German History Vol. 32, No. 4, pp.

515–532

Two Worlds Become One: A ‘Counter-Intuitive’

View of the Roman Empire and ‘Germanic’
Migration*
Guy Halsall

I: Introduction

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The topic of the place of the ‘barbarian migrations’ in German history is riddled
not only with political undertones but also with heavy irony. The ‘Great Migrations’
(Völkerwanderung) are central to any survey of German national history. Yet, the
events of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries themselves have precious little to do
with nations or even with Germany, at least insofar as those terms are currently
understood. Nor indeed can this period be distinguished from others as the migration
period. Even in more traditional visions of this topic, the linkage between the forma-
tion of a German identity and the migration of peoples contains its share of irony;
in most national myths the primordial migration brings the founders of the nation
to the land which bears their name. In the Migration Period (Völkerwanderungszeit), by
contrast, the migrants who became so important to later German politics and iden-
tity left the region subsequently known as Germany. That area, riven with conflict
between independent, effectively (if not, technically, legally) sovereign polities, was
unified partly by appeal to a shared national identity. The historical attractiveness of
such an identity lay largely in the fact that the ‘nation’ with which nineteenth-century
Germans were to identify was believed to have conquered much, indeed most, of the
rest of Europe, albeit departing from its homeland in the process.1 Those migrating,
conquering ‘Germans’, however, also played an important, if contested, foundational
role in the political mythology (and debates about it) of Spain, France and Italy. So,
for all that the barbarian invasions became a source of German national pride, the
German nation itself was descended from those Germani who had in fact stayed at
home. This did not really matter; the assumption of a transcendent, pan-Germanic
identity meant that the vigorous, warlike actions of the Franks who allegedly cre-
ated France, the Goths who were so important to the monarchs of Spain, and the
Lombards who received such a bad press in Italian historiography for rupturing the
idealized unità of the peninsula,2 could all be recouped for the German people. In
another ironic twist, the idea that all speakers of a Germanic language could be
treated interchangeably stemmed ultimately from the fact that outsiders, principally
Romans, had dealt with all such barbarians interchangeably for their own chauvin-
istic reasons.

* I should like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their forthright but pertinent and helpful commentary.
1 These regions were not included in the later appeal to a shared ‘Germanicity’ even if the legends could be used to
legitimize territorial claims and conquest.
2 C.J. Wickham, Early Medieval Italy: Central Authority and Local Power, 400–1000 (London, 1981), p. 1.

© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society.
All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghu107
516 Guy Halsall

The historiography of the theme of the barbarian migrations has been well studied.3
From the invention of the term Völkerwanderung by Wolfgang Laz in 1557 through to the
Nazis’ espousal of the heroic reading of antique Germanic invasion and conquest, the
study of the barbarian migrations and their role in the creation of Europe has never been
other than controversial and heavily politicized. A couple of examples might suffice. In
the nineteenth century, the great project of editing medieval European texts labelled its
volumes ‘the Historic Monuments of Germany’ (Monumenta Germaniae Historica).4 After
all, the Germans had conquered the Roman Empire and established their kingdoms in its
wreckage, so the entire middle ages and its literary output could be seen as a Germanic
creation. These ideas were powerful tools in German unification, in overcoming centuries
of armed hostility between, say, Bavarians and Prussians. Some were used to justify the
annexation of Alsace and the Moselle in 1871.5 Slightly later, a mix of linguistics, folk-

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lore and archaeology led Gustav Kossinna (1858–1931) to promote the idea that Indo-
European civilization was created by migrating Aryan proto-Germans.6 Obviously, much
use of these and similar ideas was made during the National Socialist era, justifying,
beyond general ideas of racial superiority, the annexation of northern France and the
proposed renaming of Sevastopol as Theoderichshafen (because the Germanic-speaking
Goths had come from that region).7 Some researchers at this time employed other ideas
from Völkerwanderung history, particularly the notion that Germanic ‘peoples’ were formed
by a war leader and his followers. The National Socialists made much use of archaeology
(largely via the SS Ahnenerbe) to bolster all these claims. 8
Needless to say, in Germany as much as in France or elsewhere, the attitude towards
the Germanic past was never uniform; historiographical development did not take a
single path. The treatment of the Germanen (the supposed historical ancestors of the
modern Germans) discussed above, for instance, contradicted a rival (if no less nation-
alistic) view of the peoples of Germania as, essentially, proto-democratic communes of
freemen (an idea that played an important part in English attitudes to their Anglo-
Saxon past). Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that there was no connection between the
ancient Germani and the Germans of his day.9 Consequently and unsurprisingly, then,
after the Second World War, some back-tracking to these alternative views took place.

3 For the historiography of the migrations, see W. Goffart, ‘The Theme of the Barbarian Invasions in Later Antique
and Modern Historiography’, in E. Chrysos and A. Schwarcz (eds), Das Reich und die Barbaren (Vienna, 1989),
pp.  87–107, reprinted in Goffart, Rome’s Fall and After (London, 1989), pp.  111–32. For the political uses of
‘migration period’ archaeology in nineteenth century France, see B.  Effros, Uncovering the Germanic Past:
Merovingian Archaeology in France, 1830–1914 (Oxford, 2012). Ian Wood is preparing a substantial volume on
the European historiography of the migrations in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.
4 D. Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises: Problems in Monastic History (London, 1963), pp. 63–98.
5 B. Effros, Uncovering the Germanic Past: Merovingian Archaeology in France, 1830–1914 (Oxford, 2012).
6 On these ideas see H.  Fehr, ‘Volkstum as Paradigm: Germanic People and Gallo-Romans in Early Medieval
Archaeology Since the 1930s’ in A. Gillett (ed.), On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early
Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2002), pp.  177–200; S.  Brather, Ethnische Interpretationen in der frühgeschichtlichen
Archäologie: Geschichte, Grundlagen und Alternativen (Berlin, 2004).
7 On the Nazis and archaeology, see J.-P. Legendre, L. Olivier and B. Schnitzler (eds), L’Archéologie Nazie en Europe
de l’Ouest: Actes de la table ronde internationale ‘Blut und Boden’ tenue à Lyon (Rhône) dans le cadre du Xe
Congrès de la European Association of Archaeologists (EAA), les 8 et 9 Septembre 2004 (Lavis, 2007). For the
renaming of Sevastopol, see H. Wolfram, The History of the Goths (Berkeley, 1988), p. 3.
8 See Legendre et al. (ed.), L’Archéologie Nazie.
9 F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. K. Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge, 1994; 1887), pp. 25–26.
 A ‘Counter-Intuitive’ View of the Roman Empire and ‘Germanic’ Migration  517

Rather than being viewed as pure ‘Germanic’ peoples, the gentes who migrated into the
western Empire were interpreted as poly-ethnic. In this interpretation, subsequently
dubbed ‘the ethnogenesis interpretation’, warriors of all origins were incorporated into
a group by subscription to a body of foundation legends, customs and law. This was
not the radical break with previous approaches that has sometimes been supposed;
the role of the leader and his retinue (Gefolgschaft) remained paramount.10 At the same
time, archaeologists avowedly eschewed the admixture of various forms of information
(Mischargumentation), adopted by Kossinna and his fellows, for a supposedly ‘purer’ form
of archaeological reasoning. In fact, their methods remained predicated on a series of
historical assumptions about the Germanic peoples.11
Nevertheless, nineteenth-century preconceptions about the Germans and their

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migrations remain fundamental to much writing about post-imperial Europe, even if
they are rarely directly acknowledged. Many of these ideas have been closely scruti-
nized as researchers have re-examined the written and especially the archaeological
evidence. The concept of ethnic identity has been thoroughly reassessed, starting from
anthropological work on the mutability of ethnicity.12 The amount of change produced
by the migrations, and the extent to which post-imperial and medieval western cul-
ture and social structures were derived from ‘Germanic’ influences, have been radically
questioned. In extreme cases, even the reality of migration has been denied.13
The overtly contested, politicized nature of work on this period has remained, how-
ever. Recently, something of an academic counter-revolution against the advances just
discussed has taken place. Oxford-trained historians have led the way, publishing books
repeating the same argument: the barbarian migrations involved real ‘peoples on the
move’, which brought down the Roman Empire.14 This has stimulated traditionalist
archaeologists into a backlash against more nuanced interpretations of the material
record.15 Whatever their authors’ politics (though these can be guessed at from their

10 A. Callander Murray, ‘Reinhard Wenskus on “Ethnogenesis”, Ethnicity and the Origin of the Franks’, in Gillett, On
Barbarian Identity, pp. 39–68.
11 For critique, see P. von Rummel, ‘Gotisch, barbarisch oder römisch? Methodologische Überlieferungen zur eth-
nischen Interpretation von Kleidung’, in W. Pohl and M. Mehoffer (eds), Archaology of Identity/Archäologie der
Identität (Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, 17; Vienna, 2010), pp. 51–77; G. Halsall, ‘Ethnicity and
Early Medieval Cemeteries’, Arqueologia y Territorio Medieval, 18 (2011), pp. 18–27.
12 Two classic articles are W. Pohl, ‘Telling the Difference: Signs of Ethnic Identity’, in W. Pohl and H. Reimitz (ed.),
Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300–800 (Leiden, 1998), pp.  17–69; Pohl,
‘Conceptions of Ethnicity in Early Medieval Studies’, in L.K. Little and B. Rosenwein (eds), Debating the Middle
Ages (Oxford, 1998), pp. 15–24.
13 Minimalist interpretations: F. Pryor, Britain AD (Hammersmith, 2004); A. Simmer, ‘La Lorraine et la chronologie
normalisée du mobilier funéraire’, in J. Guillaume and E. Peytremann, L’Austrasie: Sociétés, Économies, Territoires,
Christianisation. Actes des XXVIe Journées Internationales d’Archéologie Mérovingienne, Nancy 22–25 Septembre
2005 (Nancy, 2008), pp. 407–14.
14 See, for example, P. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History (Oxford, 2005); Heather, Empires and
Barbarians (London, 2009); B. Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation (Oxford, 2005).
15 See, for example, V.  Bierbrauer, ‘Zur ethnischen Interpretation in der frühgeschichtlichen Archäologie’, in Pohl,
W.  (ed.), Die Suche nach den Ursprüngen von der Bedeutung des frühen Mittelalters (Vienna, 2004), pp.  44–84;
G. Brogiolo and A. Chavarría Arnau,’Chiese e insediamenti tra V e VIII secolo prospettive della recerca archaeologica’,
in Ebanista, C., and Rotili, M. (ed,) Ipsam Nolam Barbari Vastaverunt: L’Italia e il Mediterraneo occidentale tra il V secolo
e la meta del VI (Cimitile, 2010), pp. 45–62. Similar points about this ‘counter-revolution’ are made by S. Gasparri and
C. La Rocca, Tempi barbarici: L’Europa occidentale tra antichità e medioevo (300–900) (Rome, 2012), pp. 74–79.
518 Guy Halsall

writings and publishing choices) there can be no doubt that these works have—in the
most generous interpretation—been written sufficiently carelessly as to provide succour
to far-right extremists.16
What is more, the barbarian migrations have become a popular metaphor among
racists and other opponents of modern migration. A  Google search for ‘nouveaux
barbares’ will yield many pages of ‘Front National’ diatribe against Muslim and east-
ern European immigrants. The Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik’s
preferred historical model was the Crusades but it is nevertheless significant that he
described the killings as ‘a small barbarian act to prevent a larger barbarian act’,17 the
latter being the supposed take-over of Europe by Muslim immigrants.18 In a speech in
Rome, the far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders used the barbarian invasions and
the fall of Rome as a lesson from history about immigration’s dangers.19 The metaphor

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has worked its way into more mainstream conservative comment, in direct relationship
to modern scholarship on barbarian migrations. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung review
of a museum exhibition, set out according to traditional paradigms, argued that it
showed how little comfort we, with ‘a new Völkerwanderung into our Imperium’ could draw
from the history of the Empire, with hardly any sign of ‘multiculturalism’, where the
migration of peoples meant, besides ‘acculturation’, above all ‘plunder, burning and
death on a massive scale’.20
The recent use of scientific (or pseudo-scientific) methodologies to examine migra-
tion has added an extra, alarming dimension. DNA, whether ‘ancient’ (from exca-
vated material) or ‘modern’ samples (from living populations), is being used to track
migration.21 The danger, barely addressed (at best dismissed as a purely ‘ideological’
objection), is of reducing ethnicity to biology and thus to something close to the nine-
teenth-century idea of race, at the basis of the ‘nation state’. Yet a DNA chain no

16 See, for example, B. Ward-Perkins, ‘The decline and fall industry’, Standpoint (Sept. 2009) http://standpointmag.
co.uk/node/2038/full (accessed 5 Sept. 2013), especially the closing sentence, which reads: ‘This is very conveni-
ent, because it means we Europeans, and peoples of European descent, while getting deeply preoccupied by our
own barbarians and their role in history (as all these books testify), can ignore the much more important, but also
much more sensitive, issue of the role of Arab and Muslim invasions in overturning the world order during the
seventh century’. ‘We’ are Europeans and people of European descent; ‘they’ are Muslims who overturned the
world order. For critical discussion of the political resonance of Heather’s work, see, for example, M. Kulikowski,
Review of P. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, in The Classical
Bulletin, 82 (2006), p. 162–164, at p. 164; Kulikowski, Review of P. Heather, Empires and Barbarians, in Journal of
Interdisciplinary History, 42 (2011), p. 277–79.
17 www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the_barbarian_inside_the_gates/ (accessed 9 Aug. 2012).
18 On one far-right forum, a commenter called ‘Kodos’ writes, in a discussion of Breivik’s actions: ‘The settlement of
barbarian tribes will last far longer then [sic] social democracy which is dying right now, we’ll have kings and dic-
tators everywhere in sixty years and they’ll have little use for feminism’. www.thephora.net/forum/archive/index.
php/t-81664-p-2.html (accessed 9 Aug. 2012).
19 www.geertwilders.nl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1740 (accessed 11 Aug. 2011).
20 D. Schümer, Review: ‘Die Barbaren mochten das Schöne: Angst und Grössenwahn: Die Kunst der
Völkerwanderungszeit im Palazzo Grassi’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (26 Jan. 2008). My thanks to Philipp
von Rummel for this reference.
21 See, for example, M.E. Weale, D.A. Weiss, R.F. Jager, N. Bradman and M.G. Thomas, ‘Y Chromosome evidence
for Anglo-Saxon Mass-Migration’, Molecular Biology and Evolution, 197, 7 (2002), pp. 1008–21; M.G. Thomas,
M.P.H. Stumpf and H.  Härke, ‘Evidence for an Apartheid-Like Social Structure in early Anglo-Saxon England’,
Proceedings of the British Academy, 273 (1601) (22 Oct. 2006), pp. 2651–7.
 A ‘Counter-Intuitive’ View of the Roman Empire and ‘Germanic’ Migration  519

more has an ethnic identity than does a bronze buckle. What is at stake in fifth- to
seventh-century western European history is not the reality of migration; migration is a
constant of human existence. It is why migration and ethnic change became so power-
fully linked and such an important feature of socio-political change. Science can tell us
nothing about any of that.22
A reconsideration of the place of the migrations in history is therefore timely. This
essay will set out a new framework for thinking about Roman–Barbarian relationships
and how these shaped late and post-imperial migratory patterns and mechanisms. The
first part of the essay calls into question the idea that the Germanic-speaking barbarians
shared any sort of unifying ethos or culture that would allow us to conceive of them as
a single entity. This section largely summarizes a particular direction in recent work,

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but the conclusion is still far from generally accepted or integrated in current study and
so requires restating. The second section breaks newer ground by demonstrating that,
rather than forming two hostile, antagonistically opposed worlds, the imperium Romanum
and Germanic-speaking barbaricum were inextricably linked, via core–periphery relation-
ships, as components of a single, Roman-centred world. Nonetheless it remains neces-
sary to discuss how and why the Romans created the image of ‘the barbarian threat’
which has so misled scholars. This is expanded upon in the third section on the Empire
and migration, which shows how the migration of even large bodies of Germanic-
speaking barbarians into the Empire was part and parcel of the rhythms of imperial
frontier policy and the core–periphery relationships between the Empire and its neigh-
bours. This point will lead ultimately to the counter-intuitive conclusion that it was the
existence of the Roman Empire that rendered ‘barbarian migration’ possible. After its
fall, indeed, such migration ceased. The end of imperial–barbarian relationships pro-
duced new patterns in politics within what is now Germany that led to the coalescing
of those regions into a new entity. The role of barbarian migration in the formation of
Germany will thus be argued to be more or less the diametrical opposite of what is usu-
ally assumed. Finally, there is no attempt here to escape or deny the political dimension
of this contribution. Apart from my conviction that the writing of history is inescapably
political, my aim is partly to provide a basis for a more politically and ethically responsi-
ble intervention by historians in modern political debate about migration.23

II: ‘Germanic’

As intimated, fundamental to traditional interpretations is the view of the migrating

barbarians as ‘Germanic’—even as ‘Germans’. Partly this stems from Roman ethno-
geography, most notably Tacitus’s Germania, which bracketed all those ‘fair-haired races’
who could not be included under the heading of ‘Gauls’ or ‘Celts’.24 That definition

22 Good critiques of the use of DNA can be found in M.P. Evison, ‘All in the Genes? Evaluating the Biological Evidence
of Contact and Migration’, in D.M. Hadley and J.D. Richards (eds), Cultures in Contact: Scandinavian Settlement
in England in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 277–94; C. Hills, The Origins of the English
(London, 2003), pp. 110–11. In an important current project, Patrick Geary (IAS, Princeton) is critically investigat-
ing the possible uses of ancient DNA from ‘migration period’ cemeteries.
23 In this I have been much influenced and inspired by conversation with Leo Lucassen (Leiden) and especially by a
lecture given by Professor Lucassen in Brussels in May 2011.
24 Tacitus: Germania, trans. J. Rives (Oxford, 1999).
520 Guy Halsall

proved tricky even then; Graeco-Roman writers readily admitted that Gauls and
Germani were closely related.25 Linguistically, we can justify grouping together all those
peoples who spoke a related form of Indo-European, whether East, West or North
Germanic. Such a definition, however, does not equate with the classical idea of the
Germani. At least the ruling stratum of the Goths, who have in recent decades become
something of a paradigm for ‘Germanic migrations’, spoke a Germanic language but
they were not considered Germani by Graeco-Roman authors, who usually saw them
as ‘Scythians’ or as descendants of other peoples recorded in the same region, notably
the Getae.26
No sense of a shared Germanic identity existed among trans-Rhenan barbarians,
except possibly within the Empire, when the Romans, on the basis of classical ethnog-

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raphy, grouped such barbarians together into military units. Usually the different politi-
cal groups east of the Rhine and north of the upper Danube were perfectly happy to
fight each other, especially for Roman pay. Walter Goffart has argued that a supposedly
common identity and past, based upon linguistic kinship, first emerged during Frankish
campaigns against the Muslims in Spain and southern France. The similarity between
Gothic and Frankish personal names was noted.27 The comprehensive rejection of the
idea of a unifying Germanic ethos and identity among pre-migratory Germani removes
the classic basis for nineteenth-century views of the German people as rooted in distant
history.28 There is really no truly ‘German history’ before the ninth-century creation
of the Eastern Frankish kingdom and the fostering of an identity separate from that
of the West Franks.29 However, unlike French and German, which distinguish between
ancient and modern ‘Germans’ (germains and allemands; Germanen and Deutsche),
English no longer has such a linguistic resource.30 Henceforth, therefore, the Latin
Germani will be used to describe the groups so designated by the Romans, and the term
Germanic will be enclosed in inverted commas except where discussing linguistics.
Nonetheless, ‘Germanic’ and even ‘German’ remain current in discussions of the
Völkerwanderung, masking numerous uncritical assumptions.31 This is especially true
among archaeologists. Cultural features, principally furnished inhumation (burial with
grave-goods) and types of sunken hut (Grubenhäuser) are habitually called ‘Germanic’.

25 See, for example, Strabo, Geography 7.1.2, 4.4.2. The Geography of Strabo, trans. H.L. Jones (8 vols; London,
1917–32); Dio Cassius, Roman History, 38.47.5. Dio’s Roman History, trans. E. Cary (9 vols; London, 1914–27).
26 H. Wolfram, History of the Goths, trans. T.J. Dunlap (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 28–29; M. Kulikowski, Rome’s Gothic
Wars from the Third Century to Alaric (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 14–15.
27 Goffart, ‘The Theme’, p. 113 and 113, n.7.
28 J. Jarnut, ‘Germanisch: Plädoyer für die Abschaffung eines obsoleten Zentralbegriffes der Frühmittelalterforschung’,
in Pohl (ed.), Die Suche nach den Ursprüngen, pp.  107–13. A  similar critique may be found in C.  Azzara, Le
Invasioni Barbariche (Bologna, 1999), pp. 8, 158–63.
29 T. Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, 800–1056 (London, 1991), p. 1; E.J. Goldberg, Struggle for Empire:
Kingship and Conflict under Louis the German, 817–76 (Ithaca, 2006), esp. pp. 147–85.
30 The equivalent terms for contemporary Germans—‘Almayne’ and ‘Dutch’—fell out of use in the sixteenth and sev-
enteenth centuries. J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, ‘Gens into Regnum: The Vandals’, in H-W. Goetz, J. Jarnut and W. Pohl
(eds), Regna and Gentes: The Relationship Between Late Antique and Early Medieval Peoples and Kingdoms in the
Transformation of the Roman World (Leiden, 2003), pp. 55–83, pp. 60–61 and p. 61, n.19. Liebeschuetz argues
in favour of a more effective shared Germanentum, unconvincingly in my view.
31 See, for example, the section heading in R. Blockley, ‘The Dynasty of Theodosius’, in A. M. Cameron and P. Garnsey
(eds), The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 13: The Late Empire, A.D. 337–425 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 111–37, at
p. 118: ‘The German onslaught on the west’.
 A ‘Counter-Intuitive’ View of the Roman Empire and ‘Germanic’ Migration  521

Their presence or appearance in a region is thus taken to denote the appearance of

‘Germanic’ immigrants. One inheritance of nineteenth-century (and earlier) notions
of pan-Germanic culture is the unlikely notion that all Germani had access to a com-
mon range of cultural traits, upon which they could draw at will. The appearance of,
for example, inhumation with weapons in an area known historically to have been
settled by Germani can be described as indicating that settlement, even if the people
in question never used that rite in their homeland. The description is justified by the
fact that, somewhere in the huge Germanic-speaking region between the North Sea
and Ukraine, another ‘Germanic’ group did bury its dead like that. The archaeological
data rarely provide prima facie support for interpretations which, however unconsciously,
echo with ‘Germanist’ assumptions. Attempts to change this intellectually careless state
of affairs are making only slow process.32

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III:  Imperial–Barbarian Relationships

The persistent assumption of a unified ‘Germanic’ culture is one area where the notion
of a binary opposition between Roman and barbarian worlds is manifested. Its roots
lie, again, in classical ethnography. Some Roman authors viewed the world in these
terms, with the imperium Romanum surrounded by hostile gentes.33 The idea that natural
antagonism dominated Roman–Barbarian relationships pervades popular and aca-
demic views of late antiquity. A common interpretation of the late imperial frontiers
sees them as a straining dam. It envisages the ‘Germanic’ barbarians piling up against
them until, in the early fifth century, they could no longer hold back the tide. When that
happened—maintaining the aquatic metaphors beloved of studies of the migrations—
‘waves’ of barbarians ‘flooded’ in, ‘swamping’ the Roman provinces.
This vision has been redressed in academic work; sadly, that correction has rarely
been taken beyond the halls of academe. When it has, it has frequently been dismissed
as ‘liberal’ political correctness—sometimes, alas, by academic historians writing in
public fora.34 The counter-attack against work revising traditional ‘Germanist’ views
includes several elements in its arguments. The first concerns the existence of an impe-
rial Roman frontier ‘policy’, or ‘Grand Strategy’, to use the term employed by Edward
Luttwak in his notorious 1976 volume.35 Luttwak, a US defence analyst,36 viewed the
Roman situation very much through the prism of the then current situation in Western
Europe, where NATO forces confronted those of the Soviet Bloc across a long, forti-
fied frontier. The contemporary resonance of Luttwak’s ideas was transparent—even
down to the notion of ‘defence in depth’, Luttwak’s preferred NATO ‘Grand Strategy’,

32 For a lengthy discussion of the problems and historiography, see G. Halsall, Cemeteries and Society in Merovingian
Gaul: Selected Studies in Archaeology and History (Leiden, 2010), pp. 91–167.
33 De Rebus Bellicis 6.1: A Roman Reformer and Inventor, ed. and trans. E.A. Thompson (Oxford, 1952).
34 See, for example, J.E. Lendon, ‘The Watch on the Rhine; Barbarians at the Gate of Rome’, The Weekly Review (26
March 2007).
35 E. Luttwak, Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third (Baltimore, 1976). For
the fifth century, the baton was taken up from Luttwak by A. Ferrill, The Fall of the Roman Empire: The Military
Explanation (London, 1986).
36 For an insight into Luttwak’s thinking, see www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/opinion/12luttwak.html?_r=2&ref=
opinion (accessed 12 Aug. 2012).
522 Guy Halsall

which (funnily enough) he saw as adopted in the later Roman period. Yet, the idea
that the Roman and barbarian worlds confronted each other as separate, opposed
entities, rather like the Western powers and their Soviet antagonists, remains deeply
entrenched. Just as western propaganda presented the ‘Russians’ as ready to invade
the West the very instant the latter let its guard down, the idea implicit in much writing
about the Late Roman Empire is that the barbarians were similarly perpetually watch-
ing and waiting for their chance to overrun imperial territories.
Why this should have been the case is (as with the theories of automatic Soviet aggres-
sion) rarely explored in depth. Barbarians were just like that. Few people have expressed the
preconception as clearly as did Henri Pirenne: the barbarians were irresistibly drawn towards
the Mediterranean, ‘happy regions where the mildness of the climate and the fertility of the
soil were matched by the charms and the wealth of civilization’.37 The reality of this proto-

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German ‘drive towards the south’ (Drang nach Suden) need not detain us. Suffice it to say that it is
largely derived, ex post facto, from the contingent fact that some Germanic-speaking barbarian
groups finished their wanderings on the shores of the Middle Sea. The traditional assumption
of a natural barbarian desire to conquer the Roman Empire lacks any empirical foundation.
Luttwak’s concept of a Grand Strategy has received detailed critique.38 At a basic
operational level, the Romans had no notion of a Grand Strategy. Frontier activity
tended to be local, ad hoc and contingent. The idea that the Later Empire developed a
strategy of ‘defence in depth’ has been dismantled. The deeper late imperial frontier
belts resulted from the fact that the armed forces were largely paid in kind and received
their supplies from the state, rather than buying them in local markets. Spreading the
troops more evenly through a largely militarized and state-controlled frontier region,
such as northern Gaul, made more sense in this context. While the danger of barbar-
ian raiding cannot and should not be discounted, the defence of interior strong-points
also stemmed from the need to protect the late imperial administration’s nodal points.
Banditry and rebellion (often fused in Roman ideology) were as much a danger as bar-
barian attack—perhaps more so. The idea that the short walled circuits of late Roman
cities resulted from haste and emergency, during the barbarian invasions of the 270s,
has been discounted; that the Romans moved from ‘preclusive security’ to ‘defence in
depth’ is belied by the heavy expenditure on frontier fortifications during the fourth
century, as late as Valentinian I’s reign (364–75).39 Finally, the separation of Roman
forces into border forces (limitanei and ripenses) and field armies (comitatenses) is unlikely
to have reflected the postulated strategy of delaying barbarians in a deep fortified belt
until mobile field armies could move up and destroy them. The distinction between the
two types of troops was more fluid than might be supposed, and the speed of commu-
nications and movement in late antiquity undermine the attempts of Luttwak and his
followers to transpose modern strategy onto the Roman Empire.40 Mobile field armies,

37 H. Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (Princeton, 1952), p. 6.
38 Classic is J.C. Mann, ‘Power, Force and the Frontiers of the Empire’, Journal of Roman Studies, 69 (1979),
pp. 175–83.
39 A. Piganiol, L’Empire Chrétien (2nd edn, rev. Chastagnol, A.; Paris, 1972), pp. 197–8. Piganiol quotes (at p. 197,
n.1) an unfortunate statement by A.  Alföldi from 1938, to the effect that Valentinian’s defences ‘créa. ..  une
Ligne Maginot’. More recently, see H. Elton, Warfare in Roman Europe AD 350–425 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 155–74;
P. Southern and K. Dixon, The Late Roman Army (London, 1966), pp. 127–47.
40 One sometimes has the idea that proponents of the ‘Grand Strategy of defence in Depth’ saw the Roman field
armies as having the same telecommunications and mobility as highly-mechanized late twentieth-century helicop-
ter-borne élite forces.
 A ‘Counter-Intuitive’ View of the Roman Empire and ‘Germanic’ Migration  523

comprising the Empire’s best troops and located close to the emperor himself, devel-
oped during the turbulent third century and certainly resulted mostly from the desire to
keep a large force of the best troops close to the ruler and away from any challengers
for power.
If general strategic principles to some extent governed the otherwise ad hoc and piece-
meal activities of individual emperors, these were more probably concerned with internal
imperial politics than with any actual Grand Strategy confronting ‘the barbarian threat’.
In practical terms, although barbarians could cause widespread damage and demoraliza-
tion during their raids, and this should not be understated, the military balance of power
lay overwhelmingly with the Romans. With a total military manpower exceeding, it is
estimated, 400,000 men, the Empire had, by antique standards, bottomless reserves of
troops.41 Even on the Rhine, the number of soldiers available far outweighed anything

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that even a large barbarian confederacy could assemble. Roman sources habitually discuss
barbarian armies as tens of thousands—occasionally hundreds of thousands—strong. It
is astonishing that professional historians continue to accept these estimates.42 The largest
nucleated settlements known in barbaricum east of the Rhine housed about two hundred
people. In much of the trans-Rhenan zone, for most of the Roman Iron Age, agricultural
surplus and its control were insufficient to support wealthy, established élites or much
craft specialization and organized industry.43 That, in this context, small or even middling
groups could have mobilized armies of twenty to thirty thousand men and moved them
even as far as the frontier without causing catastrophic famine in their homelands, or have
maintained them without starving once within Roman territory, defies belief. Julian could
starve out a force of only 600 Franks.44 While the Late Roman Empire had 400,000 men
or more under arms, its largest field armies seem only to have numbered about 20,000
troops; expeditionary forces of a couple of thousand were frequently deemed adequate
to deal even with serious regional trouble. Well organized, taxing states with more com-
plex economies, banking loans, urban settlements and more developed agricultures did
not habitually raise armies of 30,000 men or more before the sixteenth or seventeenth
century.45 The confederate Alamannic army that fought the Romans at Strasbourg in
357 cannot possibly, therefore, have approached the 35,000 men claimed by Ammianus
Marcellinus.46 It will have been remarkable if it matched the 13,000 on the Roman side.
Add to that the undoubted superiority of the Romans in the fields of armament, fortifi-
cations, siege techniques and logistics and one arrives at a better idea of how serious the
military threat posed by the Germanic-speaking barbarians really was.
The proof of this argument lies in the relative importance attached by Roman com-
manders to Roman and barbarian enemies. Invariably they left invasions by trans-
Rhenan barbarians to be cleared up afterwards, no matter how damaging they were
(as with the Alamannic attacks during the civil wars of the 350s). Primacy had to be

41 For a summary of the debate, see A. Cameron, The Later Roman Empire, AD 284–430 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).
42 See, for example, Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, pp. 1–7.
43 G. Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 367–568 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 118–31, for a survey of
settlement and social structures in Germania Magna.
44 Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae 17.2. Ammianus Marcellinus. trans. J.C. Rolfe (London 1935–39) (3 vols.)
45 For a survey of this issue, with full references, see G. Halsall, Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West (London,
2003), pp. 119–33.
46 Ammianus, Res Gestae 16.12.
524 Guy Halsall

given to the subjection of the larger, better-equipped forces of Roman enemies; this
remained true through the fifth century. Indeed, the Rhine frontier could be effectively
denuded of defending units, as perhaps in the 390s and the first decade of the fifth
century. Claudian’s panegyric for Stilicho admits that he left it defended mainly by the
fear of his name and by treaties with barbarian frontier kings.47 Only the prevalence of
the modern ‘straining dam’ theory makes this seem surprising. For most of the past two
centuries, France and Germany, or Canada and the USA, have not permanently had to
line up huge field armies along their shared borders in a form of ‘dynamic tension’, lest
their removal led to automatic invasion by the other side. There was, likewise, nothing
natural or automatic about the hostile movement of Germanic-speaking barbarians
across the imperial limes.

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So, why did the Romans focus so heavily upon the frontier and the barbarian threat?
One of the most important recent historiographical developments has been the increase
in awareness of the ideological role of the frontier and the barbarian ‘bogey man’. The
barbarian threat—especially the ‘Germanic’ barbarian threat—was largely, in John
Drinkwater’s words, a Roman artefact.48 The third century’s political instability had
made it clear that the unusual cultural and economic features that had held the Empire
together were no longer effective. Political fission and multiple empires had seemed
realistic possibilities. The revived late third- and fourth-century Empire based itself
upon a large bureaucracy. This civil service, twenty to thirty thousand strong, operated
as a huge interlocking pyramid of patronage networks with the emperor at the pinna-
cle.49 The attractions of promotion, in terms of privilege and local precedence, and the
short terms for which many offices were held made this system an enormous resource
for the emperors. Local ambitions were best served by imperially moderated competi-
tion for the benefits brought by involvement in government, and thus the Empire was
bound together as a political unit. The principal role of this crucial bureaucracy was
to collect taxation; taxation was primarily required to pay the army. In turn the justifi-
cation for the army was defence from barbarian attack. No emperor could admit that
he needed his army to cow his subjects and potential rivals! Central to any emperor’s
claims to good rulership—and thus to the legitimacy and attraction of association with
him—was a role as the pacifier of the nations (domitor gentium). Victory over barbar-
ians was especially important and expenditure on frontier fortifications a valuable sign
of imperial good management.50 Consequently, throughout the period up to 388, the
emperors remained close to their frontiers in the ‘inside-out’ late Empire, close to their
élite field armies and also, importantly, easily accessible to the local aristocracies of
strategically important frontier provinces, such as Pannonia and Gaul. Patrick Geary
famously said that ‘the Germanic world was perhaps the greatest and most enduring

47 Claudian, The Fourth Consulate of Honorius, lines 439–58. Claudian, ed. and trans. M. Platnauer (London, 1922),
vol. 1, pp. 286–335.
48 J.F. Drinkwater, ‘“The Germanic Threat on the Rhine frontier”: A  Romano-Gallic artefact?’, in R.W Mathisen
and H.S. Sivan (eds), Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity (Aldershot, 1996), pp.  20–30; Drinkwater, ‘Julian and
the Franks and Valentinian I  and the Alamanni: Ammianus on Roman–German relations’, Francia, 24 (1997),
pp. 1–16.
49 On late imperial administration, see C. Kelly, ‘Emperors, Government and Bureaucracy’, in Cameron and Garnsey,
The Late Empire, pp. 138–83; Kelly, Ruling the Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).
50 The classic treatment is M. McCormick, Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium and the
Early Medieval West (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 11–130.
 A ‘Counter-Intuitive’ View of the Roman Empire and ‘Germanic’ Migration  525

creation of Roman political and military genius’; Alexander Callander Murray has
responded that the late Roman world was in many ways created around the barbarian
threat.51 In constructing the barbarian world, the Roman Empire defined itself.
The military basis for seeing the Roman and barbarian worlds as mutually antago-
nistic entities can thus largely be discounted. Violence and warfare occurred but are
unquantifiable. The whole frontier was rarely in turmoil at once; by far the majority
of such barbarian raids as occurred were probably small-scale rustlings or robberies
necessitating ‘police actions’ in response, rather than large incursions requiring fully-
fledged campaigning. The default setting for Roman–barbarian relations across the
Rhine-Danube frontiers was most probably quiet coexistence.
Plentiful evidence supports this notion.52 Fourth-century human movement is

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far more commonly revealed, archaeologically, going from the Empire to Germanic-
speaking barbaricum. For all the weight of received wisdom, movement in the opposite
direction is mostly implicit. Items of Roman military uniform are found in the crema-
tion (and, later, inhumation) cemeteries of modern Lower Saxony and the northern
Netherlands, testifying to circular ‘career-migration’, attested in the written sources
too. Saxons left home, served in the Roman army and returned to their native land.
Such was the status acquired by having served Rome that when these men died their
families displayed that imperial connection in their funeral. Only differential funer-
ary custom distinguishes Lower Saxony and neighbouring areas on archaeological dis-
tribution maps. Had grave-goods been incorporated in the burial rites of the rest of
Germania Magna we would see such objects more evenly scattered across the region. The
late Empire recruited heavily among the Germanic-speaking barbarians, underlining
yet further the military imbalance between Rome and her neighbours. However small
barbarian manpower was, it was reduced further by the Empire’s recruitment of so
many young warriors, among whom Roman service was doubtless far more attractive
than membership of a chieftain’s warband. Such troops served Rome loyally, not least
in attacks on their co-linguists: further nailing shut the coffin of the idea of a unified
proto–German ‘people’.
Movement is also revealed by the distribution of other Roman artefacts. Settlements
close to the limites are soaked with Roman imports of all sorts, bearing witness to a
lively system of exchange.53 Imperial products are less frequent the further away from
the Rhine one moves, but they reached a long way. A type of cauldron manufactured
in the Meuse valley is known as the Vestland Type because of the frequency with which
it occurs in that region of Norway, for example.54 Roman imports are found around
the Baltic. On Fyn it is clear from their distribution that the regional élite controlled
access to prestigious Roman artefacts. The site at Gudme-Lundeborg, through which
such imports entered the region, is emblematic of a particular type of small, high-status

51 P. Geary, Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (Oxford, 1988),
p. vi; Callander Murray, ‘Reinhard Wenskus on “Ethnogenesis”‘, p. 45, n.24.
52 Set out in Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, pp. 123–4, 125–31, 150–61; Halsall, Cemeteries and
Society, pp. 91–167.
53 See, for example, H. Brink-Kloke and J. Meurers-Balke, ‘Siedlungen und Gräber am Oespeler Bach (Dortmund)—
eine Kulturlandschaft im Wandel der Zeiten’, Germania, 81 (2003), pp. 47–146.
54 H.-W. Böhme, K. Böhner, M. Schulze, K. Weidemann, G. Waurick, F. Baratte and F. Vallet, A l’Aube de la France:
La Gaule de Constantin à Childéric [parallel German edition, Gallien in der Spätantike] (Paris, 1980), pp. 127, 129.
526 Guy Halsall

settlement involved in trading with the Empire.55 Another example is Dankirke on the
west coast of Jutland.56 The commerce that reached Jutland and Fyn was presum-
ably seaborne but other trade is demonstrated through the movement of goods up the
‘amber routes’ between the Baltic and the Empire. The growth and prosperity of some
settlements in barbaricum near the frontier, such as Wijster, has been linked to trade
with the limes.57 This may also have lain behind the organized iron-working revealed at
Heeten in the Netherlands.58 The exchanges attested by this evidence can reasonably
be interpreted as commercial.
Other Roman–barbarian interactions are attested by the Roman silver and gold
objects in prestigious inhumation burials, especially in central Germania. Although
they may possibly have originated as loot, it is as plausible to view them as diplomatic

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payments paid by the Empire to its friends in barbaricum. These relationships are also
revealed by huge gold medallions bearing the same iconography as is found on normal
late imperial gold coinage, the solidi, and usually corresponding in weight to a multiple
of the latter.59 It would seem erroneous to view these as coins rather than as enormous,
prestigious units of bullion struck for diplomatic purposes.
The public, ritual deployment of Roman objects, in the Saxon cremations and the
lavish central German inhumations, underlines very clearly how important links with the
Empire were in late third- and fourth-century barbaricum. Rome’s late antique cultural
dominance is also revealed by the fact that just across the Upper Rhine and Danube
frontiers, in Alamannic territory, local leaders made imitations of just the sorts of official
brooches that Saxon soldiers took back home with them.60 We can set this evidence
against the written sources to suggest that three hundred years of close proximity to the
imperial superpower had so saturated society, politics and culture among the Germani in
Roman influence that legitimate power was difficult to express except via imperial idi-
oms. According to Ammianus, an Alamannic ruler even named his son Serapio, without
the latter apparently objecting to his strange moniker.61 In more general ways it may not
even have been that unusual; until perhaps the last quarter of the fourth century it was
normal for Germanic-speaking and other barbarian recruits to adopt Roman names.
The confederacies—Saxons, Franks, Alamans and Goths (like, perhaps, the Picts)—
that emerge in the sources during the third and fourth centuries, evidently as new

55 P.O. Nielsen, K. Randsborg and H. Thrane (ed.) The Archaeology of Gudme and Lundeborg (Copenhagen, 1994).
56 H.J. Hansen, ‘Dankirke: Affluence in Late Iron Age Denmark’ in K.  Randsborg (ed.), The Birth of Europe.
Archaeology and Social Development in the First Millennium A.D. (Rome, 1989), pp. 123–8.
57 W. Van Es, Wijster: A Native Village beyond the Imperial Frontier 150–425 AD Palaeohistoria, 11, (1967).
58 B.J. Groenewoudt and M. van Nie, ‘Assessing the Scale and Organisation of Germanic Iron Production in Heeten,
the Netherlands’, Journal of European Archaeology, 3, 2 (1995), pp. 187–215; A.D. Verlinde and M. Erdrich, ‘Eine
germanische Siedlung der späten Kaiserzeit mit umwehrter Anlage und umfangreicher Eisenindustrie in Heeten,
Province Overijssel, Niederlande’, Germania, 76 (1998), pp. 693–719.
59 See, for example, H.U. Nuber et  al., Imperium Romanum: Römer, Christen, Alamannen: Die Spätantike am
Oberrhein (Stuttgart, 2005), Catalogue number 110, p. 246.
60 M. Hoeper, ‘Die Höhensiedlungen der Alamannen und ihre Deutungsmöglichkeiten zwischen Fürstensitz,
Heerlager, Rückzugsraum und Kultplatz’ in D. Geunich (ed.), Die Franken und die Alemannen bis zur ‘Schlacht
bei Zülpich’ (Berlin, 1998), pp.  325–348; Hoeper and H.  Steuer, ‘Eine völkerwanderungszeitliche Höhenstation
am Oberrhein—der Geißkopf bei Berghaupten, Ortenaukreis—Höhensiedlung, Militärlager oder Kultplatz?’,
Germania, 77 (1999), pp. 185–246.
61 Ammianus, Res Gestae, 16.12.25.
 A ‘Counter-Intuitive’ View of the Roman Empire and ‘Germanic’ Migration  527

entities, appeared directly on the imperial frontiers.62 The role of the limes in the for-
mation of these units has recently been much discussed. The Alamanni may have come
together in some way under Roman auspices, during the imperial withdrawal from the
Agri Decumates.63 It was, however, probably more usual for the Empire to play a part in
group-formation through the de facto proximity of the limes and via possibly unintended
results of imperial ‘foreign policy’. The cross-border trade discussed above allowed
greater wealth to be concentrated in the hands of local rulers, but Roman diplomacy
was doubtless even more important.
The Romans had always played their barbarian neighbours off against each other.
During the third-century troubles, diplomatic payments to barbarians across the Rhine
probably became larger and more common as rivals for power purchased either quiet

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borders, while they removed troops to fight elsewhere, or allies to disturb the tranquillity
of their rivals’ frontiers. These policies continued through the fourth century and into
the fifth. The Romans intervened directly in barbarian politics close to the limes, usually
managing to prevent the barbarian confederacies from coalescing.64 However, when
the Romans were distracted by civil war, the confederate identities that had emerged
in the third century permitted larger barbarian units to form. The stakes in barbarian
politics had been raised.65
It is important not to get carried away with a cosy view of the Roman–barbarian
frontier. Murderous and damaging raids on the Empire occurred. When they were
launched, imperial punitive expeditions into barbaricum were doubtless even more
lethal. The barbarian could be, and was, presented as the very antithesis of the civi-
lized Roman, with much in common with wild animals. Roman troops were unleashed
across the frontier with orders to kill every living thing they found; captured barbarians
were thrown to wild beasts in public spectacle, or forced to kill each other in the arena.
When activated, the Roman ideology of the barbarian put the latter very squarely
in a state of exception, of ‘bare life’, in the phrases coined by Giorgio Agamben.66
That said, although the binary civilized:barbarian opposition could be mapped onto the
imperial frontiers, it should not be fused with the Romans’ ‘taxonomic’ ethnography
of the different peoples of the world, in which the limes played a less defined role. Like
animals and women, barbarians were praised for their closeness to the central ideal of
civilization represented by the Roman male, and damned for distance from it. Unlike
women and animals, they could be brought so close to that ideal as to be incorporated
in it, with no visible trace of their different origins.67 Thus the very troops slaughter-
ing men, women and children in Alamannic villages or dragging captives off to the
arenas might themselves be Germanic-speaking barbarians—possibly even Alamans.

62 In the Saxon case this counts (as did the Romans) the North Sea as the frontier between Germania Magna and
Britain and northern Gaul.
63 H.U. Nuber, ‘Der Verlust der obergermanisch-raetischen Limesgebiete und die Grenzsicherung bis zum Ende des
3. Jahrhunderts’, in F. Vallet and M. Kazanski (eds), L’Armée Romaine et les Barbares du IIIe au VIIe Siècle (Paris,
1993), pp.  101–8; Nuber, ‘Zur Entstehung des Stammes der Alamanni aus römischer Sicht’, in Geunich, Die
Franken und die Alemannen, pp. 367–83; L. Okamura, ‘Roman Withdrawals from Three Transfluvial Frontiers’, in
Mathisen and Sivan, Shifting Frontiers, pp. 11–19.
64 Elton, Warfare in Roman Europe, pp. 37–44, 181–92.
65 Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, pp. 161–2.
66 G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen) (Stanford, 1998).
67 Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, pp. 45–57.
528 Guy Halsall

Although always a resource available to be called upon, the ideological distinction

between the civilized Roman and the ferocious barbarian more often hovered—how-
ever chillingly and menacingly—in the background of cross-border relations.

IV:  The Roman Empire and Migration

The preceding discussion has demonstrated the inextricable connection between the
‘Germanic’ barbarian and the Roman polities, indeed the dependence of the former
upon the latter. Rather than two opposed blocs, we should envisage a single world with
a Roman core and northern barbarian periphery. This provides a very different frame-
work into which to fit the documented movements of barbarians into Roman territory.

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We can look at the dynamics from the perspective of individuals and of larger groups.
In recent decades, what is known as ‘migration theory’ has made an appearance
in the studies of late antique population movement.68 This has largely been pressed
into service by researchers wanting to maintain the idea of large-scale folk-wanderings,
especially into Roman Britain.69 Its employment has rarely gone beyond demonstrating
that migrations occur but in fact this ‘theory’ (in reality a body of general, comparative
observations about the nature of migration) has much more to offer. Ironically, though,
it tends to tell against the arguments of those who make most use of it, providing little
support for reading material cultural change simply as showing the movement of peo-
ple from barbaricum into the Roman Empire. Particularly important are migration the-
ory’s insights that processes of population movement rarely if ever constitute one-way
traffic; that migrants follow established routes rather than ‘flooding’ over the borders on
a wide front (something that surely applies a fortiori to antique population movement);
that they are drawn to pre-existing immigrant communities; and (underpinning all the
previous comments) that the flow of information is crucial to migration. A typology of
migration helps to make the discussion more precise.
This suggests, interestingly, that barbarian immigration was considerably easier
when the Roman Empire was functioning and its borders still effectively maintained.
A steady stream of information flowed from the Empire to barbaricum (manifest in the
archaeological data discussed earlier). For those who, like the Saxons mentioned above,
undertook circular ‘career migration’, this was vital. It was essential to know if, and
whom, the imperial army was hiring, where to go to be enrolled, and how to get there.
For families moving for economic reasons, information about the feasibility of settle-
ment, the routes and safety of travel, and existing communities was important; in addi-
tion to controlling access, those manning the imperial borders seem to have been able

68 For a good introduction to migration theory, see S. Trafford, ‘Ethnicity, Migration Theory and the Historiography
of the Scandinavian Settlement of England’, in D.M. Hadley and J.D. Richards, Culture in Contact: Scandinavian
Settlement in England in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 17–33.
69 H. Hamerow, ‘Migration Theory and the Migration Period’, in Building on the Past: Papers Celebrating 150
Years of the Royal Archaeological Institute (London, 1994), pp. 164–77; Hamerow, ‘Migration Theory and the
Anglo-Saxon “Identity Crisis”‘, in J. Chapman and Hamerow (eds), Migrations and Invasions in Archaeological
Explanation (British Archaeological Reports (International Series) 664; Oxford, 1997), pp.  33–44; Hamerow,
‘Wanderungstheorien und die angelsächsische “Identitätskrise”‘, Studien zu Sachsenforschung, 11 (1997),
pp. 121–34. Slightly more sophisticated is C. Scull, ‘Migration Theory and Early England: Contexts and Dynamics
of Cultural Change’, Studien zu Sachsenforschung, 11 (1998), pp. 177–85.
 A ‘Counter-Intuitive’ View of the Roman Empire and ‘Germanic’ Migration  529

to organize the settlement of those allowed into the Empire. Like the movement of
traders in the opposite direction (or soldiers’ journeys back home after their service
expired), these migrations required a peaceful and well-ordered frontier. Small-scale
population movement (in terms of the social units involved) thus flourished under the
Empire.
Larger-scale migration from barbaricum was also integral to the imperial world. As
early as Julius Caesar’s day, the Romans’ management of their borders and their pro-
motion of allied leaders or groups had led to such movements.70 Those who lost out in
barbarian politics had long sought shelter within the Republic’s or, after it, the Empire’s
frontiers, especially if they had been Rome’s friends. Unsurprisingly, they took their
families with them, as well as those of their compatriots who had supported their fac-

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tion. Large groups were, then, settled within the Empire and it is moot whether such
groups were smaller than those that entered during the so-called Migration Period.
Forty-thousand Suevi and Sicambri were (allegedly) settled in 8 BC; fifty-thousand
‘Getae’ in AD 5; an inscription records 100,000 barbarians settled in Moesia under
Nero; and so on.71 The same prudence must be shown towards these numbers as
towards those of barbarian armies; what matters is that these were larger groups than
simple families and that the Romans described them in the same terms, in the same
orders of magnitude, as they used for the fifth-century movements. As before, effective
frontier-management was crucial; the groups admitted were moved and their settle-
ment organized and administered by the imperial government. Such settlements pro-
vided, one assumes, focal communities to which later migrants from the same area were
drawn. All told, it is quite likely that significantly more migration took place across the
Rhine and Danube before the collapse of the western Empire than afterwards, provided
we keep in mind the nature of such movement.
The greater late fourth- and fifth-century population movements generally followed
the same patterns. Although an attempt has recently been made to revive the antique
‘domino theory’ first espoused by Ambrose of Milan, with the Huns pushing the vari-
ous peoples in front of them, such a view is tendentious at best.72 More sophisticated
analysis suggests that the Gothic crisis of 376–82 should be understood in the terms of
normal Roman practice. The trans-Danubian region was thoroughly destabilized by
the campaigns of Emperor Valens in the 360s.73 Rather than bursting unexpectedly
onto the scene as a deus ex machina, the Huns became another element in an already
faction-ridden situation, which took perhaps thirty years to resolve. The pro-Roman
Tervingian Gothic faction led by Fritigern and Alaviv, like the Greuthungian group that
formed around the child-king Videric, lost out in this civil strife and took the well-worn
route of moving to the imperial frontier and demanding asylum. The mismanagement

70 L.F. Pitts, ‘Relations Between Rome and the German “Kings” on the Middle Danube in the First to Fourth Centuries
AD’, Journal of Roman Studies, 79 (1989), pp. 45–58.
71 Y. Modéran, ‘L’établissement de barbares sur le territoire romain à l’époque impériale’, in C.  Moatti (ed.), La
mobilité des personnes en Méditerranée de l’antiquité à l’époque moderne (Rome, 2004), pp. 337–97.
72 See, for example, Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire. The irony of the subtitle (‘A New History’) seems
unintentional.
73 Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, pp. 173–5; N. Lenski, ‘The Gothic Civil War and the Date of
the Gothic Conversion’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 36 (1995), pp. 51–87; Lenski, The Failure of Empire:
Valens and the Roman State in the Fourth Century A.D. (Berkeley, 2002).
530 Guy Halsall

of the Greuthungian receptio (in no small measure attributable to the emperor’s distance
from events), rather than the scale of the migration, led to the Gothic revolt and even-
tual victory at Adrianople (9 August 378).74 In any case, close scrutiny of the more con-
temporary data, rather than teleological interpretations based upon subsequent events
and sources (themselves seeking explanations for later actions) suggests that the Goths
were eventually worn down and surrendered, and were settled in a fairly conventional
manner.75 Similarly, a solid case can be made that Radagaisus’ Gothic invasion of
Italy and the so-called Great Invasion of c.406 followed a typical pattern. The final
emergence of the groups based around the Huns as the dominant faction north of
the Danube led to the losers in such politics, like the Tervingians before them, seeking
refuge inside the Empire. The collapse of Roman frontier-management in the decades

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either side of 400 also played a part, removing the checks and balances that had main-
tained a rough balance of power. As had happened before, the end of active Roman
‘foreign policy’ produced crisis and tension in barbaricum and the emergence of a larger
and more dangerous unit there.76 It is interesting, in this connection, that the fifth- and
sixth-century barbarian groups who moved furthest came not from the large border
confederacies but from a sort of ‘middle band’ of territories within Germania Magna:
Vandals, Sueves, Burgundians, Lombards. It was here that Rome’s role in maintaining
political stability may have been greatest and thus where the end of effective frontier
management may have been most keenly felt.77
The crucial role of the Roman frontier and its dynamics in governing migration
to and from Germania is underlined by the fact that significant movements by large
groups from this region into the former imperial territories more or less end with the
political and military disintegration of the limes during the first half of the fifth century.
Thereafter (and indeed during the disintegration), such movement as occurred across
the Rhine was short-range ‘drift’ by Franks and Alamans, largely small-scale, if cumu-
latively significant. The Saxon movement across the North Sea was probably similar.
This ought not to surprise us. With the fragmentation of the Empire, the distances
over which information travelled reduced considerably, shortening the range of human
movement commensurately. The economic collapse attendant upon the fifth-century
imperial crisis only underlined this by reducing the distances over which exchange took
place. A final support for the thesis relating migration to the core–periphery relations
between the Empire and its neighbours may be found in the way that the last classic
‘Germanic’ Volkswanderung, that of the Lombards, also moved from trans-Danubian
barbaricum into (at that point) imperial territory.

74 As argued in Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, pp. 175–8, contra, for example, P. Heather, Goths
and Romans, 332–489 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 123–42.
75 Again, as argued in more detail in Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, pp. 180–5; contra Heather,
Goths and Romans, pp. 157–92.
76 Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, pp. 186–209. Cf. Elton, Warfare in Roman Europe, pp. 37–4,
191–2.
77 For a three-band interpretation of barbaricum and its relations with the Empire, see Halsall, Barbarian Migrations
and the Roman West, pp. 411–13; Halsall, ‘Beyond the Northern Frontiers’, in P. Rousseau (ed.), A Companion
to Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2009), pp. 409–25; Halsall, ‘Northern Britain and the Fall of the Roman Empire’, The
Mediaeval Journal, 2, 2 (2012). Inspiration for the idea came from L. Hedeager, ‘Empire, Frontier and the Barbarian
Hinterland: Rome and Northern Europe from AD 1–400’, in M.  Rowlands, M.  Larsen and K.  Kristiansen (eds),
Centre and Periphery in the Ancient World (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 125–40.
 A ‘Counter-Intuitive’ View of the Roman Empire and ‘Germanic’ Migration  531

The interconnection of the Roman and barbarian worlds is made very clear by the
ways in which the Roman Empire’s crisis around 400 produced crisis in barbaricum.
Gothic, Vandal, Alan and Suevic, Burgundian and, later, Lombard movements have
been mentioned. Saxon migration was related to the political, social and economic
instability produced by the crises in the north-western provinces around 400. As in
Britain and northern Gaul, archaeology reveals similarly critical symptoms: settle-
ments and cemeteries were abandoned, new inhumation rites involving more signifi-
cant grave-goods deposition appeared.78 The Saxon confederacy may have fractured.79
Here the Saxon migration has some points of contact with those of the Vandals and
others. The divergent trajectories of fifth-century development in different areas of bar-
baricum can be related to the varying relationships between those areas and the Empire
before 400.80

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Another point worth stressing is that, as before, movement across the former frontier
was two-way. The similarity between the archaeologies of fifth-century eastern Britain
(as far north as Scotland), northern Gaul and North Sea coastal Germany are only
explicable by postulating human movement across and around the North Sea in all
directions and the creation of a ‘North Sea cultural zone’. Written sources testify to
fifth- and sixth-century migration back to barbaricum.81 If anything, movement from
the formerly imperial provinces into what had been barbaricum may have become pro-
portionately even more important in the post-imperial centuries. Politically, this was
certainly the case, as the late fifth and sixth centuries saw a Frankish hegemony estab-
lished east of the Rhine. This region ultimately became the eastern portion of the
Carolingian Empire, which in the ninth century created an identity in opposition to the
Romance-speaking ‘West Franks’, eventually to become ‘Germany’.82

V: Conclusions

In 2007 I wrote that we should reverse the usual formula: ‘The “barbarian migrations”
were ... the product of the “end of the Roman Empire”, and not vice versa’.83 I would
now correct this. The imperial crisis around 400 produced the last great ‘folk move-
ments’ of the old style in the West, but closer examination suggests that it would be truer
to say that ‘the Fall of Rome’ ended ‘the barbarian migrations’. The analysis behind
such a conclusion should enable students of the so-called Völkerwanderung to contribute
in a more responsible fashion to modern debate. The counter-intuitive aspect of this
study is that it posits a relationship between the existence of a formal frontier and large-
scale migration that is the opposite of that which we are accustomed to envisaging. For
centuries, population movements of varying sizes and characters were a normal part of
the Roman frontier’s dynamic. When that frontier collapsed, the mechanisms for such

78 Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, pp. 346–55, 357–68, 383–6, and refs.
79 ibid, pp. 389–90.
80 Halsall, ‘Beyond the Northern Frontiers’; ‘Northern Britain and the Fall of the Roman Empire’.
81 See, for example, Procopius, Wars 8.20.1–41. Procopius, ed. and trans. H.B. Dewing, vols.1–5 (London, 1914–28).
82 Merovingian overlordship: I.N. Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450–751 (London, 1994), pp.  16–4. East
Francia: E.J. Goldberg, The Struggle for Empire: Kingship and Conflict under Louis the German, 817–76 (Ithaca,
2006), esp. pp. 186–230; Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, pp. 45–111.
83 Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, p. 34.
532 Guy Halsall

movement went with it. A perhaps more important contemporary resonance is that we
have to view these types of migration within a broad system of intimate core–periphery
Roman–barbarian relationships, rather than seeing population movement as a product
of two hostile, opposed worlds. This, it seems to me, is a more responsible and ethical
basis upon which to move from the late imperial past to migration in the twenty-first-
century world system of ‘the West and the rest’.
For the purposes of German history, this is important. If the migrations contributed
to the emergence of Germany it was in a quite different way from that which we are
used to supposing. The collapse of the Empire changed the nature and possibilities
of population movement and their relationship with politics within the trans-Rhenan
regions. Consequently, new political dynamics—which we might provisionally describe

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as more inward-looking—arose in these areas. These would create a more integrated
zone of political interaction, quite different from the Germania Magna of the Roman era.
It was that which later became Germany.

Abstract

The Roman Empire and barbaricum were inextricably linked throughout the Roman Iron Age. By late
antiquity, Germanic-speaking trans-Rhenan areas were inundated with imperial influence. Migration was
two-way and in various forms, all of which, including large-scale ‘folk movement’, were normal: part and
parcel of the imperial frontier’s dynamics. The counter-intuitive conclusion is drawn from this that the
relationship between the existence of a formal frontier and significant migration is quite the opposite of
the one we have grown used to imagining. The collapse of the frontier took with it the mechanisms for
migration. Therefore I have to modify my 2007 epigram that ‘the end of the Roman Empire produced
the Barbarian Invasions and not vice versa’. The end of the Roman Empire put an end to the barbarian
migrations. This conclusion helps us contribute more responsibly to modern debate on migration. It also
contributes to a discussion of the formation of Germany. The end of migration changed the political
dynamics of the regions between Rhine and Baltic. The latter became more inward-facing and from these,
eventually, emerged ‘Germany’.

Keywords: migration, barbarians, Roman Empire, frontiers, historiography

York University
guy.halsall@york.ac.uk