Migrations and Invasions: Huns, Germans and Slavs 🔎

The Germanic Invasions, AD 378-439 🔎

The Roman empire at the end of the fourth century had an enormously long frontier, stretching in the north-west from the Tyne-Solway line followed by Hadrian’s Wall in Britain, along the length of the Rhine and Danube rivers to the Black Sea, and in the east from the eastern littoral of the Black Sea near modern Batumi down through the Caucasus into Armenia, across the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, through the great Syrian desert down to Sinai and across to Egypt, whence it followed the desert fringe across Libya/ Tripolitania into modern Tunisia and further west, north of the Atlas mountains, as far as the Atlantic Ocean. Defending such a vast territory was always a formidable task, and with relatively limited resources – an army of perhaps 250,000, including auxiliaries and allied forces, to defend a perimeter over 8,000 miles in length, as well as maintain internal security, combat brigandage and banditry and carry out a range of other less obviously military tasks – necessarily depended less on military power alone than on trade and commerce, diplomacy and cultural influence to avoid constant conflict. It is ironic, therefore, that much of the pressure on the frontier came not from forces who were hostile to the empire, but from those who wished to be part of the Roman state but who found that they were threatened by others behind them or rejected as barbarians by the culture they admired. This is, perhaps, to formulate the issues far too simplistically, but there is nevertheless an important element of truth here. By the same token, wars of conquest and then of containment into the third century CE had familiarised Roman armies and strategists with Germanic peoples and tactics, and Roman diplomacy, power-politics and cultural influence had all worked to maintain a degree of stability. From the late third century in particular, however, a series of developments across the broader Eurasian context destabilised these arrangements.

Germanic peoples had been on the move since the first century BCE, migrating from Scandinavia into north-eastern and central Europe. By the middle of the second century some had arrived in the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea and others had settled west of the Carpathians. A short-lived stability was reached with the establishment by the Ostrogoths and Visigoths of semi-nomadic pastoralist confederacies which evolved in contact with nomadic groups, such as the Iranian Alans, in the regions north of the Black Sea across to the Caspian. But while the Visigoths occupied a restricted region in what is now the western Ukraine and Romania, the Ostrogoths dominated the whole area from the Crimea up through the Ukraine and north to the shores of the Baltic, whose indigenous, largely Slav populations were made tributary.

Other groups had been under Roman influence for far longer, including the various west Germanic peoples described by Tacitus, for example, and with whom the Romans had had both friendly and hostile relations over the centuries. Some of these had been absorbed into Roman territory; the majority had by the fourth century come to form a series of independent, often competing but still Roman-influenced tribal entities along and behind the Rhine, again exercising tributary authority over many smaller groups, both Slav and Germanic. The two largest groups in the west were the Franks (along the northern and central Rhine), with the Burgundi – an eastern Germanic group – and the Alemanni (to their south). But associated with the latter in particular, and stretching along the upper Rhine and Danube, were the Marcomanni and the Quadi. Behind these groups the Jutes, Angles and Saxons in the north, the Lombards and Thuringi in the centre, and the Vandals, Gepids and Heruls in the south and east were also in frequent conflict with one another and with the dominant tribes. Raids across the frontier, or in the case of the northern groups, across the North Sea into Britannia, became increasingly frequent during the later fourth century, but pressure on the frontier and warfare with the various Germanic groups had always been a factor of Roman imperial existence. Marcus Aurelius had defeated the Marcomanni in the second century, Frankish and Alemannic raids had been common during the third century, and in the 350s and early 360s a Frankish-Alemannic attack was defeated by Julian.

This situation was transformed by the arrival of the Huns, however, who appeared on the borders of the Ostrogothic world in the late 360s CE. A mixed group of Turkic and Mongol tribes which had arisen out of the collapse of the great Hsiung-Nu confederacy on the eastern and central steppe in the first century CE, the Huns split during the fourth century into two major sub-factions, the White Huns, also called the Hephthalites, who invaded Iran from the north-east and caused substantial disruption and devastation, and the Black Huns, who set the Germanic peoples in motion – partly in response to Ostrogothic attempts to extend their control eastwards. The clash resulted in the rapid destruction of the Ostrogothic and Visigothic confederacies and the expansion of the Huns to the Danube by the early fifth century. In turn this set in motion the other Germanic peoples, and the enormous pressure this placed on Roman defences finally led to the collapse of the western frontiers and the occupation of large stretches of the western provinces by Germanic groups, initially as federates granted land and protection in return for military service, then as occupiers and conquerors.

The breaching of the Rhine frontier by the Suevi, Vandals and Alans and their move into southern Gaul and then Spain, the Visigothic invasion of the Thracian provinces in the 370s and their subsequent move first into Italy (Rome was sacked in 410), and then on to southern Gaul and Spain, the occupation of the region of Tunisia by the Asding Vandals who had fled the new Visigoth masters of Spain in the 420s, and the Frankish and Burgundian occupation of northern and eastern Gaul, all followed from this new international situation.

In eastern Europe the movement of the Slav peoples is related to, but slightly later than, these developments. By the middle of the sixth century the eastern empire was becoming familiar with the raiding of small bands of Slavs, and during the second half of the century it became clear that many of these bands were intent on permanent settlement wherever they could find suitable unoccupied land, or drive the indigenous population off. But the small, disorganised, if numerous, bands of Slavs were soon overwhelmed by the more aggressive Avars, a Turkic people whose dominant clan (known in Chinese sources as the Juan Juan) had been chased off their pastures by their former subordinates, the Blue Turk confederacy, and had fled westwards. Allying themselves with other disparate nomad groups they appeared on the empire’s borders in the 560s, and by the 580s had become a serious threat to imperial power in the Balkans.

The west and the rise of the successor kingdoms 🔎

The polities which succeeded Rome during the fifth and sixth centuries in the west all have their origins in the tumultuous changes which affected the western Eurasian world in the two preceding centuries, yet they had very different histories and outcomes.

The loose confederacy of Suevi, Alans and Vandals who crossed the Rhine in 406 spent the next three years extracting tribute and booty from Gaul, before crossing the Pyrenees in 409 and entering Spain. Here, the Suevi established their own kingdom in Galicia.

The Visigoths, who had moved from the Balkans into Italy and thence (from 412) into southern Gaul after the sack of Rome and subsequent death of their leader Alaric in 410, had established their own state around Toulouse by about 418 – a move encouraged by the imperial government, which pitted the Visigoths against a rival emperor set up under Frankish and Alemannic influence. In 416 the Visigoths then advanced against the Siling Vandals and Alans in south-western and southern Spain, whom they crushed, before being offered an independent kingdom in south-western Gaul. This saved the remaining Suevi and the Asding Vandals in the north-western regions and Galicia; but by the late 420s the latter were on the move again, crossing in 429 into North Africa. Threatened by the establishment of a Vandal kingdom with naval power at its disposal and with the potential fatally to disrupt the grain supplies of Rome, the imperial government was forced to accept and to recognise formally the King of the Vandals, Gaiseric, as an independent ruler.

Germanic raiders from the Danish peninsula and the North Sea coastlands had meanwhile transformed the political landscape in the British provinces. In 410 Rome appears officially to have conceded to local British authorities the right to organise their own defences, in view of the lack of substantial imperial forces. Although the history of the British provinces is clouded in obscurity at this time, local polities led by Romano-British nobles and by Celtic warlords appear to have evolved, competing with one another and with raiders from Ireland, from the Pictish lands to the north, and from the Saxons, Jutes and Angles in north-west Germany, Denmark and the Low Countries. The latter were also employed as mercenaries, and by the later fifth century certain groups had a firm foothold and would, during the sixth century, succeed in establishing a political dominance in much of the southern and central lowlands.

Both the Salian and Ripuarian Frankish groups had been officially permitted to reside on Roman territory along the Rhine by Honorius in 410 as a result of the pressures he faced elsewhere. Several other Frankish groups remained in Franconia. Those Franks who settled within the empire supplied federate troops to the Roman armies. In central and northern Gaul the Salian Franks, having moved first into the low countries, were then able to establish themselves, precariously at first, in the valleys of the Moselle and Rhine, and by the last years of the century had succeeded in defeating the last remnants of independent Roman rule in the Seine valley, defeating and incorporating into their territory the Ripuarian Franks (settled originally on the right bank of the Rhine but occupying territory on the ‘Roman’ side during the fifth century), and driving off the Alemanni who threatened them from the south-east in the late 490s. Frankish control was broad – the valleys of the Loire and Seine and the central French plain were the heartland, but Frankish rule extended down to the Visigothic lands stretching across from the Pyrenees into northern Italy, across to the valleys of Main and Rhine in the east, and down to the Burgundian lands about the headwaters of the Rhône in the south-east. The conversion to orthodox Christianity of the Frankish king Clovis in 506 won the Franks the support, or at least disarmed the opposition of, the Gallo-Roman élite and the church, facilitating the consolidation of Frankish power, gaining diplomatic and political support from the eastern emperor Anastasius against the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, as well as the support of the papacy and thus political legitimacy.

The situation in Italy was, if anything, more complex. The general Odovacar (Odoacer), the effective ruler in the Italian provinces, deposed the Emperor Romulus (Augustulus) in 476. In his manifesto to the eastern emperor, Zeno, he claimed that the western army had deposed its commander-in-chief Orestes (Romulus’ father) and the emperor, and that he was himself acting on behalf of the senate. And upon sending the western emperor’s diadem to Zeno, he asked to be recognised as the emperor’s representative in Italy, with the title of patricius, on the grounds that one emperor was sufficient. Political circumstances demanded that Zeno concur. But Odovacar styled himself rex, king, not simply as senator, magistrate and patrician, and his followers – made up of the eastern Germanic groups of the Scyrii, Rugii and others – clearly saw him as their king and warleader. He ruled Italy from Ravenna for the next 17 years, until – after a conflict that lasted some five years from 488 to 493 – he was defeated by Theoderic and his Ostrogoths, who had been offered the opportunity of acting on behalf of the emperors to re-establish imperial authority in Italy (and as a means of removing the threat they posed to Roman power in the Balkans). While he acted as King of the Goths, Theoderic was a Roman citizen and maintained as far as he was able the structures and fabric of Roman government and society, retaining the framework of Roman administration, hierarchy and offices. As an Arian Christian, of course (although he has also been understood as a ‘homoean’), he was viewed by many of his non-German subjects as a heretic. But in all other respects he made a genuine effort to shore up Roman traditions, which – like many other ‘barbarian’ leaders – he greatly esteemed, and seems to have been held in considerable respect by both the papacy and the mass of the population. His Gothic soldiery replaced the Scyrii and Rugii as the ‘Roman’ army in Italy, and were settled according to late Roman principles. Eventually, in the 520s, conflicts of interest between the Gothic élite and some elements of the Roman senate, on the one hand, and other members of the Roman establishment in Italy, coupled with Theoderic’s failure to secure recognition at Constantinople for his heir, led to political crisis and the intervention of Constantinople in the politics of the court at Ravenna. The result was the invasion of Ostrogothic Italy and the devastating 20-year war which, although it resulted eventually in a Roman victory, both exhausted Italy and prepared the way for the subsequent successes of the Lombards who marched into the Po valley in 568.