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chapter one
WHO ARE THE BARBARIANS?
‘Barbarian’ is a key word in European history, Arno Borst suggested; it has helped define Europe itself, and European civilization.1 This book is about the various peoples, labelled ‘barbarians’ by Greeks and Romans, who transformed Europe between the third and the seventh centuries AD, in the period during which, traditionally, the Ancient World became the Middle Ages. Those whose interests are focused primarily on the culture of the Mediterranean world have, over the last 35 years or so, called this period Late Antiquity; those more interested in the world of northern Europe often call it the Migration Period. Most historians who have looked at the barbarians have focused their attention on their migrations or (in a different interpretation) on their invasions of the Roman Empire. This book will attempt instead to focus on the barbarians themselves, trying to see them not as faceless hordes who brought down a great civilization, but as individuals and groups who had civilizations and achievements of their own.
Barbarians and Barbarism
Attempting to gain some understanding of people generally viewed through the hostile lenses of both the Roman sources and our own prejudices is an exercise in deduction and imagination. It is a frustrating exercise, since there are many questions to which answers may never be found and many heated academic debates which defy reconciliation and conclusion. One major stumbling block is that our written sources come almost exclusively from Greek and Roman writers. The first barbarian to tell us about barbarians is Jordanes, a Goth, writing in the middle of the sixth century; but his History of the Goths may be largely derived from a lost history written by the Roman scholar Cassiodorus, and, even if it was not, it was written by a ‘barbarian’ who had lived his whole life, within the Empire had acquired a classical education and had a purely Greco-Roman view of the world. The earliest surviving text in a barbarian language is the Gothic Bible, translated from Greek in the mid-fourth century by Ulfila, the descendent of Roman citizens captured in a Gothic raid, and written in a script which he devised to capture Gothic phonology. But otherwise, by the time barbarians learned to write in the Latin alphabet, they had, like Jordanes, been thoroughly Romanized and Christianized, and initially they wrote in Latin. One of the greatest works of Latin literature in the early Middle Ages was Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written by an Anglo-Saxon barbarian who could write Latin better than most Romans, who drew a discreet veil over the pre-Christian and hence uncivilized past of his own people, and who believed that the greatest event in his people’s history was conversion by missionaries sent from Rome.
The English were, nevertheless, among the first barbarians in the post-Roman world to write in their own vernacular; the other pioneers were the Irish, through whose writings (it has been claimed) we can learn something of the world of the barbarians before ‘contamination’ with Roman ways. Some other barbarian peoples leave us no written records until much later; the Scandinavians not until the tenth century, and the Slavs not until the eleventh. Many others – the Huns and the Picts, for instance – disappeared from history without leaving any written records at all.
The history of the barbarians therefore, in the sense of the history of events and of individuals, has very largely to be written from the outside. And that is at the root of our main historical problem: how far can we trust sources written by people with deep-rooted prejudices against barbarians?
The question of sources has to stay uppermost in our minds throughout this book. As far as possible, I shall not be consigning the authors and words of our written sources to the decent obscurity of endnotes: it is important to know what our sources are, what they say and what they leave out and whether it is possible to get beyond them. It is rather too common in general books of this kind – or even in much more specialized monographs – to find bald statements of fact which, when one looks at the footnote or endnote with a trained eye, turn out to be nothing resembling fact at all. There is little point in repeating tabloid-style statements from our Greco-Roman sources without noting, as visibly as possible, that often such statements are no more than opinion or rumour.
Archaeology offers us a way of approaching the barbarians without the intermediary of a written source. Archaeologists have hugely increased our data-store over the last century and more. But, as has often been remarked, although the spade does not lie, neither does it speak. To make sense, the spade needs the archaeologist as an interpreter, and archaeologists, like historians, frequently offer interpretations which reflect theories and ideologies of the age in which they live. The most notorious example is the work done by Nazi archaeologists on the barbarian period, to support Nazi theories of race and culture. But other examples are numerous in the archaeology of the barbarians, and are far more numerous there, I suspect, than in the closely related fields of classical archaeology or later medieval archaeology.2 This is in part, I believe, because the barbarians are still with us.
Barbarism haunts us: and by ‘us’ I mean ‘many readers in the western European world and its former colonies’. We fear that we (kin to the perpetrators of Dresden, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, My Lai, Haditha and so on) may be barbarians ourselves, under the skin. At the same time we fear that our civilization is threatened by our own barbarians – fascists, communists, liberals, EU bureaucrats, fundamentalists, immigrants or any other imagined enemy.
The agonies of identification may be more acute for western Europeans than for anyone else. The English, for instance, or those with any sense of their own origins, note that they are apparently descended from Germanic-speaking barbarians, and indeed from a group who seem to have been much more successful than other barbarians in destroying the Roman civilization they found. In Britain, Latin disappeared; in other European countries once part of the Roman Empire the dominant languages, like French and Castilian, are still derived directly from Latin. In France and Spain, the historical myth used to be that the barbarians had imposed themselves as a military aristocracy, and that therefore the ruling classes of later centuries were descended from Franks or Goths. The French Revolution was thus portrayed by some as the attempts of Gallo-Romans to rid themselves of their Frankish masters.3 The history of the barbarians, over much of Europe, is inseparable from the myths that created, and were created by, the nationalism that is still with us.
None of us (least of all myself) is entirely free from our own historical context, which not only helps us determine the questions we ask of the past, but also the answers that we give. I should be honest, therefore, about my own prejudices and ideological stand. I am English, although my surname (common in Wales) suggests that I have Welsh ancestors, descendants, that is, of the Romano-Britons who managed to preserve their independence from barbarian rule for centuries longer than anyone else. By the time of my retirement I shall have spent well over a third of my professional life in Dublin, capital of a country which was much less touched by the Roman world than most European countries. Perhaps this may give me a slant on the barbarian world which is a little different from those of other historians (though I am mindful that three of the greatest historians of this period – J.B. Bury, E.A. Thompson and Peter Brown – all came from or spent significant periods in Dublin and its surroundings).
I have problems with two approaches to the period. First, I cannot quite understand those historians who regard ‘the fall of the Western Roman Empire’ and its replacement by various barbarian kingdoms as a disaster. People who do are often the same people who regarded the fall of a similarly bloated, corrupt and exploitative regime in 1991 with enthusiastic (and uncritical) joy. I am not on the whole on the side of empires, whoever is running them. In that sense, therefore, my view of the barbarians could be said to be a post-imperialist or a post-colonialist one. Second, however, I find a problem with those historians who imply that the ‘fall of the Western Roman Empire’ was not really important, and who thereby imply that the barbarians were really not that barbarian. The barbarian invasions were just a blip in the development of late antique culture, they say; the emperors may have disappeared from the West, but when one looks at the Roman economy, Roman social structure and the new Roman religion (Christianity) what one finds is continuity. Tell that, one is tempted to say, to a Romano-Briton fleeing to Brittany to get away from the Angles and Saxons, or to the inhabitant of a Roman town near the Rhine or Danube frontier, whose world was similarly overturned or destroyed by barbarian incursions that the Roman emperors were powerless to halt. Tell that to almost anyone living in the former western Europe around the year 600, who, wherever they were, found themselves living in markedly less comfort than their ancestors had done two or three centuries earlier.4
A few years ago Guy Halsall suggested that most people who studied this period were either Movers or Shakers. Movers think that many of the changes that came to the late Roman world were the result of the movement of barbarians into the Empire; Shakers think that the Roman world was already riven with tension and change, and that the arrival of a few small groups of barbarian warriors was a symptom rather than a cause of these changes. Halsall suggested that a third group – who think that nothing very much happened at all – is really an extreme wing of the Shakers. Like Halsall – though not openly admitting, as he does, to be a curmudgeonly cove5 – I am not a fully paid-up member of either the Movers or the Shakers. The trouble is (as the reader of this book will discover, possibly with some alarm) that the story of the ever-changing relationship between Romans and barbarians is an enormously complex and uncertain one, and that the history of each region of the Roman Empire, and of each barbarian group who came into contact with those regions, is unique and different. The complexity is enhanced by the problems we have with our sources (see below, p. 15); neither our written sources nor our archaeological ones speak with transparency, clarity or trustworthiness about anything.
In this book I am going to deal with the barbarians who lived in what is now regarded as Europe. I am going to ignore the barbarians of North Africa, notably the people who are still called by a word deriving from barbari (the Berbers), and the barbarians beyond the south-eastern Roman frontier, the Arabs, who would (around the time that this book ends) have more of an impact upon the Roman world than any other non-Roman people. And within Europe, some barbarian peoples are much better known to us (or sometimes, to be honest, to me) than others. In the West, the Irish, at least from the sixth century onwards, have supplied us with a wealth of material (even though they are frequently left out of any discussion of the barbarians). At the eastern end of the Continent, the various Slavic-speaking peoples have left us with nothing save archaeology, and much ofthat has been published in languages which I cannot read: for those two reasons the history of the Slavic peoples is not covered in nearly the depth that I would have liked, nor with anything resembling authority. What I shall do is remind readers that – despite what they might conclude from some books on the barbarians – by no means all Europe’s barbarians were Germanic-speaking. There were three other groups of barbarians in this period who, like Germanic-speakers, spoke languages belonging to the Indo-European group of languages: that is, Celtic-speaking peoples, Slavic-speaking peoples and those peoples speaking Baltic languages like Latvian and Lithuanian. But there were also peoples whose languages were quite unrelated to Indo-European, like the groups of Turkic-speakers who arrived in Europe from Central Asia during this period (notably the Huns, the Avars and the Bulgars), and some of those who lived by the Baltic, like the Finns and the Estonians, who spoke varieties of Finno-Ugrian (although their linguistic cousins, the Magyars, did not arrive in Europe until after the period covered in this book).6
It needs to be emphasized that the barbarians I shall be writing about have nothing in common with each other except that the Greeks and Romans labelled them ‘barbarians’. That word – barbaros (plural barbaroi) in Greek and barbarus (plural barbari) in Latin – had two meanings by the period which concerns us. Primarily it meant non-Roman, someone who came from outside the Roman Empire; but secondarily it meant ‘barbarous’, that is, someone who was not civilized. There may have been people who identified themselves in certain circumstances as ‘barbarian’, but for the most part it was a word applied to others, pejoratively, by Romans.
Map 1 Map of European Roman Empire with names of the Roman dioceses (large font) and provinces (small font) and the approximate location of various barbarian peoples. The provinces are those named by the Notifia Dignitatum in 400; the barbarians are as positioned before Goths moved into the Empire in 376. (Modified from A.H.M. Jones, The Decline of the Ancient World. London: Longman 1966, 100–101).
‘Celt’ and ‘German’ are words with respectable classical pedigrees: ‘Celt’ derives from Greek Keltoi (the Romans called these people Galli or Gauls); ‘German’ from Latin Germani. ‘Slav’, however, does not appear until the sixth century, in the form Sclaveni. But the modern usage of ‘Celt’, ‘German’ and ‘Slav’ derives from the usage of philologists from the eighteenth century onwards. The Celts are those who speak one of the Celtic languages (of which the modern speakers are to be found among the Bretons, Welsh, Irish and Scots); the Germans are those who speak one of the Germanic languages (which in modern times includes Dutch, German, the Scandinavian languages including Icelandic and English); and the Slavs are those who speak one of the Slavic languages (today Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian and so on). Thanks to nineteenth-century nationalism (and racism) historians have had a tendency to use these linguistic terms as if they represented biological groups, or races. But ‘Celtic-speaking’ means no more than that. Celtic-speaking peoples were to be found across much of western Europe, probably arriving in Ireland, Britain and elsewhere as a military elite who taught or otherwise persuaded the local inhabitants to speak their language. Speaking a Celtic language is not a sign that someone belonged biologically to a ‘Celtic’ ‘race’, even though a century ago it would have been easy to find scholars who believed that it did.
In this period, therefore, ‘Celts’ would not have thought of themselves as Celts, or ‘Germans’ as Germans, although they might on occasion have identified themselves as ‘non-Romans’, or as barbarians. In this book I shall try not to refer to Germans or Celts or Slavs, but, if I have to, to Germanic-speakers, Celtic-speakers and Slavic-speak...
