About thirty years after the knock-on effects of Hunnic invasion destroyed Roman frontier security in eastern Europe, its frontiers in central Europe were plunged into similar turmoil. And unlike 376, when there was only one major frontier crossing, this second crisis had several distinct components. First, in 405/6, the Germanic King Radagaisus led a large and again, seemingly, mostly Gothic force into Italy. The sources are fragmentary, but these intruders came from west rather than east of the Carpathians, since they crossed into Italy via its eastern Alpine routes without passing through the Balkans. Also unlike the Tervingi and Greuthungi, Radagaisus did not stop to ask permission. His was a totally uninvited intrusion.30
Second, at more or less the same time, a large and disparate grouping of barbarians left broadly the same region as Radagaisus’ force, but moved west along the line of the Upper Danube rather than following the latter south across the Alps. This group consisted for the most part of Vandals, Alans and Sueves, although there were numerous smaller population fragments attached to it as well. The Vandals (in two separate groups – the Hasdings and the Silings) had already appeared west of the Carpathians opposite the Roman province of Raetia (part of modern Switzerland) in 401/2. The Iranian-speaking Alans, originally steppe nomads, had occupied lands east of the River Don as recently as c.370. The identity of the Sueves, however, is more problematic. This term appears in Roman sources of the early imperial period, but not between about c.150 and 400. It most likely designates some of the Marcomanni and Quadi, who had formed part of the old Suevic confederation and who had been settled in the Middle Danubian region, again west of the Carpathians, since the early Roman period. More Sueves certainly occupied this same region in the fifth century, and, as Constantius II discovered in 358, the various kings of these peoples were in the habit of forming temporary political alliances amongst themselves. Drawing on these highly disparate sources of manpower, this combined unit eventually forced its way across the Upper Rhine frontier on to Roman territory. The traditionally accepted date is 31 December 406.31
Third, the same era also saw two rather less dramatic incursions. In 407/8, shortly after the Rhine crossing, a force of Huns and Sciri led by a Hunnic leader called Uldin invaded east Roman territory in the Lower Danubian frontier zone. Formerly a Roman ally, Uldin had been established north of the river in this region since c.400. Then fourth, by 413, the Burgundians had moved a significant, if shorter, distance west to the River Rhine. In the third and fourth centuries they had built a power base in the Main region, east of the Alamanni. Somewhere between 405/6 and 413, they leap-frogged their old neighbours and established themselves both on and beyond the Roman frontier line in the area of modern Worms and Speyer. This represented a displacement of about one hundred and fifty kilometres from their fourth-century abodes (Map 8).32
The surviving information about this second bout of frontier collapse is much less illuminating than that for the first (c.376–80) because we lack a surviving historical source of the calibre of Ammi-anus Marcellinus. Had it survived in full, the History of Olympiodorus of Thebes, a diplomat in the employ of Constantinople, would probably have told us much of what we want to know, but unfortunately we have only his account of events from c.408 to the sack of Rome in August 410 (though this bit is more or less complete).33 It gives great insight into some of the consequences of frontier collapse, but not into its origins. Hence it is no accident that historical debate has focused largely on the initial events on the frontier. Recent discussion, though, has allowed some common ground to be established between all parties, and brought into sharper focus the points of disagreement.
Traditionally, all of these invasions were seen as part of the Völkerwanderung, the ‘movement of peoples’. The Vandals, Alans and Sueves were each whole ‘peoples’, large groups of men, women and children. How large, exactly, was always a bit mysterious, but certainly several tens of thousands of individuals. The Hasding Vandals are reported to have lost 20,000 warriors in a hard fight against some Franks even before they got across the Rhine. And given that the ratio of warriors to total population was generally reckoned at something like 1:5, this implied a total force for just the Hasding Vandals of well over 100,000 (since they clearly weren’t wiped out by the Franks). Two sources also give figures of seventy and eighty thousand respectively for the number of warriors that could be fielded by the Vandal/Alan coalition and the Burgundians, while Radagaisus is given a total following in the hundreds of thousands.34
No one now believes that the size of forces implied by these figures can be correct. The Burgundians proved in practice never more than a second-rate power, whereas an army of eighty thousand would have made them overwhelmingly strong, and another source anyway gives the same figure as the size of their total population.35 But there is substantial consensus that the military forces deployed by these invading groups had to be significant, with several of them individually fielding warrior groups in the ten-thousand-plus range, just like the two main concentrations of Goths in 376. The scale of the destruction they wrought within the Roman system makes no sense otherwise, and the more specific figures confirm it.
On the Roman side, the cumulative effect of fighting all these invaders shows up in an army listing (the distributio numerorum) of c.420. As A. H. M. Jones has demonstrated, this document shows that something like eighty regiments – close to 50 per cent – of the west Roman field army were ground into the dust between 395 and 410. Some of this damage surely occurred in fighting civil wars, on which more in a moment, but much of it was inflicted in the heavy fighting with the different invaders that followed after 405/6. More specifically, Stilicho, commanding general and effective ruler of the western Empire, had to put together a force of thirty regiments (numeri), plausibly fifteen thousand-plus men, just to attack Radagaisus. One of the few fragments from the earlier part of Olympiodorus’ History also records that, on defeating Radagaisus, Stilicho drafted twelve thousand of the better warriors in the Gothic leader’s following into the Roman army, confirming that this intrusion mustered well over ten thousand warriors, or quite plausibly twice that number and more.36
For the coalition that crossed the Rhine, the one figure worth worrying about is provided by Victor of Vita, who records that when the Vandals and Alans among them crossed to North Africa they were mustered into seventy groups of notionally one thousand people (not warriors) each, making a total population size of seventy thousand – except that Victor also notes that this was a ruse designed by its leader, the Hasding Vandal King Geiseric, to make outsiders think the group larger than it was. Victor was a North African bishop writing a few decades after Geiseric captured Carthage in 439, but he was working primarily for a North African audience that had had to live with the Vandals and Alans. There is a reasonable case for thinking, therefore, both that he knew what he was talking about and that he had to remain on this point within the bounds of contemporary plausibility. A total Vandal/Alan population of something over fifty thousand – allowing for the exaggeration – would imply again well over ten thousand warriors, and the move to North Africa had been preceded by heavy losses in Spain. When it crossed the Rhine in 406, then, the group is likely to have been considerably larger, not least because the Sueves then formed part of it.37 The possibility for argument is endless, but the narrative of the groups’ activities, and the indications we have both of Roman counterforces and of group size, are all pretty consistent with one another. At least two of the units caught up in the central European frontier collapse could field anything up to twenty thousand warriors, perhaps a few more, and this does seem now to be widely accepted.38
Although large, it is evident that the nature of the forces on the move was not so simple as the traditional characterization of them as ‘peoples’ would suggest. The Vandal Alans and Sueves were a brand-new alliance, not a people, and the same is true of the Sueves as a group, while the Vandals originally came in two distinct sub-units: Silings and Hasdings. And Silings, Hasdings, Alans and Sueves each originally came with their own separate kings. Radagaisus’ force may have been, similarly, a new alliance, although he seems to have been its only king, while the Huns and Sciri led into the Empire by Uldin were also a new political unit of the post-376 era.39
Women and children are mentioned just explicitly and often enough, and in a wide enough range of sources, to suggest their presence. The wives and children of some of the followers of Radagaisus, who eventually found themselves drafted into the Roman army, were, we are told, quartered as hostages in a number of Italian cities. For the Vandals, Alans and Sueves we have no evidence contemporary with their initial moves across the Rhine, but a group of Alans operating in Gaul by the early 410s had its women and children in tow. And when the Vandals and Alans moved on to North Africa in 429, they were certainly then moving in a mixed body. The women (and hence their children) could have been acquired since 406, and some probably were; but this seems an unlikely and unnecessarily complicated way to account for them all, especially since we have explicit evidence elsewhere, not least in relation to the events of 376 where the phenomenon is now generally accepted, that Germanic and Alanic groups did on occasion move with families. This makes it likely enough that women and children were already present in 406. The fact that different sources can squabble over whether eighty thousand represents a total figure for the Burgundians or a count of just the warriors implies the same thing about this group. Even if they were not ancient ‘peoples’, the evidence very strongly indicates that we must still figure on them as mixed groups of tens of thousands.40
Two more points have also won general acceptance. First, despite the varied trajectories of their intrusions into the Roman world – Radagaisus into Italy, the Vandals, Alans, Sueves and Burgundians up to and across the Upper Rhine, and Uldin into the northern Balkans – it is right to regard the participants as a clustered group. For although they went in different directions, all were to be found, just before they attacked, on or around the fringes of the Middle Danubian plain of modern Hungary, west of the Carpathians.
Second, it was shortly after these departures that Huns in large numbers first moved into the same Middle Danubian region. It used to be thought that the Hunnensturm had swept west of the Carpathians as early as 376. But this was based on a misreading of the Roman poet Claudian who reports Hunnic attacks only through the Caucasus and not over the Danube in 395 (contrary to what has sometimes been thought), and on a miscasting of the Hunnic leader Uldin caught up in the events of 405–8. He was clearly a relatively minor figure, not a conqueror in the class of Attila the Hun. Between them, these observations indicate that the main body of Huns remained north and east of the Black Sea up to c.400 AD, and yet by 411/12 at the latest, and quite possibly 410, many had established themselves west of the Carpathians.41 Together these points of agreement nicely define the historical problem posed for us by the collapse of Rome’s central European frontiers in the first decade of the fifth century. Everyone accepts the large scale of the intrusive military forces involved in the action, most agree that there were women and children along too, that the crisis had its epicentre on the Great Hungarian Plain and that the Huns moved on to the plain shortly afterwards. But if this much is generally agreed, the underlying causes of the invasions remain hotly disputed.
In 1995, having identified the Middle Danubian origins of most of the barbarian groups caught up in the crisis of 405–8 and established that Huns are first found there in large numbers soon afterwards, I argued that the collapse of Rome’s central European frontiers was best understood as as a rerun of 376, as it were, this time played out west rather than east of the Carpathians. Similarities in the nature of the migration units and the precise chronology of the Huns’ advance into Europe suggested to me that the crisis of 405–8 was caused by a number of Rome’s other barbarian neighbours having decided that they would prefer to take their chances in the Roman Empire rather than face the uncertainties of dealing with the Huns, echoing the choice made by the Gothic Tervingi and Greuthungi in 376. In other words, the crisis had fundamentally non-Roman origins and was caused by developments in Barbaricum.42
Two recent studies have taken an alternative approach, locating the key causes of the crisis inside the Roman world, in a combination of evolving Roman policies towards outsiders and the politically dislocating effects of the division of the Empire into eastern and western halves. In his Barbarian Tides, Walter Goffart considers it possible that Constantinople may have encouraged Radagaisus’ invasion of Italy so as to distract Stilicho from his immediate ambition to take back from the eastern Empire control of parts of the Balkans (Roman east Illyricum) which had traditionally belonged to the west but were currently being ruled by the east. More generally, however, he argues that changes to barbarian perceptions of Roman policy and to the actual power of the Roman state, rather than the Huns, were the prime cause of the crisis. On the one hand, the continued authorized survival on Roman soil of the Goths who crossed the Danube in 376 as semi-autonomous political communities decisively increased the range of ambitions at play in Barbaricum. It raised the prospect for other frontier groups that they might enter economically more developed imperial territory without having to give up their group identity and cohesion. They were encouraged in this idea, the argument continues, because, at the same time, the west was – or was perceived to be – growing weaker. Both the actual and perceived weakness stemmed from the fact that, after the death of the Emperor Theodosius I in 395, a real separation grew up between the two halves of the Empire, ruled by different advisers in the names of Theodosius’ two minor sons, Arcadius in the east and Honorius in the west (ruled by Stilicho). This offered outside groups the prospect of being able to exploit imperial disunity to increase their chances of prosperity and survival on Roman soil.43
A related line of argument has been put forward by Guy Halsall, who contends that two usurping western emperors of the late fourth century, Magnus Maximus (383–7) and Eugenius (392–4), stripped the north-western Rhine frontier of Roman troops so as to deploy them for their – ultimately failed – civil wars with the eastern Emperor Theodosius. Western troop losses in these conflicts were heavy, especially at the battle of the Frigidus in 394, and after 395 when he was in effective control of the west, the generalissimo Stilicho did little to restore the situation north of the Roman Alps because he was much more interested in pursuing his quarrels with rivals in Constantinople for control of the entire Empire. By the early fifth century, therefore, defence on the Rhine was largely dependent upon the goodwill of local barbarian client kings; and this was only one aspect of a more general withdrawal of Roman state control which also manifested itself in the closing of the Trier mint after the fall of Eugenius in 394, and the transfer of the capital of the Gallic prefecture from Trier south to Arles. For Halsall, this withdrawal had a further effect of particular relevance to the crisis of 405–8. Coin flows to some sites in the Roman north-west were disrupted from the time of Eugenius onwards, and Halsall suggests that this extended into a decline or even interruption in the normal diplomatic payments that had been flowing across the frontier to the Empire’s semi-subdued clients for centuries. With their own political power structures thus threatened, these leaders instead moved their followers directly into Roman territory from 405 onwards, to seize the wealth that they needed to keep themselves in power. For both Goffart and Halsall, developments within the Empire thus prompted the Middle Danubian barbarians to move on to Roman soil, and the Huns then moved into the power vacuum they left behind.44
Some of the factors identified in these arguments certainly had a major influence on how the crisis played itself out. There is a distinct strand of evidence that the advantageous terms granted to the Tervingi and Greuthungi in 382 were responsible for changing perceptions of what kind of deal it might be possible to negotiate from the Roman state. In the late 390s, the revolt in Asia Minor of some allied Gothic troops under a leader called Tribigild seems to have drawn initially upon resentments of other barbarians in Roman employ that they had not been granted such good terms. Synesius of Cyrene was already claiming in 399, likewise, that the treaty of 382 (specifically as modified in further negotiations between Alaric and Eutropius in 397) had led at least one other group of outsiders to ask for admission into the Empire on similar terms.45 Divisions between the eastern and western halves of the Empire hindered any coordinated Roman response. From autumn 405, Stilicho, effective ruler of the west, was, as we have seen, in dispute with Constantinople over the control of Illyricum, even threatening war over the issue. In these circumstances, there was no prospect of any eastern assistance for the west as its central European frontier began to collapse – not, at least, until after Stilicho fell from power in the summer of 408. Some military and financial assistance then followed, but by this stage the barbarians were well established on west Roman soil.46
But there is no evidence, in fact, that Constantinople encouraged Radagaisus’ attack on Italy, and divisions between east and west Rome help explain only the subsequent course of the crisis, specifically why no eastern assistance was forthcoming until 409, not why the barbarians crossed the frontier in the first place. Nor do the changing perceptions of the barbarians provide sufficient explanation. The Vandals, Alans and Sueves still crossed the Rhine on 31 December 406, despite the disasters that had befallen Radagaisus’ force the previous summer. It took a while, but Stilicho had eventually put together a Roman army large enough to confront Radagaisus, and the result was a total Roman victory. As we saw, Radagaisus himself was captured and executed, large numbers (reportedly twelve thousand) of the higher-status warriors were recruited as auxiliaries into the Roman army, and so many of their lesser and less fortunate peers were sold into slavery that the bottom fell out of the slave market.47 Quite clearly, then, no deal analogous to that offered the Goths in 382 was on the table in the Roman west in the first decade of the fifth century. The fact that the Vandals, Alans and Sueves decided nonetheless to cross the Rhine suggests that some other factor was also at play in their thinking.
Whatever else it was, I’m pretty confident that Halsall’s proposed Roman withdrawal from the north-west does not provide the answer. For one thing, the evidence that there really was such an evacuation is not compelling, being largely an argument from silence. Many commentators date the transfer of the Gallic prefecture to Arles after 405, seeing it not as cause but as consequence of the Rhine invasion.48 Furthermore, there were enough Roman troops left in the north-west for yet another western usurper, Constantine III, to launch a putsch which took him from Britain in early 406 to the Alps and the brink of total rule of the west in 409. It was also the wrong barbarians who invaded, if interrupted diplomatic subsidies really had anything much to do with it (and we don’t actually know that the subsidies were interrupted: this too is an argument from silence). Roman diplomatic payments, as we know, went above all to the major barbarian groupings right on the frontier: namely, working our way round the frontiers of the western Empire – Franks, Alamanni, Marcomanni, Quadi and Sarmatians. The invasions of 405–8 did not for the most part draw on these frontier barbarians. The Sueves of the Rhine coalition probably fell into this category – if they really were Marcomanni and Quadi by another name – but all the others were either from the east, far beyond the western Empire’s diplomatic network (Radagaisus’ Goths and the Alans of the Rhine coalition), or from the regions behind the main frontier clientele (Burgundians and both groups of Vandals). Interrupted subsidy payments should have affected Franks and Alamanni most of all, but these groups conspicuously stayed put.49
This argument could be taken further, but there is yet another decisive problem in supposing a withdrawal of Roman power from the north-west to have triggered the frontier collapse of 405–8. The first of the invasions, the attack of Radagaisus (405/6), didn’t actually affect the north-west. It powered its way across the Alps into northern Italy, where it is not possible to argue there had been any reduction of central imperial power. In fact, any troop withdrawals from the northwest would only have strengthened imperial military capacity in Italy. If a reduction in Roman power in the north-west was the prime cause of the invasions of 405–8, why did the first invasion go in a different direction?
More revealing, in my view, is a closer look at the identity of the barbarians caught up in the crisis. The available sources are not good enough to allow us to reconstruct a detailed situation map for the fourth-century Middle Danube, but we can sketch in the basic outlines: Marcomanni and Quadi north and west of the Danube bend, Sarmatians from different groups (Limigantes and Argaragantes) either side of the River Tisza. Further north were to be found Vandals and other Germanic groups, but they did not impinge directly on the frontier action in the fourth century.50 When this distribution is compared with the invaders who emerged from the region after 405, it becomes clear that the Middle Danube had already seen a huge political-cum-demographic convulsionbefore the outpourings across Rome’s central European frontiers.
Vandals first appeared on Stilicho’s radar a few years before 405–8, in the winter of 401/2, when their presence nearby posed something of a threat to the peace of Raetia, more or less Roman Switzerland. This neighbourhood had emphatically not been their home in the mid-fourth century, when they were to be found the best part of six hundred kilometres further north-west, in the northern Tisza region and Slovakia, right out on the fringes of the Middle Danubian plain and old Roman Dacia.51 Their initial relocation to the fringes of Raetia, while nothing compared with subsequent marches to Spain and North Africa, was nonetheless a substantial move in itself.
That Radagaisus’ coalition, which certainly included some Goths, should have invaded Italy from west of the Carpathians reinforces the point. One or several of the many Gothic groups known from the fourth century were presumably drawn upon to make up the Gothic contingent in Radagaisus’ following. But no Goths inhabited land west of the Carpathians at that time. Likewise, the Alans: historical sources are entirely unambiguous that when they crossed the Rhine, they were the largest single component of the mixed invasion force. In other words, many Alans had come to occupy territory west of the Carpathians by about 405. But again, no Alans inhabited this region in the fourth century. Up to c.370, their westernmost stamping grounds were located around fifteen hundred kilometres further east, on the far side of the River Don.52 Different Alanic subgroups (their political structure seems to have encompassed many largely autonomous units) had begun to move west on the tails of the retreating Tervingi and Greuthungi from the mid-370s. One group of Alans, in alliance with some Huns, joined the Goths in the Roman Balkans in the autumn of 377 and even fought at Hadrianople. More Alans were encountered by the Emperor Gratian in the north-west Balkans in the summer of 378, who incorporated the same or yet more Alans into the western field army in 380.53 Things then quietened down, at least in our sources, but Alans on the move to the west were a major part of the first frontier crisis in the years after 376, and some continuation of this phenomenon is necessary to explain why there were so many Alans west of the Carpathians by 406. The observation is only reinforced by the fact that Uldin’s mixed power base, which also crossed into Dacia from somewhere on the fringes of the Middle Danube, consisted of Huns and Sciri.54 Neither of these groups shows up in the fourth century, even on the eastern fringes of the Middle Danube. The Burgundians and the Sueves, if the latter were indeed Marcomanni and Quadi, were hugely in the minority, therefore, in becoming involved in the crisis of 405–8 as long-established inhabitants of the Middle Danube and its environs.
Such a degree of population displacement was entirely abnormal in the hinterland of Rome’s frontiers. Group movements in the frontier region were usually controlled by the Romans extremely tightly. As we saw in Chapter 3, when members of just one Sarmatian subgroup, the Limigantes, returned in 359 to the sector of the Middle Danube frontier from which they had been expelled the previous year, Constantius II reacted decisively because of the propensity for disturbances beyond the frontier to spill over on to Roman territory.55 The arrival of so many newcomers in the Middle Danubian region immediately before the crisis of 405–8 completely dwarfs the amount of disruption faced by Constantius fifty years previously. Two substantial groups of Vandals, very large numbers of Alans, at least the Gothic element of Radagaisus’ coalition, and the Huns and Sciri of Uldin were all newcomers to the Middle Danube. So the frontier penetrations faced by the western Empire in 405–8 were the product of an equally large, if not actually bigger, crisis beyond the frontier itself. Something profound must have been going on there to cause all these groups to relocate themselves west of the Carpathians, even before they made their better-documented moves on to Roman soil.
So what was it? None of the factors relating to developments internal to the Roman Empire satisfactorily account for this major concentration of armed groups and their dependants in the Middle Danube region before 405–8, though they certainly help explain what happened next – why the west received no eastern help before 409/10, and why attacking through Gaul proved a better option than invading Italy. In 1995, I argued that it was the second stage of Hunnic movement into Europe that had prompted this gathering of the clans west of the Carpathians, and to my mind this still provides much the likeliest explanation. Not only does the chronological correlation between their advance to the heart of Europe and the departure of our invaders from the Middle Danube plain suggest it, but, as we will explore in the next chapter, a close look at the migratory patterns of the Huns themselves provides two strong planks of further support. First, the Huns had pressing reasons of their own to want to move into central Europe, making it highly unlikely that they were merely exploiting a power vacuum that had already been created there by the departure of the Vandals and others. Second, the Huns’ treatment of neighbouring populations who got in their way made it reasonable for those neighbours to want to escape. It is thus entirely comprehensible that a second westward shift in the centre of Hunnic operations from the Black Sea to the Middle Danube, which clearly did occur in the early fifth century, should have had the effect we observe in the run-up to 405–8: causing potential new subjects to move out of its way. Not only is this the simplest explanation for the build-up of immigrants west of the Carpathians, it is also the most cogent and compelling. The proposed alternatives utterly fail to explain what the bulk of the invaders of 405–8 were doing west of the Carpathians in the first place.
Given such a strong likelihood that this crisis was a rerun of that of 376, only this time west rather than east of the Carpathians, we should not be surprised that the sources suggest some similar observations about the detailed operation of the migration processes involved in the later case. Many of this second wave of migrants, like the fourth-century Goths before them, had an established history of relocation. The one exception, it would seem, were the Sueves (assuming, again, that this term does designate various subgroups of the Marcomanni and Quadi), who had not moved anywhere before participating in the Rhine crossing. The Alans, on the other hand, were originally nomads – but this needs a bit more comment. Nomads, contrary to the received images of random movement over vast distances, typically make relatively restricted and cyclical moves between well-established blocks of summer and winter pasture. This is an entirely different phenomenon from the geographical dislocation witnessed in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, when families and flocks were moved hundreds of kilometres from long-established haunts. As with the late second- and third-century Goths, an inherent capacity for movement, engendered by the less rigid attachment of their agricultural economy to any particular territory than we are generally used to in the modern world, will also have been a factor in making this relocation possible. And in any case, by the time the various Alanic subgroups involved in the Rhine crossing had reached the Middle Danube, the jumping-off point for the events of 406, they had recently made one long trek from east of the River Don, so that a properly migratory – rather than merely nomadic – habit had already gathered momentum amongst them.56
The same is also true of Radagaisus’ Goths. They will have shared some of the past experiences of the Tervingi, being another of those concentrations of Germanic-dominated military power generated by the third-century migrations to the Black Sea. Since Goths are not found west of the Carpathians in the fourth century, the Gothic followers of Radagaisus must have made at least one move in the recent past from the Pontus to the Middle Danube, on the eve of what was to prove their ill-fated journey to Italy. The Vandals had not moved as far as the Goths in the third century, but did extend their control, from the time of the Marcomannic War onwards, south from northern and central Poland to parts of former Roman Dacia in upland Transylvania. They, again, must also have made an initial move west from this region to the fringes of the Alps, where their presence was noted in 402. In large measure, therefore, round two of the Völkerwanderung encompassed population groups with firmly entrenched migration habits, who were more likely to respond to major threats and opportunities by moving again.
The range of motivations in play among these later migrants, likewise, was probably similar to those of the Goths of 376. What we cannot reconstruct, since the date of the Huns’ entry en masse into the Middle Danubian region is uncertain, is how immediate a threat they faced. Whether they needed to leave their old abodes in more of a hurry than had the Tervingi in 376 is unclear, but this doesn’t change the fact that their motives for moving were substantially political and negative. They too were looking for new and safer homes. The influx of substantial numbers of Goths, Alans and Vandals on to the Middle Danubian plain would have been enough in itself, of course, quite apart from any Hunnic pressure, to generate political problems within the region itself. If the return of one relatively small Sarmatian subgroup to the frontier area was enough to destabilize the situation in 359, a mass influx of outsiders can only have caused political chaos.
But, as was also the case in 376, this does not deny that the immigrants also had their eye on the potential economic and other gains that might come their way from a well-organized relocation on to Roman soil. If increased pressure from the Huns made it imperative to move somewhere, then, as in 376, perceptions of its likely advantages turned the migrants’ thoughts towards the Empire. Two further observations are also worth making. First, finding a new home outside the Empire would not have been easy. The smaller concentration of Tervingi who retreated from the Danube in 376 rather than pursue their Roman visa applications further, for instance, relocated themselves in upland Transylvania or its western fringes. But to secure this new territory, they had to expel some Sarmatians already in residence. These latter, in turn, spilled on to Roman soil.57 Similarly, while en route for the Rhine in 406, the Vandals, as we have seen, had a bruising encounter with some Franks, in which they are said to have lost the unbelievable figure of twenty thousand dead – which we can reasonably take as representing a genuine memory of a hard fight. Germania was not full of fertile land ready for the taking, and given that you would have to fight for a new home wherever you went, at least Roman territory had the attraction of greater economic development. And, like the Tervingi in 376, most of the second wave of migrants had enough knowledge of the Empire to be well aware of these potential advantages. An active field of information, in other words, may have turned the discussions of our later migrants towards an imperial option, just as, even in 376, hopes of economic predation were operating alongside the Goths’ genuine fear of the Huns. Second, there is every reason, as we have seen, to suppose that the survival of the Goths of 376 as a semi-autonomous unit on Roman soil provided a further incentive for the displaced groups of the early fifth century to try the Roman option.
None of these immigrants should have been in any doubt, though, that their ambitions for a place in the Roman sun would meet with heavy resistance. If doubt there was, the fate of Radagaisus’ force must have quickly defused it. Given that their migration was an attempt to force the Roman Empire into making concessions in their direction, then each group needed to field a powerful military force. This meant, again as in 376, that freemen (or their Alanic equivalents)58 had to be recruited. For the same reasons as in 376 (and in the later stages of the third-century Germanic and the ninth-century Viking expansions), the only possible migration unit was the large grouping of ten thousand-plus warriors, many accompanied by their families. The immigrants’ clear perception of the dangers of their enterprise is also visible in some of the alliances they put together for the purpose. The Sciri footsoldiers sold as slaves and distributed as coloni (farmers) in the aftermath of Uldin’s defeat probably had no choice, and the sources on Radagaisus’ following are not good enough to make comment worthwhile.59 But the massive alliance of Vandals, Alans and Sueves was an entirely new combination of groups that had not even been near-neighbours in the fourth century. At this point it was clearly still a loose alliance, but even this much cooperation must have taken a great deal of brokering. And not everyone seems to have been persuaded that it was the right move. It has been suggested that enough Siling Vandals stayed put to give their name to modern Silesia, and, more convincingly, that Sueves in large numbers still inhabited the Middle Danube region long after the migrant Suevi of 406 had reach northwest Spain.
So determined and so thoroughgoing was the Empire’s resistance to these new migrants that some of them altered their initial strategies. Uldin’s force was picked apart by diplomacy, when the east Roman negotiators managed to win over some of his key supporters without a fight. These were offered attractive positions in the Roman military, one presumes, while many of the less fortunate Sciri were consigned to servitude on Roman landed estates. The fate of Radagaisus’ force was similar. Again, some of his higher-status supporters abandoned ship, doing a deal whereby they were drafted into the Roman army. This time, however, the scale was different. The twelve thousand ‘of the best’ of Radagaisus’ warriors who were drafted into Stilicho’s army may have had it in mind from the beginning that being part of a larger migrating group might be a useful means of eventually cutting their own deals with the Roman authorities. But, just as likely, side-swapping was a stratagem employed only when the brute reality of overarching Roman military power became clear, as Stilicho and his field army approached.60
Like the Danube crossing of 376, the demographic displacement associated with the collapse of Rome’s central European frontier only partially fits the image of the traditional Germanic Völkerwanderung. The crisis of 405–8 did see massive mixed groupings cross the frontier for reasons that had more to do with factors external to the Empire than anything happening within it. And even if some of these groups were too well organized to resemble the floods of refugees sometimes seen in the modern world, their activities are often explicable in terms of the principles behind modern migration patterns, not least the web of negative and positive motivations driving the migrants, and the massive influence of existing political structures and flows of information. That said, the groupings were complex political associations, not ‘peoples’ in the traditional sense of the term. Some of the groups caught up in the action do seem to have had long histories. Hasding Vandals, for instance, figured in the second-century Marcomannic War. But like all Germanic groups of the late Roman period, they had been through several centuries of dynamic transformation generated by intense interaction with each other and with the Roman state, which meant that they encompassed a wide range of social classes and rights. This internal group complexity was then increased by the inter-group alliances that were forged, such as that between two separate Vandal groups, and Alans and Sueves in order to increase their chances of survival on Roman soil. This added to the picture much greater size, new political ties, and sometimes massive cultural disparity (in the case of the nomadic Iranian-speaking Alans). Even if some of their component units had well-established links, therefore, the entities that crossed the frontier were improvised political alliances, not long-standing aggregates of population.
We should not wonder, then, that the Roman authorities were able to destroy some of them precisely by targeting the joins in their fabric, notably by attracting away elite military followers of both Radagaisus and Uldin at the expense of the group leader and the less favoured rank and file. But the internal disunity that might naturally be generated by social complexity and improvised alliances is only part of the story. Another striking characteristic of those groups that managed to survive their initial encounters with the Roman state was an apparent capacity to repeat the migratory process.