The Decline and Fall of the Classical World

It is difficult to envision the end of classical civilization without the barbarians. The names Franks, Goths, Saxons, Angles, Vandals, and Burgundians have become synonymous with successor kingdoms. Indeed, each of these peoples established kingdoms in territories around the western Mediterranean. The Franks settled in northern Gaul, and under Clovis, expanded to the south defeating the Visigoths decisively at Vouillé in 507. The Visigoths, after a settlement with the Roman emperor Honorius in 418, settled in Aquitaine around Toulouse; then, after Vouillé, they centered their kingdom around Toledo. Their eponymous 'cousin'people, the Ostrogoths settled in Italy from 489 to 580. The Angles and the Saxons moved to Britain after the departure of the Roman troops in 410. The Vandals swept through Gaul and into Spain, but eventually crossed the Gibraltar straight and created a kingdom in Northern Africa, with Carthage as its capital, until Justinian invaded in 534. Finally, the Burgundians (who had been a 'Rhine People' at least as early as the fourth century), settled in central Gaul.
This little story tells us that these 'barbarians' redrew the map of the western empire.The question that historians is whether or not these movements ought to be dubbed invasion or migration. The first term implies violent, armed contacts between Romans and barbarians, whereas the second term implies a far more peaceful process. I shall present both arguments individually, and present what I have come to understand regarding the fifth and sixth centuries.
Scholars such as Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins (the latter more so than the former) see the barbarians (and especially the Goths) as key players in the dynamics of decline and fall. Bryan Ward-Perkins, in The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (a work responding to modern trends which recast the barbarian problem in terms of peaceful migration and progressive acculturation), states that 'until recently, very few have seriously questioned the violence and disruption of the Germanic takeover of power. And indeed, Ward-Perkins has reasons to see the change from the classical world to the medieval world as more violent than processual. There is, in the written sources, evidence of violence. In 446, Leo, the bishop of Rome, for instance, addresses the problem of nuns who had been raped by invading Vandals in his twelfth epistle. These raped nuns became an intermediary class between holy widows (generally aristocratic women who had taken their vows after the demise of their husband) and nuns who had not been raped, and thus maintained their holiness intact. As Ward-Perkins points out: 'the unfortunate nuns and Bishop Leo would be very surprised, and not a little shocked, to learn that it is now fashionable to play down the violence and unpleasantness of the invasions that brought down the empire in the West.'
Ward-Perkins finds further evidence of invasion in what he considers an abrupt end to comfort. At a conference (I did not have the pleasure to attend, but Professor Drake and many of my friends did), he showed the difference of quality between late-antique and early-medieval potteries, and ancient potteries. Professor Drake stated that the differences are indeed palpable. Furthermore, in the archaeological record, there is a lack of remains of luxurious villas. Michael Kulikowski (in an absolutely awesome book called Late Roman Spain and Its Cities) notices that some Spanish villas became the locus of small communities (more about that later). Another example shows the site of Augusta Raurica, a thriving colony along the Rhine frontier in the second century, becomes abandoned in the fourth to make way for a castrum, or military camp. The baths, a symbol of Roman luxury were integrated in the castrum. In the fifth, the use of the baths is discontinued, and the camp becomes the site of yet another small community.
Thus, in what has become known to me as the catastrophist theory, the Roman Empire indeed falls, and it falls quickly... and violently. Barbarian invaders destroy the classical world in less than a hundred years, population dwindles, nuns are raped, and a climate of violence reigns.
In the next chapter, I will look at the opposite view, promulgated by Walter Goffart in his book Barbarians and Romans, and introduce the arguments of change and continuity of Peter Brown.

For Further Reading:
1/ Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (good place to start)
2/ Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire (more nuanced, political account)
Oldies
3/Courcelles, Histoire Literaire des Invasions Barbares
4/Gibbon, Decline and Fall (vol.3). The classic. His arguments are summarized in other books like Ward-Perkins'.

Post-Modernizing the Goths

I was reading an interesting book The Future of History by Breisach. The book itself focuses on the way post-modernism has shaped history. One particular aspect of post-modernism has affected a particular line of historical argument: ethnogenesis (see earlier posts for a thorough discussion of ethnogenesis).
According to Breisach, post-modernist philosophers sought to re-evaluate the role of time in the shaping of history. More specifically, nexuses, that is, the ways of explaining history, were declared 'characteristic only for one period of human development', or, as Breisach states '[nexuses] were no more than pragmatic, contextual constructions of Western culture for coping with life.'
One particular passage in The History of the Goths by Herwig Wolfram came to my mind as I was reading these considerations. As historians of the barbarians, we have, literally, no direct sources for the study of the Goths prior to their entry into the Roman world. Consequently, we have to rely on archeology, but if archeology can shed light on day-to-day life, they cannot help us derive a concrete picture of the history of the Goths. Furthermore, the lack of structural remains means that we have little or no idea as to the political structures of the Goths.
Wolfram remedied to this problem in an interesting way. He uses the Gothic bible of Ulfila (Bishop of the Goths, translated the bible into gothic, died ca.380), and compares it to the gothic terms found in the bible. For instance, Ulfilas chose to translate the word sanhedrin, the ruling council of the Jews, as gafaurd, which he transforms into a tribal council. Similarly, he finds that the gothic leader Athanaric (who led the Gothic army against the Huns) is not a military leader, but a 'judge', that is, which can be likened to the role of censor in the Roman republican apparatus.
This methodology begs an interesting question. Did Ulfila use these terms because they represented an actual situation, or did he use these terms to explain the Jewish reality in the first century B.C.? In more concrete terms, is the gafaurd a sanhedrin or merely the closest political structure to the sanhedrin? Whenever we write history, we have to make sure that our intended audience understands our argument. As such, the nexus to which Breisach refers to must be a compromise: that is, it must satisfy our quest for the truth, but it must also be understood by the people who are reading us. This begs a further question: can we really truthfully explain the past, or are we limited by our own social constraints?

For Futrer Reading:

1)Breisach, The Future of History
2)Wolfram, The History of the Goths
3)Grafton, Worlds Made by Words