural regimes of the early Germanic world, this many people living in such close proximity for over three hundred years would have been inconceivable. Production could never have been that intense, nor fertility maintained for so long. Feddersen Wierde was only possible because its population had adopted a much more intensive agricultural regime, which allowed them to maximize the fertility of their fields to a much greater extent, and permitted a much greater concentration of population to thrive over many generations. The full details of the revolution are beyond reconstruction, but it certainly involved using the manure from all the cattle in a more integrated fashion to maintain the fertility of arable fields.15

  It would be rash to generalize from this one example, nor is there any reason to suppose that Feddersen Wierde – based on a greater integration of pastoral and arable agriculture – provides the only possible model of Germanic agricultural intensification. A substantial number of other excavations of Roman-period settlements have made it clear, however, that it was by no means an isolated example of rural development. Nearly as famous as Feddersen Wierde is Wijster, also in north-western Germania. There, originally a single family began to farm in the middle
of the first century BC. Grubbing-out by modern farmers meant that large parts of this site were too damaged to excavate properly, but by the fourth century the one family farm had grown into an extensive settlement housing between at least fifty and sixty families, who were busy exploiting the easily worked sandy soils overlooking the mouth of the nearby River Drenthe. Other large settlements of the Roman period excavated in this area beyond the Rhine frontier include Hodde, Vorbasse, Ginderup, Mariesminde and Norre Fjand.

  Elsewhere, the picture is not so comprehensive, nor is the precise mode of agricultural intensification so well understood, but enough is known to document the fact that Germanic rural development was a general phenomenon of the Roman period. In what is now central Germany, and the eastern and south-eastern reaches of ancient Germania beyond the Carpathians, the evolving settlement pattern is known in much less detail, and there is no reason, of course, why agricultural practice had to have changed everywhere at the same time. Nonetheless, enough big settlements are known from all these regions – Barhorst, fifty kilometres west of Berlin with thirty families, for instance, or, in the far south-east, the many large settlements of the Goth-dominated Cernjachov system of the fourth century – to show that more intensive agricultural regimes had evolved right across Germanic-dominated Europe in the course of the Roman centuries. Some isolated finds of agricultural equipment indicate the same, iron ploughshares and coulters showing that the soil was being more effectively turned over by the fourth century. The greater size and longevity of settlements, combined with all the evidence for more effective ploughing equipment, document a major transformation of agricultural practice in Germanic Europe in the early centuries AD, even if its techniques remained considerably less specialized than on the other, Roman side of the frontier.16

  Two observations follow. First, the massive increase in food production that this revolution in agricultural production must have generated goes a long way towards explaining how the new military kings could support their retinues. Before it unfolded, it must be doubtful that there was enough surplus food in the undeveloped Germanic agricultural economy to support permanent specialist warriors on the fourth-century scale. Second, and this is a much broader point, the vast increase in food production also implies that the population of Germanic Europe increased exponentially during the same period. There is no way to put a figure on the increase, but, as the demographers teach us, one of the key limits on the size of any human population is always the availability of food. The Germanic agricultural revolution, with its vast increase in food supplies, meant that the population must have grown accordingly. Demographic expansion also shows up in other evidence. In Germanic cemeteries occupied throughout the Roman period and excavated with due attention to stratigraphy, larger numbers of people are found interred in those areas in use in the third and fourth centuries compared with the preceding two hundred years. Pollen studies, likewise, provide an alternative view of the same development. Over the first four centuries AD, the proportion of pollen produced by cereal crops increased at the expense of grass and tree pollen, a further indication of agricultural intensification.17

  This major increase in agricultural output not only explains how retinues were fed, but must also have been one basic source of the new wealth in Germanic society of this period, visible most obviously in the form of the retinues’ expensive military equipment. Food surpluses could be exchanged for other desirable items. But while perhaps of central importance, agriculture was not the only source of new wealth. Evidence has emerged in recent years to show that, over the first four centuries, the overall economic wealth of Germanic Europe was being increased dramatically by a marked diversification of production and an associated increase in the exchange of a whole series of other goods besides food.

  The evidence for both metal production and its subsequent working is highly suggestive of a similar pattern of expansion in that sector of the economy. In particular, two major centres of production in the territory of modern Poland – in the Mountains and in southern Mazovia – are between them estimated to have produced upwards of 8,000,000 kilograms of raw iron in the Roman period, with exploitation increasing dramatically in the later centuries. For metal-working, the evidence is more fragmentary, but equally suggestive. When they were first excavated, it was thought that the sixty swords from Ejsbøl Mose represented the greatest find of Roman swords ever discovered in one cache. More detailed analysis has shown, however, that, though based on Roman models, the swords were actually copies forged in Germanic Europe. By c.300 AD, therefore, at least one centre was turning out standardized military equipment on a reasonably large scale, whereas the Germanic swords known from earlier eras were all individual products.18

  Evidence for the working of precious metals is equally striking. A hoard of exquisite gold and silver vessels was found at Pietroasa in Romania in the later nineteenth century. Much of it dates to the fifth century, but at least one of the silver dishes was produced in the fourth century and outside the Roman Empire, in Germanic Europe. Moulds for making these kinds of item have been discovered in fourth-century Germanic contexts, and the general level of personal adornments made from precious metals increases over the Roman period. By the fourth century, intricately worked silver fibulae – safety-pins – by which the Germani customarily fastened their clothes, had become reasonably common, and the remains of workshops for producing them have been found at at least one royal seat among the Alamanni. In the first two centuries AD, fibulae had usually been made of bronze or iron. From the mid-third century, Germanic pottery began to change its modes of production. In the third and fourth centuries, Germanic potters for the first time – if not everywhere, and not at the same moment – started to use the wheel to form their wares. This development was combined with much improved kiln technology, allowing the pots to be fired at far higher temperatures, and led to a considerably higher quality of pottery becoming widely available across Germanic Europe. Switching to wheel-made pottery not only generates a higher-quality product but is closely associated with larger-scale, more commercial production. In some areas the transformation was total. In the Goth-dominated Cernjachov world north of the Black Sea in the fourth century, wheel-made tablewares, largely indistinguishable from their provincial Roman counterparts, became the norm (although cooking pots were still made by hand). Among the contemporary Alamanni, by contrast, several local experiments in wheel-made wares never managed to achieve either longevity or widespread distribution – in face, perhaps, of stiffer and nearer Roman competition than their Gothic counterparts. But before the late Roman era, all high-quality wheel-made wares found in Germanic contexts were, without exception, Roman imports, so even this much economic development represents a major transformation.19

  Metalworking and pottery production are obviously major areas of the non-agricultural economy, producing both more expensive and cheaper, more widely consumed items. Increasingly professional production methods are visible in other sectors of the later Germanic economy as well, some of them again entirely new. One of the most dramatic is glass production. Before the fourth century, all the glass found in non-Roman Europe was Roman, imported across the frontier. But sometime after 300 AD, a glass production centre opened at Komarov in the hinterland of the Carpathians. Its products came to be distributed widely across central and eastern Europe (Map 3). The various contexts in which the glass has been found indicate that it was an elite item, often used as a mark of status. Though hardly a major employer, its production would certainly have represented a highly valuable addition to someone’s economy. An equally fascinating, though entirely different, example has turned up in an excavated village within the lands dominated by Goths in the fourth century. At Birlad-Valea Seaca in modern Romania, investigators found no less than sixteen huts devoted to the production of one item characteristically found in graves of this period: combs constructed from deer antler. Hairstyles were used by some Germanic groups to express political affiliations, and also to expr
ess status. The most famous example is the so-called Suebic knot described by Tacitus and beautifully preserved on one early Germanic skull (Plate 4). In this context, it is hardly surprising that combs were a significant personal possession. Within the huts, parts of combs in every stage of production were discovered, shedding light on the whole process. In this case, it would seem, an entire settlement was devoted to the production of one key item.20

  Not only agricultural production, then, but other areas of the economy of Germanic Europe had begun to blossom – in relative terms – by the late Roman period. Right across the region, the early centuries AD witnessed an explosion of development and wealth generation. And like globalization now, at least as important a historical phenomenon as the new wealth itself was the much less comfortable fact that it was not being shared remotely equally. Development in the Germanic world generated clear winners but also clear losers, and it is at this point that military kings, their retainers, and economic development converge still more closely. Many of the items being produced, not just the food, were being consumed by the new military kings and their armed retinues. The iron was necessary for steel weaponry, obviously, but some at least of the glass, precious metal objects and even the higher-quality pottery was aimed in their direction. All of these items have turned up in burials, which careful analysis can show to have belonged to the Germanic social elite of the late Roman period.21 Just how big a social and political revolution had been set in motion?

  WARRIORS, KINGS AND ECONOMICS

  Romantic nineteenth-century conceptions of early Germanic society, framed at the height of nationalist fervour, propounded the notion of early German Freiheit, ‘freedom’: the idea that Germania before the birth of Christ was a world of free and equal noble savages, with no intermediate nobility but with kings who were directly answerable to assemblies of freemen. This was mistaken. Even in the time of Tacitus, Germanic societies had slaves, though the slaves ran their own farms and handed over part of the produce rather than living under closer domination as unfree labour on someone else’s estate. And although the material remains of the Germanic world in the last few centuries BC show no obvious distinctions of status, this does not mean that there weren’t any. Even in a materially simple culture – and in the third century BC about the greatest sign of social distinction available among the Germani of north-central Europe was to keep your clothes on with a slightly fancier safety-pin – differences of status can still make a huge difference to quality of life. If higher status translated merely into eating more, doing less hard manual labour and having a better chance of passing on your genes successfully, it was nonetheless extremely real, even if it could not be expressed in the possession of much in the way of fancy material goods. I doubt very much, in fact, that the status distinctions we find in Tacitus were new to the Germanic world of the first century AD, even if they can’t be measured easily in archaeologically visible material items over the preceding centuries.22