Migration Period

• 1. Introduction

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  The Migration Period began, by one common reckoning, in the year 375, when the Huns swept out of Asia into Europe. It ended in 568, when the Lombards conquered Italy. Between those dates the Western Roman Empire fell, and tribe after tribe settled the lands it left behind. Burgundians, Vandals, Goths, Alemanni, Alans, Huns, early Slavs, Pannonian Avars, Bulgars, and Magyars all moved within or into Europe. Some historians stretch the span more loosely, from as early as 300 to as late as 800. The Germans gave it a name of their own, the Völkerwanderung, the wandering of peoples. The French and Italians preferred a harsher word: invasion. That clash of names hides a deeper argument that still divides scholars. Did these migrations bring Rome down, or did a Rome already collapsing pull the tribes in? How many people actually moved, and were they ever the unified peoples the old maps drew? This is the story of an age when the map of Europe was redrawn, and of the historians who still cannot agree on why.

• 2. Counting The Wanderers

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  Modern estimates suggest the Gothic crossing of the Danube in 376 brought between 90,000 and 200,000 people into the Empire. Migrating groups ranged enormously in size. Some were war bands of a few thousand. Others were entire tribal groups numbering over 100,000. The Rhine crossing of 406 involved a coalition of Vandals, Alans, and Suebi estimated at up to 200,000 people. The Ostrogoths under Theodoric numbered between 100,000 and 200,000 when they invaded Italy in 489. Estimates for the Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain range from 20,000 to 200,000, and the Lombard invasion of Italy in 568 has been put at around 150,000. Other movements resist counting altogether. The Franks, Burgundians, and Slavs settled gradually and in dispersed patterns, which makes their numbers hard to pin down. Adding the figures together, the total migration into Roman territory across the period could have ranged from roughly 500,000 to over 1,000,000 people. Those numbers describe scale, but they do not yet explain the chain of events that set so many groups in motion.

• 3. Before They Crossed

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  After 1000 BC, Germanic peoples moved out of southern Scandinavia and northern Germany into the lands between the Elbe and the Oder. The first wave pushed west and south. Around 200 BC it drove the resident Celts west to the Rhine. By 100 BC these peoples had reached the Roman provinces of Gaul and Cisalpine Gaul, where Gaius Marius stopped them, and later Julius Caesar. It was this western group that the Roman historian Tacitus, who lived from AD 56 to 117, and Julius Caesar, who lived from 100 to 44 BC, described in their writings. Between 600 and 300 BC, a later wave of Germanic tribes migrated east and south from Scandinavia. They reached the opposite coast of the Baltic Sea and moved up the Vistula near the Carpathian Mountains. In Tacitus's era the tribes carried unfamiliar names: the Tencteri, the Cherusci, the Hermunduri, the Chatti. Then federation and intermarriage reshaped them. Out of that mixing came the groups later writers would know well: the Alemanni, the Franks, the Saxons, the Frisians, and the Thuringians.

• 4. The First Wave

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  In 376 the Tervingi crossed the Danube into Roman territory, fleeing the invading Huns. The first wave of invasions ran from about 300 to 500, partly documented by Greek and Latin historians but hard to verify through archaeology. At Marcianopolis, the escort of the Tervingi leader Fritigern was killed during a meeting with the Roman commander Lupicinus. The Tervingi rebelled. The Visigoths, a group derived from the Tervingi or from a fusion of mainly Gothic groups, eventually invaded Italy and sacked Rome in 410 before settling in Gaul. Around 460 they founded the Visigothic Kingdom in Iberia. Odoacer led a confederation of Herulian, Rugian, and Scirian warriors that deposed Romulus Augustulus in 476. The Ostrogoths followed under Theodoric the Great and settled in Italy. In Gaul the Franks, a fusion of western Germanic tribes whose leaders had been aligned with Rome since the 3rd century, entered Roman lands gradually through the 5th century. After Childeric consolidated power, his son Clovis won a decisive victory over Syagrius in 486. The Frankish kingdom fended off the Alemanni, Burgundians, and Visigoths, and became the nucleus of what would later become France and Germany. The Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain came in the 5th century, as Roman control there ended, while the Burgundians settled in northwestern Italy, Switzerland, and eastern France.

• 5. The Second Wave

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  Between 500 and 700, Slavic tribes settled more of central Europe and pushed into the south and east, gradually making the eastern half of the continent predominantly Slavic-speaking. Turkic tribes such as the Avars joined this wave, and later the Ugric-speaking Magyars. In 567 the Avars and the Lombards destroyed much of the Gepid Kingdom. The Lombards, a Germanic people, settled in Italy in the 6th century alongside Herulian, Suebian, Gepid, Thuringian, Bulgar, Sarmatian, and Saxon allies. The Bavarians and the Franks followed and came to rule most of the Italian peninsula. The Bulgars, a nomadic group probably from Central Asia, had held the Pontic steppe north of the Caucasus from the 2nd century. Pushed by the Khazars, most migrated west and dominated Byzantine territory along the lower Danube in the 7th century. From that point the demographic picture of the Balkans changed permanently. The region became Slavonic-speaking, while large native Thraco-Romanised populations survived in the Balkan mountains. By the ninth century, Bulgars had invaded and settled the central Haemus Peninsula and Epirus.

• 6. Halted At The Frontier

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  At the siege of Constantinople in 717 to 718, the joint forces of Byzantium and the Bulgars defeated Arab armies trying to invade southeast Europe through Asia Minor. The early Byzantine-Arab Wars pressed against Europe's edges. During the Khazar-Arab Wars of the 7th and 8th centuries, the Khazars stopped Arab expansion across the Caucasus. The Moors, made up of Arabs and Berbers, invaded through Gibraltar and conquered Hispania from the Visigothic Kingdom in 711, before the Franks halted them at the Battle of Tours in Gaul. These campaigns drew broad frontiers between Christendom and Islam that held for the next millennium. By 902 the Muslims had taken most of Sicily from the Christians. The Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin began around 895. Hungarian invasions troubled Central Europe until their massacre at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955, considered the final act of the invasions from Asia. The Viking expansion from the late 8th century conventionally marks the last great migrations of the period. Missionaries from Rome in the West and Byzantium in the East gradually converted the non-Islamic newcomers and drew them into Christendom.

• 7. Invasion Or Migration

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  Völkerwanderung is a German word, borrowed from German historiography, naming the early migrations of the Germanic peoples. German and Slavic scholars speak of migration, reaching toward the idea of a dynamic, wandering people, in terms like Stěhování národů, folkvandring, and népvándorlás. French and Italian historiography instead speaks of barbarian invasions, Invasions barbares and Invasioni barbariche. The disagreement runs deeper than vocabulary. French and Italian scholars have tended to see a catastrophe, the destruction of a civilization and the start of a Dark Age that set Europe back a millennium. German and English historians have tended to read the same events as the replacement of a tired Mediterranean civilization with a more virile, martial, Nordic one. Historians have offered many causes for the barbarians' appearance on the Roman frontier: climate change, weather and crops, population pressure, a primeval urge toward the Mediterranean, and a domino effect supposedly set off by the construction of the Great Wall of China, which forced tribes westward until the Huns fell upon the Goths. The scholar Guy Halsall reversed the usual order. He saw the barbarian movement as the result of Rome's fall, not its cause. Archaeology supports him: Germanic and Slavic tribes were settled agriculturalists, probably drawn into the politics of an empire already failing for other reasons.

• 8. Inventing The Tribe

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  In his 1778 history of the Germans, a writer equated migratio gentium with Völkerwanderung, and Herwig Wolfram, a historian of the Goths, traced the phrase to that work. Wolfram noted that the meaning of gens as a biological community was already shifting in the early Middle Ages. He warned that scholars have no terminology free of the concept of nationhood created during the French Revolution. The primordialist view dominated the 19th century. The German linguist Johann Gottfried Herder treated tribes as coherent biological entities and saw the Volk as an organic whole, with a core spirit visible in art, literature, and language. Language above all was held to be the deepest mark of ethnicity. That Romantic ideal of a single ancestral German, Celtic, or Slavic people helped feed political movements like Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism. From the 1960s, scholars such as Goffart and Todd proposed new models. They argued that the Germani felt no shared identity, and similar theories were offered for Celtic and Slavic groups. The process of forming tribal units was named ethnogenesis, a term coined by the Soviet scholar Yulian Bromley. The Austrian school led by Reinhard Wenskus popularized the idea, influencing Wolfram, Walter Pohl, and Patrick J. Geary. They located the spark in a small elite, the Traditionskern, the kernel of tradition, which gathered followers by claiming an ancient, divinely-sanctioned lineage. As the model holds, for decades and possibly centuries the tradition bearers idled and the tradition itself hibernated, with ample time for forgetfulness to do its work.