A Peaceful Transition: a Few Remarks

This blog post is a bit different from the others as it concerns the preliminary knowledge requisite to the understanding Walter Goffart's argument of peaceful transition. I have had many conversations, with many different people on the nature of the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages, and most (both lay and professional historians) speak of transition rather than sudden change. This blog post is solely for lay historians who wish to understand the reasons behind the argument of peaceful transition.
The notion that the historical period is an artificial construction is philosophical in nature (see Breisach). For me, the historical period is fairly real on two levels: 1) when I apply to graduate school, I have to choose a field of inquiry, defined by a historical period; and 2) a historical period is defined as a general set of ideas that apply to a certain time period. For example, the Renaissance is clearly an age where Humanist ideals of grammar and rhetoric take precedence over theology, law and medicine, all prized disciplines in the Middle Ages. That this happens in different areas at different times is not necessarily relevant. At some point in time, a historian can say: 'we have left the Middle-Ages.' With this in mind, I will retrace some ideas pertaining to the blurring of historical periods: the peaceful transition between the classical and the medieval periods.
Walter Goffart's main argument in Barbarians and Romans deals with the allocation of land for the Goths, the Burgundians and the Lombards from a legal perspective. That is, why in 410, we have a western Europe governed by the Romans, when in 418, we see a Visigothic enclave, in 443, a Burgundian enclave, and in 500, no more Romans in Western Europe. In roughly 90 years, the territories of the western empire disappear. Why?, and perhaps most importantly how?
First, Goffart, as opposed to Ward-Perkins (see previous post), states that this process was peaceful and smooth (it is actually the first sentence of the book). Ward-Perkins' remark that the Vandals raped nuns is not necessarily the best one to use. Goffart himself states that the Vandals expropriated sometimes violently the Romans. Again, the argument here would be that processes of change occur differently, in different areas, at different times.
Goffart is right to question the idea of violent transition. First of all, almost of the initial barbarians (Franks, Goths, Alamanni, Burgundians, the Huns being the sole exception-- and even then...) had been in contact with the Empire for extended periods of time. The Franks were probably a conglomerate of peoples already mentioned by the first century author Tacitus in Germania. The Goths are known as Goths in the literary sources by the mid-third century (ostensibly later than the Franks), but Wolfram states that the Goths' arrival in the Roman orbit might have occurred as early as 238, and the Cernjachov culture (possibly Gothic culture according to Peter Heather) as early as the second century. Thus, those barbarians, that supposedly caused the Roman Empire to collapse had been in contact with Rome for a few hundred years. In other words, if one is to say that the barbarians caused the fall of Rome, the history of decline must start as early as the first century (which few will actually do).
Furthermore, barbarians, via the military had clearly infiltrated the Roman civil life. Silvanus, a Frank, was a Roman general, and a brief usurper in 355. More successful were the barbarians Stilicho (regent in 400-408), Ricimer (de facto ruler 456-472), and Odoacer (general and king of Italy after he deposed the Emperor Romulus Augustulus, whose own father Orestes was at least partially non-Roman). The army provided the barbarians with a way in, an apparatus to use to gain access to Roman civil power (for more on this, see the first chapter of Before France and Germany by Patrick Geary).
To conclude: the barbarians we are dealing with are NOT foreign invaders. They were settled peoples, whose life, as Goffart states, resembled the life of the Gallic (and thus 'Roman') peasants. Thus, back to our original question: how did these barbarians acquire land?
Next post will deal with Goffart's argument on the matter.