A Refuge in the Roman Empire (Part 2)

Moving forward to the early second century AD; Trajan fought and defeated the Dacians (101-106 AD), following an earlier campaign by Domitian, and raised a column about it in 109AD. This was the last expansion of the Empire, and proved a war too far. Immediately north of the Dacians were the Goths, who had moved upriver on the Vistula and found themselves at the Carpathians. They expanded into the northern parts of Dacia. By around 250AD this had become a threat to Rome, and its new emperor, Decius, led an army into Dacia to repel the Goths.

It didn’t work. Decius was killed in the marshes on the north bank of the Danube. The Goths went on to raid various parts of the empire, even crossing into Asia Minor and abducting Roman citizens in Cappadocia as slaves. Rome had removed a buffer state when they’d have been better advised to strengthen it.

Amongst the captives from Cappadocia were Christians, and whilst they had started as slaves of the Goths, their offspring gradually became Goths (while still able to speak Greek and Latin). About a hundred years after being abducted, one of those new Goths, Wulfilaz, turned up in Constantinople. His name is recorded variously as Ulphilas or Wulfila, and he was a Christian priest. We will catch up with him later on.

When Constantine took control of the eastern empire, he established a treaty (foedus) with the Danubian Goths, the group later known as the Visigoths. This was something very much to their advantage; the right to trade with Roman Moesia at any point along the Danube; the ability to absorb all and any young men the Goths could spare into the Roman Army, where they would spend twenty years as a soldier; if they came back it would be as  men in their late 30s or above, and if they chose not to return there was the offer of a cash sum, Roman citizenship and the ability to marry a Roman citizen girlfriend and settle as a burgher of the town. The third advantage of the foedus was a regular ‘gift’ of high quality Roman pottery and metalware, of which the king would keep some and give the rest to his higher nobles and so on down the line, securing loyalty in this way.

This pact served both Romans and Goths well. The Romans had to pay for the ‘gifts’ (i.e. bribes) to the Goths, but that was a lot cheaper than fighting them. The real damage was to Roman egotism. The bribes also provided a structure of chieftain generosity and reciprocal service typical of a Germanic war band.

 The Emperor Decius

Wulfilaz appeared in Constantinople in 340, and was allowed to create a translation of the Bible into Gothic, using a mix of Latin and Greek letters with some Gothic runes. By his own admission, he omitted the Book of Kings in the Old Testament because the Goths were warlike enough without encouragement. He returned to Gothland under the protection of Fritigern, but later took a community of Gothic Christians back within the empire in about AD347/8 under the protection of Constantius II; who was an Arian, and so Wulfilaz’s group adopted Arianism, which was legitimised at the Church Council of Rimini; it was probably close to the Christianity they’d practised in Cappadocia when it was still underground.

The Goths ran into difficulty because they were drawn into a dispute over who should be eastern emperor; Valens, the brother of Valentinian, who had been picked by his brother, who had been appointed and acclaimed by the army, rubberstamped by an obliging Senate, was unpopular with Procopius, a cousin of the former emperor Justin. Somehow Procopius persuaded the Gothic leadership that he was the rightful emperor.

Procopius (also claimed as Valens, but probably too young to be him)

In the Germanic system of royal inheritance, Procopius might have succeeded, because that system established a royal pedigree, and anyone within the royal lineage could seek to be king. The principal targets were stability and legitimacy. It was obviously necessary to avoid children, the ill, mad and illegitimate inheriting, and (as was later shown) women were best placed as ‘peaceweavers’. The next one down the age range was usually best, so brothers and cousins often inherited ahead of sons, particularly ones of dubious mental health, which is why Hamlet was sidelined for Claudius in the myth Shakespeare took from Saxo Grammaticus.

Procopius put his case to the Tervingi Goths, under their leader Athanaric, in terms they used and understood, but which was never used by the Romans once the Julio-Claudians had exterminated themselves.

It would have been smart for Valens to have told the Goths to do what their foedus required and rewarded their renewed loyalty, but he was exceptionally dumb, so he punished them, ending the open trading along the Danube, cutting it to one place, and closing the army to Gothic recruits, thereby trapping youths of fighting age in Gothland kicking their heels resentfully. By doing this he impoverished the Gothic farmers and built up a reservoir of young men who blamed their rulers. By ending the bribes, Valens was able to cut taxes in the Eastern Empire, the first emperor to do so in a century, and was praised for it by the orator Themistius, although he may not have known about it, since Themistius spoke Greek by no Latin and Valens the reverse, so they probably smiled politely at each other as the Empire destroyed itself.

The struggles of Christian Goths and the adverse reaction of the ‘pagan’ Athanaric towards Rome is seen in the martyrdom of Sabbaz (St Saba) in AD374 by drowning. Within two years, this 38 year old Arian Goth had been made a Roman saint, another cause of war with the Arian emperor Valens. An official hagiography The Passion of St Saba has been discussed by Peter Heather in his book The Goths in the Fourth Century (1991). No doubt such murders by Athanaric eased the decision of Fritigern’s Goths to emigrate to the Roman Empire in AD376, less than two years later, at just the moment that Bishop Basil of Caesarea in Moesia. We can see some similar push factors to the murders by ISIS of Christians and Yazidis in recent times in Syria and Iraq.

Unknown to Valens, the Huns had parked themselves to the north of Gothland, having found a way across the Pripet Marshes at the mouth of the Volga. The Goths had a new power to crawl to, so some of them, under Athanaric, asserted that they no longer needed the Romans, now they could get what they wanted by offering services to the Huns. Other Goths – those nearer to the Danube, possibly no further than 30 miles from the river – thought if they offered themselves as even more dogged than before in devotion to Rome, they might receive their old favoured position once more.

Those southern Goths were led by Fritigern, and they sought refuge within the Roman Empire.  It sounded reasonable, but it was the beginning of the end.

They petitioned Valens to let them enter the empire, and this was permitted. The numbers – perhaps 50,000 – were rather more than had been intended, These were however not all men of fighting age, and included women, children, the elderly and the sick. In that respect, they resembled the sort of migrants fleeing conflict seen in the movements of 2014.

Valens allowed them to be placed in transit camps, where they were ripped off and half-starved for some time by the local governors, Lupicinus and Maximus, who sold them food at high prices, claiming there was a famine. They led their menfolk out to acquire illegally what they could not legitimately obtain. They hoped to get to Adrianople (modern Edirne on the Turkish-Greek border), where some Goths had already settled (echoed by modern migrants desire to get to Britain or Germany because they have relatives there). But Valens had already killed their relatives in the city. With some irony, as I write, the Turks are stopping astern migrants at Edirne from entering Greece.

On 9 August 378, Valens led Roman troops against the local Goths and lost, possibly burning to death in an agricultural worker’s hut as he fled the battlefield. Fritigern lived on for some time, and over time, the successful Goths were settled in Thrace and many of the young men joined the Roman army, helping Theodosius I win the Battle of the Frigidus on 8 September 394; by doing so, they showed the Western Imperial Army could be beaten, as the army of Valens had been.

Most of those who followed Alaric in the early fifth century were born within the empire and were therefore full Roman citizens. We have no evidence to say that any of those ‘Visigoths’ spoke a word of anything except Latin and Greek. They had been absorbed and transmitted their energy to the Romans.

A Refuge in the Roman Empire (Part 1)

A Refuge in the Roman Empire

The large-scale movement of people into the European Union reflects movements in past eras; numbers were smaller, but so were the numbers of people on earth.

The Romans were never like the Greeks in the classical period. The Citizenship Law of Pericles, approved in Athens in 451BC, required that an Athenian citizen had to be the son of an Athenian citizen and of a woman who was the daughter of an Athenian citizen; women did not have citizenship, but could convey it to a son. Scorn was placed on Thebes, whose kings it was claimed were from Asia Minor. Herodotus speculates that the Spartans were part Egyptian, but then Herodotus had a mother with a Persian name. Alexander I, king of Macedon (ancestor of Alexander the Great) took a delegation of Macedonians to the Olympic Games, but while he was admitted, because he could prove he was a Greek, the others were turned away because they couldn’t. Any Athenian resident of non-Athenian ancestry who did not match up was categorised as a ‘metic’, and any Athenian man who had not completed the course as an ephebe was excluded from citienship, as were men who owed certain debts, or whose ancestor had. They still had to pay taxes, however.

Rome was always different; they believed that they were descended from a group of Trojan refugees, and had themselves been founded by immigrants. Being a Roman citizen was always a juridcal matter, not one of birth. They were told that Romulus had offered to protect on the Capitolium any man who would follow his rule; Emma Dench of Harvard calls it ‘Romulus’ Asylum’. The earliest Rome featured thre different groups with differing languages – including a bunch of Sabines who spoke Oscan, not Latin; Rome’s second king, Numa Pompilius, was a Sabine, and of course the incomers had already married Sabine wives. Later, not only was Attius Clausus Romanised as Appius Claudius, he was made a patrician and a senator.

The secession of the Plebians in 494BC to the Mons Sacer (Sacred Hill) three miles away in protest again debt imprisonment and bondage showed even at the early date how people were prepared to quit Rome if the conditions weren’t right. It took Rome a long times to achieve suitable conditions, for there were secessions in 449BC, 445, 342 and as late as 287BC, when they moved to the Janiculum. Removing the labour of the lower orders could remove agricultural production and manufactures.

The settlement of Germanic and other groups within the empire is known by two contradictory names in different languages: the French refer to les invasions barbares, the barbarian invasions, whilst the Germans call the process the Völkerwanderungen, the wandering of the people. Such titles are modern and reflect political differences centuries after the events. But the movements were now new, even in the fourth century.

The first settlement clash was with Germanic tribes who were moving south. This resembles the sort of movement we see today when a modern calamity strikes a particular region. In the case of the Cimbri and Teutones, it was a tsunami which hit northern Jutland around 130-120 BC. We know this because one of them gave an eye-witness description to Posidonius, a Greek geographer (fl.100BC), who was told that the sea retreated and then the tide came in faster than a horse could run. That’s clearly a tsunami, for all that Strabo poo-pooed the idea, because Mediterranean tides aren’t so powerful (Strabo 7.2.1).

The reason for the tsunami is unknown, but might have been due to a shift in the rocks on the bed of the North Sea, known as the Storegga Slide. It flooded nothern Jutland and broke of the northern tip into islands, flooding good farm land with salt water. The loss of their land seems to have set the Cimbri and their neighbours the Teutones on the move. It is unlikely that they marched all the way down the peninsula; perhaps they were transported by boat (by the Aviones, the ancestors of the Saxons) to the mouths of the Rhine. At the foot of the Jutland peninsula was (and is) the Danwerk, a large earthwork which it would not have been possible to cross without permission, so that route is unlikely.

The Cimbri and Teutones probably walked up the Rhine towards its source and then down the Danube. Given the confused accounts of Cimbri turning up in wht are now central France and Spain, it is feasible that all movement of unknown people was counted as them. The Romans had never encountered Germans before. They thought they were Gauls, and compared them to the attack on Rome by Gauls in the early fourth century. Given that Gauls had taken over northern Italy c.500BC, the displacement probably affected the Roman kingdom.

As the Cimbri made their way up the Rhine, they seem to have left some members behind: the Atuatuci, who lived in the Meuse valley near Namur, claimed to descend from those Cimbri and Teutones who stopped there. Since what is now southern Germany was populated by Gaulish speakers first, there were probably many such stopovers which turned out to be permanent.

Did the Cimbri and associated groups even know who the Romans were? They must have heard tales about a big and rich land down south, and severely misjudged what that meant. For them, a big country was viewed in Iron Age terms, maybe twenty miles across. They would have no idea that a realm could be hundreds of miles across. This is similar to the viewpoint attributed to Prince Jugurtha, the north Asfrican price who said he would never have attacked the Roman Republic had he known how big it was.

The Roman involvement began in 113BC, when the wandering Cimbri made it down the Danube as far as Vindobona, modern Vienna, where the king of Noricum, a Celtic kingdom in the eastern Alps, roughly modern Austria, called on his allies, Rome, and were forced to retreat, but turned and defeated a Roman army that had underestimated them. A further attempt to reach the Mediterranean by means of the Rhone must have involved retreating to western Switzerland, where the sources of Rhine Danube and Rhone are very close.

This must have taken years to complete, because they next met a badly-led Roman army at Arausio (modern Orange in the middle Rhone) in 105BC; the Romans commanders could not agree on tactics and the Romans were defeated. A battle against Germnaic people at Burdigala (Bordeaux) in 107BC was probably a quite separate group, but assigned to the Cimbri.

In 103BC, the Romans defeated the Cimbri at the Isère in Gaul and captured their king, Teutobod. The rest of the Cimbri entered Gallia Cisalpina, where in 101 they were completely defeated at Vercellae and those who survived were enslaved.

As a result of several bad decisions and drastic underestimation, the Romans had been defeated by ‘barbarians’ in their own neck of the woods for the first time since Hannibal. Henceforth all northern invaders – if that’s what they were – were to be regarded as hostile.

The Cimbri seem to have attracted incomers – possibly given inferior rank below that of the warrior elite which can only have developed as they encountered obstacles. Young men inspired by a spirit of adventure and young women fancying available Cimbri will have joined them as they moved across the land, taking what they wanted. The destruction of their heimat (homelad) would have meant the Cimbri had nowhere to return to.

This was a Völkerwanderung in the true sense. They did not set out to attack the Roman world, and probably had little or no awareness that it existed, but had nothing to lose by pressing forward. A lesson should have been learnt that inbound settlers will fight when they have to, but if given a reason not to could be turned into settlers, eventually into taxpayers.

One reason for Roman weakness here could have been the fact that the armies were loyal to their general providing he won and they could earnt a living out of it. There was nothing to be made by fighting off armed settlers, so there was nothing to motivate the soldiers.

Seeing Rome defeated and no income deriving from them backing Rome would have been a good motivation for the Social War; indeed, Pompeius Trogus reported that the removal of the Socii led to an outbreak of Cimbric raising in Gallia Cisalpina. The rise of Marius and Sulla to supreme power as a result of both wars helped see off the last democratic parts of the Roman Republic.