Empires and Barbarians (3 page)

Nor was it so different in the past. ‘The history of mankind is the history of migration.’
¹
This is a truism, but, as with most truisms, one that is in a broad sense correct. It is a basic implication of the currently available evidence for human evolution that, having evolved in one favourable context on the continent of Africa, different hominid species then used the adaptive skills provided by their extra brain power to colonize most land environments on the planet. The whole world, in essence, is peopled by the offspring of immigrants and asylum seekers.

The recorded history of the last millennium, too, throws up many examples of migration, some of them – especially those originating from within Europe – remarkably well documented. The modern USA, of course, is a phenomenon created by immigrants. Up to sixty million Europeans migrated overseas between 1820 and 1940 to destinations worldwide, thirty-eight million of them to North America. Continuing waves of especially Hispanic-speaking immigration mean that the US story has not yet reached any kind of conclusion. Likewise, a quarter of a million people emigrated from Spain to the New World in the sixteenth century, another two hundred thousand in the first half of the seventeenth. In the same centuries, respectively, eighty thousand and half a million British braved the North Atlantic. Moving still further back in time, the documentation becomes scrappy, but migration was certainly a significant phenomenon. In the high medieval period, perhaps two hundred thousand Germanic-speaking peasants
moved east of the Elbe during the twelfth century alone to take lands in Holstein, west Brandenburg and the Saxon marches.
²

This book is concerned with a still more distant past: Europe in the first millennium
AD
. It is a world that hovers between history and prehistory. Some parts of it are studied primarily through written historical sources, others through the material remains that are the preserve of archaeologists. This range of evidence and its combinations pose particular challenges, but there is no doubt that migrants of all kinds were busy within the frontiers of Europe in the thousand years after the birth of Christ. Given the overall part that migration has played in human history, it would be bizarre if they had not been. The first two centuries
AD
saw Romans move outwards from Italy to bring the joys of town life and central heating to large parts of western Europe. But it is the migration of so-called barbarians from beyond the borders of imperial Europe that has long been seen as fundamentally characteristic of the first millennium.

Who were these barbarians, and where and how were they living at around the time that Christ was born in Bethlehem?

At the start of the first millennium, imperial Europe, defined by the reach of Rome’s legions, stretched out from the Mediterranean basin as far north – broadly speaking – as the River Danube and as far east as the Rhine. Beyond these lines lay Europe’s barbarians, who occupied some of the central European uplands and most of the Great European Plain, the largest of Europe’s four main geographical regions (
Map 1
). The unity of this vast area, however, lies in geological structure, not human geography. While heavy clay soils are characteristic throughout its wide expanses, distinct variations in climate and hence vegetation generate marked differences in its farming potential, both because of
the growing seasons and the basic fertility of the soil. Western parts, particularly southern Britain, northern France and the Low Countries, are governed by Atlantic weather systems, bringing mild, damp winters and cooler summers with, again, plenty of rain. Why it was the British who invented cricket, the only game that cannot be played in the rain, remains one of history’s great mysteries. Central and eastern reaches of the plain enjoy a more continental climate, with colder winters and hotter, drier summers. Average winter temperatures fall as you move further east, and summer rainfall declines in a south-easterly direction. Historically, this has had huge effects on farming, particularly in pre-modern eras employing only limited agricultural technologies. In the south-east, even in the famously fertile black-soil region of Ukraine, productivity was limited by low summer rainfall, with settlements clinging to the river valleys. North and east, winter cold imposed serious limitations. Because of the cold, the characteristic deciduous and mixed deciduous/coniferous forests which comprise the natural vegetation of most areas of the plain eventually give way, first to purely coniferous taiga forest and then to arctic tundra. Broadly speaking, the northern boundary of the mixed woodland zone marks the edge of that part of the European landscape where enough humus built up in the soil in the dim and distant past to make normal farming, or an adapted version of it, possible.

At the start of the first millennium
AD
, much of this plain was still heavily wooded, and northern Europe was a long way from developing its full agricultural potential. This was not just because of the trees, but also because of the soil. Potentially highly productive, the thick clay soils of the North European Plain required heavy ploughs to maintain their fertility: ploughs capable not just of cutting furrows but of turning the soil over, so that the nutrients in weeds and crop residues could rot into the soil and be reclaimed for the next growing season. In the mid- and high Middle Ages, this problem was solved by the
carruca
, the four-wheeled iron-shod plough drawn by up to eight oxen, but at the start of the millennium most of Europe’s barbarians were doing little more – literally – than scratching the surface. So the inhabitants of the European plain were farming at very little, if anything, above subsistence level, and the population was distributed between isolated, cultivated islands amidst a sea of green.

Mediterranean commentators were always much more interested in themselves than in the barbarian ‘other’ across the frontier, but even
they could see that there were more of these islands of cultivation, and hence a denser overall population, the further west you went. More specifically, they divided the barbarian occupants of the Great European Plain into Germani and Scythians. There had previously been Celts – Keltoi – too, but most of previously Celtic western- and central-southern Europe had been swallowed up by the advance of Roman might. And already at the start of the millennium, these areas were set on a non-barbarian trajectory towards Latin, towns and rubbish collection. The archaeological evidence suggests that the placing of the new boundary of imperial Europe wasn’t just an accident. Pre-Roman Celtic material culture is famous for a distinctive art style, expressed particularly in beautifully crafted metalwork. Celtic settlements of the period also shared a general sophistication in other aspects of material culture: amongst other things, technologically advanced wheel-turned pottery, substantial and often walled settlements (so-called
oppida
), and the considerable use of iron tools to generate a comparatively productive agriculture.
³

The material remains thrown up by Germanic-speakers in the same period, by contrast, were generally of a much less rich and developed kind. Typical finds from Germanic Europe consist of cremation burials in urns with few or no gravegoods, only hand-worked rather than wheel-made pottery, no developed metalwork style and no
oppida
. The general level of agricultural productivity in Germanic-dominated areas was also much less intense. It was precisely because the economy of Germanic Europe produced less of an agricultural surplus than neighbouring Celtic regions, of course, that there was smaller scope for the employment of the specialist smiths and artists required to produce sophisticated metalwork. And while the Romans never took a broad strategic decision to absorb just Celtic Europe, the narratives of attempted conquest indicate that Roman commanders on the ground eventually came to appreciate that the less developed economy of Germanic Europe just wasn’t worth the effort of conquest. Traditional accounts of Rome’s failure to conquer the Germani, as these Germanic-speakers are now often called, emphasize the latter’s destruction of Varus’ three legions at the battle of the Teutoburger Wald in 7
AD
. Reality was more prosaic. The defeat was heavily avenged by the Romans in the years that followed, but this couldn’t hide the fact that potential taxes from a conquered Germanic Europe would pay neither for the costs of conquest nor for its subsequent garrisoning.

As a result, shortly after the birth of Christ, different Germanic-speaking groups were left in control of a vast tract of Europe between the Rivers Rhine and Vistula (
Map 1
). The primary social and political units of these Germani were characteristically small. Tacitus in the first century and Ptolemy in the second provide an almost bewildering list of group names, which you can only approximately plot on a map. The key point emerges nonetheless with total clarity. There were so many of these political units (‘tribes’ if you like, but that word carries a lot of potentially inappropriate baggage) that, individually, they must have been extremely small-scale.

Not all of this area had always, or perhaps even for long, been the preserve of Germani. Graeco-Roman sources document that Germanic Europe had grown in size periodically, even if they provide almost no circumstantial detail about the processes involved. The Germanic-speaking Bastarnae moved south-east of the Carpathians at the end of the third century
BC
, for instance, to become the dominant force north-west of the Black Sea. Around the turn of the millennium, the Germanic-speaking Marcomanni evicted the Celtic Boii from the upland basin of Bohemia. When we talk of Germanic Europe, therefore, we are really talking about Germanic-
dominated
Europe, and there is no reason to suppose that the entire population of this truly vast area – some of it militarily subdued in the fairly recent past – was culturally homogeneous in terms of belief systems or social practice, or even that it necessarily spoke the same language.
⁴

‘Scythia’ was a catch-all term among Graeco-Roman geographers for inhabitants of eastern parts of the North European Plain, stretching from the River Vistula and the fringes of the Carpathian Mountains to the Volga and the Caucasus (
Map 1
). In Greek geographical and ethnographic tradition, it was often portrayed as a chill wilderness, the archetypal ‘other’, the mirror image of Greek civilization. And to the inhabitants of this world, every imaginable type of uncivilized behaviour was ascribed: blinding, scalping, flaying, tattooing, even drinking wine unmixed with water. In reality, the territory designated by this term encompassed a wide variety of habitats. In the valleys of the great rivers flowing gently south out of the eastern reaches of the Great European Plain good farming country could be found, within, at least, the temperate zones marked by the extent of the forested steppe. To the south lay the much drier landscape of the steppe proper, whose expansive grasslands provided a natural home for the herds of the
nomad. Further north and east, less intensive farming regimes gradually faded out, leaving the landscape for the hunter-gatherers of the Arctic Circle.
⁵

Of these different population groups, nomads will play a major role in our story of the transformation of barbarian Europe in the first millennium, but only an indirect one, so there is no need to explore their world in detail. Suffice it to say that by the start of this period nomad populations had long tended to roam the lands south-east of the Carpathians and north of the Black Sea. Geologically, this landscape is again part of the European plain, but a general lack of summer rainfall makes farming precarious or impossible. East of the River Don, there isn’t enough rain to make farming viable without irrigation, a technology which singularly failed to penetrate these lands in antiquity, and the land retained its natural vegetation: steppe grassland. West of the Don, enough water for farming is to hand in some of the river valleys, but these valleys sit in close proximity to a large swathe of territory, just inland from the Black Sea coast, which is again natural steppe country. Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, political domination of this landscape in antiquity tended to switch backwards and forwards between nomad and more settled agricultural groups. At the birth of Christ, the Germanic-speaking Bastarnae and Peucini who had moved into the region in the third century
BC
still retained their domination, but it was about to be overturned by nomadic Sarmatians, who swept through the area in the first century
AD
.
⁶

North of the forested steppe, the eastern reaches of the North European Plain are swathed in vast stretches of increasingly coniferous forest. Here, as average winter temperatures fall lower and there is less humus in the soil, conditions become much tougher for farming. It was a world little known to the Mediterranean at the start of the first millennium. In his
Germania
, Tacitus places the hunter-gatherer Fenni (Finns) in the far north, and another group, the Veneti (or Venethi), between them and the Germanic Peucini on the fringes of the Carpathians:

The Veneti have taken a great many customs from the Sarmatians, for in plundering forays they roam through all the forests and hills that rise between the Peucini and Fenni. Still, they are more properly classed as Germani, because they have fixed homes and bear shields and take pleasure in moving fast by foot.

Pliny, a little earlier, had likewise heard of the Venedae, as he names them, but reports no detailed information, and even the second-century geographer Ptolemy knew little more about them than a few of their group names. The area was a touch less mysterious than what lay beyond, where people had ‘human faces and features, but the bodies and limbs of beasts’, but only just.

Archaeologically, the picture of the inhabitants of these wooded and forested zones of eastern Europe around the birth of Christ is reasonably straightforward. As Tacitus’ comment about permanent settlements implies, it was a world of farmers, but farmers with an extremely simple material culture, less developed even than that prevailing further west in Germanic Europe. The remains of its pottery, tools and settlement are so simple, in fact, that they frustrate any attempt at stylistic or even chronological categorization, being extremely slow to change before the second half of the first millennium
AD
. This archaeological evidence suggests that it was a world of small, isolated farming settlements, operating at a lower subsistence level than the Germani, with little sign of any surplus, and none of trade links with the richer world of the Mediterranean to the south. The ethnic and linguistic identity of these forest-dwelling Veneti has generated much discussion, in particular regarding their relationship, if any, with the Slavic-speakers who become so prominent in European history after about 500
AD
. We will return to this discussion in
Chapter 8
, but it would appear that the likeliest place to find Slavs – or their most direct ancestors – at the birth of Christ was somewhere among these simple farming populations of the easternmost stretches of the Great European Plain.
⁷