Goffart - Barbarian tides the migration age and the later Roman Empire

Barbarian Tides

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES

Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor

Edward Peters, Founding Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire

Walter Goffart

PENN

University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia

Copyright 2006 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goffart, Walter A.

Barbarian tides: the migration age and the later Roman Empire / Walter Goffart.

p. cm.(The Middle Ages series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-3939-3

ISBN-10: 0-8122-3939-3 (cloth: alk. paper)

1. Migrations of nations. 2. EuropeHistory392814. 3. RomeHistoryGermanic

Invasions, 3rd6th centuries. 1. Title. II. Series.

To Eva Sophia Baldi Goffart

Appendices

Twenty-five years ago I published Barbarians and Romans A.D. 418584: The Techniques of Accommodation. Barbarian Tides is a sequel, a rethought, revised, much expanded, and wholly rewritten version of the earlier book. It is a comprehensive, though certainly not an exhaustive introduction to the activities of northern barbarians in late antiquity, activities often called the barbarian invasions. Quite a lot has happened to this field in twenty-five years. Barbarians and Romans pointed hesitantly in a footnote toward future discussions, observing that the continuity of peoples seemed to be a matter of current concern and that the idea of an enduring core of tribal tradition was arousing controversy. There has been much discussion since then of peoples and cores of tradition under the general heading of ethnicity, and the claim has been widely made that ethnicity was very important in late antiquity. From another angle, late Roman studies have experienced an impressive increase in the attention paid to the cultures of the eastern provinces and to all manner of religious phenomena. By comparison, the intrusion of barbarians has receded to the margins of interest.

My central concern in the present book is not to talk about past ethnicities or ethnogenesis theory but to liberate barbarian history from the German nationalism that has suffused it ever since the sixteenth century and, in whatever disguises, continues to do so today. As long ago as 1972, I expressed a wish that someone should write a history of the Migration Age detached from German nationalism. The studies presented here attempt to fill this vacuum or at least illustrate some ways of doing so.

History is my subject, not nationalism. Passion of some sort motivates most scholars including me. Nationalism unashamedly affected a vast source collection that medievalists rightly extol and prize, namely, the Monumenta Germaniae historica, the historical monuments of Germany. The motto its founders adopted at the start of their enterprise in 1819 was Sacer amor patriae dat animum: A holy love of the fatherland inspires [us]; and there is little doubt that, without the patriotism of its collaborators, the Monumenta enterprise would have fallen short of its prodigious (and continuing) achievements. Love of country is not on trial here; no apologies or retractions are called for. What is wanted is only a willingness to surmount entrenched tradition and come a little closer to understanding the activities of non-Romans in late antiquity. I take issue with misapprehensions of barbarian history, in particular the anachronistic belief, ubiquitous outside as well as inside Germany, that the Migration Age is a Germanic subject, in which barbarians are synonymous with Germanic peoples. Strange as it may seem to hear it said, there were no Germanic peoples in late antiquity. The illusion that there were can be outgrown. The barbarian invasions are a deeply interesting slice of the European past; they concern a multiplicity of peoples with names of their own; and they can be approached in other than nationalistic ways. This book, like its predecessor, tries to move the subject in that direction.

Three institutions at Yale have welcomed me and kept me active: the Department of History, Berkeley College, and the Elizabethan Club. I am very grateful to them as well as to the Yale libraries and librarians that have served me extraordinarily well. The Rockefeller Foundation Study Center at Bellagio allowed me to benefit from its tranquility for an unforgettable month. Parts of this book have been delivered as lectures over the past five years at Chicago, Yale, Bellagio, Harvard, Kalamazoo, and Champaign-Urbana; the audiences that bore with these trial runs have my sympathy and gratitude. A slightly different form of has appeared in Speculum 80 (2005): 379-98. I am indebted to Patrick Prin for advancing my archaeological education and to Josh Chafetz for help on a legal point. I take special pleasure in thanking Andrew Gillett, Michael Kulikowski, and Alexander C. Murray for looking at drafts of this book and offering their candid advice; readers will see how much I owe to their writings. My wife, Roberta Frank, always my most valued critic, has reconciled the demands of her stellar career with sustaining me through another book. My thanks are scant recompense for her care.

A funny thing happened to the later Roman Empire on its way to the twenty-first century: it ran into a wave of ethnicity and ethnogenesis. The turn toward ethnicity is striking. Did earlier historians miss something important? Where has this new preoccupation come from and should we follow in its tracks?

Herwig Wolframs Geschichte der Goten, first published in 1979 and translated into English in 1988 as History of the Goths, presents itself as an example of historical ethnography. The book was central to bringing ethnicity and ethnogenesis to the forefront of discussions. In focusing on the Goths, Wolfram, a historian by training, did not choose a neglected subject.

Ethnogenesis has been variously defined.

These challenges to past errors suggest that students of the Migration Age should take a profound interest in tribes and tribe formations, that this subject is acutely important to understanding the role of the barbarians in late antiquity. Whether or not ethnicity returned to the Roman Empire in the fourth century is open to discussion, but there is no doubtso it is allegedthat ethnicity should have a high priority in todays classroom. We are urged to reorient the focus of attention from wherever it was in the books of, for example, J. B. Bury, Ludwig Schmidt, or Lucien Musset and move instead toward a subject one used to pay little attention to, namely, the Germanic tribe.

This change of focus might be timely and desirable if it did not absorb all the energy of those concerned with the northern barbarians in the age of Romes fall. Much else needs to be set right in narratives of the Migration Age. The concept of ethnogenesis does little to remedy other issues. A historian quoted a moment ago complained that our ideas about the Germans were It is a much more arduous and delicate task to deal with the mass of discordant and tangled modern German research and speculation into Germanic antiquitiesa turbulent flood of erudition and conjecture. There is no guarantee that our knowledge of the early Germans will be enriched and improved by no longer being shaped only by classical sources but by a body of commentators that includes superb, standard-setting scholars along with cranks, maniacs, and superpatriots. The main problem (at least as it looks from North America) is to tame the still-raging wave of the science of Germanic antiquity