15 - The Germanic peoples

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In the reign of Constantine I, the peoples of northern Europe were contained by frontiers that were recognizably derived from those of the early empire. A century later, those frontiers had effectively disappeared. Germans and other barbarians were settled in Gaul, Britain, the provinces on the Rhine and Danube, in the Balkans, Italy, Spain and North Africa. The period covered by this volume thus saw a radical transformation in the relations between the Germanic peoples and the Roman empire, bringing to a culmination changes that had begun in the previous hundred years. Since the conflicts of the later second century, there had followed a century of tumultuous change in the tribal geography of the lands between the Rhine and the western steppes. Large confederacies of peoples had emerged by the middle of the third century, now strong enough to pose a serious military challenge to the Roman frontiers. Many of the small tribes known to Tacitus and Ptolemy had vanished, presumably absorbed in greater, though still loose, political organisms. It is not possible in the literary record to detect the first moves towards the formation of primitive states. If they were made at so early a date as the fourth and early fifth centuries (a point on which there must be serious doubt), they were not recorded by the writers of the late empire. Interest in the detailed workings of barbarian society was no higher than it had been in the first and second centuries and was in any case only expressed within a Roman frame of reference which was not equipped to reflect the realities of preliterate societies.