Grace Cole - The Barbarians

Barbarians. The label itself is an insult.

For centuries, people have been taught to demean the tribes that overran the fabled Roman Empire. They were not only feared and loathed but branded as ferocious, filthy, and ignorant. Their tribal names Goths, Huns, Vandals became synonyms for savagery.

It was the barbarians, the story went, who reversed the progress made in Greece and Rome and interrupted the spread of Western civilization. The 600 years they dominated Europe - from the fall of Rome to the time of the Crusades - were written off as the Dark Ages.

The truth, though, is far more complex and interesting.

The barbarians began very much as we think of them, but they also had a vigor and initiative that the Romans had lost in their years of dominion - and a sense of justice and individual worth that was all their own. As the hordes from the north gradually melded with the empire, they enriched its culture with their robust art and epic sagas even as they soaked up the Roman way of life and Christian faith. When the Renaissance finally burst into bloom, the result was not just a revival of classicism but a whole new civilization one that couldnt have existed without the barbarians input.

By the time of its demise, the Roman Empire had been fending off invaders for eight centuries. In fact, ever since homo sapiens displaced the Neanderthals, the place we now call Europe has witnessed a constant influx of newcomers. Some, like the Germanic tribes that plagued the Romans, originated in the northern parts of the continent. Others came from Africa and still others from Asia Minor. But the critical flow, beginning with the Scythians 3,000 years ago, trickled in from the steppes of Central Asia. Successive waves of Avars, Huns, Sarmatians, and many more nomadic peoples muscled their way into Europe, each tribe seemingly fiercer and stronger than the last. Settled tribes yielded to them, retreating south and east and displacing others. Successive groups learned new customs and traditions from the people they had conquered, trading their nomadic life for the security of farms and villages, only to be shoved aside in their turn by the next wave of newcomers.

Twenty-one hundred years ago when Julius Caesar first fought the barbarian tribes of Gaul, they were, indeed, uncivilized. They had begun drifting south some 2,500 years ago, in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, from their original homeland in Scandinavia. But they were still few in number and primitive in lifestyle. These nomadic herdsmen, who hunted and fished to supplement the food supplied by their flocks, were fierce, intimidating warriors who relished battle and the plunder it provided. A century later, most of them had settled into hamlets of wattle-and-daub huts, tending some crops but still living primarily to make war.

The Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus described them as having blue eyes and reddish hair; great bodies, especially powerful for attack, but not equally patient of hard work; little able to withstand heat and thirst, though by climate and soil they have been inured to cold and hunger.

Caesar referred to the barbarians as Gauls, from the Roman name for the province he was expanding in what is now France and part of Germany. But the Germanic tribes had separate identities even before they left Scandinavia, and each of them held its own lands. The Celts, Caesars main opponents, lived in western France and eventually Ireland. The Franks settled south of the Rhine and gave their name to France; the Visigoths lived along the Danube and their kinsmen the Ostrogoths farther east in the Black Sea region. The Vandals occupied southern Poland, while the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons held territory along the North Sea Coast.

During the next two centuries, the frontier of the empire stabilized in northern Europe along the Rhine and the Danube. But several trends were at work.

The first was a profound transformation in the empire itself. By CE 400, Rome had lost the energy, discipline, and character that had kept it dominant for eight centuries. Leadership of the empire had shifted to Constantinople, where Byzantium, the glorious Eastern Roman Empire, was now the wealthiest and paramount power. In the end, the western empire succumbed to its own decadence: The hordes from the north only provided the final push.

Europe had become a backwater. In the city of Rome, the population was shrinking and trade with the outside world declining. The great estates of the nobility were not gaining but ebbing in wealth. Great swaths of land that had once produced crops were being reclaimed by forests. The integrity and efficiency of the Roman government had been eroded by political expediency and corruption. Roman citizens had grown soft from centuries of prosperity; rulers subdued the masses with endless bread and circuses that kept bellies full and minds occupied. Many Romans did no work at all, and even those who did had an easy time of it; a century after Caesar, fully 150 days of the Roman year were official holidays. Not surprisingly, it was hard to find Romans willing to take up the hard life of soldiers.

The second great trend of the era was the mingling of the Germanic tribes with the Romans as the newcomers learned the ways of the empire. Some of them had settled in Gaul, living peacefully alongside their Roman neighbors. Even tribes outside the frontier increasingly visited Gaul and bartered with Roman merchants - food, hides, and slaves in exchange for silver bowls, farm implements, furniture, and gaudy trinkets specifically made for the barbarian trade. Tribespeople prized Roman coins, not as money but to wear as jewels. After centuries of intermingling, barbarians and Romans were learning to tolerate and even appreciate each other.

But unlike the self-indulgent Romans, the tribesmen retained their zest for battle and were happy to enlist in the army, which the Romans increasingly shunned. By CE 400, there were more barbarians than Romans in the legions - and many of the empires best generals were barbarians as well. They didnt seem to mind that their duty was mainly to fight other barbarians; they had been doing that all along.

The third great trend was the wholesale conversion of people to Christianity. The new faith spread quickly in the empire, spurred on by its message of hope for the poor and the promise of eternal salvation. By CE 330, Emperor Constantine the Great, himself a believer, had legalized Christianity and moved his capital from Rome to Constantinople, which would flourish for a millennium as the center of the Eastern Empire and its Church.

The new religion also attracted the barbarians. Christian missionaries from both Rome and Constantinople traveled among the Germanic tribes, making many converts. This convergence of faiths, however, was not the unifying agent it might seem. The missionaries sowed discord between the tribal converts and the Church because the creed they preached was Arianism, which held that Christ was a perfect man but not divine. In the Churchs concept of the Holy Trinity, this assertion was heresy. What seems a trifling difference to modern minds became the fiercest doctrinal dispute of the early Church, which saw barbarian Christians as no better than heathens.

The schism would last for centuries until the Churchs version of Christianity finally prevailed. But so would another, perhaps deeper and even more divisive gulf: the contempt of the Romans for people they considered inferior. Even as they lived side by side with the newcomers, traded with them, relied on them to defend the empire, and in some cases even intermarried, most Roman citizens could not accept barbarians as equals - or respect them. Romes treatment of the tribes finally triggered rebellion, culminating in the ultimate destruction of the Western Roman Empire.