Professor Peter Heather
Appearances
The Ancients
The Saxons
Well, certainly the 360s looks as though it was a step change. There's a thing called, our contemporary historian Ammianus Marcellinus calls the barbarian conspiracy.
The Ancients
The Saxons
You just can't trust these barbarians. They're always going to conspire if you take your eyes off them for a moment. And that's a simultaneous attack by Picts and Scots. Scots, of course, are the Irish. So we've got raiding on the west coast of Roman Britain from Ireland. We've got Picts maybe also coming by boat rather than just going around Hadrian's Walkway or something like that.
The Ancients
The Saxons
Because there are watchtowers that are refurbished in the 4th century on the Yorkshire coast. And I doubt that the Saxons are rowing all the way up to... And that would be a cunning plan in spades. So it's usually argued that these are the picks. And I think that's entirely plausible that it's so. At that same time, that exact same moment,
The Ancients
The Saxons
In the 360s, we then also get Saxons attacking in the south. There's been an attempt to say that that's not so, but the sort of majority opinion is now quite clear that what Amir Anas seems to be saying is what he actually said. that we had Saxon raiding at that point in the mid-360s, and two British military commanders are killed.
The Ancients
The Saxons
One who seems to have been the garrison commander in and around Hadrian's Wall, but then also someone else who's called the Count of the Maritime Tract is killed. And I suspect that that is the ancestral command position for the Count of the Saxon Shore. The Saxon Shore. I think. I think what Stilicho is doing is saying, I've come Completely changed everything. He's renamed it.
The Ancients
The Saxons
It looks as though, and you know, the sources are really rubbish. It's very important to understand that. What's really frustrating is there was a wonderful account of this written by an East Roman ambassador, a man called Olympiodorus, who knew everything, wrote everything down, but it only survives in fragments. Damn. Yes. So there are hints.
The Ancients
The Saxons
And two different people used him, Zosimus and Sosimun. And then there are independent fragments that survive in a very brief summary. And the trouble is that Zosimus certainly at least confused a few things as well. So this makes it quite tricky to know exactly what happens. But the broad outline would seem to be that in response to the Rhine invasion and of the Vandals, Alans and Suevs.
The Ancients
The Saxons
And Stilicho is unable to deal with that. That a local British military commander, well, a series of them, but it ends up being Constantine. He's the third and the one that doesn't get killed by the soldiers.
The Ancients
The Saxons
He takes the field army troops from southern Britain, unites them with the field army troops, regional field army troops on the Rhine and creates a user patient and sells himself as the man who's going to deal with the Vandal threat. So he takes these troops off. And as far as we can see, they never come back.
The Ancients
The Saxons
In the military listing from the early 420s, there is a field army account of Britain, but it's not clear whether he's in Britain. Because by that date, a fleet that used to be on the Solent is now stationed in Paris. It's called the Pevensey fleet, but it's in Paris. So the thought is that the key elements of the Roman military in southern Britain are taken to the continent and never come back.
The Ancients
The Saxons
The Hadrian's War units are probably still there. But what this effectively does is remove the umbrella of central Roman military protection from southern Britain.
The Ancients
The Saxons
Whether that happens immediately in 408, whether it's confirmed by Flavius Constantius when he restores order in the Western Empire and says, no, we're not going to protect Britain, that is the level of detail we don't know, which I think Olympiodorus probably would have told us if we had it, but we don't have it.
The Ancients
The Saxons
Well, the only narrative that we've got is by the British cleric, Gildas. The story as told by Gildas, and he's writing in the 6th century looking back to the 5th century, is that the removal of the protection leaves Britain open to attacks from Picts and Scots, so from Scotland and Ireland.
The Ancients
The Saxons
and that the local, I guess, villa-owning sub-Romano British who retain their culture and their identity for a generation or two have to take measures for their defence, one of which is calling in Saxon military auxiliaries. And those auxiliaries, first of all, beat off Picts and Scots, then decide that actually they can take the place over for themselves, call in their friends, and there we go.
The Ancients
The Saxons
I suspect that we've got everything going on. What I think is certainly true is that we're looking at large numbers of small groups of different kinds. The Gildas story is partly mythicized, I think, but also broadly plausible.
The Ancients
The Saxons
We see that kind of thing happening, but that doesn't mean, given the backstory that we've seen in the fourth century of Saxon raiding along the Channel Coast, that doesn't mean there wouldn't have been autonomous Saxon raiding as well as the Allied groups being hired in for mercenary service by the sub-Romano Brits as well. So I would have thought all these things are going on.
The Ancients
The Saxons
I mean, basically... The obstacles to effective raiding along the channel had been removed by the disappearance. And I should say that those Saxon shore forts, the archaeological evidence for their maintenance and usage runs out in the early 5th century. That's kind of further confirmation that the troops taken by Constantine III never came back.
The Ancients
The Saxons
So the channel shore has been opened up for raiding. So I think that is happening. But also I think the employment of mercenaries is perfectly plausible too. The extent to which they're bringing women and children, well, that's a very interesting question.
The Ancients
The Saxons
Yes, that I think is exactly the right image to have in your head. The other way of putting it, it's a different way of saying the same thing, is actually Saxon migration into Britain is in effect not a cause of the fall of the Roman Empire, you might say. The Roman Empire has fallen in Britain in the sense that the imperial center has abandoned the provincial population.
The Ancients
The Saxons
And that's what makes it possible for very small group migration, multiple small group migration to happen. You try that, you know, if the Goths had tried multiple small group migration across the Danube, they'd get smashed. It's because there isn't effective Roman military counteraction available within Britain that this kind of small group thing can happen.
The Ancients
The Saxons
The overall balance between men and women and children, that is a really interesting question. You've got two kind of data sets because the narratives are rubbish. They don't work. So you've got to approach this problem laterally and come at it from a different direction.
The Ancients
The Saxons
One thing is the language replacement of the mix of Celtic and Latin by Anglo-Saxon or Old English, as we should call it, which is undoubtedly a Germanic language. And the point here is is that, of course, there are no scorts. So children learn language particularly at home and particularly from their mothers.
The Ancients
The Saxons
It's really hard to imagine how Anglo-Saxon would become the language at least of the early medieval elite as it emerges in post-Roman Britain if there are not plenty of female speakers of Germanic. So, in other words, we've got to have Anglo-Saxon women as well.
The Ancients
The Saxons
That's one data set that's already there, and the dominance of Germanic language amongst the new elite of post-Roman Britain is quite clear. The new data set that's slowly emerging is generated by the capacity now to extract DNA from ancient bones. Can't do it from cremations. Has to be inhumations.
The Ancients
The Saxons
There's quite a lot of it. But the numbers that have been tested so far are quite small. The real issue, and this is the sort of thing that's fought over, is the extent to which The dramatic cultural change, which is evident in Britain, says switch. Villas disappear. Latin disappears. The sort of civilian bureaucratic elite is replaced by military aristocracy. All of that everyone agrees about.
The Ancients
The Saxons
What is disagreed about is the extent to which this new elite that we meet in the pages of Bede from, whose memory goes back to about, well, it goes back really to the arrival of the Roman mission in 597. B knows damn well about the 5th and earlier 6th centuries. He basically copies out Gildas.
The Ancients
The Saxons
It's so striking to me that his historical memory and the memory of the people he grew up around doesn't stretch back into that period. So he relies on Gildas for that. And it's only from the time, the last decade of the 6th century onwards, that he's telling you stories about kings and things that are totally independent of that. Anyway, we're clear of the cultural change.
The Ancients
The Saxons
The contentious issue is the extent to which that cultural change is driven by the arrival of Saxons. In other words, do Saxons predominate in the early medieval elite that we meet in the pages of Bede and in various other stories and are visible archaeologically? It's that question that the DNA will, I think, eventually shed a lot of light on. I'm notoriously a migrationist.
The Ancients
The Saxons
I think that the Anglo-Saxon takeover is a bit like the Norman conquest, but only bigger. So in the Norman conquest, we know that the massive peasants just stay where they are. But about 2,000 Norman families replaced 3,500 Anglo-Saxon families as the dominant land-owning elite. I think the Anglo-Saxon takeover was like that, but there are more Anglo-Saxons. as it were.
The Ancients
The Saxons
But the alternative point of view is that a lot of sub-Romano Brits, as it were, buy into Anglo-Saxon culture. So they look like Anglo-Saxons, but they are actually natives. You don't take away the importance of migration if you do that, but you do reduce the numbers. The DNA will eventually address that point. So far, I think we've got one cemetery, but it's very interesting.
The Ancients
The Saxons
It's from Buckland, which is a suburban parish in Dover, and you've got a cemetery there and the DNA. It's something like 100 burials. Sorry, I can't remember the exact number off the top of my head. You get the DNA from the small bones inside the ear. That's where it's preserved best.
The Ancients
The Saxons
And when I first started being interested in this, the DNA people were saying, no, you won't get any DNA out of bones in North European conditions. It's too wet and it's too cold. Well, actually, you can. So it's really interesting. We didn't think we were going to have this data set. But anyway, the Buckland Cemetery.
The Ancients
The Saxons
And they're people buried with all the Anglo-Saxon gear of jewelry and weapons and all the rest of it. Most of the people you can trace familial relations, they're buried close together through the DNA, very precise ones. But it looks like they are mostly descended from immigrants who've arrived from northern continental Europe, i.e. Saxon areas, recently.
The Ancients
The Saxons
There is one family which has entirely local Roman British DNA, looks exactly the same. I mean, that's one cemetery. There are hundreds of cemeteries. My gut instinct is that that's probably going to be about right. In other words, that a small number of the old Roman British elite make it into the new Anglo-Saxon elite, but most of it is actually immigrant.
The Ancients
The Saxons
That's exactly the pattern from the Norman Conquest, for instance. where I think by Doomsday Book there are two Saxon landowners left.
The Ancients
The Saxons
Yes, these are the Angles traditionally associated with Anghelm. The Anglian kingdoms of England, the people who call themselves Angles, are East Angles, of course, probably the Northumbrian, two separate kingdoms, Monisha, Deira, to start with, Middle Angles. Their royal genealogies trace their name from Woden, interestingly. That's very striking.
The Ancients
The Saxons
I think that that's entirely likely, and that's kind of the model that I have in my head. I think there are some crunch moments. So the Continental Roman Chronicles in the 5th century tell us that the manure hits the air conditioning in Britain in about 440. And it seems to me that might be Gildas's mercenary revolt. moment, there or thereabouts.
The Ancients
The Saxons
So there's a Saxon mercenary of revolt in Gildas' account. Yes. And they encourage other people to come over. They get fed up with just receiving the interest on the real estate through tax payments and decide they'd like to control the real estate for themselves.
The Ancients
The Saxons
But Gildas' story is not one of final defeat, because in Gildas, you have this kind of potential Arthur figure, Aurelius Ambrosius, who leads a British counterattack. And he's successful. He wins this victory at Mount Baden, wherever the hell that is. Ambrosius is already on this. Yes, absolutely. Where the hell is that? People would give their eye teeth and that.
The Ancients
The Saxons
But anyway, it doesn't say that the Saxons are wiped out, but it's certainly suggesting that Saxon intrusion is contained. And if you run the chronology and think that 440 is the mercenary revolt, that's around 500 would have to be certainly there or thereabouts.
The Ancients
The Saxons
yet swing forward 100 years to when Bede starts up, and Anglo-Saxons have taken over all of northern England, everywhere to the Welsh border, and are right on the fringes of Devon. I mean, they've got Somerset. So another big moment of expansion has happened between the victory that Gildas records circa 500 by the Brits and the situation that we have very well documented for us by Bede.
The Ancients
The Saxons
It's very late, actually. Looking back on the 290s, a chronicler writing in the 370s talks about Saxons and Franks causing trouble in the Channel. Some people suggest that's an anachronism. The first absolute contemporary indisputable mention is in the so-called Verona List from 314. And I actually think there's nothing wrong with the mention from the 290s, but it's circa 300.
The Ancients
The Saxons
So the Saxons keep coming back. I think they do. Yes. And the conditions on the other side of the North Sea, I mean, there is marine intrusion that's been documented. There might be negative push factors as well. But I certainly think that a flow of increasing momentum is extremely likely. And it will be small groups. I mean, the Sutton Hoo ship didn't have a mast, doesn't have sails.
The Ancients
The Saxons
It's a rowing boat. There's no sign of sails amongst being used by these populations until the Viking period in the 8th and 9th centuries. So they are rowing. Bigger rowing boats, small rowing boats, but they are rowing. It's not impossible that they could have hired ships with sails from the sort of more Roman parts. And I wouldn't put that out.
The Ancients
The Saxons
You know, the Goths, when they raid across the Black Sea in the third century, hire ships and sailors from the old Greek cities of the Black Sea coast. So you couldn't rule that out. And it might be possible to put together a larger migration groups on that basis. But as far as we know, at least, we're talking about migration groups that are being carried by rowing boats.
The Ancients
The Saxons
Yes, I think so. That is what it suggests to me. The trouble is Gildas doesn't give us any specific geographical pointers as to where Aureus Ambrosius manages to restore British control to the Anglo-Saxon chronicles. is pretty rubbish. I mean, there are some things that are very clear. So it records a battle in the late fifth century at Durham.
The Ancients
The Saxons
I've been rear-ended, actually, just outside Durham Park. I know exactly where that is. It's on a huge ridge just north of Bath. And if you stand on that ridge, you see the whole of the Bristol plain. in front of you. It's pretty clear that's the moment when the British lose control of Somerset and push back towards Devon, you know, further away.
The Ancients
The Saxons
The Saxons extend their control out of these highlands and down into that Bristol plain. You can see that, but whether it took place in the date that it's supposed to have taken place, Neanderthals and Chronicles seems to me extremely doubtful.
The Ancients
The Saxons
It's a bit unclear. I think you can see some patterns. For instance, early medieval England is full of unfree people. So you have an unfree peasant labouring class who are not part of the political structures. I would have thought these must be the descendants of the Romano-British peasant agriculturalists
The Ancients
The Saxons
I mean, the thing we know now, which Victorians didn't know, is that the late Roman countryside of the 4th century is absolutely full of people. The estimates of populations for Britain in the 4th century put it up at the 4 million level. It's not going to get that high again until the eve of the Black Death.
The Ancients
The Saxons
I would have thought it's extremely likely the sort of Serf, tenant, peasant class is just there. This is why what happens to the Roman British elite is so important because they're the people who are interacting more directly with the Saxon intruders. So it's kind of competition, cultural competition between them and the Anglo-Saxon intruders. Those relations won't have been hostile everywhere.
The Ancients
The Saxons
They don't preclude some of the old Romano-British elite making its way into the new elite. I mean, that one line in the Dover Cemetery, absolutely clear. We've got a local person who made it in. Interestingly, in the Wessex royal genealogy, there's one figure with a Celtic name. So who is he and what is going on there?
The Ancients
The Saxons
And then the late 7th century law code of Aina, who is king of Wessex in the 690s, does recognize that there are British landowners within the Wessex kingdom. But it gives them only half the social value of their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. In other words, as one colleague has put it, there's a kind of apartheid culture going on there.
The Ancients
The Saxons
Yes. So I think there will have been a lot of local alliances, but they are unequal alliances. And I think the end result would be that only a relatively small number of the old Romano-British elite would really make it into full acceptance in the sort of early medieval Anglo-Saxon world.
The Ancients
The Saxons
Yeah, you're fighting an existential struggle for control of the real estate, very nice real estate, of central and southern England, all this kind of agricultural, good agricultural land. A bit wet, but...
The Ancients
The Saxons
No, it is quite striking. Some of these later Roman confederative names like Goths do appear in Tacitus' lists. And obviously the Goths of the 4th century are very different from the Goths of Tacitus' time. But Saxons aren't mentioned at all.
The Ancients
The Saxons
Yes, and that's an important point, which we probably should have mentioned earlier. One thing that really confirms that we're dealing with a flow of increasing momentum rather than big moves is the political structure that we see in the pages of Bede when it emerges, because actually it's very fluid. And it continues to be fluid.
The Ancients
The Saxons
You know, Victorians talked about the seven kingdoms, the heptarchy. Well, no, because the political process keeps on going. So Kent, which is the dominant area in 597, that's why the mission goes to Kent. The king of Kent has a Frankish wife. I'm sure that's part of the diplomatic negotiation, the backstory to why Augustine and his band of brothers turn up in Kent.
The Ancients
The Saxons
But Kent gets swallowed up by Mercia and becomes dominated by Mercia. And in fact, in the early 8th century, the Kentish royal line is actually extinguished. We're actually seeing a process, a sort of Darwinian process of competition. We know of other kingdoms that are disappeared. So the huiche around Worcester. We have got a lot of early charters from them.
The Ancients
The Saxons
They run their own territory, and then the Mercians take them over, and the Hwichi royal dynasty is demoted to being kind of aristocrats within the Mercian, broader Mercian hegemony. Quite how many originally independent kingdoms, princedoms, I mean, there were, that's very contested. There's an interesting document called the Tribal Hydage.
The Ancients
The Saxons
Only dates from post-conquest manuscripts, so there's nothing early. But on the other hand, it preserves a lot of history. strange political-looking names, like Kwiche and whatever, and it gives them all a kind of value allocation. Hydage is a unit of value, not a unit of size. So a hide of good land is smaller than a hide of bad land. But within this, there are about 40 different names.
The Ancients
The Saxons
Were these all originally independent princedoms? Not impossible. It's much contested in the literature.
The Ancients
The Saxons
That's got to be broadly it. It's got to be something like that, but it's just how many and how small. I mean, I think you probably could turn up with three boatloads. I mean, the fourth century Needham ship or the Sutton Hoo ship, that'd be about 30 men a boat. You could turn up with a warband of 30, well, three lots of 30, so 100 men, and carve out a little Princeton.
The Ancients
The Saxons
I mean, you know far more about the conversion of the Saxon thing than most other conversions because Bede provides such a narrative of it. It's a partial view. I mean, what Bede tells us is a story of conversion of kings and elites, a top-down process. But that is, of course, fascinating because these are warrior aristocrats. And you've got to ask, you know, how does Christianity work for them?
The Ancients
The Saxons
You know, there's no turn the other cheek possible in the Anglo-Saxon world. Don't love your enemies. They're engaged in martial competition against each other and against what remains of British kingdoms further west. We're having to recreate Christianity, redefine it. in order to make it work for any medieval warriors.
The Ancients
The Saxons
And that kind of story starts to emerge from some of the sources that survived for us.
The Ancients
The Saxons
They are in the northern part of Germany. They are immediately behind, as it were, in an eastwards direction, the Franks. So the Franks are on the North Sea, lower Rhine, in that kind of region. And the Saxons are their eastern neighbours. We're talking... areas like, well, by the fourth century, we're talking the northeastern part of the Netherlands. Now we're talking southern Denmark.
The Ancients
The Saxons
Absolutely, that might well be going on. The interesting thing is we're told that the missionaries sell the idea of Christian conversion on the backs of the great glory of Christian civilization. Well, of course, that doesn't work in a British context because the Anglo-Saxons have spent 200 years beating the crap out of Christian Brits. What's impressive is the Frankish Christian world.
The Ancients
The Saxons
south of the channel. You know, this is where we have Merovingian kings in their absolute glory and their prime. And Kent's relationships with the Frankish world are very close. You know, this is why Ethelbert of Kent has a Frankish wife and Frankish princess as a wife. So, you know, that's the conduit or that's trajectory from which Christianity looks impressive.
The Ancients
The Saxons
Yeah, the continental Saxons become predominant in what's now southern Scandinavia, i.e. Jutland and the islands, and the areas immediate around it. One of the things that's emerged from all the new DNA work is that whereas DNA from Denmark in the early Roman period looks like DNA that you find in Norway and Sweden...
The Ancients
The Saxons
There's actually a large intrusion of continental North European DNA into Jutland in the late Roman period. So that looks like Saxon expansion into the Scandinavian world there. And certainly by the time that we get detailed Frankish sources, the Saxons are important dangerous, occasionally subordinated neighbors to the northeast of the Franks.
The Ancients
The Saxons
What will eventually happen, of course, in bloody campaigns that last over 30 years is that Charlemagne will subdue the continental Saxons and make them part of the Frankish empire.
The Ancients
The Saxons
It's my pleasure. And you should revisit it when there's been a lot more DNA work.
The Ancients
The Saxons
Yeah, these groups all don't like the Romans, but they don't like each other either. The sources are quite unanimous that quite a lot of this kind of Frankish intrusion onto West Roman territory in the 4th century is a knock-on effect from conflict with Saxons. And there's archaeological reflections, too, of at least spreading Saxon influence westwards.
The Ancients
The Saxons
We can certainly say that they spoke a Germanic language. That is crystal clear. The Anglo-Saxon language that comes down to us in the British context, or some of the manuscript evidence is going back to the late 7th, early 8th centuries, and its Germanic character is completely clear, yeah.
The Ancients
The Saxons
Well, we don't really know. The Saxons, the continental Saxons are not literate. I mean, they have runes, but they're not writing any kind of connected texts. And the first kind of Saxon histories we get date from after the Frankish Carolingian era conquest of Saxony. And in fact, they tend to be 10th century even. So that's...
The Ancients
The Saxons
Yes, it is. Way late. So, you know, 700 years or 600 years after where we're thinking about in the late Roman period. Do we know why they're called Saxons? It's not totally clear why they're called Saxons. There's a knife that's called a sax. But there are also hints that there is potentially a god involved here.
The Ancients
The Saxons
Some, well, one of the early Anglo-Saxon genealogies, royal genealogies, that of the kings of the East Saxons, the Essex boys, goes back to a god called Saxnet. who also appears in one continental North Sea prayer.
The Ancients
The Saxons
So what is clear and become more clear from recent finds is that kings of these late Roman groups, and they have multiple kings, they are advocates and followers of particular warrior gods. So I think it's not impossible, though the evidence is limited. I have described it all for you. The Saxons are getting their name because their chosen warrior god cult is actually Saxon.
The Ancients
The Saxons
The archaeology is, in a sense, quite clear. They are agriculturalists. They mostly cremate their dead. There are some groups that bury bodies. They live in clustered villages to some extent, but also rural spread. What is completely unclear is their political organization. And it's unclear because they are not in direct contact with the Roman world.
The Ancients
The Saxons
So we know, for instance, that the Alamanni, who are the southern neighbors of the Franks on the sort of middle and upper Rhine, that they tend to form a political confederation. You've got a number of separate kings over different areas within Alamani territory, but within each political generation, you tend to have an overking. And that's what I think makes the Alamani the Alamani.
The Ancients
The Saxons
They are a confederative group who will tend to throw up a recognized overking. Whether that's true of Saxons, I'm sure the multiplicity of kings is true, but whether they had a confederative tendency that made them politically recognizable and distinct, like the Alemanni did, there's no way of knowing that, actually.
The Ancients
The Saxons
And in regards to religion, is their religion what we would call Germanic paganism? Certainly. But the crucial point about that is that that is on the move. And that's become very clear. So, for instance, these different Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies, most of them trace their descent from Woden, not from Saxony. And it's clear that Woden was not a dominant figure in the early Roman period.
The Ancients
The Saxons
But what has just been found is a beautiful 5th century gold bracteate where a king in Jutland describes himself as Woden's man. Yeah. So I think Woden is genuinely one of these war gods. In other words, we've got competing warrior cults. Saxnet, possibly. Woden, certainly. But they're all new. And the nature of leadership in the Germanic world has changed since the time of Testus.
The Ancients
The Saxons
Wonderful work by an old friend of mine, sadly passed away, called Dennis Green, showed that the words for leadership in the Germanic world... change over the Roman period. They change from meaning things like leader of the people, that kind of stuff, to different words for military leadership.
The Ancients
The Saxons
So there's a series of them in different Germanic languages by the later period, but they all mean war leader, every single one. So leadership has become much more militarized. I think this is why war god cults are so important. This is a brutal and competitive world, and getting the right war god on your side is really important.
The Ancients
The Saxons
Certainly so. In those fourth century sources, we meet Saxons in two guises, either raiding along the Channel region or as destabilizing and disturbing Rome's immediate Frankish neighbors. So in both contexts, it's very much one of hostility.
The Ancients
The Saxons
Yes, that's exactly the pattern that's suggested. If you look at what the North Sea coast was like and the channel coast fringes in the late Roman period, you can basically work your way down it, hidden or safe from the open sea. Sacks and boats don't have sails. They are rowing. They are rowing from Jutland to the Channel. This is what we're talking about.
The Ancients
The Saxons
And these expeditions must have taken several months. And they're not, you know, fast-moving hit-and-run raids. We're not quite in Viking territory. But certainly there are as many Saxon intrusions noted in northern Gaul, northern France, on the south side of the Channel as there are in the north, yes.
The Ancients
The Saxons
That's deeply contentious. You'll be pleased to know. There's a chain of fortifications along the south coast of Britain running from kind of Norfolk. round to the Solent, which are commonly called the Saxon shore forts, the Letus Saxonum. And one idea is that this is all a huge structure to fend off a massive Saxon threat. They're dated to about 300 AD.
The Ancients
The Saxons
But actually, that's probably, they come to maximum capacity when the British usurper, Carousius, is trying to defend himself from the continent. However, and some people argue from that, there's no Saxon threat in 300, and the dated mention of a commander of the Saxon shore is only in the Notitia Dignitatum from the late 4th century, from 395.
The Ancients
The Saxons
There's no mention of anyone earlier than that called the Count of the Saxon Shore. And I think that's correct. I think the Count of the Saxon Shore is created in 395 because by Stilicho, when he comes to power in the Western Empire, his chief propagandist, a poet called Claudian, mentions him having done something to protect Britain from the Saxons. And I think the two things tie up.
The Ancients
The Saxons
I'm sure that's correct. However... While most of those forts were built to fend off Diocletian's attack on Carusius, about half a dozen of them stay in service subsequently. So I think even though there's not a count of the Saxon shore in the 4th century, there is a military command with quite a lot of troops available that is directly responding to seaborne Saxon troops. threat.
The Ancients
The Saxons
And you've got to think about that threat. They're rowing. They don't just come and then leave. They come, they have to rest up, they have to raid, and then they leave. Trying to find these Saxons at sea, that's a small boat's problem in spades. But they're on land at least for several days.
The Ancients
The Saxons
So actually, a well-placed series of local garrison infantry and cavalry forces is a perfectly good response to that potential level of threat. So to my mind, there are others who don't think this. There are some who think that the threat only built up from about 360.
The Ancients
The Saxons
I think the evidence is good enough to suggest that from the 290s onwards, we're seeing small boatloads of Saxons turn up periodically and that the Romans have had to counter it. And it is said...
The Ancients
The Saxons
quite specific the carousers is given quite a lot of money to build defenses against raiding in the channel and it's this money that he uses then to mount his user patient so there's something going on in the channel and if it's not franks and saxons it's both of them are mentioned then who is it well yeah exactly it seems to very likely very possible no i think it is yeah so
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Yeah, they're tiny. You've got 60-odd groups in between what's now the Rhine and the Vistula in Poland. So each territory is small, and actually they don't like each other very much, and there's a strong implication that there's empty territory between the main concentrations of each of them.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Absolutely. You get very temporary alliances. They don't last long even in victory, like Arminius' doesn't, for instance. But by the late empire, we get in the Roman sources, a smaller number of names appearing. So Franks and Alamanni on the Rhine, Saxons behind them, fairly small groups actually opposite what's now the Danube band in Hungary.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
So Sarmatians and Quadi, but then have another large confederative group Goths of different kinds on the Lower Danube. So the political world, viewed through a Roman lens at least, has changed a lot.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
When you get to the late 4th century, I think there is. Well, the sources, the contemporary sources are absolutely unanimous that the arrival of the Huns across the Western steppe from the Volga to the Ukrainian steppe is what pushes the Goths to the Danube frontier in 376. So certainly that becomes a major factor in the late 4th and 5th centuries.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
But we've already seen the evidence quite strongly suggest that there is a movement from, you might say, outer periphery of Germanic groups towards the Roman frontier in the second and third centuries, which has got nothing to do with the Huns. So there's already been movement. There has. Yes, there has.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
And I think that makes quite a lot of sense if you think about the type of relations that Rome establishes with these frontier groups, which often involves favorable trading relations, diplomatic presence, all kinds of things for the groups around the frontier. Because the practical deal beyond the ideological point of showing that you're superior, which is not unimportant,
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
The practical deals are about maintaining frontier security in the most efficient way for the empire. So in other words, you want to establish relations with a fairly stable group and you work actually to stabilize it. You don't expect these things to last forever, but you're looking for a kind of 10, 20 year settlement so that you don't have to intervene militarily.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
So actually a lot of wealth collects amongst the groups immediately adjacent to the frontier. They also play a large role in supplying the foodstuffs and raw materials needs of Roman legions on the Roman frontier. So again, transfer of wealth from empire to the groups immediately adjacent to the frontier.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
So wealth, there is a kind of overall revolution, economic revolution unfolding in the Germanic world between the first in the fourth centuries, but it's not evenly spread. The wealth concentrates near the frontier, and ambitious groups further away want to be part of that action.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Yeah, there are some specific examples where groups want to get out of the action, but it's too competitive and too difficult. They do ask. The Latin term is receptio, being received onto Roman territory. There's one small group that do this in the second century as part of the so-called Marcomannic War. But Rome also...
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
often transfers populations away from the immediate frontier region because it's aware that competition taking place there, which is always military, might spill over onto Roman territory. So they don't want the immediate frontier zone to be too crowded because that will lead to conflict and it will spill over.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
It's different in a couple of ways. In the second and third century, well actually in the first century too, there are resettlements. Rome is always militarily in control of the situation. So really quite large numbers of people are moved around sometimes. There's an inscription from the Balkans which claims that in the first century over 100,000 people are being moved around.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Did they count them? Is that real? I don't know. It clearly means a lot of people. More than that, you would hesitate. But it's a lot of people. There's no reason to think it wasn't a lot of people. And similarly on Rhine frontiers too, we do see some major transfers of population. But the empire is controlling it. It doesn't mean that everyone who's moved in is necessarily unarmed.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Some of these people you want to use as sources of auxiliary troops. New recruits for the Empire. Absolutely. And they might have particular skills. So the Batavi from Batavia are very good light cavalry. You don't want to change them. They're like the Gurkhas or the Scottish Highland regiments in the 18th, 19th century British army. They have specific characteristics. They're very good soldiers.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
You want them to be what they are. But what's different about 376 onwards is the lack of Roman control on the one hand, and that partly reflects the other big difference, which is the size and degree of autonomy that the intrusive groups retain.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
It is. And it's not just one Gothic group. It's two large Gothic groups. This is the key bit of information our best source tells us. The Huns have undermined the security of tenure that the Goths have had north of the Black Sea. I mean, currently, it's exactly the area where the current
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
ukraine war is being fought but they'd been there for over a century so you know it's not like they moved in one day moved out the next they'd established a reasonably stable hegemony in that region but the arrival of the hans undermines that and we end up with two separate large gothic groups both wanting admission to the empire Scale of it? Well, one source says over 100,000 people. Oh, right.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Well, that's a lot in one place. It is a lot of people in one place. And it's not surprising that food supply has become a problem. The clearer piece of evidence that it's a lot of people is the fact that they can destroy Valens' eastern borders. field army on one day at Hadrianople in 378.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
How many you think there were slightly depends on how many troops you think Valens brought with him, but our best source tells us that two-thirds of Valens' army died.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Yes. The key point is that Valens is not in Constantinople. He's in Antioch because he's fighting Persia.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
So he and his army are fully engaged against Persia when the security of the Danube frontier collapses. So, you know. foreign policy headache number one. And he doesn't let them all in. What he does is let one group in and try and exclude the other. I'm absolutely certain, left to his own devices, he'd have let none of them in.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Is he almost kind of trying to play them off each other at the same time? Yeah, it's divide and rule. It's the least worst scenario. He knows he doesn't have enough troops in the Balkans to keep both out. So he's letting one in, fingers crossed behind his back.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
keep the other one out, make a deal with Persia, which is what he does as soon as possible, to free up his army and then we'll restore normal order even against the group we've let in.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
I don't think he's thinking that way. That's what the sources tell us he's thinking. But, you know, no emperor can ever say, well, sorry, we're stuffed. I have to let some of them in because I don't have enough troops in the Balkans. That is a not possible admission for a Roman emperor to make. You have always to be
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
in control of the situation against barbarians, because otherwise God is not with you and therefore you're not a legitimate emperor. What should have happened would be that you'd let half them in, break them up into small groups, settle them in separate parts of the Balkans, then draw on them for a smallish, reasonably sized number of recruits in dribs and drabs subsequently.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
I think they do, yes. One thing that occurs is that there are supply problems. Now, you could say trying to feed 100,000 people is very difficult anyway, but the Roman sources let it slip that Valens' officials had been busy moving all the food into defended cities, where the Goths can't get at it on their own account.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
The Goths also know enough about Roman policy to know that letting them in in one Group is a real break with the past, and this may not be forever. So actually, the group that is admitted stays in contact with the group that's not admitted.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
And it's pretty clear that Valens had also given contingent orders to his local commanders what to do if things start to look like they're getting a bit dodgy, and that the Goths, the group that have been admitted, are going to go into revolt.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
because one standard trope you see in Roman frontier management in the fourth century is invite a slightly dangerous looking king to dinner and then eliminate them. And as tensions start to build up, the local Roman commander invites all the leaders of the admitted Goths to dinner and eliminates most of them. Fritigern comes out of this dinner party And this fascinates me.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Well, except that the dinner party got rid of all his rivals because Fritigern is not an old established leader. When that group negotiates to come in, two people are named, Fritigern, but also Alavivas. Alavivas disappears, I imagine, at the dinner party. I've got a feeling Fritigern said to the local Roman commander, okay, look, you take him out of the way and I'll give you a deal.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
I'll keep the Goths quiet. It's my deep, dark suspicion. I cannot prove it. I cannot prove it.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
And what happens is the troops that have been posted to keep the second group on the other side of the river, have to come in to deal with the rebellion and the other group immediately crosses.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
I mean, he knows that the problem is a very serious one. And actually, it takes him two years between 376 and 378 to extract his army from Persia. But he also has been negotiating help from the Western emperor, who is his nephew, Gratian. So Gratian is on his way with an army. But Gratian is slow. He's only on the fringes of the Balkans.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
As soon as he started to move his troops, there was some trouble on the Rhine. Because the people on the other side of the frontier watch. frontier like a hawk. So they're looking at Roman army movements for any opportunities that might arise. So Gratian is slow, and then Valens is sitting not far from Constantinople with his army waiting for Gratian. The idea is clearly that you're going to
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
catch the Goths between these two field armies the eastern and western one and Restore order as it were normal patterns of events But he gets some intelligence that I think what it told him is that only one of the two gothic groups was by itself near Hadrianople
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
So he rushes forward, thinking that he's got a chance with his army just to take out one of the Gothic groups, which he should be able to do. But actually, they're both there. And we're told his army is not fully deployed, and the other Gothic group hits them from the side. The result is the deaths of two-thirds of his army.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Yeah. I mean, higher estimates think the Valens came with 30,000 men, so 20,000. I think you probably came with 15, more like 15, and so 10,000 died, but either way. And it is the cream. I mean, this is the thing. The way that the late Roman army is set up, the regiments that go with the emperor, the so-called praesental forces, they are the cream. They are
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
better paid, better equipped, better trained. So it is the crème de la crème of the East Roman army is lost on that afternoon.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
You can't get out of the Balkans eastwards because the Romans control the sea crossings into Turkey, and you can't get out westwards because Gratian is still there with his forces. But the Romans decide that they cannot, in the end, get together enough forces properly to subdue the Goths. They try.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
So Gratian appoints a colleague, the Emperor Theodosius I, who puts together, improvises another Eastern army. He's appointed clearly from his own propaganda as the man who's going to win the Gothic war, but his army falls apart. We don't quite know what happens. the sources are evasive. They said, we're not going to do that, thanks very much.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Or treachery, or Theodosius took one look at the balance of forces and realized he couldn't win. We don't know. But anyway, whereas when he first appears, Theodosius is the man to win the war. He then hands control of the war back to Gratian and his forces after the summer of 380. The summer of 380 is something happens to Theodosius's army.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
And Gratian decides that he can't win an outright victory. So we end up with a deal done with the Goths that the leaders of Hadrianople among the Goths, they don't appear. So my strong suspicion is that part of the deal is that they'd be eliminated. They have to be given up. Yeah. But Fritigern is not mentioned again, but we do a peace deal
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
And that peace deal doesn't recognize a single Gothic leader as king, but it does allow Goths continued autonomy in large masses, maybe several rather than one composite mass, in the Balkans on Roman territory. This has been contested, but actually sources that are contemporary that are in favor of the deal and are hostile to it say the same thing about it.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
So to my mind, that's game, set, and match. You know, when both sides to the story are telling you the same thing, essentially that's the nature of the deal.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
to Western usurpers and uses the Goths on both campaigns. But the Goths don't like being used. There are mutinies on the first campaign. And in the second campaign, well, how did that happen? The Goths end up in the front line of the battle. And the Frigilists then suffer very large casualties. accident design.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Yes. And that is the backdrop to Alaric's revolt. When Theodosius suddenly dies unexpectedly in January 395, Alaric is able to mobilize the ill-feeling amongst the Goths, who are well aware that the Roman state might want to revisit the deal very exceptional, totally unique deal that it's offered them, and he can get enough of them onside to make a major revolt.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
To my mind, the sources are pretty clear that he knows that what he needs is a more secure deal from the Roman state. And he uses ravaging and conflict as the mechanism to extract that deal. So his first move is on Greece. They march south. And that does get him a temporary deal with the Eastern Empire. But that deal is very unpopular in Eastern imperial circles.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Giving in to barbarians and letting them do what they want is not on the script for the divinely supported empire, and it gets overturned. At that point, no one is threatening Alaric with extinction or anything like that, but he's completely in political limbo, and he tries his luck with the Western empire. So this is the first invasion of Italy. in 401 too, again in search of a deal, I think.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Well, by the time Alaric comes back in 408-9, Stilicho has been eliminated, but only just. And the reason he's been eliminated is the real problem, namely that we've had two further mass incursions across the frontier. And unlike the first one in 376, which went into Eastern Imperial territory, the two new ones have gone into Western Imperial territory.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
In 4056, a king called Radagaisus led a very large force into Italy. Stilicho does manage to control and dismember that force, pulls it apart diplomatically. We're told that he transferred a lot of its high-status members into the Roman army, but the king who leads it ends up being executed.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
But then at the end of 406, we get a second major accursion across the Rhine, the famous Vandals, Alans, and Suevs, who then start rampaging through Gaul and Spain. And Stilicho doesn't really have an answer to that. I think that he starts to make overtures to Alaric as part of a potential answer.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
as a way of then pulling some of Alaric's military clout into the Western Roman army with a view possibly at that point then of restoring order against the Vandals, Alans, and Suevs. But Stilicho's incapacity to defend southern Gaul and Spain immediately from the Rhine invaders has prompted usurpations in Britain. Is this the rebellion of Constantine III?
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
He's the third of three. Quarrelsome lot, the British. But he's the one who's successful. He's got some field army units in southern Britain, and he also then is able to pull in quite a lot of the Roman army of the Rhine. So he puts together quite a major force.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
So at this point, the Emperor Honorius starts to lose confidence in Stilicho because you've got Constantine III hammering away north of the Alps. You've got Vandals, Alans, and Swerves in southern Gaul and Spain. And you've got Stilicho making eyes at Alaric.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
and that doesn't seem to make sense in fact i think it's perfectly reasonable maneuver on stilicho's part but it's quite easy for other people to get in the imperial ear and once stilicho has lost the emperor's confidence he is undermined because he has quite a good legacy if i'm correct in that people there seems to be quite a bit of sympathy for stilicho isn't there with all the problems that he faces as you say all of these threats coming very quickly one after another where it's
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
You have that in your inbox and see how you feel, frankly. And what I think is fantastic about Stilicho was a bit like the Thane of Cawdor, nothing becomes him like the leaving in his life, like the leaving of it. He'd been undermined. He knows that there's a warrant out for his arrest and that he will be executed.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
And I think it is the groups from that invasion of Italy in 4056, the barbarian groups, he's transferred into the Roman army. They say, come on, lead us in revolt. We'll put you back in control. But he refuses. He allows himself to be arrested and executed rather than lead them in a desperate bid to save his career. And I think that's a pretty extraordinary moment, actually. Yeah.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
And he knows his son is going to be killed as well, because it's never just you. But he accepts that rather than pressing the nuclear button,
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Well, Alaric's constant need remained a deal, which recognizes the Goths as part of the Roman Empire, part of the Roman political and military world. And he sensed now that the West is going to be the place for him to get that deal. Constantinople, the walls have constructed the armies in one piece. They put it back together after Hadrianople.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
He's never going to be allowed back into the political realm. structures of Constantinople. The East is strong. Yeah, absolutely. This divided, brutalized West is the place where he can negotiate the best deal. That's what brings him to Rome. He doesn't want to sack Rome. He sits outside it for 18 months before he finally sacks it.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
What he's doing there is using it as a bargaining chip in the desire to get a deal from the Western Roman state.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
In the end, he does, yes. There's a sequence of regimes, if you like, around Honorius. So advisors come and go with different policies. The first guy who replaces Stilicho has We should fight them on the beaches. But that proves a total disaster. So he's quickly ousted. Then the next guy comes along and says, we should do a deal. So they do. They concoct a deal.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
But actually, that deal, from Honoris' point of view, looks way too favorable to Alaric. And it was an extraordinary deal. Under those terms, Alderic was going to be given an imperial generalship. His troops are going to be stationed either side of the Alps, northern Italy, and then the other side. So it'd be very close to Ravenna and Milan, the political centers of northern Italy.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
And the Goths were going to receive not only rations, but also payments in gold. So like full-on Roman soldiers. That's close to establishing a semi-Gothic protectorate over the Western Empire. Honorius won't have that. So that deal is rejected. Then, as our best source tells us, everyone's astounded because Alaric comes back with another offer. And that offer, I think, is very revealing.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
He says, look, okay. No generalship, no gold, bit of land on the frontier, i.e. not close to the political heartland, and just some rations. So he's actually, he's relented.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Yes. I think it tells you that Alaric's perception is that the current malaise in the Western Empire is only going to be temporary. He could get far more than that in the short term, but that's not what he wants. He wants a long-term deal, and he thinks that that is the shape that a long-term deal might take.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
And actually, he's not wrong because when his group is eventually settled in 416 to 418, when it finally does a deal, it's not Alaric anymore. He's dead by now. But the deal that's done is very similar to Alaric's minimum offer, not his maximum offer. So no generalship, no payments in gold that we know about, land well away from the Italian political heartland, i.e.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
southwestern Gaul, and occasional military service.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
It's a huge symbolic moment. Rome is a cultural capital. There's a huge scholarly argument about whether emperors visited Rome on three or four occasions for a month in the first century, i.e. they never went there.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Yeah, that's right. It's important for its universities. It's important for its cult sites, for its history, but it's not where the empire is run from. My favorite put down is from an Eastern orator who refers to it as a sacred precinct far from the highway. He talks about it in the 350s. So politically, it's not that big a deal, but culturally it is, psychologically too.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
People fight about it, but it's certainly one of the major stimuli which will set Augustine of Hippo in the city of God, putting forward the argument that actually there isn't a special relationship between the divinity and the Roman state. There's a temporary one, and that's only contingent, and the divinity might withdraw his support from that state at any point.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
We really don't know quite how devastating it was. The Goths are Christian, and all our commentators are Christian, and they all share the view that it has to be God's will. So according to Augustine and friends, it's the most civilized sack there's ever been. Virgins are led off to the churches and are safe, and the Goths, who knows?
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
It doesn't look like it is the wreck of some of those early modern sacks, or indeed the Vandal sack in 457. But there are treasures, and there are burn layers that you find occasionally, so I don't think it was a piece of cake either. Alaric is forced into sacking. He doesn't want to, but he's kept his forces outside the city. They expect a return. They want all this stuff.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
So I think it's a slightly controlled process and not a total devastation of the city. We have plenty of archaeological and literary sources which suggest that the city is not a burnt and devastated landscape.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
The Vandals, well, there are two separate groups of Vandals that we know about, Hasding Vandals and Siling Vandals. And when they cross the Rhine at the end of 406, they are separate units with their own kings, our best. Suggestion is that they are from Central Europe, close to what's now Hungary, Slovakia. And they'd been there or thereabouts from the 3rd century onwards.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
They are agricultural farmers. And they are not immediately close to the frontier in the 4th century. So we don't have direct information. Roman relations between Vandal kings and Roman emperors recorded in our 4th century sources.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Well, their journey is only part of it, actually. There's a bigger journey that's involved, and that is when they cross the Rhine in 406, they are in alliance with loads of others, some small groups. But the biggest partners with these two separate Vandal groups are are Alans. And the sources are quite unanimous that the Alans are in the majority at that point.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
And in fact, when they share out Spain in 411-12, the Alans get more of Spain than the two Vandal groups. So the Alans are definitely the bigger party to this alliance. And they've come even further. Are they Iranian? Yes, they're north of the Black Sea.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
So we've got to get the Alans over the Carpathians or round the Carpathians into Central Europe to make the alliance with the Vandals and then shunt everybody further west. So the islands, I think, are collateral damage from the arrival of the Huns. So this is the great domino effect.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
There are lots of my colleagues who don't like domino effects, but how the hell you get tens of thousands of islands in Hungary when they used to be in Ukraine without a domino effect, I do not know. I think essentially what happens is that the Huns destabilize things
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
north of the Black Sea, but that destabilization then destabilizes things in Central Europe, which is why we have loads of islands there to make this alliance. And they all cross into Southern Gaul in 406. They cross into Spain, it looks, in 409.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Really rich. Yeah. And they divide up Spain between them, we're told the allocation in one of our sources. The Alans get the best bits.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
They move on to North Africa because the Goths of Alaric, not led by Alaric anymore, are settled in southwestern Gaul by the one smart, or the first really smart, ruler of the west who gets control of Honorius after Silico's death, a man called Flavius Constantius, who will later marry Honorius' sister, the one dragged off by the Goths. and become emperor in turn, co-emperor.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
They don't get rid of Honorius, they rule with him. And he settles the Goths in southwestern Gaul, does a deal with them for joint military action. And between 416 and 418, that joint Roman Gothic force destroys the Alans as an independent force, kills their kings, destroys the Siling Vandals, and we're left only with the Hasding Vandals in Spain.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
But the refugees from certainly the Alans, and I suspect also the Siling Vandals as well, join the Hasding Vandals. And the Hasding kings who invade North Africa, their official titulature is Kings of the Vandals and Alans. So it is an alliance.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
That Roman Gothic counteraction in Spain was clearly pretty nasty or effective, depending on your point of view, and destroys the hegemony that the Alans had had within that grouping.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
There's an outline chronology. So they transfer themselves over the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco in 429. There is then a slow march westwards. They are given an intermediate deal in 435, which sees them in control of Algeria or sort of central and western Algeria. The really rich bits of North Africa are what are now Tunisia and Eastern Algeria.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
This is where all the kind of millionaires had their holiday homes between the wars. Is it Hipporegius and Carthage and places like that? Yes, absolutely. Well, that's where, you know. Yves Saint Laurent has a famous house there, fabulous gardens you can go visit, etc., etc. This isn't Beaugest in the desert. This is really rich Mediterranean landscapes.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Then in 439, the Vandals break out of that deal and out of the reservation that they've been put in, and they take over the richest bits of North Africa. With some fighting.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
You know, one should never discount. None of these kings are so securely in power that they can afford not to reward their followers. So there is always a need for kings to make raiding opportunities available, otherwise satisfy the unruly.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
political aspirations that might be bubbling up within their own followings, but also about getting, again, a secure deal that recognizes their control of North Africa. You can imagine that the first response to the vandal seizure of the best bits of North Africa is not one of, oh, thanks for doing that from their own point of view.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
A huge Roman counterattack involving both East and West is prepared in 441-442.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
The force is gathered in Sicily, but then, oh, Attila invades across the Danube. and the eastern forces are withdrawn.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
What prompts the sack of Rome by the Vandals in 457 is a chain of events that follows on from Attila's death, which means that the reigning Western emperor, Valentinian III, doesn't think he needs his chief advisor anymore, a man called Aetius, who's another very competent generalissimo like Stilicho or Flavius and Constantius, so he kills him. Supporters of Aetius kill Valentinian in turn.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
We've got political chaos. Geiseric sense opportunity, but also the need to establish that his Vandal kingdom will be safe.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Yeah, yeah. He's the son of the first has-been Vandal king who created the alliance, yeah.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
The Vandal Sack of Rome is certainly more brutal. They're there a week. And the current Western emperor, he's really still only at the kind of pretender stage. He is the emperor in name. Petronius Maximus is killed, fleeing the city as the Vandals arrive. Yeah, supposedly they strip up much more of the city. Again, it's not left burnt and in ruins, but it's a very substantial sack.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
I think you can say that the Vandals are playing a more substantial role in the fall of the Empire for this reason. The Empire is actually a very simple structure. You tax the agricultural production of provincial holdings to maintain the central army. Every time you lose control of provincial territories,
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
you sap that flow of revenues and make it impossible for the empire to maintain armies of the same scale. What we see happening between 440, actually you can see it happening from 420 onwards,
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
is the slow draining away of this tax revenue lifeblood of the Western Empire to the extent that it can no longer maintain sufficient forces to be the preponderant military force within Western imperial territory. That's the process. And North Africa was the kind of jewel in the crown of the Western Empire.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Didn't take much defending before the Vandals arrived there, produced great agricultural surplus, you know, perfect characteristics for your province. You know, if you wanted to design the ideal province, that's it. Doesn't need much defending, produces lots of wealth. Thank you very much.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
But taking the richest part of North Africa out of the tax base of the Western Empire, that is a very disastrous moment for the crucial fiscal military axis, which is what keeps the empire in being.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
And it's important to see that what kills the empire is not these occasional military defeats. It is the sapping away of the revenue flow. So we look at the Sax of Rome, we look at the Battle of Hadrianople, they have short-term significances. But the long-term process is the disappearance of the flow of tax revenues, which keeps that army in being.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Yeah, exactly. And that is the right way to think about it. Every loss of a province is a loss of tax flow. It already shows up. We have this document called Notitia Dignitatum, which lists the Roman army. Very usefully from our perspective, we have two lists for the Western army, one from 395 and a later updated version from the early 420s, probably just after the fighting in Spain.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
And you can compare and contrast the two. And very interesting things show up. First of all, the Roman field army has suffered very heavy casualties in the intervening period. I mean, like 40% of the regiments that existed in 395 don't exist in 420.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
But then the numbers have been made up, but they've been made up for the most part, not by recruiting new units, but by shifting what used to be frontier defense forces into the field army. So a lot of former garrison troops have now been regraded, whatever that means, as field army troops. So the total number of field army troops is the same. But as it were, we've done it on the cheap.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
We haven't filled in the gaps by proper new recruiting. And goodness knows what holes have been left on the frontier where those troops have been transferred. That, I think, is absolutely showing you the effects of the loss of revenue flow already by the 420s. And that's before the loss of North Africa.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
I think the Hunnic invasions of the West are not directly causative of the fall of the Western Empire, but they are indicative of what's going on in the sense that the very effective West Roman leader at the time, Aetius, who is the right-hand man of the Emperor Valentinian III and the effective ruler of the Empire, But Aecius had been using the Huns to keep people like the Goths under control.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
So Aecius has had to live with Goths in southwestern Gaul. He's had to settle Burgundians in the Rhône Valley. But all the time he's been drawing on Hunnic military support. So there's a big Gothic revolt. in the mid-430s. Burgundians are just another group that are problematic at this time. And the Burgundians were heavily attacked by Huns before the remnants are settled on Roman soil.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Whether that's a Roman policy to do that or whether it's accident that the Hunnic action against the Burgundians was autonomous, we don't know. But anyway, basically, Aecius has been drawing on Hunnic support, well, to put himself in power to start with, but then also to keep control of the sort of geostrategic situation in the Western Empire in the 430s.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Attila comes to power, I think, in 440 with his brother and immediately changes. And we start to see a Hunnic empire, which is no longer willing to be paid for mercenary service by the Western or Eastern empires, but is taking direct military action to access wealth and subsidies from it. And this, of course, changes the balance of power. You can't use the Huns anymore to keep the Goths in control.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
So when the Huns eventually turn from having ransacked the Balkans and the Eastern Empire for everything they could get to Western campaigns in 450 and 451, then Aetius has to put together a new military alliance to face down the Huns. The Roman army by itself is not strong enough. He calls in Goths. Goths are back on side. They're back on side. And this actually points to the future.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Attila's empire has this brief flowering. It falls apart when he dies. There's then a huge fight for succession amongst the Huns. And there's a lot of fallout from that, which leads to yet more groups ending up on both Eastern and West Roman soil, more groups of barbarians. But fundamentally, we're left with a new political context in the Western empire,
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
where the Goths are too powerful to be excluded from deal-making. So to construct a regime that's got any kind of chance of working, you have to get the Goths on side because you can no longer use hunting outside threat to keep them on the reservation, as it were.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
And the moment that the Vandals are sacking Rome, that then Western Emperor's representative, Avetus, has gone to the Goths to concoct a deal with them when Petronius Maximus is killed. And lo and behold, the Goths, or Avetus has himself declared emperor at the Gothic court. The Goths have become kingmakers. I was going to say emperor makers or kingmakers, isn't it?
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Absolutely. And that is really pointing to the strategic shift, which is with the decline in tax revenues, the Western army is no longer strong enough to operate completely independently of Gothic military supports. Well, you have to include the Goths in this.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Exactly like Stilicho. Again, you've got a dominant figure with what was originally a child emperor. This type of relationship is never pretty, and it's never easy to resolve. The only way for someone who comes to power as a ruler to assert their independent control is by violence. You've got to eliminate the person who's been dominating you.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Edward III does it successfully in England, gets rid of his mother and her lover with a kind of extraordinary coup d'etat. to take power. It has to be something like that. Valentinian III, with the threat of the Huns now removed, thinks that he can be his own man. The scene is actually very indicative. Aetius is listing out all the remaining tax revenues that there are.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
And, you know, Valentin's had enough of that knife in the midst of this.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
No, they don't. I don't think he was willing to be told, as again, you know, modern parallels might suggest, those with God complexes don't like to be told hard truths. Yeah.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
The core areas left, and there are two functioning regimes, one by Majorian, 459 to 461, and then Anthemius in the later 460s. They have control of Italy, obviously, the nice Dalmatian coast, Sicily. They can still exert power north of the Alps. The landowning opinion in central and southern Gaul is still within their political compass.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
And northeastern Spain, Taracanensis, it's the Roman province around Barcelona, that much is reasonably under control. That's their core territory.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
My own answer is categorically that they are central to this. And I think for two reasons. First of all, the old model of social and economic dislocation in the third and fourth centuries, followed by political collapse in the fifth, which is intuitively convincing. The archaeological evidence makes it clear that that's no longer supportable. Economy and society are flourishing.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
And indeed, actually, the cultural evidence, if you look at writings from the late third and fourth century, there's a ton of it, you know, very sophisticated. This doesn't look like a world in crisis at all. So we've got that.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
And the second part is, while certainly civil war and tension is now systemically hardwired into the operations of the Roman imperial system because of the division between East and West, I don't see any narrative pathway that gets you from the kind of civil wars that we see in the fourth century to imperial collapse, and for this reason. So we see two kinds.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
We either see conflict between Eastern and Western Roman emperors, usually for preeminence over the whole kit and caboodle. In other words, we're looking to pull the thing together, not to break it apart. The other type we see is that there's a kind of fault line in the Western Empire around the Alps, because we've got one army group in Gaul, and we've got another army group
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
In northern Italy or the western Balkans, protecting the sort of middle Danube frontier. And you get rival leaders. I mean, emperors are always generals, as it were. So these two army groups can put forward rival pretenders for control of the western empire. And we see conflict of that kind.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
But again, as the sort of fancy sociologists would call it, these are centripetal, not centrifugal conflicts. We're not looking to break off a bit of the empire and run it separately. We've seen rival leaders for control of the whole thing.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
And there is not any sign in the fourth century of the kind of thing that we saw in the third century, which is bits of the empire operating and setting up as autonomous units. So we had the Gallic Empire, we had Palmyra in the east in the third century. No repeat of that at all.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
And the reason we don't have is that we've reorganized the military so that the most powerful military formations are around the imperial person. It isn't possible anymore for a regional general to set up an independent part of the empire. They can't do it. British usurpers try it. They get crushed in the late third, very early fourth century. And there is no repetition.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
So, you know, if you think what does the fall of the Empire in the West means, it means the disappearance of a unitary state that runs from Hadrian's Wall to the Atlas Mountains of North Africa into a series of successor states. Can we get to that situation just with the pattern of Roman politics and Roman military organization in the 4th century? see no remote possibility.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
And this is where the barbarians are crucial. They undermine that flow of revenues, which makes for that preponderance of the praesental forces around the emperor. So they take the revenue almost for themselves in the forming of their own kingdoms. So therefore, the preponderance of military power disappears from the Roman center. It can't keep everyone straight.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
We get regional fragmentation, but around the barbarian dynasts, not around Roman military commanders. Because it couldn't happen around Roman military commanders. There isn't a regional Roman commander who has a powerful enough military formation to stand up to the central forces.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
It's my absolute pleasure. I've been rabbiting on about these things now for about 40 years, but it doesn't lose my interest. That may be a reflection on me. No, absolute pleasure.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Yeah, that's right. We're both shut down at home doing this.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
You've got to imagine an extremely prosperous Roman Empire. That's, I think, the single most important point that people need to understand because it's the revolution in our understanding of the empire that has emerged over the last sort of 40 years. If you talk to any of my
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Older colleagues now happily in their graves, but this would be the single most extraordinary thing that they wouldn't expect. Because of the archaeological evidence, we now know that the rural economy of the Roman Empire and its general population levels are at a maximum in the 4th century compared to any other point in the empire.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
So that's, I think, it's not teetering on the point of collapse, in other words.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Historians are sometimes very weird. They think that if you detect any problem in any society, it's about to collapse. Well, you know, look around you. Human life is not perfect. There are some serious issues. For various reasons, they've had to divide political authority between two centers, one in the West and one in the East. And there is...
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
fairly constant tension and occasional conflict between those two centers. Occasional civil war is part of the deal by the late imperial period, but that looks systemic and sustainable, as it were.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
In the mid-fourth century, it looks pretty balanced to me. Obviously, as the West starts to lose control of its territories, the East emerges very quickly as more powerful. But actually, if you look at
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
The archaeological evidence from, well, even southern Britain, but also definitely central and southern what's now France, Gaul, then Spain, North Africa, which are all Western imperial territories, they're all flourishing. So it's not clear to me that there is an obvious imbalance between the two.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
The line runs through the Balkans, and there's a bit of bickering between exactly where in the Balkans we should put it. But basically, the very nice bits of the Balkans, like what's now Croatia, the Dalmatian coastline, and Greece are usually part of the Western Empire. Bizarrely, you would think Greece would be in the Eastern Empire, but it's not in the 4th century.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
They picked the term up from the Greeks. I mean, it's a term of abuse. We're used to it and we throw it around a lot. But to call someone a barbarian is to say that they are an inferior, indeed imperfect human being. The Romans inherit the sort of classical Greek view of what civilization is, and it's quite specific actually.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
It comes down to a vision of how human beings are constructed, that we have a rational soul or mind in a very physical, irrational body. And barbarians are people in whom the rational faculties of the mind or soul have not been developed sufficiently to control the irrational faculties of the body.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Civilized people, the rational faculties have been developed sufficiently to control all those impulses that come from our physicality.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Well, both things are true, of course. You know, there is the ideology and then there's the practicality. And the ideology is not an insignificant element in the way that relationships are constructed. So if you're a smart prince on the frontier, you know damn well how you're expected to behave when you're confronted with an emperor parading his standards through your territory.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
Groveling is good. Gentle sobbing, excellent maneuver. Gentle sobbing. Gentle sobbing. There's a Sarmatian prince called Zizace in 358 who knows the script perfectly. So he lies down on the ground. He can't move. He's so full of awe in the face of the emperor. He sobs gently, and then he gets the deal he wants. I could make some modern parallels.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
But you play the script, you get the deal you want. But the script is real. Every portrayal of an emperor in resplendent glory, well, it will usually have two things. It will have a victory in the top corner, an image of victory, and it will have a barbarian lying supine at the bottom. Because the other element to this Roman image of superiority is that this is divinely ordained.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
So you have divine support for the empire because it is the one place that generates these properly civilized human beings, which is what we're all meant to be. And how does divine support manifest itself? Well, most obviously in victory. If you have the supreme omnipotent creator of the cosmos on your side, you ought to win.
The Ancients
Barbarian Invaders: The Sacks of Rome
We're seeing, by the fourth century, a shift, really, in the sense that if you look at the time of Castus in the first century, you've got lots of small-named groups on the Rhine and Danube in Europe. If we're talking about European frontiers, for my sins, I added them up once, and it's something like... It's over 60 named groups in Tacitus' Germania.