As the sun set over the battlefield of Adrianople, on August 9, 378, the spectacle could not be more shocking. Scattered here and there, the corpses of more than twenty thousand Romans, killed at the hands of the Visigoths, were beginning to suffer the effects of the summer heat in Turkey. Among them was that of his own emperor, Valens, who could never be recovered.
Never, since the troops of General Publius Quintillo Varus were crushed by other Germans in the German forest of Teutoburg almost four centuries before, had the Roman eagles suffered such a disaster. Very soon the news spread throughout the Empire, and accelerated, if possible, the entry into it of new barbarian contingents willing to take over land and loot.
Fear spread among provincials and Romans, and many became aware that the hour of the end of their world was approaching.
The origin of the Germans must be sought in the south of the Scandinavian Peninsula and Denmark between 1600 and 500 BC. C. At an uncertain time, in the middle of the 1st millennium BC. C., some groups began a movement towards the south. The phenomenon would last centuries and would lead them to settle in a large space, delimited to the north by the Baltic Sea, to the south by the Danube, to the east by the Vistula and the Dnieper and to the west by the Rhine. At this point they would be stopped by various Celtic towns that were in a phase of expansion.
The causes of these migrations are unknown, although among the factors would be the cooling of their territories and the flooding of their lowlands. The displacements were initially peaceful, and dragged from isolated families to entire towns, such as the Goths, the Vandals or the Burgundians. Some tended to form unstable confederations, such as the Franks, the Alemanni or the Saxons.
Along with them, impelled by such a great movement, there were also peoples of strains other than the Germanic, such as the Alans and the Sarmatians, of Iranian origin, the Slavs and Celtic groups.
The Germans knew various forms of dependency, but they had an egalitarian tendency. Its social organization was based on the extended patriarchal family (Sippe), co-responsible for the actions of all its members. At the top was a council of notables, and at the base the assembly of free men or warriors (Thing). In this the most important issues were debated and leaders were chosen.
However, over time, a nobility possessing significant wealth, obtained in its raids, developed and imposed itself. These chiefs, authentic warlords who came to condition the power of the councils, were supported by an elite of warriors. With them they established a fidelity pact that the Romans knew as comitatus.
They also used to enlist people from other tribes, even those of their defeated enemies, who, finding themselves without chiefs to serve, joined them without further impediment. This would explain the inextricable mix of tribes that would assault the Roman Empire. These were the barbarians that Rome would be forced to confront.
The entry of the Germans into history could be placed around 230 BC. C., when two of its tribes sacked the Greek city of Olbia, next to the Black Sea. More than a century would pass before the first great clash took place between Rome and the Germans, this time Cimbri, Teutones and Ambroni. After devastating Norica (located between the Alps and the Danube), Gaul and Hispania, where they were rejected by the Celtiberians, these tribes headed towards Italy. There they would be defeated by the Romans at Aix-en-Provence and Verceil.
However, the pressure that the Germanic tribes exerted on their neighbors was far from easy to contain. Rome, by extending its borders to the regions where they lived, soon had proof of this.
In his conquest of Gaul, Julius Caesar was able to defeat a contingent of more than 15,000 warriors at Vespontio in the mid-1st century BC. C. But, shortly after, the crushing defeat of Varus in Teutoburg convinced Octavian Augustus of the impossibility of subduing those barbarians. The Caesar chose to keep them beyond a fortified line that extended along the channels of the Rhine and Danube. The quintessential limes was born.
At first the system seemed viable, but the vitality of the Germans and the impossibility of guarding the entire border made it less effective. It was almost impossible to stop them once they had crossed the limes, and attempts to create a mobile reserve to plug possible breaches were almost always done at the cost of weakening one's own defenses.
The situation worsened after Marcus Aurelius, in the 2nd century, when the Suevi Semnones pushed the Cudos and Marcomanni towards the border. The emperor managed to defeat them, but since then there has been no Roman ruler who did not have to dedicate enormous efforts to mitigate the permanent boiling of his borders.
The situation reached its climax in the first third of the 3rd century, when Franks, Alemanni, Burgundians and other tribes plundered the Roman West at will until they reached North Africa. The attack led to the walling of cities, which had neglected their defenses after centuries of peace, and culminated in the defeat and death of Emperor Decius at the hands of the Goths.
They would return to the fray. They were defeated again by Emperor Aurelian. However, the Caesar ordered the retreat of the Roman border beyond Dacia (today Romania), which would soon be occupied by the Germans.
The reforms undertaken by Diocletian at the end of the century made it possible to restore the situation. But it was at the price of accepting the barbarians themselves as repopulators to mitigate the demographic decline of the Empire, or as soldiers to serve in legions whose recruitment was becoming increasingly difficult.
A process of Germanization of the army began, which did not seem the most suitable to defend the Empire from other barbarians. Many of them reached important positions in it and in the imperial administrations.
However, it would be the Huns who, like dominoes, would unleash the unstoppable movement that would end the Western Roman Empire.
Motivated by a shortage of pasture, an apparent overpopulation, the ambition for loot or all three at the same time, the Huns reached the confines of the Empire in the last third of the 4th century. They defeated the Alans settled north of the Black Sea, the Ostrogothic kingdom and their western brothers, the Visigoths.
The defeat caused thousands of refugees, not just Goths, to appear on the banks of the Danube asking for asylum from the Romans. Emperor Valens agreed to settle them in Lower Moesia (southern modern-day Bulgaria), where they soon suffered abuse from the local authorities. They saw in them a means with which to increase their fortunes, which ended up causing an uprising.
To restore the situation, Valente confronted the Visigoths in Adrianople. His horsemen destroyed the Roman infantry, which marked the beginning of the long supremacy of cavalry, one of the fundamental vectors of the coming Middle Ages.
Given the delicate situation, Theodosius, the last ruler of the unified Empire, renewed the treaty that converted the Visigoths into federates of the Empire. However, political instability was the sign of those years.
Arcadius, son and heir of Theodosius in the East, convinced the Visigoth king to turn against Italy. The objective was to cause the military fall of Honorius, ruler of the West and brother of Arcadius. The Westerners' decision to concentrate the bulk of their forces on the defense of Italy further weakened the precarious Rhineland-Danubian limes (in what is now Germany).
At the beginning of the 5th century, masses of Germans took advantage of this circumstance to cross the Rhine, leaving the border open for future invasions. The speed and ease of their progression suggests the connivance of other barbarians already settled in the Empire.
Shortly after, the legions of Britain landed in Gaul and named one of their officers emperor, who would receive the name Constantine III. It meant the definitive loss of the island, which was attacked by different tribes on several fronts. But it also allowed the Suebi, Vandals and Alans, after a series of changing alliances, to penetrate into Hispania, whose territory they disputed and divided up.
Meanwhile, the Christianized Visigoths, after two failed attempts, sacked Rome in 410. This people wandered through Italy and Gaul until they again received federated status. In exchange he had to expel Suebi, Vandals and Alans from Hispania.
A long process of struggles began that would put an end to the latter, reduce the Swabian territory to one end of what is now Galicia and expel the Vandals to North Africa. But, in practice, the Visigothic action meant that Hispania was also lost to the Empire.
North Africa, on the other hand, fell into the hands of the Vandals, who would create their own kingdom and sack Rome in 455.
Meanwhile, other Germanic peoples, such as the Franks, were crossing a now non-existent limes everywhere and settled quietly in the eastern part of Gaul. In the middle of the 5th century, Ravenna, the new Roman capital, barely maintained control over Italy.
And that was not all: the Huns and their Germanic vassals continued to represent the greatest danger. Led at that time by Attila, they were diverted towards the West by the court of Constantinople, always skilled at getting rid of uncomfortable neighbors.
The situation was such that it caused a last and momentary union of Romans and Germans to defend themselves from the common danger. People from all towns and tribes were mobilized against him, from Alans to Franks, from Romans to Visigoths. These formed the core of the forces that, with Theodosius I, would defeat the Hun in the Catalaunic Fields in 451.
However, Attila began a second penetration that, after devastating the Po Valley, had as its final objective the now only mythical Rome. The attempt would be aborted by Pope Leo I after holding an interview with the barbarian on the banks of the Mincio. Attila withdrew.
Nominally, the Western Roman Empire still existed, but it was a mere political fiction lacking coercive capacity, whose sole task was to sanction the independent policies of the Germanic kingdoms that were being formed in its ancient homeland. Hence the deposition of its last emperor by Odoacer, chief of the Heruli, in 476 and the sending of the imperial insignia to Constantinople did nothing more than ratify a reality.
The Germanic kingdoms that succeeded the Western Empire would in turn have to face, almost immediately, new invasions. But this is already a medieval story.
This text is part of an article published in number 445 of the magazine Historia y Vida. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
