Despite Western conventions, it is important to view the barbarian migrations as a whole. They were
not
confined to the Germanic peoples, nor to the Roman frontline in the West. What appeared in the West as a sudden deluge at the end of the fourth century was just one act in a drama that was far more extensive both geographically and chronologically.
The first sign of the coming deluge occurred in 376, when the Ostrogoths, pressed by the Huns, petitioned the Emperor Valens to settle in Moesia. Some of them were allowed to cross the Danube, but were required to surrender both their arms and their children. Two years later, in August 378, they fought a pitched battle at Hadrianopolis (Edirne) in which the Emperor was killed. Thanks to the heavy cavalry of the Goths’ allies, the Sarmatian Alans, Rome’s invincible legions were decisively beaten. (In military history, that demonstration of the power of Sarmatian-style lances and their oversize chargers marks the debut of the most characteristic features of medieval warfare.) Four years after that it was the turn of the Visigoths. Their king and war-leader, Alaric, cannot have been indifferent to the Ostrogoths’ success. He was given the title of
magister militum illyricorum
as a sop. But in the course of a thirty-year adventure his imperial office did not restrain him from sacking first Athens (396) and then Rome (410). The immediate cause of Alaric’s wrath lay in the Empire’s refusal to accept the Visigoths for settlement in Noricum. Thereafter, he conceived a plan to take them to Africa. But his death at Cosenza caused yet another change of direction. Alaric’s successor, Athaulf, married the captured stepsister of the Emperor Honorius, whilst his brother Wallia gave the Visigoths respite by settling them in Aquitaine. The Visigoth kingdom of Tolosa (Toulouse) was short-lived. But it provided the springboard from which, some time after 507, the Visigoths set out to create their most enduring legacy in Spain.
The rampage of the Visigoths provided an opening for three more huge invasions. When the legions of Gaul were withdrawn to protect Constantinople from Alaric, the garrison of the Rhine was dangerously thinned. Some time around 400 the Burgundians took their chance to move into the area at the confluence of Rhine and Main. Thirty years later they were challenged by the Roman general Aetius, whose Hunnish auxiliaries drove them off. But in 443 they were back to settle permanently in the vicinity of Lyons. Henceforth the Burgundian Kingdom developed in the valleys of the Rhone and Saône, controlling the principal Alpine passes, [
NIBELUNG
]
At Christmas 406 a vast horde of barbarians crossed the frozen Rhine near Coblenz. Vandals, Suevi, and Alans poured into Gaul. The Vandals took a roundabout route to Alaric’s original destination in Africa. They crossed the Pyrenees in 409, the Straits of Gibraltar in 429, and the gates of Carthage in 439. They took 33 years to cover the 2,500 miles from the Rhine. From their Carthaginian base they took to the sea, seizing the Balearic Islands and Sardinia. In 455, under Genseric, they imitated Alaric and sacked Rome. The Vandal kingdom in Africa remained a major force until the restoration of imperial power in the following century. The Vandals parted company with their original companions, the Suevi
and the Alans, in Spain. The Suevi created a kingdom in the far north-west, in Galicia; the western Alans went for the valley of the Tagus.
NIBELUNG
F
OR
several decades at the turn of the fifth century, the Burgundian court stood at Worms on the Rhine, the ancient
Civitas Vangionum
. Known as Nibelungs after a former chief, the Burgundians had been brought in as auxiliaries on the imperial frontier. They were to be driven out in 435–6 during battles with the Roman general Aetius and the advancing Huns. The names of three royal brothers Gundharius (Gunther), Gislaharius (Giselher), and Godomar (Gemot) are known from the later
Lex Burgundiorum
. After halting at Geneva, they moved on to Lyons, where in 461 they set up the first Kingdom of Burgundy, [
LUGOUNUM
] A plaque on the site of the former palace at Worms recalls that city’s distinctions:
Here Was
The Holy Temple Area of the Romans
The Royal Castle of the Nibelungen
The Imperial Residence of Charlemagne
The Court of the Prince-Bishop of Worms
Destroyed by the French in the Years 1689 and 1745.
More than One Hundred Imperial and Princely Diets
Took Place Here.
Here, Before Emperor and Empire, Stood
Martin Luther
1
Further north, near the present frontier of the Netherlands, stands the cathedral of St Victor at Xanten
(Ad Sanctos)
. St Victor, a Christian martyr of the late Roman era, is taken to be the prototype of the legendary warrior Siegfried (Victory-Peace).
At the time of the Burgundians’ sojourn at Worms, the Huns of Attila were still camped on the plains of the Middle Danube. They too form one of the many historical elements which, interwoven with the fantasies of myth and saga, form the basis for the most famous Germanic legends.
The
Nibelungenlied
is an epic poem of some 2,300 rhyming stanzas written in Austria in the early thirteenth century. Of 34 extant manuscripts, MS A is kept at Munich, MS B at St Gall, and MS C at Donaueschingen. All variants relate the adventures of the Burgundian court following the arrival of the invincible Prince Siegfried—dragon-slayer, guardian of the Nibelungs’ treasure, and owner of the magic cape of darkness. Siegfried saves the country from a Saxon army, overpowers the Icelandic princess Brunhild, who will only submit to a man that can defeat her in athletic contest, and, after ceding Brunhild to King Gunther, wins the hand of Gunther’s sister, Krimhild. The harmony of the two couples cools when Brunhild learns the secret of her defeat. Gunther’s retainer Hagen discovers Siegfried’s one point of weakness, kills him with a spear as he is drinking at a spring, and casts his treasure into the Rhine.
2
(See Plate 9.)
Just as the unknown author of the
Nibelungenlied
transposed these pagan tales into the courtly and Christian idiom of medieval Germany, so Richard Wagner would transpose them, embellished, into the idiom of Romantic opera in
Das Rheingold
(1869),
Die Walküre
(1870),
Siegfried
(1872), and
Götterdammerung
(1876). The first complete performance of the Ring Cycle took place at the Festspielhaus, Bayreuth, in August 1876.
In the second part of the
Nibelungenlied
, the widowed Krimhild leaves Germany to marry the heathen Etzel (Attila). In due course, she invites her Burgundian relatives to visit her at Etzelburg/Gran (the modern Esztergöm). Her aim is to avenge her beloved Siegfried. After cutting off Hagen’s head with Siegfried’s faithful sword, she leads all the poem’s principal personalities into a bloodbath of common hatred.
Modern literary pilgrims can trace the road of the Burgundian party from Worms to ‘Hunland’. They go from the ‘See of the Three Rivers’ at Passau, where Krimhild’s brother was bishop, to the seat of Count Rudiger at Bechlaren (Pochlam), and on to the fortress of Melk, to the Roman gate of Traismauer, to Tulln, where Etzel awaited his bride, and to Vienna, where the seventeen-day wedding banquet was held. Yet at the end all is sorrow:
Hier hat die Mär ein Ende.
Diz ist der Nibelunge Not.
(Here the tale has its end. This is the Nibelung’s downfall)
In Britain, the departure of the legions in 410 gave a signal for the onslaught of the sea raiders. For more than a century, the Roman governors had sought to hold the forts of the ‘Saxon Shore’. Now the Romano-Britons were left to their own devices. Some Roman troops may possibly have returned for a decade or two after 418; but a vain appeal for assistance was made to Aetius in 446. Soon afterwards, all regular contact between Britain and the Empire was severed. Henceforth, the Anglo-Saxon longships brought not just raiders but mercenaries and colonists. In 457 Kent was surrendered to Hengest’s Jutes, a tribe that had worked its way from ‘Jutland’ in Denmark via Frisia. The Angles, who left a sign of their earlier abode in the district of ‘Angeln’ in Schleswig, took over Britain’s eastern coastlands. They sailed into the Humber, founding communities which underlay the expansive kingdom of Mercia, meaning the March or ‘Frontier’. The Saxons, under Aelle, first landed on the south coast, laying the foundation of the kingdom of the south Saxons (Sussex). Others—the middle Saxons (Middlesex) and the east Saxons (Essex)—moved up the valley of the Thames.
Thus began the long conquest and settlement of eastern Britain which resulted in the emergence of ‘England’. For three centuries and more, hundreds of local
chieftains controlled their own minuscule statelets, until by a process of merger and annexation the larger groupings emerged. The most powerful of the later Anglo-Saxon principalities, that of the West Saxons (Wessex), did not eliminate its rivals until 940—five hundred years after the first Anglo-Saxon raids. In the meantime the hard-pressed Britons struggled to stem the tide. Their victory under the semi-legendary King Arthur at Mons Badonicus c.500 served to hold the Anglo-Saxons back, and to preserve the Celts of the West, [
TRISTAN
]
Whilst the Germanic tribes overran the Empire’s western provinces, the instigators of the cataclysm, the Huns, finally made their appearance in Pannonia. They built their tented capital on the plains of the Tisza (Theiss) in 420. In 443 they came under the rule of Attila (c.404–53). His was a name that became a byword for wanton destruction: ‘The grass never grew where his horse had trod.’ For several seasons this ‘Scourge of God’ wreaked havoc in the Empire’s Danubian provinces. In 451 he rode to the north and west, collecting assorted barbarian allies, including Gepids and Burgundians. He spared Paris, protected by the prayers of St Geneviève. But on the Catalaunian Plains near Châlons, on grassland well suited to his cavalry, he met bloody defeat at the hands of a coalition formed by Aetius from Theodoric’s Visigoths and the Salian Franks under the ‘Sea-born’ Merovech. ‘His retreat beyond the Rhine comprised the last victory achieved in the name of the western Empire.’
6
Attila then turned on Italy. Turin, Padua, and Aquileia suffered the earlier fate of Metz. ‘The succeeding generation could scarce discover the ruins of Aquileia.’ At Milan, Attila was offended by a mural in the royal palace which showed the princes of Scythia prostrate before the imperial throne. He commanded a painter to reverse the roles. In 452, on the shores of Lake Bolsena, he was somehow persuaded to withdraw by the Patriarch of Rome, Leo I. Suitably enough, having retired to the Tisza with an item of female loot called Ildico, he expired during the nuptial night from a burst artery, ‘suffocated by a torrent of blood … which regurgitated into his stomach and lungs’. The horsemen of the Hunnic horde dispersed as quickly as they had appeared. Shattered by the treacherous attack of their former allies, they were forced to cede their hold on the Pannonian station to the Gepids and the Ostrogoths, [
CSABA
]
[
EPIDEMIA
]
Attila’s death gave the Ostrogoths the chance to assert their independence to the full. Advancing from Pannonia, they launched into a campaign of rapine in the Eastern Empire which did not cease until Theodoric received the usual prize, together with the titles of
magister militum
and
patricius
of Italy. Unfortunately for him, another barbarian warlord was in the field. Having casually deposed the last of the Western emperors, Odoacer had won his position at the head of a mercenary army operating in Sicily, Dalmatia, and even beyond the Alps. A fight to the finish was inevitable. The end came after a three-year siege of Ravenna and Odoacer’s murder by Theodoric. It was 493. The way was now open for the establishment of an Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy.
Similarly, Merovech’s grandson, Hlodwig or Clovis (c.466–511), king of the Salian Franks, was able to exploit his status as a Roman
foederatus
and to multiply his dominions in the disputed province of Gaul. Starting from the old Salian
at Tournai, Clovis defeated the last ‘Roman’ general of Gaul, Syagrius, before conquering the rival Riparian Franks (in modern ‘Franconia’), the Alamanni, the Burgundians, and in 507 the Visigoths of Aquitaine. Putting all the lesser Frankish princes to death, and taking a Christian wife, Clotilda, he was baptized at Rheims, possibly at Easter 496. The result was a huge ‘Merovingian’ realm stretching from the Pyrenees to Bavaria. Clovis reputedly received a diadem from the Emperor in Constantinople, together with the honorific title of Consul. He died in his new capital, Paris, after a reign of thirty years. Without knowing it, he had founded what Lavisse called ‘not a nation, but a historical force’—a force which was destined to give rise both to France and to the German Empire.
EPIDEMIA
B
Y
all accounts, many of Attila’s warriors were already stricken by a violent illness on the eve of their defeat by Aetius in 451. Some historians have concluded that it was the Huns who added smallpox to Europe’s pool of diseases.
1
Others report that smallpox was already raging during the Roman plague of 165–80. It was certainly still killing large numbers in the eighteenth century. It claimed 14,000 in Paris in the epidemic of 1719, which preceded the discovery of vaccination by a couple of years. Even so, it killed Louis XV in 1774, and possibly Joseph II in 1790.
From time immemorial, all feared the shadow of pestilence. Russian folklore included the tale of the ghostly Pest Maiden, whom villagers kissed at their peril. In the Book of Revelation, there was the Fourth Horseman on his ‘pale horse’, ‘and his name that sat on him was Death’.
For the long-term historian, as for the epidemiologist, the crucial problem is to know why certain diseases, which exist in mild form for generations, can suddenly explode with devastating virulence. Environmental shifts, a mutant strain, or a fresh human habitat may all be contributing factors. Smallpox, for instance, was well known to medieval Europe without ever being the worst scourge of its kind. Yet on reaching the Americas it wreaked unparalleled havoc, virtually annihilating Aztec civilization, decimating the native Americans, turning 20 per cent of mankind into 3 per cent, ‘singlehandedly establishing and sustaining slavery’.
2
Syphilis, ‘the Americans’ Revenge’, followed a similar career in reverse. In the Americas it had caused minor skin irritations; in Europe it killed and disfigured millions, [
SYPHILUS
]
Malaria was exceptional. Endemic since ancient times, when it had claimed Alexander the Great, it was never responsible for sensational epidemics. But it killed steadily and ceaselessly, especially in districts like the Campagna marshes near Rome, where the
plasmodium
parasite could breed in warm, stagnant water. Cumulatively, it ‘caused the greatest harm to the greatest number’.
3
Every deadly disease has had its day, and every age its particular plague. Leprosy reached its peak in the thirteenth century. The Black Death cut its swathe in the fourteenth century (See Chapter VI) and several times later. Syphilis raged during the Renaissance and Reformation, and on into the Enlightenment. Tuberculosis reaped its crop among the Romantics, claiming Chopin, Siowacki, Keats, and countless others. Cholera was the scourge of Europe’s early industrial cities, and influenza the unlikely reaper of the early twentieth century. AIDS, the leprosy of the late twentieth century, arrived to shake the complacency of a scientific age, and to show that plagues were not just a curiosity of the past, [
LEPER
] [
SANITAS
]