Authors: Peter Heather

Empires and Barbarians (104 page)

Not, of course, that any of this really spelled the end of migration.
Some human beings are always on the move in search of greater prosperity or better conditions of life, and European history from the tenth century onwards is still marked by migration on a periodically massive scale. From late in the first millennium onwards, however, medieval migration generally took one of two characteristic forms. On the one hand, we see knight-based elite transfers. The Norman Conquest is a particularly large-scale and successful example of this phenomenon. Much more usual were bands of one or two hundred well-armed men looking to establish small principalities for themselves by ousting sitting elites and/or establishing their rights to draw economic support from a dependent labour force. The productive rootedness of peasantry and the empowering effect of new military technologies were key factors in dictating the characteristics of this particular migratory form. Castles and armour allowed them to establish a form of local domination based on quite small numbers of men that was extremely hard to shift. The other common form of migration was the deliberate recruitment of peasantry to work the land, with lords offering attractive tenurial terms to provide the incentive, and employing agents to run recruiting campaigns. Again, new patterns of development were of crucial importance here, since the extra agricultural productivity of the new arable farming technologies being put into practice in the late first millennium made it highly desirable for the masters of the landscape to secure sufficient labour to maximize agricultural outputs. Though they had come a long way, the new Slavic states still lagged behind western and southern Europe in levels of economic development. They therefore figured among the chief customers for the new peasant labour being mobilized from more developed parts of Europe where higher population levels reduced opportunities for ambitious peasants to get more land on better terms. As a result, hundreds of thousands of peasants from west-central Europe would be attracted eastwards by the offer of land on much better terms than could be secured at home, and the Slavicization of much of old Germanic Europe that had occurred in the early Middle Ages was partly reversed by an influx of Germanic-speaking peasants.
¹⁸

NEWTON’S THIRD LAW OF EMPIRES?

Both of these later medieval forms of migration are very well evidenced, operating, as they did, in an era when literacy was intensifying across most of Europe, so their importance within developing European history cannot be contested in the way that that of their earlier counterparts of the first millennium has come to be. The prevalence of these different forms in a later era, however, is no objection to the broader argument of this book, that larger-scale, socially more broadly based predatory forms of migration than knight-based expansion had played a hugely important role in the making of Europe in the first millennium. The later migratory forms were entirely appropriate to the economic and political conditions prevailing across the Europe of the central Middle Ages. The kinds of large-scale predatory migration flow studied in this book – essentially combining peasants and elites within the same migrating groups, where the later Middle Ages saw them move separately – were equally appropriate to their own area. In the first millennium, highly disparate patterns of development then combined with a lack of agricultural rootedness and relatively low agricultural outputs. This meant that the economy of barbarian Europe could support only very few military specialists, so that it was necessary and possible for ambitious leaders to put together large and hence necessarily broad-based expeditions to secure wealth-generating positions on the fringes of more developed, imperial Europe. This in turn generated forms of migration that were different from those operating in the central Middle Ages, and different again from those we are used to in the modern world. Migration in the first millennium looks thus not because our sources were infected with a distorting cultural reflex, but because prevailing circumstances contrasted in some key ways from those operating subsequently. They entirely conform to the basic principles of modern migration, however, in that direction of movement and form of the migration unit were both largely dictated by prevailing patterns of development.

In short, there is every reason to respond to the limitations of the old invasion-hypothesis model not by rejecting migration as an
important explanatory factor in first-millennium history, but by bringing a series of more complex migration models back into the picture. Deployed in more analytic fashion, migration ceases to be a catch-all, simplistic alternative to ‘more complex’ lines of explanation focusing on social, economic and political change. Understood properly, and this is the central message screaming out from the comparative literature, migration is not a separate and competing form of explanation to social and economic transformation, but the complementary other side of the same coin. Patterns of migration are dictated by prevailing economic and political conditions, and another dimension in fact of their evolution; they both reflects existing inequalities, and sometimes even help to equalize them, and it is only when viewed from this perspective that the real significance of migratory phenomena can begin to emerge. A further line of thought that follows from this is that prehistorians should perhaps not be too quick to reject predatory migration either as a periodic contributor to the shaping of Europe’s deeper past. If the argument is correct that the predatory forms of migration observable periodically in the first millennium were generated by a reasonable degree of geographical proximity between zones of highly disparate levels of development, combined with the existence of societies where those who farmed also fought and were not deeply rooted in one particular patch of soil, then these are conditions which are likely to have existed in many other ancient contexts too, and periodic predatory migration could reasonably be expected as one natural consequence.

That is no more than a side issue for this study, however, and thinking about the transformation of barbarian Europe in the first millennium in overall terms, there is no doubt that development played a profoundly more important role in the process than migration. Old narratives had this the other way round, emphasizing the arrival of named peoples at their assigned places across the map of Europe at different points within the millennium, until all the modern nations were in place. In this view, movement and arrival were the events of key historical importance, and what happened subsequently was so much detail. This was deeply mistaken. Much more important than these occasional moments of arrival, many of which led precisely nowhere, were the dynamic interactions between the imperial powers of more developed Europe and the barbarians on their doorstep: Germanic, largely, in the first half of the millennium, then Slavic,
largely, in the second. It was these interactions, not acts of migration, that were ultimately responsible for generating the new social, economic and political structures which brought former barbarian Europe much more to resemble its imperial counterpart by the end of the millennium. This is not to say that these transformations were inherently a good thing, or that there was something inherently better about imperial Europe, but the evidence leads directly to the conclusion that it was new connections with imperial Europe, and the responses to those new connections on the part of elements within barbarian societies, that ultimately demolished the staggering disparities in development that had existed at the birth of Christ. This in a nutshell is the second major argument I have been attempting to make. Not everywhere in Europe was Christian and full of states built around castles, knights and a productive peasantry by the year 1000, but this was true to an extent that would have astonished Tacitus in the first century
AD
. He thought that eastern Europe was home to creatures with ‘human faces and features, but the bodies and limbs of beasts’; in his terms, barbarian Europe was barbarian no longer.
¹⁹

Migration had played a role – sometimes a very major one – in this unfolding story. Especially if you take the definition of mass or significant migration offered in the comparative literature – and I have found this extremely helpful – migration can be understood as central to the action at various key points in the millennium. Perhaps above all, the Hunnic ‘accident’ threw enough more organized Germanic groupings on to Roman soil in a short enough space of time both to undermine the central Roman state and to generate a massive collapse in the old power structures of barbarian central Europe. This in turn allowed for an extraordinary Slavic diaspora whose cultural effects – the widespread Slavicization of central and eastern Europe – remain a central feature of the European landmass to this day. These are hardly minor phenomena. Even so, migration should generally be given only a secondary position behind social, economic and political transformation when explaining how it was that barbarian Europe evolved into non-existence in the course of the millennium. For one thing, aside from particular and unusual moments like the Hunnic or Avar accidents, patterns of migration were entirely dictated by and secondary to patterns of development. It was only when nomadic intruders added a much stronger shade of politically motivated migration into the picture that the relationship was reversed, and migration started to dictate
patterns of development, undermining both the west Roman state and Germanic Europe in one fell swoop.

Even without the Huns, moreover, these processes of development would eventually have undermined the Roman Empire. Looked at in the round, what emerges from the first-millennium evidence is that living next to a militarily more powerful and economically more developed intrusive imperial neighbour promotes a series of changes in the societies of the periphery, whose cumulative effect is precisely to generate new structures better able to fend off the more unpleasant aspects of imperial aggression. In the first millennium, this happened on two separate occasions. We see it first in the emergence of Germanic client states of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, and again – this time to more impressive effect – in the rise of the new Slavic states of the ninth and tenth. This repeated pattern, I would argue, is not accidental, and provides one fundamental reason why empires, unlike diamonds, do not last forever. The way that empires tend to behave, the mixture of economic opportunity and intrusive power that is inherent in their nature, prompts responses from those affected which in the long run undermine their capacity to maintain the initial power advantage that originally made them imperial. Not all empires suffer the equivalent of Rome’s Hunnic accident and fall so swiftly to destruction. In the course of human history, many more have surely been picked apart slowly from the edges as peripheral dynasts turned predator once their own power increased. One answer to the transitory nature of imperial rule, in short, is that there is a Newtonian third law of empires. The exercise of imperial power generates an opposite and equal reaction among those affected by it, until they so reorganize themselves as to blunt the imperial edge. Whether you find that comforting or frightening, I guess, will depend on whether you live in an imperial or peripheral society, and what stage of the dance has currently been reached. The existence of such a law, however, is one more general message that exploring the interactions of emperors and barbarians in the first millennium
AD
can offer us today.

M
APS

1. Roman and Barbarian Europe at the birth of Christ

2. Germanic political groupings in the time of Tacitus

3 Germanic Europe in the mid-fourth century

4. The Marcomannic War

5. The Agri Decumates and Elbgermanic Triangle

6. Third century Germanic expansion to the Black Sea

7. The Crisis of 376–80

8. The Crisis of 405–8

9: Repeat migrations

10. Attilas subjects

11. Early Anglo-Saxon England