Empires and Barbarians (30 page)

This is not to say that no indigenous individuals or even groups of individuals managed the leap to a more integrated higher status among the incoming Goths. The need to recruit military manpower might well have led to some alliances that were more equal, like that made between the Goths and some Huns and Alans on Roman soil in 377. It is also possible that some indigenous groups would have been allowed access to the intermediate status of lower-grade fighter (freedmen?), where individuals were allowed to fight, and had considerable advantages over slaves, while being nonetheless personally dependent upon particular freemen. Overall, however, since identity was linked to status, integration could never have been automatic.

Thinking about the events of 376 in this light, Tervingi decision-making would certainly have involved the freeman class, since the advocates of particular policies needed to win its support. The evacuation presumably encompassed both freemen and freedmen, since, between them, these social classes provided the military capacity of the group, and lower-grade warriors are encountered in other Gothic groups on the march.
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Even so, this would still leave many indigenous groups on the outside, I suspect, who were involved in neither process, and such, it seems, is suggested by both the literary and the archaeological evidence. One historical source refers to ‘Carpo-Dacians’ north of the Danube after 376, when the Tervingi who dominated the Carpathian region had already left, and there is no sign that all Cernjachov settlements and cemeteries came to a grinding halt at that date.
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My own best guess is that the complex sociopolitical world of the Tervingi comprised a dominant Germanic-speaking Gothic elite, most of them able to trace their origins back to third-century immigrants,
with dependent freedmen and slaves of various origins closely tied in with them. Alongside this world of the Goths ‘proper’, as it were, also existed many communities descended from the older indigenous populations of the region. They had certainly been subdued by the Goths, and may well have paid various kinds of tributes, but were probably largely autonomous on a day-to-day basis, and that much less likely to have participated in the evacuation of 376.

In short, what we can reconstruct of the confederation of the Tervingi – in particular its military, political and cultural capacity to sustain itself in the face of Roman power – is broadly consonant with the idea that its leading political groups – ‘kings’ playing to an audience of militarized freemen and perhaps also, to a lesser extent, freedmen – could have engaged in a decision-making process of the kind Ammi-anus reports. Given the circumstantial detail he reports, and the fact that there is nothing inherently implausible in the action as he describes it, then his account should broadly be accepted. There is certainly not a big enough problem here to justify setting his narrative aside because of a priori assumptions about the limitations of group identity in the Germanic world. These doubts are based in part upon a one-sided reading of recent debates about group identity, and the broader run of evidence does generally indicate that the top echelons of the Tervingi shared at least a strong enough sense of political identity to make Ammianus’ account of their decision-making perfectly plausible.

Even a brief glance at the discipline of migration studies requires us to ask a more precise range of questions, however, if we are really going to understand the action. Why did the Tervingi and Greuthungi of 376 respond to the crisis generated by the Huns, first, by moving at all, and second, by deciding to move across the Roman frontier? Ammianus gives us no further details, so that we cannot hope to recover everything discussed in that highly charged meeting north of the Danube. But what can be learned from migration studies about the kinds of factors that play upon migrant decision-making, suggest a few observations of importance.

The fact that the Tervingi should have responded by moving is not in itself that surprising. We knew that its dominant political class was largely descended from Germanic-speaking migrants who had carved out their position in the Black Sea region as recently as the third century. Comparative migration studies have demonstrated repeatedly that a migration habit tends to build up within population
groups. As noted earlier, older generations who have themselves moved pass on to their offspring the expectation that, if necessary, one might move in search of better conditions. And the ructions chiefly associated from a Roman perspective with the third century had carried on well into the fourth in lands beyond the frontier. Only after 300
AD
, did the Tervingi take full control of the territories between the Carpathians and the Danube that had previously been the preserve of Carpic groups. Several such groups were transported south of the Danube by the Romans between c.290 and 310, and it was this that had allowed the Tervingi to move in. But even as late as the 330s, the Tervingi were still on the move. In 332, they started to move west of the Carpathians into the territory of some neighbouring Sarmatians, but Roman military action forced them to return to the Lower Danube region. Some of those who had participated in the events of the early 330s will still have been alive in 376, so that the possibility that one might solve life’s big problems by migrating was certainly a living tradition amongst the Tervingi elite.
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Another recurrent theme of migration studies, the importance of an active field of information, also played a central role in the decision to seek out the new territory they wanted inside the Empire rather than anywhere else. The Tervingi, of course, knew a great deal about their powerful neighbour; they had been semi-subdued Roman clients since the 320s. This must have influenced their choice of destination, once they had decided that they needed to up sticks.
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The advantages they perceived in this Roman option require, though, a bit more thought. Ostensibly, the Goths presented themselves to the Empire as refugees, offering it military service in return for sanctuary. But the Empire had well-established policies for the settlement of would-be immigrants, and of these the Tervingi were, again, well aware. They had witnessed at first hand the resettlements of Carpi around the year 300, and further resettlements of Sarmatians in the 330s. The terms of these resettlements were not necessarily punitive – they could range from the seriously unpleasant to the generous – but all resettlements were made in the context of overt Roman military domination. This precondition did not apply, however, in 376. When the Tervingi requested asylum, the Emperor Valens found himself in the middle of a long and complicated dispute with Persia, which he had initiated, and all his striking forces were tied up in the east.

This makes the issue of motivation on both sides, Roman and
Gothic, significantly more complicated. A variety of sources are unanimous that Valens was extremely happy to see the arrival of the Goths on the Danube, viewing them as a ready source of military recruits. But it was a key feature of Roman imperial propaganda that no emperor should ever have policy dictated to him by barbarians, and this reported joy has to be seen as the propaganda it undoubtedly was. Only an idiot would be happy to see the total breakdown of political stability on one of his two major frontiers when he was already engaged in hostilities on the other, and, though many things, Valens was no idiot.
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Indeed, absence of overwhelming joy is confirmed by the careful policy he formulated. Rather than letting in all the unsubdued Goths requesting asylum, he admitted only the Tervingi of Alavivus and Fritigern, while posting all available troops in the Balkans to exclude the Greuthungi of Alatheus and Saphrax. Faced with not having enough troops to exclude all the Goths, he was making the best of a bad job.
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As for the Tervingi, it is a fair presumption that they were well aware of Valens’ situation. Frontier clients were adept at interpreting Roman troop redeployments – from the Danube to the Euphrates in preparation for the hostilities with Persia, for instance – and one basic fact of life in the frontier contact zone was that information leaked through it like a sieve. Ammianus tells one famous story of the Alamanni, who first began to suspect that trouble was brewing further east on the Danube in 376 because troops were being moved away from their front, then had their suspicions confirmed by a Roman guardsman of Alamannic origins returning home on retirement.
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But even if it seems unlikely that the Tervingi were second-guessing Valens from the start, we have two strong indications that they had something a bit more ambitious in mind than accepting the submissive role they knew the Empire usually assigned to immigrants. As Ammianus tells us, first, their request was for ‘part of Thrace’ not just as an escape route from the Huns, but also because its fields were fertile. Immigrants into the Roman world, as we have seen, were usually broken up into small groups and went wherever the Roman state chose. The Tervingi, however, had a more proactive choice in mind.

In seeking to understand this, it is important to factor in the general patterns of economic development operating in and around the Roman world. The Goths and other Germanic migrants of the third century had moved into the Black Sea region because it was part
of a more developed inner periphery around the Roman Empire, with many economic attractions. And while these migrants were benefiting from that greater wealth, the Roman Empire was operating at a still higher level of development, with still greater economic surpluses. This wealth was immediately visible to outsiders in the Empire’s frontier zones in the form of towns, fortifications, armies, even villas, all of which, as we have seen, regularly attracted cross-border raiders. Ammianus’ account of Gothic motives – that Roman wealth had entered their calculations – makes perfect sense, therefore, and also recalls modern case studies, where it is rare for economic motivations to be absent from immigrants’ calculations, even when their thinking has a strong element of the political and involuntary about it. It also meant, of course, that the Goths were not just refugees in 376, since any ambition to share in Roman wealth was bound to bring them into conflict, in the longer term, with the Roman state, even if Valens was currently too preoccupied with Persia to put up much of an argument.

The second indication that the leadership of the Tervingi had higher-order ambitions in mind, and was well aware of the likely consequences, emerges in their reaction to Valens’ eventual decision to admit them, but not the Greuthungi. Instead of just rejoicing at their own good fortune, they continued, as Ammianus tells us, to maintain contact with the Greuthungi, with a view to joint action.
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This strongly suggests that the Tervingi’s leaders had formulated a more ambitious agenda, one that might well require concerted action on the part of both groups to realize. As to the precise nature of these ambitions, one can only guess. But the elite of the Tervingi were directly descended from third-century migrants who had witnessed a Roman withdrawal, under pressure, from the old province of Transylvanian Dacia. This deeper perspective, drawing on a longer-term field of information, as well as their own more immediate experience of Roman clientship, may have powered the hopes that made them turn their eyes towards the Empire in the summer of 376. Behind their self-presentation as refugees may well have lain the hope that they could make the Empire withdraw in due course from part of Thrace as well, and thus gain possession of a fertile landscape whose economic development was generally higher even than that of the inner periphery.

No wonder the discussions were lengthy . . . Moving on to the territory of the Roman state, especially if your ambitions strayed beyond
the bounds of total submission, was a manoeuvre fraught with danger. Valens’ army may have been fully occupied in the summer of 376, but it was not going to be so for ever, and the Tervingi had first-hand knowledge of its power – from the 330s when it had forced them out of the lands of their Sarmatian neighbours, from the service of their own auxiliary forces within it between times; and from the 360s, when their only mechanism for avoiding outright defeat at its hands had been to run away. What all this emphasizes, of course, is that seeking asylum inside the Empire, despite its obvious economic attractions, was a stratagem that could only work if the migrants were able to field a significant military force. Without it, they would have not the slightest hope of fending off the Roman military counteraction, which was bound to follow in due course. The power of the Roman state supplied, therefore, a fundamental reason why the migration unit had to take the form it did, and this is entirely in line with another key point underlined by comparative migration studies.

Existing political structures are always a key determinant of the nature of migratory activity. Because of their relatively low economic development, fourth-century Germanic kings could support specialist military forces numbering only in the few hundreds. Forces of that magnitude stood no chance of facing up to a Roman emperor complete with a field army intent upon restoring ‘normal’ patterns of immigration. The best a small immigrant military force might hope for was to find employment as a reasonably well-treated auxiliary unit in the Roman army, and some Gothic groups of this kind who had entered the Empire at other times, it seems, followed precisely this trajectory.
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But for the Goths’ more ambitious enterprise of 376 to stand a chance of success, the leadership of the Tervingi needed to involve the broader militarized element of Gothic society: its freemen with their dependent freedmen – if my identification of the two warrior status groups is correct. The exact terminological identifications do not really matter, though. The key point is that large numbers of warriors were required, and just as in the third century, this meant that recruitment had to look beyond the world of specialist military retinues.

As a result, and again as in the third century, it was entirely natural that the migration units should encompass women and children alongside the warriors. The Goths of 376, like the third-century immigrants from Poland to the Black Sea, were set on a one-way trip, and the option of leaving families behind them on a what-if ? basis did
not exist. Families left at home would have been much too vulnerable to predation from the Huns. And as already noted, the women as much as the men had had the migration habit firmly entrenched among them by the remembered life choices of their immediate ancestors. On the immediate everyday level, Germanic economic development could not support enough unencumbered specialist warriors to take on the Roman state unaided.