The Genesis of the Frankish Aristocracy (Part 3 of 4)

Part 2 of this article can be found here
The Frankish Aristocracy



A Frankish aristocrat...

Those Treveri who turned to the barbarians for support bring us to the other element involved in studying the origins of Merovingian northern Gaulish social structure: the incoming Frankish aristocracy. The social structure of the Franks, when living outside the Empire, is, however, difficult to evaluate. The archaeology of the Frankish homelands is in many regards exiguous and relevant observations of Roman writers are scanty – a fact that Gregory of Tours encountered as early as the 570s. Frankish communities seem by and large to have employed an unurned cremation rite that left no archaeological traces. Nonetheless this does suggest that the funeral ritual was not the focus for significant expenditure of resources on the manifestation of status, or for competition between kindreds in that regard. Settlement architecture offers some insights suggestive of similar trends. The site at Heeten reveals a small fortification controlling iron extraction. Whether the iron obtained was used within Frankish society and politics (restricting access to the material to those with good relationships with the ruler) or traded with the Roman frontier is unclear but either scenario would see a ruling stratum with politically valuable assets. Trade with the frontier probably also explained the growth of the site of Wijster (Netherlands). It does not seem unreasonable to posit a steady increase in the stability of the power-bases of the numerous local Frankish leaders. Roman frontier policy, insofar as it existed, seems to have prevented the emergence of rulers of the whole Frankish confederacy during the fourth century but does not appear to have undermined the reality of the power of local leaders. When the late fourth-century civil wars broke out, one response to the withdrawal of troops from the frontier to engage in warfare in Italy and elsewhere was evidently the signing of treaties with the barbarian leaders beyond, further bolstering their authority. This will not have been lessened when two such rulers, Sunno and Marcomer, inflicted a defeat upon Roman forces despatched by the equally Frankish magister militum Arbogast. Arbogast’s death in civil war did not produce any amelioration of the situation on the frontier. Claudian is clear that Stilicho’s flying visit to the region did little more than shore up the treaties with the barbarians beyond. As a strategy, this neglect of the crucial Rhenish limes may seem surprising to those brought up on the traditional, misleading narratives of ‘barbarian invasion’ but it fits well with the way the Romans assigned little practical military (as opposed to ideological) value to the so-called barbarian threat, especially when conflict against rival Roman forces loomed. Furthermore, it was not necessarily an ineffective strategy. When a large group of barbarians from the interior of Germania arrived on the Rhine in 405 or 406 and forced their way into the Empire, the local Franks fought hard – if ultimately unsuccessfully – to defend the frontier, killing a Vandal king in the process. No resistance by regular Roman forces is mentioned.

Thus, if there was no established, independently wealthy Gallo-Roman aristocracy for the Merovingians to deal with in northern Gaul, it seems much more likely that a group of powerful Frankish noble or royal families existed with quite well-established power within their communities. Whether there were similarly established aristocratic rungs beneath these lesser rulers, or whether the power of the kings was based upon a more fluid network of leudes or followers is difficult, even impossible, to establish. Nonetheless, traditional historiography has tended to assume that these social strata were those from which the sixth-century Merovingian Frankish leudes (or at least those of this class whose families hailed originally from barbaricum) ultimately descended. Some link seems probable, but the model needs reassessment. For one thing, it remains predicated upon a vision of Frankish settlement that sees it operating as a moving front of invasion, gradually rolling from north to south, somewhat in the manner of the front lines in the World Wars. The reality is likely to have been considerably more complex.

The Frankish settlement of northern Gaul was a slow, complicated process. Some Franks had been settled in Toxandria since the fourth century and doubtless retained contacts with their relatives north of the Rhine. It is probably a mistake, however, to see Frankish migration into northern Gaul as an inevitability once the Romans’ hold on the Rhone frontier was loosened, as it was, fatally, between 388 and 413. The mechanisms of migration require closer consideration than, typically, is involved in the usual assumptions and narratives that see the barbarians as piling up against the limites for some generally unspecified reason and thus inevitably spilling into and swamping or flooding the provinces beyond (in the usual liquid metaphors beloved of the idiom) once the barrier (seen, naturally, as a dam) was removed. The latter is, unsurprisingly, an interpretation beloved of those who present the ‘barbarian migrations’ as a xenophobic, anti-multiculturalist warning to us all. Some barbarians moved as large groups, not peoples but as sizeable contingents related in some way or other to a leader or group of leaders. The latter usually moved into the Empire, in a dynamic witnessed over and over since at least the first century BC, when their standing in their homeland was seriously challenged (often, ironically, as a result of Roman interference). Such mechanisms explain most of the well-known large-scale movements such as the Gothic migration into Thrace in 376 and the ‘Great Invasion’ of 405/6, some participants in which eventually ended up in Carthage thirty years later (these barbarians had arrived in Spain in 409, making this the only dramatic short-term, long-distance migration by any large group in the whole fifth century). There was no Frankish migration of this sort in the first half of the fifth century.

Other migrations were undertaken by small groups or individuals. Sometimes these constituted ‘career migration’, such as motivated by the desire to serve in the Roman army. A permanent change of residence did not necessarily ensue although frequently it did, especially if the recruit reached the army’s higher echelons. Otherwise, barbarians might cross the frontier in search of ‘a better life’, perhaps employed by the Roman state to farm otherwise ‘deserted’ lands, and have a steadier and more assured access to the items of Romanitas which held such attraction in the barbarian homelands. Some furnished burials of late fourth- and early fifth-century northern Gaul have been interpreted as those of such immigrants. Although the evidence for this reading is more or less non-existent, it is likely that some of the local leaders whose families displayed their status in these graves were of non-Roman or specifically Frankish extraction. They nonetheless used the occasion to stress just how Roman their status was.

It is valuable to ponder the existence of these dynamics in the early fifth century. At the higher political level, the withdrawal of organised Roman presence from the Rhine seems – fatally for the ‘straining dam’ hypothesis – to have had no immediate effect on the Frankish polities beyond. Stilicho and, perhaps, other leaders bolstered the power of the frontier kings with treaties and subsidies. This encouraged the Franks to the active defence of the Rhine against the Vandals noted earlier. In this connection one might nevertheless envisage some Frankish groups moving into the Empire, centred on aristocrats or petty kings, perhaps ousted as the greater kings became more powerful in the absence of the old imperial frontier regulation. Although it is likely that they moved further into Gaul to seek the sources of imperial power, it is also possible that whatever residual forces remained on the Rhine (perhaps fast turning into local warlords rather than regular units) would have taken on such recruits. It is also conceivable that such leaders were drawn in by the social and political crisis in northern Gaul, where they could provide armed backing to particular factions. This would be the situation that Salvian witnessed. In this context one might see how an émigré Frankish aristocrat could quite easily become a local leader of some standing and authority. This dynamic might lie behind Gregory of Tours’ famous account of how the Franks crossed the Rhine and set up kings in each pagus. A need for powerful support and backers in the unstable northern Gaulish local politics might also have sucked the power of the Frankish kings southwards and westwards across the Rhine. Such an expansion could also have been produced by the movement of other Franks into the region, when political differences and hostility spilled over into the old Roman province. The dynamics here could have been rather different, though, as any Frankish leaders installed in regions would (it seems reasonable to assume) have been those in a particular relationship with the king. Frankish leaders settled independently might also have been able to maintain their position only by accepting the rule of a greater king.

The proliferation of ‘woulds, coulds and mights’ in this discussion so far illustrates our absence of hard data and reliance upon hypothesis and analogy. Nonetheless, the mechanisms proposed appear plausible and some support for these dynamics can be found in the scanty written record, outside Salvian’s diatribe. Sidonius’ panegyric for Majorian refers to a victory by Aëtius at the vicus Helena – somewhere in northern Gaul (Hélesmes in the département of Nord [France] has been suggested) – over a group of Franks. The ‘battle’ itself seems principally to have involved breaking up a wedding party. This need not have been as farcical an event as might initially seem to be the case, bringing with it as it does the image of grizzled legionaries overturning the cake and skewering the best man in mid-speech. Quite apart from possibly representing a marriage alliance with a northern Gallic magnate family (as Salvian might have envisaged) such an occasion would doubtless have been the occasion for the bestowing of gifts upon local aristocrats, cementing the Frankish leader’s local standing. To have attracted Aëtius’ attention, this must have been a political event on some scale. The location at a vicus is perhaps also instructive, given what was said earlier about the possible roles of such intermediate settlements in late imperial Gallic society. The incident underlines the ‘zero-tolerance’ policy followed by the representatives of the Ravenna government whenever they were in the region, governing ‘by punitive expedition’, and the seriousness of the decision to join the barbarians or otherwise unauthorised local leaders. An earlier defeat by Aëtius of an encroaching Frankish group is mentioned in the 420s.

The movement of ordinary groups of Franks in search of social and economic betterment seems less likely in this scenario. The socio-economic crisis in northern Gaul would surely act as a deterrent compared with the comparative stability (at this stage) of the trans-Rhenan lands. Migrating groups tend also to have to be sure that there is an extant community within the host population that will accept them. Under imperial government (ironically for the usual views), official sanction and organisation of barbarian settlement eased this process considerably. Without organised imperial presence on the frontier the information exchange across the Rhine must have become much more irregular and unreliable. Fifth-century Frankish migrants, then, would have moved in anything other than the ‘wave’ usually envisaged. It is far more likely that they trod well-known routes towards already-existing Frankish communities. The military leaders mentioned above could thus have acted as ‘scouts’; once established, news of their success could have travelled back to their homelands and possibly encouraged others to join them. In this scenario, the local standing of such leaders would be enhanced by the arrival of their fellows from beyond the old frontier. Nonetheless, one still needs to question why, in the circumstances of the earlier fifth century, other Franks would want to leave their old homes and move to Gaul.

On the other hand, the crisis of the Empire and the decline of effective imperial presence on the Rhine might have made extant Frankish immigrant communities more permanent. Critical study of modern migration suggests that the relative closing of borders and clamping down on state benefits for immigrants in the late 1970s and afterwards, rather than cutting off the flow of incomers, made those already living in the host countries less likely to return home (as had previously been the case) – for fear that movement back again, to find work, would become impossible – and instead a desire to bring their families to the host country to ensure the benefits that were still available. It is not difficult to see similar mechanisms at work in the fifth-century frontier provinces. A big part of the migration of Germanic-speaking barbarians in the fourth century was ‘career migration’: service in the army followed by a return home. Without the regular army’s presence, the Frank was more likely to stay in Gaul than to return across the Rhine, and perhaps find a means of bringing his relatives to join him there. There might have been a shift in the dynamics of Frankish involvement in northern Gaul during the late 440s, as will be discussed later.

The late Roman army in Gaul was, however, still recruiting from the Franks, and this point piles further problems upon the traditional ‘moving front’ model. From the middle of the fifth century the Roman field army in Gaul seems to have operated from bases along the Loire valley. Controlling this line enabled easier movement to north, south, east and west, while holding the crossing points effectively prevented such movement by opponents of the government. The stationing of some barbarian groups settled in the fifth century might, by the middle of the century, have been aimed at further strengthening this strategic deployment (doubtless seen neither as a permanent arrangement nor as acknowledging any formal retreat of the frontier). As the lands that could effectively be taxed by the imperial government shrank during the fifth century crisis, it became more necessary to recruit troops from barbaricum. Thus any Franks entering Roman service would have been drawn to the Loire rather than the Rhine. Given the points made earlier it might be the case that, to a greater degree than in the fifth century, those who had them brought wives and families along as well. It is therefore far from unlikely that Frankish settlement did not simply push southwards according to the ‘moving front’ model. An important focus for settlement was well ‘behind the lines’ in central Gaul.

By the late 450s, the recruitment of Franks to the Loire army was such that the army itself appears to have been known and referred to as ‘the Franks’. One stimulus for this was Frankish politics. In the last major barbarian invasion of Gaul, by Attila in 451, the Huns were joined by a king of the Franks whose candidature for the throne they had supported. His brother and rival, following to the traditional mechanisms of barbarian politics, fled to the Empire and thus the Loire army. Consequently, when the Roman army met the Hunnic forces at the Campus Mauriacensis (or the Catalaunian Fields) there were Franks on both sides.

It might be the case that, by the middle quarters of the fifth century, the Frankish territories were suffering experiencing their own crisis. Early fifth-century stability had, as mentioned, been brought about by treaties with and subsidies from the Empire, as it turned its gaze inwards, away from the frontier. By the 440s, though, the Empire had been absent from the Rhine frontier zone for a generation or more. This might indeed have produced a crisis of legitimacy for the Frankish rulers, especially in times of succession, as the events before Attila’s 451 invasion illustrate. Archaeology provides some confirmation of the hypothesis. Wijster had been abandoned by the second quarter of the fifth century, by which time furnished inhumation, a classic index of some sort of social instability at the local level, had made their appearance in the region. By the last quarter of the century, the rural settlements (like Gennep) that were flourishing at the century’s start also experienced contraction.

It is quite likely that the Frankish king supported by Aëtius before the Catalaunian Fields was Childeric, eventual founder of the Merovingian dynasty, found leading the Franks in campaigns on the Loire by the 460s. When he was stripped of office following the execution of emperor Majorian in 461, Aegidius, the magister militum commanding the Loire forces, apparently (according to a famous story told by Gregory of Tours) adopted the title of ‘King of the Franks’. Gregory tells us that this was during an eight-year exile of Childeric amongst the Thuringians. One possible reconstruction of events is that Childeric had been given command of the Loire forces by Aëtius but was removed from that command under Majorian (who became emperor in 457) and replaced by Aegidius. He resumed his command after Aegidius’ death, which took place eight years later, in 465. Childeric might have returned from the north two years earlier, either as a rival for military leadership or as a subordinate commander for Aegidius. The latter is possible as Aegidius, whose command had been ‘illegitimate’ since 461 might have needed to win allies and support (and Frankish recruits) in the face of aggression from the Ravennate government and its Gothic army in Aquitaine. Aside from his famous grave in Tournai and Gregory’s story of his exile in ‘Thoringia’, the sources locate Childeric, without exception, on the Loire or near Paris.

The military power of Childeric (son of Merovech and thus the first Merovingian) thus originated largely in the Roman Loire army. Childeric’s theatre of operations, on the Loire and around Paris, suggests that he had control, early on, of the more prosperous southern half of the Paris basin. It was for the control of these military and economic resources that, after establishing his right to succeed to his father’s position of a king of the Franks, Clovis competed with Aegidius’ son Syagrius, with the aid of some of his northern relatives. Syagrius’ defeat at or near Soissons made Clovis the most powerful northern ruler. By the first years of the sixth century, Clovis’ Franks had cowed the Burgundians and even the Goths of Toulouse, signing a treaty with the latter at Amboise which brought a large amount of gold into the Frankish coffers. Rather than proceeding is a steady north-to-south advance, then, Clovis’ control over the Paris basin extended more in the manner of a pincer, like the legitimacy of his rule, expanding from one base in the north amongst the Salian Franks and another between the Loire and Paris, founded in what had been the Loire army, ‘the Franks’. With the advantages brought by his control of the southern Paris basin, Clovis was able to turn north and gradually eliminate his Frankish rivals. The chronology of these operations is difficult to unravel, as Gregory of Tours’ grouping of Clovis’ campaigns against the other Franks at the end of his reign results from his stylistic desire to portray the Catholic Clovis as a divine avenger. Nonetheless, the take-over of the Rhine Franks of Cologne must have taken place after 507 and the defeat of Alaric II of Toulouse. The conquest of Gothic Aquitaine was another event that brought great wealth and resources to the Merovingian king, with important consequences.

This discussion has crucial implications for the present enquiry. For one thing it implies that many of the leudes and other officers of Clovis and Childeric owed their position to a role in the Loire army. While military service was hereditary in the late Empire, a position in the command structures was not. The economic resources, booty and tribute acquired by the first Merovingians will also have given them great powers of patronage, attracting Franks to them from the north. Any northern Frankish aristocrats who joined the Merovingians will have found themselves competing for royal favour with the officers of the Loire army and other men – Franks, Romans and others – who had risen in and owed their standing to the service of the kings. The Merovingian take-over of the other Frankish kingdoms saw the transfer of the loyalty of the deposed kings’ leudes to Clovis’ family. These too found their position dependent upon Merovingian favour, as Gregory’s stories make clear. The reward of good service with lands and local position underlined this position.

So far, our enquiry has demonstrated that neither the Gallo-Roman population of northern Gaul, nor the incoming Franks had a significant, powerful aristocratic stratum, with which the Merovingian rulers of the late fifth and sixth centuries would have had to contend. Indeed, especially once Clovis had eliminated or cowed his rivals for authority in the north (the other Frankish kings, the Alamans and the Thuringians) it is clear that he held the whip-hand in any relationship with local leaders. Archaeological cemetery evidence further illustrates the situation.

Part 4 can be read here

The Genesis of the Frankish Aristocracy (Part 2 of 4

Part 1 of this piece can be found here

Transformations around 400


Thus far, the evidence points overwhelmingly to the facts that the northern Gallic social élite was, outside the Triererland, not especially wealthy and that, along with the region’s economy and most of its social structures, it was intimately connected to the imperial state focused upon Trier. Considering the main issue with which this article is concerned, we can conclude that, even were the Merovingians handed control of northern Gaul via treaty in a smooth transfer of political authority, they would not have inherited a powerful, independently wealthy regional aristocracy.

The preceding discussion renders almost predictable the effects on the region produced by political changes after c.380. In 381 Emperor Gratian moved the imperial court from northern Gaul to Italy and Milan. A series of changes is then visible across the region. In most areas villas enter a final phase of desertion, being abandoned by the second quarter of the fifth century. There were exceptions of course. In more southerly areas, around Paris, there is much better evidence of villa survival until rather later in the century, something that seems also be true in the Triererland. The picture, as before, is rarely a straightforward one of economic decline. In the south of the modern Netherlands, around 400 there is a late phase of construction on some rural sites, such as at Gennep. However, these are not villas of the old type. Even with these caveats, however, the impression cannot be avoided that the very late fourth and earlier fifth centuries constituted a period of profound change in the northern Gallic rural settlement pattern and economy. The development is again incompatible with an explanation in terms of an alleged ‘de-Romanisation’ (as is made clear by the continuing – indeed the increased – usage of Roman symbols in burials) or simply through a new military culture. The fifth-century end of the villas makes the latter explanation unlikely. The fourth-century aristocracy of the region had already, as we have seen, been very largely militarised and even those not involved in the army directly were linked to it economically. We cannot be sure that fifth-century aristocrats were markedly more militarised than most of their predecessors. Indeed, sixth-century Frankish law suggests that civic, Roman aristocrats were still a feature of the area’s social structures. If the fifth-century insecurity led to more fighting and greater (and more violent) competition for local leadership, then this affected the survival of villas not through a shift towards a more military state of mind, allegedly eschewing elaborate building, but through the need to spend surplus on local alliances and the equipment of a retinue, leaving little for the upkeep of stone buildings. Aristocrats had to choose where to spend their limited resources and the times ultimately demanded that they choose politics and security over architectural embellishment. Ultimately, the final demise of the northern Gallic villa is an economic issue, not one of a shift in mentalities – even if the latter can reasonably be postulated.

This impression is underlined by study of the region’s towns, which underwent further dramatic contraction and in one or two cases died out completely. There is little trace of occupation on the intermediate settlements, the vici and castra. This is partly related to the problems of dating very late Roman occupation. The two principal supports for such chronologies are coins and finewares and both are problematic after c.400. The latest developments of Argonne Ware pottery, to which we shall shortly return, were not recognised as such until about 1990, which probably means that traces of fifth-century occupation had earlier been wrongly assigned to the fourth century instead. Additionally, the region’s coin supply dried up early in the fifth century after the closure of the Trier mint. While undoubtedly making the identification of late Roman levels very difficult, these changes are themselves significant. The end of coinage and the failure of local powers to mint replacements, after the end of a series of silver imitation solidi in the middle quarters of the century, imply a significant reduction in the scale and complexity of the economy.

Truly monetized commerce requires a neutral medium of exchange and a guarantee of a coin’s value, accepted by both parties to a transaction. The government of a state or polity has the power to provide such a guarantee, moreover one which can be accepted across large distances. With the crisis of the imperial state in northern Gaul around 400, such guarantees disappeared and the areas over which objects were traded shrank accordingly. In whose name the silver imitation solidi, already mentioned, were struck remains mysterious but these coins nevertheless enabled some monetary transactions to take place across a reasonable distance in the middle quarter of the century. Their face value was nevertheless fairly high and the absence of small change is a crucial index of a downturn in the extent of the economy’s monetization. Such coins possibly served other purposes than the strictly commercial, as was the case with the gold solidi. When these silver coins, which are not numerous in any case, ceased to be struck, coinage in the region was limited to imported Eastern Roman solidi until the Frankish rulers began to strike solidi themselves in the sixth century. The function of this type of high-value coinage (1/72 lb. of gold) might very well have been more political than economic. Small denomination coinage remained absent until the seventh century.

Other coins were available nonetheless. The frequency with which Roman coins are found in the pouches buried with sixth-century Merovingian males suggests that such coins continued to serve as handy units of bullion. Their use was more limited than that of a properly minted and guaranteed currency. It has long been known that, in the sixth century, scales or balances are known in northern Gallic burials. Frequently found in lavishly-furnished graves, their symbolism seems to refer to a role in vouchsafing ‘weights and measures’ and this might (though there are other interpretations) have been related to determining the correct quantity of precious metal in old coins. Although these data come from a later period than that which under consideration, they seem suggestive of mechanisms that could have existed as the late imperial monetary economy collapsed. If we combine this evidence with the conclusions just reached about the relative power of the local aristocracy, it is clear that the word of such a local leader would not be recognised by both parties to a transaction over wide areas: another feature in restricting the distances over which commercial exchanges might be made. Some evidence, to which we will return, suggests that the standing of northern Gallic aristocratic families might have been somewhat more secure in the early fifth century than it was a hundred years later and this could have extended the zones over which their word was held to be good, but the general point will surely stand. With the collapse of monetary exchange, the only other mechanism for long distance movement of goods was that associated with the imperial economy but, in the context we have outlined, this too was fading fast.

It is here that Wickham’s attention to the ceramic data is important. His account is as follows:

In northern Gaul around 400 by far the commonest fine ware in the sigillata tradition was Argonne ware … often quite elaborately decorated with a roller wheel … with a 400km radius of distribution from the Rhine to well south of the Loire … [I]t continued into the late sixth century; it reached less than 200km by now … but survived a century into the Merovingian period as a production on a substantial scale.

If this conclusion can be reached from this evidence, then there must – clearly – be something wrong with the model I have sketched. Something about the other evidence, whether of the rural and urban settlement sites or of the burials, to which I will shortly return, must conceal a crucial element in the equation or else the way we read such data is fundamentally mistaken. The picture of imperial crisis and collapse in the region, after c.380, that I have drawn from the written sources must also be wide of the mark. Wickham has (as we have seen) ways of explaining the exiguous settlement evidence in terms of a shift in aristocratic culture to a more military model, which would fit with the idea of the region’s militarisation. This latter proposal is not entirely satisfactory for reasons that have been discussed, but the main point is that Wickham presents a coherent, rounded argument.

Whether intended this way or not, a fair and straightforward reading of the passage quoted is as follows: this pottery was distributed over an area in excess of 500,000 km2 and continued to be produced ‘on a substantial scale’ through the fifth century to the end of the sixth century, even if the area over which it was distributed had shrunk by half by then. The image presented by such a reading is, however, misleading. If we examine Didier Bayard’s study of this form of ceramics, a rather different picture emerges. We find (figure 1) that in his early fifth-century Phase 2, almost all Argonne ware is found within a 300km-radius of the kilns (6 sites yielding such pottery beyond that radius compared with 66 within it) and within in a ‘box’ 500km (east-west) by 300km (north-south). That is an impressive area of 150,000 km2, but still considerably less than that implied by Wickham’s statement. More to the point, by the time of Bayard’s Phase 3 (roughly 440s-460s) this had contracted further. All of the finds he catalogued from the middle decades of the fifth century lay within a 300-km radius and most (67-79%) of them within 200km. Most lie in a box covering 120,000 km2, less than half the area calculated on the basis of the 300km radius of distribution. Thus, this contraction, which a straightforward reading of Wickham’s account implies was something that happened slowly over the fifth and sixth centuries, actually happened quite suddenly around the middle of the fifth, with the abandonment of the Rhine forts. By the time of the political end of the western Empire in the late fifth century (Bayard’s Phase 4) the distribution of Argonne ware had contracted so that 98% of it was found within a 200km radius – in fact within a 200kmx200km box (a considerably smaller surface area) – though fairly evenly distributed within that zone. Argonne ware does continue into the late sixth century but it is important to clarify that the last decorated phase dies out around 540 and that thereafter only standard undecorated forms were produced. So, rather than being distributed across somewhere between 125,000 and over half a million square kilometres during the late fifth and sixth centuries, the impression easily gained from Wickham’s statement, this pottery was in fact only traded across 40,000km2 during this period. In comparative terms, nevertheless, that might represent a widespread distribution of material, but how it relates to other post-imperial ceramics needs to be reassessed. It is now, for example, suggested that some post-imperial wares made in Leicestershire were distributed over an area ranging from the Channel coast to Yorkshire, a not dissimilar reach. It is also important to note the end of decoration in the early sixth century and the restriction in the range of forms, both of which features underline an economic change not unfairly characterised as decline.

The last phases of occupation on the Rhine forts are shadowy and a sophisticated reinterpretation, pondering whether they were still bases for regular troops or, moving away slightly from the usual narrative, centres for local warlords, is overdue. Either way, it seems clear that after the middle of the fifth century whoever did control these forts was no longer in a position to be able to guarantee a market for the products of the Argonne kilns on anything like the old scale. Overall, the link between the collapse of the state and severe economic contraction could not be clearer.

The archaeological cemetery evidence fits this picture of crisis. From about the time that Gratian moved the court back to Italy, the number of lavishly furnished burials in northern Gaul increases steadily. In these burials, men are interred with weapons and, more frequently the belt-sets and brooches that were the insignia of imperial office. In some cases they were accompanied by burials of women and children, the former buried with a wide range of new jewellery forms, notably brooches. The latter and the desire to fit this change in the record into the old narrative of barbarian conquest led to the assignment of these graves to incoming ‘Germanic’ settlers. A closer examination of the archaeological data (the rite itself and the artefacts deposited), freed from these assumptions, combines with the lack of any documentary historical support for the notion to compel a more subtle reading. This sees the subjects of these burials, as yet comparatively few in number and found in small clusters, often on larger cemeteries, as representing locally powerful families whose status was called into question by the death of a member. Given what has been said about the bases of the northern Gallic aristocracy’s power, so closely related to the presence and legitimation of the Roman state it should be no surprise that their local standing should have been jeopardised by the removal of effective, regular governmental presence. It should equally be unsurprising that the Moselle valley, where the wealthiest nobles seem to have been concentrated, is largely free from such burials at this time. The choice of items, and their symbolism, also makes sense in the context described. In the absence of effective imperial presence, the bases of a family’s legitimate authority were proclaimed, especially when an adult male member died, questioning the inheritance of such authority. In this situation, legitimate power was proclaimed by the use of badges that made a link with imperial power. Otherwise they stressed traditional Roman aristocratic virtues and pastimes, such as hunting. The women’s costume, one imagines, made a comment about their status as a chaste wife, a good mother, and so on. As imperial presence grew ever more distant, the use of the badges of office waned accordingly, although other symbolism persisted. Nonetheless, examination of the ritual in comparative perspective suggests that, as yet, the power of these families was not decisively threatened. In a slightly later period, the distribution of furnished burials was far more widespread across communities, and the choice (and number) of goods related to the life-cycle and gender. Rather than being concentrated in the burials of a particular kindred, but spread across subjects of both sexes and all ages, grave-goods were focussed upon mature adult males and younger women.

On the eve of incorporation into the Merovingian kingdom, the northern Gallic aristocracy was even less wealthy than it had been before and its status within local communities was more under threat as the effective legitimacy of a claimed link with the Empire faded. Although this does not imply that many aristocratic families had necessarily lost their local pre-eminence, it seems to be the case that the social, political and economic arenas within which they lived had shrunk considerably. It is against this backdrop that the famous passages of Salvian’s De Gubernatio Dei should be understood. Long taken, doubtless wrongly, as the paradigm for late Roman western aristocracy, Salvian’s comments must be placed in a very specific chronological and geographical context. The assumption that his tirades against the corrupt aristocracy of his times were aimed at the magnates of the Trier region whence he hailed (and whence he had fled, not least as a result of the actions of these rapacious individuals) is not certain but is a reasonable working hypothesis. We have already seen that the Triererland was an exceptional region of northern Gaul. Archaeological data make it clear that we should have no reason at all to generalise from the aristocrats of the lower Moselle valley. What has perhaps been less fully discussed is the precise moment that Salvian was describing. Writing in the 440s, it is reasonable to suppose that his account of the tyrannical curiales belongs to the 430s or perhaps slightly earlier; the issue turns on how recent one supposes that Salvian’s arrival in the south was at the time of his writing. If the picture he painted does belong to the 430s then it is quite instructive when viewed against the archaeological evidence.

In our current state of knowledge, this decade would lie towards the end of the period of occupation of the Triererland’s villas. The sharp decline in the distribution of Argonne ware and the end of occupation of the Rhine forts in the 440s have also been mentioned, and the politically-active generation of the region would largely have been children (at most) when even a usurper emperor last ruled at Trier. The area was fast approaching a severe, critical point and it is unsurprising that it had become a political hot-house. There was no imperial presence to regulate those who claimed to wield power in its name and none of the usual rotation of offices that was part of the efficient management of patronage. Thus those who could continued to cling onto their ‘legitimate’ power, and in the critical situation of the second quarter of the fifth century they exploited it to the maximum. Without the opportunity to share this power, their opponents could only adopt the strategies mentioned by Salvian: either to wield local authority without formal imperial legitimation, that is to say to become rebels or bagaudae (in the eyes of the imperial government or of those who claimed to act in its name) or to turn to the barbarians for support. The three responses to crisis described by Salvian (claiming legitimate power; claiming power without allegedly imperial legitimation; and turning to the barbarians for support) were, in general, the options available to the political classes throughout the fifth century west, but around Trier they took on a particular form and intensity. The fourth option, the one taken by Salvian, was to flee to areas where the Empire’s writ still ran, and he does not seem to have been the only one to have chosen this course of action. In the Triererland of the 430s-440s, this must have seemed an attractive choice, especially as (unlike us) contemporaries did not know that the Empire would not return. Indeed their knowledge of history doubtless suggested that, eventually, inevitably, it would. For these reasons, the decisions to join the barbarians or to follow the ‘bagaudic’ course – those that seem to modern observers to be the ‘far-sighted’ or ‘realistic’ options – must have been taken by contemporaries very much in extremis. On their periodic forays back into northern Gaul (fizzling out in the 440s – as we know but contemporaries did not), the representatives of the Empire dealt equally harshly with bagaudae and barbarians. As well as creating these risks, turning one’s back on the traditional bases of political power brought all sorts of other identities into question, not least one’s masculinity. That the depredations of those who claimed a legitimate imperial basis for their power should have driven their rivals to take these actions is a graphic indication of how critical the situation on the lower Moselle had become.

Part 3 here.

Ethnicity and Early Medieval Cemeteries

The text, of this paper, which I gave on 29 Nov 2010 at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria has been removed as it is now published.  You can access a pdf of the publication here.  The points made (and much of the debate) will often seem 'old hat' to British archaeologists, although the implications of these points have in fact not been very thoroughly assimilated or applied with any sophistication in Anglo-Saxon archaeology.  This paper instead relates (as it says in the text) more to a Mainland European (especially German, French and Italian) debate, which has also begun to take place in Spain.  For those historiographical reasons I hope it will also be of some interest to Anglo-Saxonists. 

I have left the illustrations used in the original post, which can perhaps be used as an accompaniment to the puiblished paper.

My thanks to Juan Antonio Quiros Castillo (not Lopez as it inexplicably says in the published version, embarrassingly) for the invitation and to everyone else who came for such an interesting day and such a warm welcome in Vitoria.

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Distribution map of franciscas



East and West-Germanic
'Tracht' (traditional female
costume)

 


Nouvion en Ponthieu, grave 140















 

(From a paper I published in 1992:
I no longer regard the brooches
and axes as 'of Germanic origin')







 





Allegedly Frisian ('west Germanic')
costume of the 5th century (in the
blue ring)

 

Age and the strength of
the gender-related
significance of grave-goods
assemblages at Ennery
(Lorraine) in the 6th century.

 
 

Supposedly Ostrogothic burials in
Italy

 

 

'Visigothic' Cemeteries in Spain in the
6th century

 




Political divisions of Iberia, c.560





Goths and Romans

This is the text, more or less as given, of my paper at the '410 AD, The Sack of Rome' conference in Rome (described in the post below).  The 'and' in the title, should be italicised... :

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It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…

Alaric’s sack of Rome was always going to cause shock waves across the Empire, and thus in our evidence. The first sack of the city by people claiming – or called by – a non-Roman ethnic name for almost exactly 800 years would have been reason enough, but this attack took place against a backdrop of heated controversy and debate.

It was the epoch of belief; it was the epoch of incredulity…

In 410, the emperors had been Christian for less than a century; fewer than twenty years previously, the current Emperor’s father had outlawed non-Christian religious practice; this was the height of the very generation in which the senatorial nobility forsook its ancestral gods for the new religion and, during Alaric’s sieges, leading officials had partaken of – now illegal – pagan rites in an attempt to stave off the city’s capture.

We had everything before us; we had nothing before us; we were all going direct to heaven; we were all going direct the other way

That the first sack for eight centuries should occur against this background was always going to heighten and refract the polemic and apologetic that was bound to have happened anyway.

Not only that, but the sack took place amidst controversy about the place of barbarians inside the Roman Empire. Alaric and his men were no invading horde from barbaricum, like Radagaisus’ Goths defeated four years earlier. That would have been bad enough. These barbarians were very much within the Roman Empire and its structures. As Orosius said, Alaric was a ‘king of the Goths and a count of the Romans’. Since the end of the Gothic crisis in 382 the Roman army had recruited large numbers of Goths, so that whole units, armies even, could be referred to as ‘the Goths’. In some ways this was not new practice, but it had novel and distinctive features and its scale was, as far as we can tell, unprecedented. Around 400, Synesius of Cyrene had delivered an impassioned rant about the perils of placing these ‘wolves’ among the sheep dogs and a massacre of Goths in Constantinople occurred not long afterwards. More recently still, Stilicho’s downfall had brought forth all the usual anti-barbarian rhetoric and led to the massacre of the wives and children of those of Radagaisus’ force who had been enrolled into the army. The soldiers themselves, unsurprisingly, took themselves off to join Alaric, present in Italy precisely on the instructions of the executed barbarian public enemy.

The sack of 410 might have been less violent than many other episodes in the city’s history, such as Maxentius’ unleashing of the garrison on the rioting citizens about a century earlier; one can propose that if the impression we gain from the sources is correct – a hazardous assumption given their apologetic nature – Alaric’s capture of the city resembles a heavy-handed occupation more than a full-blooded sack, such as Rome endured in 455 or 1527 (the last being the only one of the three meaningfully attributable to 'Germans'). Nevertheless it is important to remember that in August 410 the Romans endured three days of brutality that none of us would want to experience. That said, one can be forgiven for supposing that, in the context just outlined, the sack would have generated this sort of impassioned literary outpouring even if the violence had amounted merely to a couple of bloody noses and a black eye.

I will position the sack of Rome within a different narrative from those usually given: especially the teleological, triumphant story of the Goths’ heroic march from the Balkans to their eventual kingdom in Aquitaine, sometimes seen as the realisation of a long-standing desire. I see the tale in more ironic terms, as one whose eventual outcome was very much not the one intended, either by the Goths or by the Romans. Alaric’s Goths are indeed ‘Goths and Romans’, not striving to create something entirely new, but to ensure their acquisition of something more traditional, within established political structures. Their precise nature, however, the political and geographical situation within which they found themselves and the demands of centuries-old Roman political ideology and vocabulary constantly worked upon them (although it need not have done) to produce a situation always in flux, and results that were quite unexpected and indeed un-looked-for. This story, at some levels, is a simple twist on the old narrative but in its details is quite different; the 410 sack of Rome continues to represent the closing of a chapter, but in a rather different way.

It behoves us then to look more closely at these Goths. Michael Kulikowski asked whether the contrast between Nation and Army is a necessary one; it is difficult to explain very much, very convincingly, by taking one or other option in the form usually presented. The evidence is unsatisfactory, but so is the 'nation or army' question. I find the idea of the nation – the people on the move – unconvincing on methodological and evidential grounds, and the extreme version of the argument, that this was a coherent people with a single set of aims, to found a kingdom, finds its principal attraction in the fact that it is impossible even to parody (believe me; I’ve tried). By contrast the notion of the Goths as army, and more so the notion as the Goths as simple Roman army, has great difficulty in explaining anything.

The mistake, as in the debate over whether the people are Goths or Romans, is to see a question of essence where there is only one of existence. The fate of conglomerations of historical actors is not determined by their essence but by ‘contingency, singularity [and] risk’, to take a phrase from Roland Barthes, occurring in chaotic constellation and kaleidoscopic sequence. ‘Every thought launches a throw of the dice’, as Stéphane Mallarmé wrote. The same is true for every speech and gesture. By neglecting this, the usual emplotments of Gothic history err by making historical actors into a bizarre form of the Lacanian ‘figure presumed to…’, refracting and veiling any encounter with the historical Real. I will try and steer a perilous course between these alternatives.



The cookhouse of the 8th Hussars in the Crimea (1854/55),
by Roger Fenton: not a migration of people, in spite of the
presence of (A) a wagon, and (B) a woman.

 Over the past twenty years, the ‘People on the Move’ interpretation has sometimes been thought proven by references to Gothic wagon trains and to Gothic women and children, references evidently considered to render the case closed. They do not. Indeed, on any close inspection, this is a silly argument. No matter that the references to Alaric’s wagon trains and those to Gothic women and children rarely coincide. The important points are that all armies have wagon trains and, more importantly, that up to the later nineteenth century at least the presence – not the absence – of women and children with armies is actually the norm; you don’t even need to leave the late Roman period to see that. The presence of Gothic women and children means nothing in deciding whether the Goths were a people or an army and we should draw a veil of charity over this whole sorry argument.

The notion that Alaric’s followers were a ‘people on the move’ is further questioned by the sheer proliferation of groups of Goths within the Empire after the solution of the Gothic crisis in 381-2, which belies any claim to see Alaric’s group as the Goths. Traditionally Alaric’s force was a direct descendant of the Gothic or Tervingian ‘people’ settled as a quasi-autonomous group with – allegedly – its own laws and leaders. Hardly any aspect of this construct finds clear support in the data. I am not even convinced that the so-called Treaty of 382 even took place – certainly not in the form we have been expected to believe, since Theodor Mommsen’s day. The counter-argument cannot be proven either but I would maintain that is a simpler, more economical explanation of the evidence we have, requiring fewer presuppositions and less (indeed no) teleology.

Nonetheless, at no point can we deny that Alaric’s troops were Goths. Indeed it seems to me to be impossible to understand the course of development of Alaric’s forces without appreciating that this really was the factor that impinged most upon them, even if possibly more from the outside than the inside.

It is unlikely that the number of men killed in the disaster at Adrianople topped 5% of the total Roman army so it is no real surprise that the Empire was able to grind the Goths down. Adrianople’s significance lay in who died: the best units of the eastern field army. That the Romans were unable to win via a dramatic victory in the field, that it took so long to make a new, effective field army, says volumes about the quality of the late imperial military. That it needed many years to rebuild an effective army and that such time was never found in the West after 394 is key to understanding fifth-century western political history. It is no surprise that in Adrianople’s aftermath the East turned to hiring experienced barbarian troops to forge a new cutting edge for its armed forces. Given the enduring situation beyond the Danube, the fact that the bulk of such troops should have been Goths is no more astonishing. The form that such Gothic formations took was novel if not, in itself, unprecedented, but none of this implies a necessary, direct continuity between the Goths settled – in whatever form – after 382 and Alaric’s followers. Undoubtedly some of his men were warriors who had fought in the Balkans between 376 and 382, though by 410, thirty years on, I doubt there were many. Most, I suspect, were like (I assume) Alaric, only adolescents or teenagers when they crossed the Danube but some, I imagine, were born inside the Empire. Growing up there, their social formation would have been moulded by the society and culture of the imperial Balkans rather than the forests and plains of Gothia. How many had provincial Roman mothers? We don’t know, but it has a bearing on exactly what it meant to be a ‘Goth’. Incidentally, in seeing Alaric as ‘a Goth and a Roman’ It is interesting that the story Claudian had heard about Alaric was that he had been born on an island in the Danube: born, as it were, in the Romano-Gothic frontier. Maybe he was, of course, but even if not it seems to me to be interesting and apt propaganda for him to have put out, for Roman audiences and for Gothic.

All the more in that what the historiographical concentration on direct socio-political continuity between Fritigern’s Tervingi and Alaric’s Goths – at best an unproven continuity – obscures is the possibility (the probability I would say) that large numbers of the Goths in Alaric’s and the other Gothic units proliferating in the Empire were recruited not from Goths settled after the crisis of 376-82 but directly in trans-Danubian Gothia. Alaric’s reinforcement by the former Goths of Radagaisus only underlines this. Constant infusions of trans-Danubian Goths might have gone some way to counteract the gradual ‘Romanisation’ of Goths from within the imperial borders but the circumstances of their recruitment modify traditional ideas. Such infusions also seem a more plausible mechanism than internal reproduction for the maintenance of the numbers of Gothic troops. This line supports the argument, on which most commentators seem agreed to some extent, that - like Gaïnas’, like Fravitta’s, like Sarus’, like Tribigild’s - Alaric’s Goths were formed on Roman soil. The old names Tervingi and Greuthungi disappear. Goths are, now, just Goths. Even the term Vesi, presumably the root of the Byzantine compound ‘Visigoth’, is first attested in the Notitia Dignitatum.

Consideration of the Gothic forces requires us to discuss the term foederati. In the early fifth century, federates were not merely regular soldiers; Zosimus consistently distinguishes barbaroi from stratoitai. Yet, in the Strategikon of c.600 the foederati are simply an élite cavalry unit. A half-century or so earlier, Procopius said that in the old days foederati had been people serving the Empire on equal terms but now they were just members of the foederati units. When this change took place is unclear, but a passage in Olympiodorus of Thebes is interesting. Talking of bucellarii and foederati during Honorius’ reign he says that these were now formed of men of all nations, evidently including Romans. So, even by the second decade of the fifth century the foederati, whatever they had been, were a mix. Sources agree in using technical regular army terms for Gothic units and their commanders. The development of the foederati between c.400 and c.600, in my reading, resembles that of some of the auxilia palatina: regiments originally composed of barbarians but whose élite status soon made them attractive to recruits of all sorts.

Nonetheless, if the foederati were on the road to becoming an élite corps of regular horse, no one knew that in 410; that road had a long way to run. More significantly, their ethnicity, however defined and created, was shared with their commander, adding a new, strong bond to the already, famously, close links between Roman generals and their troops. Fifth-century generals – federate generals especially – increasingly behave as condottieri, their troops their stock-in-trade. In first decade of the fifth century there were further reasons why these bonds were so close. With the political debate mentioned earlier, with the backlash against barbarian mercenaries, for a commander like Alaric to give up his command was to invite his own demise. One only had to think back as far as Stilicho to see that, or further back only to the fates of Fravitta and Mascazel. The troops themselves needed only remind themselves of what happened to the families of Stilicho’s Gothic recruits, let alone the massacre of Gaïnas’ troops in Constantinople in 400. The Roman army had barbarised, it had adopted a self-consciously barbarian identity in the fourth century, but the foederati, at this stage at least, were something slightly – but importantly – different. There were good reasons why Alaric, Gaïnas and the rest – Stilicho even – could not be just ordinary Roman officers.

However loyal they might have been, the problem with foederati was that centuries of anti-Barbarian rhetoric could be deployed against them whenever they found themselves on the wrong side of whichever faction controlled the court. Those who opposed a reliance on Gothic troops (normally civilians it has to be said) made full use of such vocabulary and this rhetoric was capable, as it always had been, of being turned to very un-rhetorical, bloody ends. In the period’s factional politics, such troops were only too likely to find themselves in the political cold as indeed Alaric and his men did, frequently. Fravitta found to his cost that you didn’t even need to be on the wrong or even the losing side…

That Alaric and his army were firmly ensconced within the established frameworks of Roman politics is made clear by the events of 409, when the Roman senate, no less, joined Alaric in raising the usurper Priscus Attalus. It is impossible to know who the driving force was in this agreement but we should not automatically assume that it was Alaric. Eastern Roman historians tended to blame the senate, as something of a Leitmotif of their account of what went wrong in the fifth-century West, though they too might be arguing back from later events. Whatever the case, the senatorial-Gothic alliance is difficult to accommodate within the old narratives of kingdom foundation. So is Alaric’s unceremonious dumping of Attalus and attempt to come to terms with Honorius in 410.

Alaric never demanded a kingdom or recognition as a king. Indeed our sources rarely call Alaric a king. The titles he demands are Roman. Thomas Burns’ argument that Alaric only styled himself king when in rebellion, when without formal Roman office, has much going for it even if, inevitably, it cannot be proven. It might have been more plausible still had Burns not wanted to accommodate Alaric’s Goths simply within the regular Roman military framework. I suggest that the title rex fits the command of foederati particularly well. 'King' may not often have been used as a formal Roman title, but the Romans were accustomed to federate kings. Alaric was not often referred to as a king but Athanaric always was (sometimes to his displeasure) and he signed more than one foedus with the Empire. Alaric’s foederati were a somewhat different, new sort of foederati but the vocabulary used to describe them paired well with his employment of the term rex. And he was not alone in this. Sarus too (we assume it is Sarus) is described as having at some point been a rex and, like Alaric, Sarus and his smaller Gothic group had a tendency to slip into and out of legitimacy. When looking for a term that conferred legitimacy within and yet simultaneously without Roman politics, the title king was apt.

Alaric did not want a kingdom: he wanted a formal command and a fixed base, wherein his troops could draw pay and supplies within the imperial system. The new elements within the system made the linkage of army and general closer and a wise commander could not separate his own objectives from those of his troops. The desire to keep them together also seems to spring quite naturally from this situation. But it was not new, as Constantius II and Julian could have told Alaric fifty years earlier. From this sort of situation and its dynamics it is not difficult to see how the territorial kingdom could evolve, without evoking any of the usual teleologies, unfounded assumptions about long-term ethnic traditions, binary ethnic polarities, unchanging ethnic identities and so on.

But kingdoms are for losers. Counter-factual arguments are fruitless but I suspect that had Alaric got what he wanted and lived longer, there might very well have been no Gothic kingdom. His kingship is born out of opposition. Indeed, throughout the fifth century, the lesson repeated over and over is that a kingdom is the default option, faute de mieux; the preferred outcome is always power at the centre, controlling court and Empire (or what remains of it), without regnal title. If that cannot be achieved, one falls back on the kingdom. The importance of Alaric is that he had become, and died as, king of the Goths. His career and the options he took may well have set the precedent which others followed (and even this was developing precedents set by Bauto and Stilicho). Not only that, the emerging patterns of military command, that his career exemplifies, were followed by Roman as well as non-Roman, federate generals, with forces regarded very much as personal fiefdoms.  (It might be that the reason why Roman commanders do not take the title king is that they do not command foederati; the one who did - Aegidius - apparently did style himself king when he was in rebellion.)

So much for Alaric. What of Honorius: usually condemned as a fainéant? Modern historians have even described him as a child-emperor at points when he was in fact in his early adulthood; such is his reputation. And yet, the reason Alaric died as king of the Goths, rather than fading away as an old soldier within court politics, like Bauto, the reason why Athaulf succeeded to the Gothic command as king – in opposition - and took the title 'king' for longer, so that it had by 420 become a fairly standard element of the political furniture, even if a formal kingdom hadn’t, the reason why Athaulf’s army gelled further as ‘the Goths’ even as its actual Gothic component must have weakened, is that Honorius refused to accept him. He steadfastly rejected anything to do with the rebel Goth. This stubbornness should be given the importance it deserves. In important ways it gave birth to much of the political landscape of the fifth century, and not just to the sack of Rome.