Barbarian Europe [antikvár]

Introduction Few of the peoples in this book have ever been forgotten. Some had their own chroniclers, men who recorded their rimes and those of their ancestors. Others were the subjects of homihes or treatises prepared by Roman historians or churchmen. Even to their own writers the warriors of the past sometimes seemed savages; contemporary Romans saw them as awe-inspiring but only vaguely defined groups who threatened stable government in the provinces. The names of some have continued to the present day as terms of abuse - Hun, Goth or Vandal. During the 5th century AD the barbarians, most of whom traced their origin back to the German-speaking tribes of the Baltic, broke through the Roman frontier defenses and in the course of two or three generations made themselves masters of almost the whole of western Europe. The Franks from beyond the Rhine occupied northern and central France; the Burgundians and other Germanic tribes annexed the Rhône valley and Switzerland. Spain and western France fell for a time to the Visigoths from eastern Europe, while Italy itself became the kingdom of the Ostrogoths from the fringe of Asia, later to fall prey to the Germanic Lombards. Britain, most northerly of the provinces of the Roman Empire, enjoyed a period of independence before passing under the control of migrants from northern Germany and Denmark. The area which had for so long presented at least a semblance of unity was now broken up into a series of antagonistic and often warring kingdoms. Political frontiers were insecure ; whole provinces changed hands as the result of the success in battle of individual monarchs, and federations rarely survived the deaths of their founders. Into this complex of kingdoms poured fresh waves of barbarians, the Avars and Magyars from the east, and the Vikings from the north. The period of the great Germanic migrations is sometimes called the Dark Ages, chiefly because of the inadequacy of the written record as a source for a continuous narrative. Some areas fare better than others: those provinces in which Roman civilization had set down its deepest roots were never wholly without chroniclers, or scribes willing to copy legal and administrative documents. But in the blackest periods of European ilhteracy these areas, Italy, southern France or Spain, stand out like oases of historical knowledge in the middle of a prehistoric desert. In solving some of the problems the disciphnes of archaeology and place-name study are of some help, though their results tend only to comphcate an already puzzling picture. For the archaeologists the curse of a protohistoric period is everywhere visible, for in this period, when so much is already half-known from documentary sources, the temptation is irresistible to give to the data a more precise chronology or more specific context than they can truly sustain; the cause of the temptation, a natural enough desire to bring the material into correspondence with recorded events, is httle enough justification for the tendentious arguments about the significance of discoveries, of which examples, not perhaps always intentional, are to be found in the following pages. The distribution of this archaeological material is complementary to that of the written record. With the possible exception of the Aegean area, the countries which flank the North Sea are archaeologically the most intensively studied in the world. The result is a mass of discrete observations whose synthesis has not yet been achieved, and which is little aided by written information, for these are the blackest regions of the Dark Ages. Barbarian Europe is not the whole of the continent. The eastern half of the Roman Empire, with its capital at Constantinople, survived the fall of its western partner by nearly 1,000 years. Even if its frontiers were frequently broken by barbarian hordes, they were soon restored, and they formed an effective barrier to the expansion of barbarian kingdoms eastwards. The history of Greece, the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean is thus part of the story of the Byzantine Empire, and has little to do with the Europe of the barbarians. While Constantinople stood, however, the empire had not fallen, and the possibihty of a revival of the west by Byzantine conquest was never wholly abandoned. Meanwhile the barbarians themselves were changing. To an extent undreamed of by their first victims, the barbarian kingdoms - in their laws, material culture, rehgion and even speech - came to model themselves on the civilization they had had a hand in destroying. By the time the folk movements came to an end the borrowing had been acknowledged formally in a revival of the Roman Empire, but in a forin that few Romans would have recognized.