Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire

by Walter Goffart

The Migration Age is still envisioned as an onrush of expansionary "Germans" pouring unwanted into the Roman Empire and subjecting it to pressures so great that its western parts collapsed under the weight. Further developing the themes set forth in his classic Barbarians and Romans, Walter Goffart dismantles this grand narrative, shaking the barbarians of late antiquity out of this "Germanic" setting and reimagining the role of foreigners in the Later Roman Empire.

The Empire was not swamped by a migratory Germanic flood for the simple reason that there was no single ancient Germanic civilization to be transplanted onto ex-Roman soil. Since the sixteenth century, the belief that purposeful Germans existed in parallel with the Romans has been a fixed point in European history. Goffart uncovers the origins of this historical untruth and argues that any projection of a modern Germany out of an ancient one is illusory. Rather, the multiplicity of northern peoples once living on the edges of the Empire participated with the Romans in the larger stirrings of late antiquity. Most relevant among these was the long militarization that gripped late Roman society concurrently with its Christianization.

If the fragmented foreign peoples with which the Empire dealt gave Rome an advantage in maintaining its ascendancy, the readiness to admit military talents of any social origin to positions of leadership opened the door of imperial service to immigrants from beyond its frontiers. Many barbarians were settled in the provinces without dislodging the Roman residents or destabilizing landownership; some were even incorporated into the ruling families of the Empire. The outcome of this process, Goffart argues, was a society headed by elites of soldiers and Christian clergy--one we have come to call medieval.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, European History, Roman History, Ancient History, Audiobook

384 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2006

About the author

Walter André Goffart was a German-born American historian who specialized in Late Antiquity and the European Middle Ages. He taught for many years in the history department and Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of Toronto (1960–1999), and was a senior research scholar at Yale University. He was the author of monographs on a ninth-century forgery (Le Mans Forgeries), late Roman taxation (Caput and Colonate), four "barbarian" historians, and historical atlases.
Two controversial themes in his research concern the Roman policies used when settling barbarian soldiers in the West Roman Empire (Barbarians and Romans and the sixth chapter of Barbarian Tides), and his criticism of the old idea that there was a single Germanic people opposed to the empire in late antiquity, which he believes still influences academics studying the period.

Reviews

[Terence · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the final volume of Glen Cook's Black Company series, Soldiers Live, Croaker, the Company's physician, annalist and ultimately Captain, becomes a near omniscient being capable of observing events in both the past and the present. A dream come true for Croaker, and one I'd love to emulate; I dare say, an existence any historian must envy because we must know the whats, whys and wherefors of human experience. And where we can't know, we speculate. Speculate and present our ruminations as "facts." Or the admitted fantasies of older historians morph into the unquestioned consensus of their descendants. It's this tendency - the human penchant for storytelling and connecting dots that shouldn't be - that is Walter Goffart's target in the present volume. Specifically, against the idea of a Germanic migration that stretches back centuries (if not millennia) and brought about the destruction of the Roman Empire, replacing a Mediterranean romanitas with a Germanic ethnicity that determined the shape of medieval Europe. (The latter thread found its most pernicious and palpably evil manifestation in theories of Nordic racial and cultural superiority and Nazism.)

The book is divided into 7 separate-but-related essays and a conclusion. The first three essays are historiographical, and tackle in order: the meaning of "Migration Age," the thesis that the invasions caused Rome's fall, and the myth that a German consciousness existed prior to the Middle Ages. The next four essays deal with four aspects of the late Roman Empire and its responses to the "barbarians": "Jordanes' Getica and the Disputed Authenticity of Gothic Origins from Scandinavia"; "The Great Rhine Crossing, A.D. 400-420, A Case of Barbarian Migration"; "The 'Techniques of Accommodation' Revisited"; and "None of Them Were Germans: Northern Barbarians in Late Antiquity." The final essay draws all these disparate threads together to offer an explanation of Rome's "fall" and the emergence of medieval civilization. Goffart acknowledges that he only uses the literary sources in his discussion, ignoring (for the most part) recent archaeology and ethnographic studies because he feels that, while they can discern material conditions, they can't differentiate linguistic or political change. To the extent that we can, we are limited to the textual survivals.

The "Migration Age" is the latest English translation of the German Volkerwanderung. The reader should understand that it's German historiography and the paradigm that it established that underlays much of our understanding of Ancient and Western history, and certainly the general citizen's understanding. To wit: The Roman Empire endured centuries of pressure and conflict with Germanic barbarians on its frontiers. In the early 5th century AD, pushed by Hunnic tribes migrating from Central Asia and attracted by the decadent weakness of the late Empire, these tribes achieved substantive breakthroughs along the Rhine and within a century had destroyed the Western Empire and nearly so the Eastern. Furthermore, it's possible to trace a connected line of migrations for distinct Gothic, Vandal, Frankish and other peoples. In it's most extreme manifestations, some patriotic German historians have found Germans as far back as the Bronze Age and into the Neolithic.

Goffart identifies 3 traditions of the migration paradigm. At first glance, the most plausible is the "core" theory, which posits a fairly limited Volkerwanderung in both time and space and doesn't claim more for the sources than warranted. The second theory is the "Asian," which emphasizes the "domino theory" of barbarian movements: Somewhere in Central Asia a tribe (for some reason) migrates from its ancestral home, and pushes the neighboring tribe out of theirs and so on in a cascade of dominoes until it reaches the Rhine-Danube valleys and brings down the Romans. One tenet of this theory is the Huns are the direct descendants of the Xiong-nu, a tribal confederation that troubled Han China from the 3rd century BC, and eventually crossed Asia to show up at Rome's doorstep in the 5th century AD. All this ultimately based on a passing resemblance between "xiong-nu" and "hun." Finally, there's the "Germanic" strain, which claims to be able to trace the "German" race (or, more PC, the ethnicity) back through the mists of time to a fantasy homeland in Scandinavia.

All three strains are inadequate to describe what happened along Rome's frontier. The tribes under discussion were nearly all sedentary agrarians (w/ exceptions like Huns and Avars, who really did begin as nomads). When migrations occurred, they were small scale in time and space - not vast, centuries-long wanderings. Goffart's historiographical essays make the following claims, offering an alternative view of what transpired (pp. 233-4): (1) The tribes of the Migration Age were not "wandering" peoples - they moved from a specific place and for a specific reason. There was no significantly greater tribal movement in the 5th century AD compared to the 2nd (for example); the difference was in Rome's capacity to respond. (2) "Germans" did not overthrow the "Roman" empire. Most tribes were destroyed (anyone remember the Scirians?) and the surviving peoples settled on Roman soil as "adherents to the Roman religion, defenders of Roman populations and laws, and preservers of the Roman language." (3) There were no "Germans" until the Middle Ages, and the notion of Vandals, Goths, etc., as foreigners from a distant, far northern homeland is a fiction born in Justinian's campaigns to restore the empire in the 6th century.

This last point is the focus of chapter 4, where Goffart demolishes the myth of Gothic origins by arguing that Jordanes' Getica was written by a Constantinopolitan who may not even have been a Goth, based on the work of Cassiodorus, an Italian at Theodoric's court in Ravenna. In point of fact, there's no reason to believe the people identified as "Goths" came from Scandinavia nor even that there was a consciousness of continuity between any putative northern origin and the people who invaded the empire.

In the 5th chapter, Goffart tackles the Rhine crossing on Dec. 31, 405/Jan. 1, 406, when a confederation of mixed tribes crossed the frozen Rhine, denuded of defenders called back to the hinterland to serve in the civil wars racking the empire at the time. Goffart doesn't attempt to ascertain motive - he can't. No one really can as the evidence doesn't exist. Consensus says it was Hunnic pressure from the east but there's no real evidence for this; it could have been internal pressures unremarked in later writings; it could have been provoked by Constantinople in its rivalry with Ravenna; or it could have been all or none or some of the above. "What decided the Danubians to combine with Alans and launch a one-way invasion across the Rhine is beyond our powers to determine. We can only be certain that...their behavior was hardly anomalous. Although the Empire left itself open to attack, it mattered more that barbaricum seemed worthy of being abandoned for a better if more perilous life" (p. 237).

Chapter 6 is a dense explanation of how barbarians were settled in the empire without too much social and economic disruption. It's based on Goffart's earlier work, Barbarians and Romans, A.D. 418-584, which stirred controversy because it turned common understanding - that Rome gave direct ownership of land to barbarians - upside down. Instead, the fractions of "land" allotted to barbarians refer to tax revenues. In order to finance barbarian settlements and do so in a manner that didn't generate massive unrest "imperial authorities abandoned a complex military system based on the collection of taxes and their redistribution to soldiers as rations and pay, and exchanged it for a scheme in which taxpayers and their assessed properties were directly assigned to individual soldiers as the permanent, hereditary source of their sustenance" (p. 236).

Chapter 7 is a series of case studies about some of the lesser known barbarian tribes, and a reflection on Gothic identity in Roman Italy. The thrust of the first part is that ethnic identity was fluid, fixed only in subsequent, more settled centuries looking to solidify their own ethnicity. The reconquest of Italy by Justinian is a prime example of that: There was no "Gothic" consciouslness. Totila, the last Ostrogothic king, fought to be recognized as the legitimate representative of the nomen romanum in Italy.

(End part one: I ran out of characters so my final thoughts are continued in the first comment.)

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very long and quite dry, but contains great argumentation about the Migration Theory of the barbarians and the deconstruction of German nationalist history.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is somewhat of a takedown of the scholarly concept of the "Völkerwanderung" or "Migration Age" towards the end of the (Western) Roman Empire. Goffart show in meticulous detail that the various sedentary peoples settling to the north and east of the Roman frontiers were nor wondering peoples at all. They simply moved from one stable position, where they sometimes lived for a century or longer, to another stable position. The "barbarians" were, at that time, already intermingled with and supporters of the Roman civil and military society. Franks, Sueves, Alans and Vandals had been marrying into the Roman society since the fourth century at least. They also occupied military positions within the Roman army (e.g. Stilicho was of Vandal descent).
The other, related concept Goffart takes issue with is that of a "Germanic people" that, through a mixture of migratory movement, conquest, land seizure and kigdom foundation brought about the downfall of the Roman Empire. Goffart can show that the existence of a "German" or "Germanic" identity in late antiquity is a learned invention of the sixteenth century, refined and "exuberantly" (Goffart) developed by generations until the present day. The connection between those tribes were linguistically, as can be shown by philological means of reconstruction. But they were at each others throats as much as they were fighting the Romans, and as said above, there was a lot of peaceful interaction on various layers of society.
The book is impressive for its level of detail, though I found the insistence on the key arguments, while overall compelling, sometimes a little too redundant.
On a final note, I wish I could have experienced Goffart and his wife Roberta Frank, a distinguished scholar of Old English and Old Norse, having, say, a scholarly argument during breakfast. Two brillant minds and their combined philological horsepower, that must have been quite a show... R.I.P. Walter Goffart

[Justin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Even if I partially agree with some of Goffart's claims about the too-casual, too-general use of the term "Germanic" to describe wildly different groups of barbarians (as the Romans would call them), his obsessive focus on the semantics of historical discourse while totally ignoring other sorts of non-literary evidence (like, for example, a little old field called "archaeology") sure is...odd? for an esteemed historian of Late Antiquity.

Goffart belabors his point to such a degree--is so preoccupied with belaboring--that he should look into becoming a doula.

[Anne Cupero · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting foray into the actual barbarian movements, not a sound bite about Romans and barbarians. The specifics of his arguments though were tedious, especially when he attempts to use this book to refute other historians. One piece of knowledge I came away with, is that there really is much more to the time period after the fall of the Roman Empire than is ever taught.

[Alex]

Important for understanding the myths of German nationalism.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not qualified to judge whether Goffart is right, particularly about hospitalitas and the settlement of barbarians in Roman provinces, but I enjoyed his detailed engagement with the primary sources. It's striking how little we actually know from primary sources, and how much imagination earlier generations of historians brought to the problem. Wickham, for one, is skeptical of Goffart's theory of tax allotments given to barbarians. On the face of it, it seemed a neat solution to the problem and Goffart's evidence seemed to line up with it.

The problem, in short, is how the various barbarians--Goths, Vandals, Franks, Lombards--settled in Italy and Gaul and the rest of Roman territory. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that suggests sustained conflicts between the Romans in those territories and the barbarians as a result of settlement. There's no land owner writing to complain about his land being given to a barbarian. The barbarians did serve in large numbers in the Roman army and had been billeted, at least in Gaul, in earlier times. Goffart proposes that a portion of local tax collections were given to the barbarians, which allowed them to be integrated into the local economy without displacement of Roman landowners.

Goffart's larger enterprise is to question whether there was anything Germanic about the barbarian tribes along the Roman border. Neither the barbarians nor the Romans called these tribes German. Tacitus's book was (entirely?) forgotten in late antiquity, only to be rediscovered in the 15th century. The description of a 5th century tribe like the Goths as German is a modern fantasy. His argument seems pretty convincing on this point, and more detailed than this short summary suggests.

There's similar success to be had at questioning the whole notion of barbarian migrations or a migration age. The migration from Scandinavia has scant mention in historical sources and seems likely to be an invention when it is mentioned. The tribes lived for hundreds of years in locations near the Danube and Rhine--which is hard to describe as a migration. They had likely lived there long enough to forget every living elsewhere.