barbarian invasions

barbarian invasions, the movements of Germanic peoples which began before 200 bce and lasted until the early Middle Ages, destroying the Western Roman Empire in the process. Together with the migrations of the Slavs, these events were the formative elements of the distribution of peoples in modern Europe.

The Germanic peoples originated about 1800 bce from the superimposition of Battle-Ax people from the Corded Ware Culture of middle Germany on a population of megalithic culture on the eastern North Sea coast. During the Bronze Age the Germanic peoples spread over southern Scandinavia and penetrated more deeply into Germany between the Weser and Vistula rivers. Contact with the Mediterranean during this era was made through the amber trade, but during the Iron Age the Germanic peoples were cut off from the Mediterranean by the Celts and Illyrians. Germanic culture declined, and an increasing population, together with worsening climatic conditions, drove the Germans to seek new lands farther south.

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history of Europe: Barbarian migrations and invasions

In a sense, the Roman Empire had been already “barbarized” before the barbarian invasions began in earnest. Land left vacant by the dwindling Roman population was colonized by immigrants—Germans and others—from beyond the frontiers. The Roman legions were largely recruited from Germans and other non-Romans, some of whom even rose to the imperial purple. Thus, in the end, the Roman emperor, with his guard and his household, ruling over an empire exploited to fill his treasury, was essentially indistinguishable from those barbarian chiefs with whom he clashed.

The migrations of the Germanic peoples were in no way nomadic, nor were they conducted en masse. Many members of the migrating groups remained in their original homelands or settled down at points along the migration route. Even before 200 bce the first Germanic tribes had reached the lower Danube, where their path was barred by the Antigonid dynasty of Macedonia. At the end of the 2nd century bce, migratory hordes of Cimbri, Teutoni, and Ambrones penetrated the Celtic-Illyrian lands and reached the edges of the Roman frontier, appearing first in Carinthia (113 bce), then in southern France, and finally in upper Italy. In 102 bce the Romans routed the Teutoni and destroyed the army of the Cimbri the following year. Swabian tribes, however, advanced through central and southern Germany, and the Helvetii, a Celtic tribe, were compelled to retreat into Gaul. When Germans under Ariovistus crossed the upper Rhine, Julius Caesar checked their advance and launched a Roman counteroffensive. Under the emperor Augustus the Roman frontier was pushed back as far as the Rhine and the Danube.

Before long, population growth forced the Germanic peoples into conflict with Rome once again. From 150 ce unrest spread among the tribes on the Roman periphery, and the resulting wars between the Romans and the Marcomanni threatened Italy itself. Marcus Aurelius successfully halted the Germanic advance and campaigned to expand Rome’s northern borders, but these efforts were abandoned upon his death. Almost immediately, his son Commodus sought terms with the Germans, and soon the Alemanni were pushing up the Main River, establishing themselves in the Agri Decumates by 260 ce.

Meanwhile, to the east the Goths had penetrated into the Balkan Peninsula and Asia Minor as far as Cyprus, but Claudius II checked their advance at Niš in 269 ce. Enriched by their conquests and enlisted as imperial mercenaries, the Goths became a settled population, and the Romans abandoned Dacia beyond the Danube. Everywhere within the empire towns were fortified, even Rome itself. Franks and Saxons ravaged the coasts of northern Gaul and Britain, and for the next three centuries incursions by Germanic peoples were the scourge of the Western Empire.

In the 4th century ce the pressure of the Germanic advance was increasingly felt on the frontiers, and this led to a change in the government of the empire which was to have notable consequences. In May 330 ce Constantine I transferred the capital from Rome to Constantinople, but the empire, from Hadrian’s Wall to the Tigris, continued to be administered successfully from a single centre. This would not remain the case for long, however, as the increasing perils from outside the empire made closer supervision essential.

The pace of the Germanic incursions increased dramatically during the reigns of the emperor Valens and his successors. These invasions were of two types: (1) migrations of whole peoples with their complete German patriarchal organizations intact and (2) bands, larger or smaller, of emigrants in search of land to settle, without tribal cohesion but organized under the leadership of military chiefs. The Goths and Vandals, and later the Burgundians and Lombards, were of the first type; to the second belonged the Franks, “free” men from the Saxon plain, and the Saxon invaders of Britain. The distinction was a vital one. The Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, and Lombards never took root in the soil, and succumbed in turn, while the Frankish and Saxon immigrants not only maintained themselves but set up a wholly new polity, based on the independence of the territorial unit, which later on was to develop into feudalism.

The emergence of the Huns in southeastern Europe in the late 4th century put to flight many of the Germanic tribes in that area and forced additional clashes with the Romans. In 378 the Goths defeated and slew Valens in a battle near Adrianople, but his successor, Theodosius I, was able to stem the Germanic tide, however temporarily. After the death of Theodosius in 395, the empire was divided between emperors of the East and West, and the emperors at Constantinople did everything in their power to drive any potential threats away from their own capital and toward the lands of the Western Empire. In 406–407 Germanic and other tribes (Vandals, Alani, Suebi, and Burgundians) from Silesia and even farther east crossed the Rhine in their flight from the Huns and penetrated as far as Spain.

Alaric, king of the Visigoths, sacked Rome in 410, signaling the beginning of the end of the Western Empire. Shortly after Alaric’s death later that year, the Goths passed into Gaul and Spain. In 429 Gaiseric, king of the Vandals, crossed from Spain to Roman Africa and created the first independent German kingdom on Roman soil. Soon the Vandals had established themselves as a great naval power which for a while commanded the Mediterranean and devastated the coasts of Italy and Sicily. Meanwhile, the Franks and Burgundians were pressing into Germany and Gaul, and from 449 onward the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes crossed from the Jutland peninsula and occupied Britain. About this time the Huns, under Attila, launched a significant campaign into Gaul. The Roman general Flavius Aetius, who ruled the Western Empire in everything but title, forged an alliance with the Visigoth king Theodoric I, and their combined army inflicted a serious reverse on the Huns at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains (451).

Aetius was murdered by the emperor Valentinian III in September 454, and this event marked the sunset of Roman political power. Six months later Valentinian was slain by two of Aetius’s retainers, and the throne of the Western Empire became the stake in the intrigues of the German chiefs Ricimer, Orestes, and Odoacer, who maintained real control through puppet emperors. In 476 the succession of Western emperors came to an end with Odoacer’s occupation of Rome, and this date is traditionally given as the end of the Western Roman Empire. The Roman Senate decided that one emperor was enough and that the Eastern emperor, Zeno, should rule the whole empire.

For a time, Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, ruled a kingdom that included Italy, Gaul, and Spain. After his death in 526, the empire of the Ostrogoths was shattered, and changes took place which led to the rise of independent Germanic kingdoms in Gaul and Spain. In Gaul Clovis, the king of the Franks, had already established his power, and in Spain a Visigothic kingdom with its capital at Toledo now asserted its independence.

Under Justinian (527–565), the Byzantine Empire seemed in a fair way to recover the Mediterranean supremacy once held by Rome. The Vandal kingdom in Africa was destroyed, and in 552 the Byzantine general Narses shattered the power of the Ostrogoths in Italy, The exarchate of Ravenna was established as an extension of Byzantine power, the Ostrogoths were forced to give up the south of Spain, and the Persians were checked. With the death of Justinian, however, troubles began. In 568 the Lombards, under Alboin, appeared in Italy, which they overran as far south as the Tiber, establishing their kingdom on the ruins of the exarchate. In Asia the emperor Heraclius, in a series of victorious campaigns, broke Persian power and succeeded even in extending Roman dominion, but Italy, save for Ravenna itself and a few scattered seacoast towns, was thenceforth lost to the empire of which in theory it still formed a part.

The withdrawal of Byzantine influence from Italy produced one result the importance of which it is impossible to exaggerate: the development of the political power of the papacy. At the beginning of the 6th century, Rome, under Theodoric, was still the city of the Caesars, and the tradition of its ancient life was yet unbroken. By the end of the century, Rome, under Pope Gregory the Great (590–604), had become the city of the popes. Along with the city, the popes laid claim to some of the political inheritance of the Caesars; the great medieval popes, in a truer sense than the medieval emperors, werethe representatives of the idea of Roman imperial unity.