As we move to within 100 years of the deposition of the last Roman Emperor in the West, we encounter a situation in which a large group of Goths is arriving on the banks of the River Danube, in the year 376. This was on the border of what is now Romania and Bulgaria, and they were seeking asylum inside the Roman Empire. Two of their rulers had recently died, one been deposed, and they were manfully, but unsuccessfully, trying to resist the expansion of the Hunni into their lands on the northern shores of the Black Sea.
The Romans badly mishandled this ‘immigration crisis’, and just two years later things had got much, much worse for them. On 9 August 378, the Goths had inflicted a crushing military defeat on the Romans at the battle of Adrianople. The Emperor Valens and several thousand Roman soldiers had lost their lives in that conflict. As Themistius (Or. 16, p. 296. 17ff.) put it, ‘our armies ... vanished like shadows’. The Gothic victory is often seen as a game-changer in world history (at least if you see it with hindsight).
As we’ll discover when we analyse those changes later in the course, the Goths were the first autonomous group of immigrants to make their way across the borders of the Roman Empire en masse and survive; under their leader Alaric they’d be the first group of immigrants (as opposed to ‘invaders’) to sack Rome, which they did on 24 August 410; and ultimately, in September of 476, Romulus Augustulus would be deposed as the last Emperor of the Roman West. And one way or another, Goths would play a key role in all of this.
And beyond the confines of our course, it would come about that two of the new states that would emerge out of the Western Roman Empire would be Gothic: that would be the Visigothic kingdom in Spain and southern Gaul, and the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy.
Also looming large in the Roman consciousness were the Huns, the Hunni, whose leader Attila is arguably the most famous barbarian in Ancient History. The burgeoning power of the Huns had huge effects on the Roman Empire, both directly and indirectly. In the first half of the 5th century many internal political issues were sorted out inside the Roman Empire using Hunnic forces, but on the other hand, the Huns themselves started to make very effective incursions into Roman territory: they defeated the armies that were sent against them; they sacked important cities like Aquileia and Treveri – Trier in Germany, where I am now; they demanded (and they received) huge subsidies from both Constantinople and Ravenna, and they drove numerous peoples to seek refuge inside the Roman Empire. Essentially, as far as ‘barbarian’ politics were concerned, they became a very, very significant alternative to Rome. For its part, Rome’s ability to intervene became more and more circumscribed. Unlike the Goths, they never burned R ome, but they burned themselves indelibly onto the Roman psyche.
So at this stage of our studies, we should perhaps make an analysis of the peoples of ‘Barbaricum’ north of the Rhine and Danube, with special emphasis on the Goths and the Huns. Certainly, in doing so we will engage with some really extremely interesting topics, such as issues of identity (Roman-ness and barbarism), Roman attitudes towards barbarians, and barbarian attitudes towards Romans, not to mention looking at both the Goths and the Huns through a wide variety of literary and archaeological sources. Once we’ve done that, we’ll try to bring our ideas together, and analyse what it meant, in the 4th and 5th centuries, to be a Roman or a barbarian.