From the fifth century to the early part of the eighth century, western Europe and the Mediterranean world experienced invasions by various seminomadic peoples: Mongolian, Germanic, and Arabic. The effect of these invasions was three centuries of enormous upheaval and confusion, which resulted in the transformation of European government and society. The most serious invasions were the intrusions into the Roman world by the Germanic peoples—the so-called barbarian invasions—for, unlike the Mongolian and, for the most part, the Arabic invaders, the Germans settled in and determined the destiny of western Europe.
The word barbarian was used by the Greeks, to designate an alien, and therefore, by definition, someone inferior in culture to a Hellene. The Romans applied this in the pejorative sense to the people who came to live along the Rhine-Danube frontier. They also generically termed these people Germani, which was originally the name of only one of the tribes who lived beyond the Roman frontier. Another tribe was called the Allemanni, which later became the root of the French and Spanish terms for German. The Germans referred to themselves with a word that became the root of the modern Deutsch and Teuton, that is, Theut, which simply means “the folk” or “people.”
Who were the Germans? Where did they come from, and why? What were their political and social institutions? These important questions exercised the energy and imagination of many historians, particularly in Germany where naturally the study of the Völkerwanderungen, or the migration of the peoples, has been encouraged by nationalist feeling. The literary sources, however, are meager, and all we know about the Germans before the first century B.C. has been derived from archaeological research. These studies revealed that the German invaders of the Roman Empire originally came from Scandinavia. Therefore, the later Vikings, whose migrations and invasions of western Europe came during the ninth century A.D., were ethnically the same people as the ones whom the Romans called the Germans. About 1000 B.C. the Germans began to move southward from their original homes in Denmark and southern Norway and Sweden. By 100 or so B.C., spreading south and west, they had reached the Rhine river, and somewhat later, perhaps in the first century A.D., they migrated into the Danube basin as well.
As the Germans began to press across the Rhine, they had an easy time pushing back the Celts, who were peaceful people given to agriculture, poetry, and song. The Germans would have conquered Gaul, as they later were to conquer Britain and to push the Celts into the Welsh mountains, had it not been for the arrival of Julius Caesar and the Roman legions in the middle of the first century B.C. After hard fighting, Caesar pushed the Germans back beyond the Rhine, and the Romans extensively colonized the southern half of Gaul. The Germans temporarily crossed the Rhine in the middle of the third century, during a period of transitory imperial breakdown, but the Rhine frontier was soon reconstructed. Until the final collapse of the Rhine frontier in 406 A.D., the only Germans who crossed the great river into Roman territory were the tribes who were allowed to become federates or mercenaries in the imperial army.
By the second century A.D. the Danube basin was heavily settled with Germans, who pressed on the imperial frontier in this region as well. The Germans along the Danube were dominated by the two great divisions of the Gothic nation: the Visigoths, who lived nearest the frontier, and the Ostrogoths. In the third century A.D. the Danube frontier also was temporarily broken, but the Goths were driven back beyond the Danube before the end of the century. It was not until 376 that any of the Goths were again allowed to cross the Danube river.
There is no positive evidence of the causes of the Völkerwanderungen. We can only surmise the causation a priori. The Germans left Scandinavia partly because of a shortage in food supply that was due to the growth of the population and partly because of continual wars between the tribes, in which the losers were driven from their homeland to seek a new place to live in the south. As the Germans approached the frontier of the empire, they came in contact with the wealth, advanced technology, and pleasant climate of the Mediterranean. They sought to get into the empire not to destroy it, but to participate in its higher standard of living.
The nature of the early Germanic political, legal, and social institutions has aroused great interest among historians, and many tomes have been published on the subject. This great interest is due not only to nationalist motivation, but to the fact that so many of the later institutions of medieval Europe seem to have developed out of, or at least are related to, the early Germanic ways of doing things. Particularly in the nineteenth century, when scholars subscribed to the organic view of political and legal development—that the fully developed institution is predetermined by the shape of the microcosmic primitive institutional form—they devoted enormous energy to studying early Germanic institutions.
The sources for the early history of the Germans are meager. The most valuable description of Germanic life by any ancient historian is the Germania of Tacitus, written in A.D. 98, which comes to about fifty pages in modern print. Tacitus never visited the German frontier, but as a powerful aristocrat he was able to talk to soldiers who had returned from the front, and he had access to governmental officials and documents. Unfortunately, his purpose in writing the Germania was not entirely the impartial dissemination of information. Rather, he wanted to present to his readers the contrast between the primitive, unspoiled, energetic, virtuous Germans and the decadent, oversophisticated, effete Romans. His idealized picture of the virtuous German hausfrau may be taken with a grain of salt. There is, however, enough circumstantial detail about German political and social institutions in the Germania to make Tacitus’ work extremely valuable to the historian.
The second group of sources consists of the Germanic folk poetry. Unfortunately, of this group only the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf has come down to us in a form close enough to the original version to be usable as a historical source. The great German cycle of the Nibelungenlied, which inspired the libretti for Wagner’s operas, has come down to us only in a thirteenth-century version heavily overlaid by ideological concerns of that era. Beowulf, on the other hand, was written down by a cleric in the late eighth century; the Christian overlay is superficial, and the poem graphically reveals the ideals and mores of the upper strata of Germanic society. The social picture it presents can be confirmed by comparing the Germanic way of life it depicts with the mores of Scandinavian society presented in the Icelandic sagas and eddas. Although these sagas and eddas depict Scandinavian society in the High Middle Ages, they reveal a society at a similar stage of development. This stage can also be found in the Homeric poetry, which similarly is a product of what the English scholar H. Chadwick called the “heroic age.”
A third group of sources for the early history of the Germans is the so-called Germanic law codes. These are not really law codes, but merely written statements designed to amplify the greater part of Germanic law that remained oral and customary. In spite of their drastic limitations, the Germanic laws, such as those of the Burgundians, the Franks (the Salic law), and the Anglo-Saxons (the “dooms”), contribute valuable information on Germanic political and legal life.
Finally, archaeological evidence has contributed to the historian’s reconstruction of early Germanic life. Archaeology not only can trace lines of migration, but it often graphically reveals the level of technology and culture that a particular German people attained. Thus the jewelry and other ornamental work found in the Sutton Hoo ship burial in eastern England in 1939 confirms Beowulf’s description of the ship burial of a great king and demonstrates the Germanic skill in metalwork. On the other hand, it must be admitted that the results of archaeological work on medieval history are often difficult to interpret, partly because the investigations of archaeologists of medieval civilizations, unlike those of Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations, are limited by the fact that the sites of medieval estates, towns, and roads are still usually very much in use, and therefore systematic excavation is usually precluded.
The picture of the early Germans has undergone great changes in the past four decades. In the 1920s and ’30s it was fashionable to emphasize the similarities of German and Roman life and the continuity of institutions through the fifth and sixth centuries, with the result that the effects of the Germanic invasions on European government and society were viewed as relatively minor. The leading proponents of this view were the Austrian scholar Alfons Dopsch and the famous Belgian economic historian, Henri Pirenne. Dopsch, in his massive Economic and Social Foundations of Western Civilization, by means of dubious archaeological evidence, tortured misreading of texts, and special pleading, concluded that there was little difference in the level of culture and economy of the Germans and the inhabitants of the Roman world. The Germans in Dopsch’s work appear as good Austrian burghers who were ready to sit down for a bit of Wiener schnitzel and Löwenbrau with their fortunate Roman hosts. Likewise, Pirenne contended that the German invasions did not mark a cataclysmic break in the economic and social development of western Europe. He attributed cataclysmic proportions not to the Germanic invasions, but to the expansion of Islam in the eighth century.
Since the Second World War, not surprisingly due in great part to the work of French scholars, the Dopsch-Pirenne interpretation of the early Germans has been seriously undermined, and we have returned to the earlier view of the disastrous consequences of the Germanic invasions. E. Salin presented archaeological evidence that directly contradicts the material marshaled by Dopsch in favor of his thesis. P. Courcelle, in his brilliant Literary History of the Germanic Invasions, convincingly argued that we ought to take seriously the lugubrious views of contemporaries on the significance of the invasions and the actions of the Germans. R. Latouche, relying on the research of other scholars as well, presented a synthetic view of early medieval economic development that restores the central importance of the German invasions; he also wrote the best general history of the barbarian migrations and settlements.
From the limited written and archaeological evidence that we have about the development of Germanic society from the time the Germans came to settle along the Rhine-Danube frontier to the establishment of the Germanic kingdoms in western Europe—let us say from 100 B.C. to A.D. 500—two fundamental facts emerge that must be realized if one is to understand correctly the Germanic society in the time of the invasions. The first fact is that the degree to which the Germanic peoples across the Rhine-Danube frontier had been influenced by Roman civilization differed markedly from one tribe to another. Some had reached about the same stage of civilization as that which they saw across the frontier along the border of the empire. They devoted themselves to agriculture, engaged in extensive commerce with Roman merchants, and accepted Christianity, although by chance it was actually Arian Christianity—they were converted by Arian missionaries in the fourth century. Such Germans only wanted to enter the empire as federates and participate in the life of the Mediterranean world. They greatly respected Roman power and had no intention of bringing harm to it. This level of civilization was reached especially among the Goths living in the Danube basin, who were in contact with the richest and most heavily populated part of the empire.
On the other hand, it appears evident that other Germanic peoples had been little affected by Romanization and were fierce, ignorant, and barbarian in every sense of the word. Most, though not all, Germans who invaded the empire from across the Rhine appear to have belonged to this category. The reasons for this situation are not clear. It would seem, however, that these Germans remained in closer contact with their Scandinavian homeland, which was, of course, nearer. In addition, there were a greater number of German peoples stacked up against the Rhine frontier, so that those who were farther back from the frontier tended to be progressively less affected by contact with the empire. Thus the Franks were more violent and less civilized than some of the early invaders, such as the Burgundians. And the Anglo-Saxons, who came directly from the North Sea area, were untouched by Romanization.
Thus it is not easy to generalize about the Germanic peoples. Some were at a social and cultural level equivalent to the peasants of the empire; others indeed impress us as primitives, in spite of attempts by modern German historians to portray them as quite civilized.
The second fundamental fact that should be borne in mind in regard to the Germans of the period of the great invasions is that their political and social institutions did not remain static between 100 B.C. and A.D. 500, but underwent profound changes. Like many primitive peoples Germanic society was first organized according to blood ties—the family and kindred. Although these ties were preserved to a considerable extent up to and through the period of the invasions (as shown by the blood feud in criminal cases), another form of social organization was slowly emerging, and it became central in the period of the invasions (400–600). During this period, the bonds of kinship were weakened, a process that shows itself in the prevalence of strife between relatives. The binding force formerly wielded by kinship was increasingly transferred to the relationship between “lord” and “man,” between whom no bond of blood relationship was necessary, only the bond of loyalty. Thus during this period the importance of kinship decreased and the use of the bond of allegiance, or loyalty, greatly increased.
This great change in social organization went along with, and facilitated, a change in political organization, the growth of an irresponsible type of kingship resting not upon the folk but upon military prestige. To the war leader who could provide booty went the allegiance of his followers, but these followers might not even belong to the same kindred or folk as their “king.”
Thus, during the period of the Germanic invasions, and at least partly the result of the circumstances of a people on the move and engaging in conquest, there was a social and political transformation within Germanic society itself. Many of the able-bodied fighters were emancipating themselves from the tribal obligations and bonds by which a society of primitive peoples is usually governed. Furthermore, the princes who emerged among the Germans during this period were freeing themselves, to a large extent, from any public control by the tribe or community. As long as they could feed and enrich their soldiers, they retained the allegiance of these warriors, and neither the king nor war band had any social or political obligation to the folk as a whole. We shall see this situation appear many times among the Germans during the Germanic invasions; the Frankish kingdom of the sixth century arose out of this social and political context.
The basic German political institution at the end of the fourth century can therefore be said to be the comitatus, or gefolge, consisting of the chief or king and his war band, who accorded him their loyal service in return for his protection and largess. A chief who reigned for a long time or who achieved great military success was able to create a royal dynasty. The dynasty would claim descent from Woden, put on sacred airs, and possess the kingship as its private property. But succession to the kingship could not be by primogeniture; this was not an early Germanic idea and was restricted by the original power of the war band to give or refuse loyalty. At the death of the king, the leaders of the folk would come together and choose that member of the royal family who was most “throne worthy,” that is, the best fighter. While strict hereditary succession appeared rapidly in the new Germanic kingdoms of the fifth and sixth centuries, the right of election by the folk remained a strong medieval political tradition for many centuries, especially in areas where the original Germanic institutions remained influential. The election of the king by the leaders of the community was operative in England in the late ninth century in the case of the elevation of the famous King Alfred to the English throne, and as late as 1199 the infamous King John owed his crown, in part, to the electoral principle. The Germanic electoral principle played havoc with dynastic continuity in the medieval German empire and survived to the nineteenth century. The perpetuation of this aspect of early German institutions was due, at least in part, to the fact that it found favor with the church, which recognized in the principle of throne worthiness a way of exercising a veto on royal accessions.
The comitatus was an extremely weak nucleus for the medieval state. In fact, it can be said that the Germans had no concept of a state, no idea of public authority, and no understanding of loyalty other than the personal loyalty to a chieftain. With some exaggeration, it may be said that the Germanic political theory was not above the level of that held today by marauding street gangs. The distance from the sophisticated Roman idea of public authority and office and of loyalty to an impersonal emperor who represents the state was vast, and the decline in the level of political thinking was precipitous. To understand the disastrous histories of all early medieval kingdoms, it must be remembered that the medieval state had to develop from this abysmal and crude level. Early medieval political construction was constantly challenged and inhibited by the inability of the Germans to conceive of public, as distinct from personal, loyalty. It is not surprising, therefore, that the medieval state did not begin to take shape until the eighth and ninth centuries and did not experience its first era of greatness until the middle years of the eleventh century. And even this late and partial success was made possible only by the addition of ecclesiastical (in part, Roman) conceptions of authority and loyalty to the primitive Germanic political tradition.
The Germans’ original legal conceptions were scarcely more advanced than their political ideas. The purpose of the Germanic law courts and forms of procedure was not to establish justice, which the Germans had no way of determining or even of defining, but simply to stop a fight. Rather, the aim was to inhibit the blood feud, to find an alternative for an aggrieved kin or family seeking vengeance. There were various ways of doing so, and the purpose of the law courts was simply to put these alternatives into operation. The first alternative was the payment of wergeld (man money), a monetary compensation to a family for the killing of one of its members or a smaller payment to an individual who had been maimed. The so-called Germanic law code consisted mostly of tables of wergeld: so much to be paid for the slaying of a nobleman, so much for a freeman, so much for a serf, so much for an arm, so much for an eye, etc. The compensation required was often heavy, and even then the aggrieved kinsmen or individual did not always have to accept it and might prefer to gain satisfaction by vengeance. It was the court’s duty to convince the plaintiff to take the wergeld and thereby preclude the outbreak of a blood feud. Nevertheless, blood feuds were frequent in early Germanic society. Such a feud in England as late as 1060 decimated whole families. Anyone who reads early medieval legal records knows that life then was nasty, brutish, and short. It was a violent society in which drunken brawls ending in homicide were extremely common, and the resulting blood feuds were a constant possibility.
Early medieval men did not think of a brawl resulting in homicide as murder. Their legal conception resembled that of the American frontier, at least as represented in popular literature and entertainment. To kill a man in a fair fight meant that you had to reckon with his kinsmen, but it was not murder. Murder was killing someone by stealth—a homicide in which the killer was not known for certain. Such a situation put heavy pressure on the Germanic law court, for if the court did not designate the murderer, the slain man’s kin would take justice into their own hands and exact vengeance from whomever they suspected. It was therefore necessary to hold a trial and prove the guilt or innocence of the suspect. But neither the methods of proof and assessment of evidence devised by Roman law, which involved a thorough inquiry by a panel of judges, nor the later common-law jury system were available to the Germanic law court. The leaders of the Germanic court would not have known how to assess the evidence even if it were presented to them. This left two methods of proof: the ordeal, involving divine decision, and compurgation, involving the swearing of oaths.
In proof by ordeal the odds were weighted heavily against the defendant. In the ordeal of hot iron the defendant was required to grasp a redhot piece of metal. His hand was then bandaged, and if after three days the burns were on the way to being healed, the defendant was innocent; otherwise he was guilty. The ordeal of hot water worked similarly: The defendant was made to put his arm into a caldron of boiling water and lift a stone from the bottom; his arm was then bandaged and in three days it was inspected to decide his guilt or innocence. The ordeal of cold water was a favorite in England, where there were numerous rivers and brooks. The defendant was tied hand and foot and thrown into the water; if he sank he was innocent, and if he floated he was guilty, on the premise that water, a divine element, would not receive a guilty person. In the feudal period an additional ordeal, trial by combat between the accuser and the defendant or their “champions” (representatives), was instituted. Because guilt or innocence was decided by the strength of the champion, trial by combat did not leave the question sufficiently to divine judgment; a wealthy man could hire the biggest thug in the country and systematically get rid of his enemies by bringing false accusations. Hence, trial by combat was severely limited by the powerful monarchies of the twelfth century, although technically this method of proof was not abolished in England until 1819. Although the three common ordeals were rough on the defendant, it must be emphasized that they were intended to be biased in this direction. For the defendant who was put to the ordeal—in England this was called “making his law”—was either someone who was reputed to be a criminal by his neighbors or was a person of low social status. A wealthy or highborn person of good reputation in his community was seldom put to the ordeal. The ordeal, therefore, was a method of providing divine support for popular prejudice. Through the ordeal each folk court was able to cleanse the community of the ill famed, who sooner or later were bound to be accused of a crime and put to the ordeal.
The church was initially hostile to the Germanic ordeal, but if it was to influence the early medieval legal process, it had to accept this common method of proof. After the Germans were converted, the church imposed a religious sanction on the ordeal: Before going to the ordeal, the defendant appeared in church and swore on the Bible or a holy relic that he was innocent, while the priest admonished him to confess his guilt so as not to damn his soul and lose eternal as well as mortal life. We think that in many cases this brainwashing resulted in confession and that thereby an element of rationality was added to the crude legal process. A defendant convicted by the ordeal was hanged on the spot, hanging being one of the Germanic contributions to civilization. At times in the early Middle Ages the church succeeded in having kings substitute maiming for the death penalty. Medieval medicine being what it was, the loss of a limb frequently amounted to a slow death in any case. It is also doubtful that the community courts actually followed those humanitarian pronouncements.
Compurgation was a privilege of a defendant who had popular opinion on his side, and this usually meant that he was wealthy or highborn. It greatly favored the defendant, for by this method of proof the defendant simply denied his guilt under oath and produced a certain number of oath helpers, preferably of high social status, to swear that his oath was a true and good, or “clean” one. Although the church warned about the perils of perjury, we know that it was common in proof by compurgation. A guilty man who had important relatives or a powerful lord who were willing to lie for him would never be convicted. The conditions of compurgation further attest to the underlying fact that the Germanic criminal process was class biased. The poor, the unfree, the lordless were lucky if they did not end on the gallows, whereas the rich and well connected could come to this end only through the most flagrant and repeated crimes, and even then usually only when their victim was from the upper strata of society.
It is apparent that little can be said in favor of the early Germanic legal process. Yet German law made one great contribution to western civilization in its political implications. Roman law found its origin in the will of the despotic emperor and favored political absolutism. The king had no control over Germanic law; his only legal function was to see that the community courts met and decided cases, and even in this regard his contribution was often negligible. Germanic law was based on the principle that law resided in the folk, that law was the custom of the community, and that the king could not change this law without the assent of the community. Because of this difference between Germanic and Roman law and because England, even in the High Middle Ages, remained relatively untouched by Roman law, the Victorian historians found the origin of English parliamentary institutions and the idea of the rule of law in the forests of Germany. Although it has been fashionable among twentieth-century writers to scoff at this interpretation, there is an element of truth in it. The Victorians, with their organic conception of institutional development, erred in thinking that the great oak of English liberalism grew inevitably out of the acorn of German law. There was nothing inevitable about this development; in 1200 England appeared to be going in the direction of absolutism, and it took centuries of experience and political strife before the legislative supremacy of Parliament triumphed. But it is true that from German law England received a heritage of the legal supremacy of the community over the king. All western European countries could have drawn upon the same legal tradition. But after 1100 the Roman principle of legal absolutism slowly won out on the Continent, whereas England alone preserved the early Germanic idea that law resides in the folk, rather than in the will of the king.
From a simple comparison of the population of the empire and the number of Germans, it would be hard to explain why the Germanic tribes were successful in establishing themselves on Roman soil in the hundred years that followed the Visigothic crossing of the Danube in A.D. 376. The population of the empire at this time was 50 to 70 million people. Comparatively, the Germans were few in number. The largest tribes, such as the Visigoths, had only about a hundred thousand people, including women and children, and could not have put more than twenty thousand fighting men into the field. The total number of Germans who came into the empire during the first century of the invasions could not have equaled more than 10 percent of the population of the Mediterranean world.
It must, of course, be remembered that the Roman government faced a great variety of political, economic, and military problems. The Roman army consisted mostly of proletarians and Germans, and the German generals in the service of the western emperor turned out to be unreliable in many cases. Furthermore, the empire had an extremely long frontier to defend, so that in any one place (west of Constantinople, at least) the German armies were substantial in number compared to the Roman defenders. A large army had to be maintained in the East to hold back the Persians, who steadily threatened the eastern defenses from the third to the seventh centuries. It must also be remembered that those regions of the western empire that were more distant from the Mediterranean coast were thinly populated, and hence German settlement in many regions of the Latin-speaking world had a strong impact on the demographic situation.
The impetus for the German invasions came in the 370s from the invasion of the West by Mongolian tribes called the Huns (known as the Hsiung-hu in their Asiatic homeland). Until the seventeenth century, western Europe was to be periodically threatened by nomadic Asian invaders; the Turks were the last of these invaders, and the Huns were the first. It is believed that in the second or third century A.D. the Huns lived in what is today northern China or Mongolia. Certain internal changes in the Chinese political situation forced them to move westward. They tried to invade India, but were repulsed. They then moved with great rapidity westward and passed north of the Caspian and Black seas and down through southern Russia into the Balkans. About the middle of the fourth century they broke into the Danube basin and easily defeated and subjugated the Ostrogoths. They struck terror into the hearts of the Germans, who as yet made only limited use of cavalry and were unable to withstand the Hunnish armies, which apparently fought entirely on horseback. A contemporary Roman historian described the Huns as invincible devils who not only fought but even lived on horseback; he claimed, no doubt on the basis of stories he got from the Germans, that the Huns did not even dismount to eat, but warmed raw meat under their saddles and kept going.
The terrified Visigoths, who lived closest to the Danube frontier and who desperately sought a way of avoiding the fate of their Ostrogothic kinsmen, begged the eastern emperor to allow them to cross the river and find refuge on Roman soil. The emperor granted this request, and the first large-scale migration of a German folk into the empire took place peacefully in 376. Almost immediately there arose all those problems involving the settling of displaced persons with which we are familiar in the twentieth century. The Visigoths claimed they were being cheated by the Roman governors and businessmen, and the Roman population in northern Greece was scarcely overjoyed by this influx of barbarian immigrants. After two years of bickering, the desperate Visigoths revolted and fought against the emperor. The overconfident emperor entered battle with insufficient preparation and without bothering to bring up his cavalry; in consequence his army was soundly beaten, and he was killed. This battle of Adrianople in A.D. 378 can be said to mark the real beginning of the German invasions, for whereas the Visigoths were pacified soon after by Theodosius I and the immediate damage was slight, they had demonstrated that a Roman army could be beaten by a Germanic tribe.
After the death of Theodosius I in 395 the Visigoths again became restless. They were dissatisfied with the lands in Greece that the emperor had given them, and they doubted the good will of Theodosius’ sons toward them. The great emperor was succeeded, in the East and West, by his two sons, who were immature and stupid and who were surrounded by venal courtiers who were incapable of dealing with the explosive situation that was bound to develop. The Visigoths meanwhile had chosen as their king a certain Alaric the Bold, one of the most aggressive and competent of the early Germanic leaders. Alaric had no intention of destroying or even impairing imperial power; he simply wanted good lands for his people. The Visigoths, it may be said, did not want to destroy the empire; they wanted a homestead act, and all the trouble they were to make for the emperor in the following quarter of a century, which had the effect of shattering imperial power in the West, could have been avoided had the emperor initially granted their modest requests. But the silly and ill-advised emperor refused to make any concession whatsoever, and Alaric was left only with the recourse of waging war against the Roman authority that he, in fact, greatly respected.
The Visigothic invasion of Italy, which followed in the first years of the fifth century, was more in the nature of a picketing demonstration than actual warfare. The Visigoths were reluctant to inflict any damage on the Roman power, while, the head of the western imperial army, the German general Stilicho, was lackadaisical in his dealings with the Visigoths. Stilicho prevented the Visigoths from marching down into Italy, but he made no effort to drive them from the empire or even to push them back beyond the northern boundaries of the Italian province. The terrified emperor fled to the impregnable fortress of Ravenna, which was, however, off the main road into Italy, and hence played little role in the calamitous events that were to follow. In A.D. 406 Stilicho withdrew his armies from the Rhine frontier to bolster the Italian defenses against the Visigoths. A motley group of German tribes poured across the Rhine into France, Spain, and North Africa, and within thirty years these provinces were lost to the emperor. Therefore, the year 406 marks the most important turning point in the first century of the Germanic invasions.
It is not easy to determine what was in Stilicho’s mind, but in any case he was murdered in 408 by jealous aristocrats with the approval of the incredibly stupid emperor, and henceforth the road to Italy lay open to the Visigoths. In 410 Alaric’s army took Rome and held it for several days in an attempt to blackmail the emperor into accepting the Visigothic demands for a homeland. It was this famous “sack of Rome” that so exercised the imagination of contemporaries, including St. Augustine; as Augustine pointed out, the Visigoths actually inflicted little damage on the city. It was Alaric’s intention to march his people to the foot of Italy and then to cross over and settle in the rich province of North Africa, but on the Visigoths’ march beyond Rome their great king died. He was succeeded by his brother-in-law Ataulf, who announced the reconstruction of the empire under Gothic leadership, a policy that was later put into practice by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric. To symbolize his policy, Ataulf kidnapped and married Theodosius’ daughter, a vivacious and brilliant woman who enjoyed herself immensely as a German queen and who played a leading role in the confused diplomacy and politics of the following three decades.
Ataulf marched his people back into northern Italy and across into Gaul. Finally, in A.D. 418, the emperor granted the Visigoths their request and allowed them to settle as allies and dependents of the empire in western Gaul, from where they also spread across the Pyrenees into Spain. The Visigothic kingdom in Gaul was conquered and absorbed by the Franks in the early sixth century. In Spain Visigothic rule lasted until the Arab conquest in 711. The story of the Visigothic invasion of the empire is a mixture of farce and tragedy. Its disastrous effects could easily have been avoided, for at no time did the Visigoths wish to harm imperial power. That in the end the Visigothic migrations opened the door to a host of other German invaders was largely the fault of the imperial government.
Of the many German tribes who broke across the Rhine frontier in 406, the most important were the Burgundians and the Vandals. The Burgundians settled in the Rhone valley and contributed their name to French geography. They were a peaceful people, apparently quite adept at poetry. The thirteenth-century poetic cycle of the Nibelungenlied was ultimately derived from stories that originated in fifth- or sixth-century Burgundy. The Burgundians were absorbed into the Frankish kingdom in the early sixth century.
A much more fierce and primitive people were the Vandals, who, led by their king Gaiseric the Lame, marched across France, through Spain, and into North Africa. The awesome Vandals were besieging St. Augustine’s city of Hippo when he died. By the fourth decade of the fifth century the rich province of North Africa had become the Vandal kingdom. The Arian Vandals mistreated the Catholic clergy and never gained the loyalty of the North African population. As a consequence North Africa was easily reconquered by the Byzantine emperor in the 530s, and the Vandals’ influence on North African development was ephemeral and negligible. Nevertheless, the Vandals’ conquest of North Africa was an important turning point in the process of imperial disintegration in the West. The Vandals turned out to be good sailors; almost as soon as they invaded North Africa, they formed piratical fleets and cut off the sea communications between Italy and the rest of western Europe. This action made it impossible for the imperial government to reinforce the imperial armies in Gaul and Spain, and it accelerated the establishment of new Germanic kingdoms on Roman soil. Already in the 420s the Roman legions had been withdrawn from Britain, leaving the native Christian Celtic population there prey to invasion by savage and heathen German tribes from across the North Sea.
The last victory in western Europe of an army carrying the imperial standard occurred at Chalons in Gaul in 451. At this battle the Hunnish invasion of western Europe, led by their terrifying king Attila, was repulsed, and the Hunnish empire disintegrated soon afterward. But even this last triumph of Roman arms was misleading because while the army that defeated Attila was led by a Roman general, most of his soldiers were Visigoths. After 451 the imperial destiny in the West moved steadily toward extinction. In 455 the last descendant of Theodosius died, and for the next twenty years the western emperors were merely the puppets of various German generals and chieftains who contended for mastery in Italy.
The victor in this struggle was a German general named Odovacar, who deposed the reigning emperor in 476 and chose not to replace him. When Odovacar realized that he could not take the imperial title for himself, he ruled the Italian population as the viceroy of the eastern emperor, but he called himself king of the Germans in Italy. Odovacar made use of an old Roman law on the quartering of soldiers to force the Italian landlords to give up part of their estates for the settlement of his heterogeneous German army on Italian soil.
During this first century of the Germanic invasions, what was the attitude of the Roman population to these great upheavals in government and society? Many people, disgusted with the despotism and heavy taxation of the later empire, were either indifferent to the invasions or actually welcomed the invaders. It was hoped that the primitive Germans would not be able to preserve the imperial taxation and police system, and, with few exceptions, their hopes in this direction were fulfilled. Letters written by Roman aristocrats in the early fifth century in Gaul show how hard they tried to ignore the momentous changes occurring outside the walls of their estates. But there were aspects of the invasions that immediately struck fear among the ruling class of the empire. There are contemporary reports of the atrocities inflicted on the Roman population, especially by the Arian Vandals in North Africa. Furthermore, when the prospects of imperial collapse became real, the indifferent aristocracy in some instances experienced a revival of patriotic feeling. The same types of Gallo-Roman nobility who had looked upon the early stages of the invasions with smug indifference suddenly, about the middle of the fifth century, formed armies of their own and maintained pockets of resistance until they were finally crushed by the Franks at the end of the fifth century.
The fact that the Goths and Vandals turned out to be Arians made the invasions a particularly difficult problem for the church. While Augustine interpreted the invasions as being the result of a providential plan for the eventual assimilation of the Germans into the Catholic church, St. Ambrose and St. Jerome looked upon the invaders with horror. Another Catholic bishop denounced the Germans as vermin who ought to be exterminated.
By the second half of the fifth century the Augustinian view was beginning to prevail, as pessimism and lamentations of disaster were giving way, among the leaders of the church, to growing hope. The work of Pope Leo the Great demonstrated the new opportunity for leadership that had come to the church as a consequence of imperial disintegration. It was becoming apparent that the end of the empire did not mean the end of the world or even the end of the Latin church.
The mood of the Roman population of the Germanic kingdoms in 480 was therefore one of watchful waiting. What attitude would the German kings finally take toward the church? Could they be converted to Roman Catholic Christianity? And there was always the possibility of reconquest by the eastern emperor, still waiting in the wings and declaring that his war of reconquest was only a matter of time. The Latin churchmen contemplated this possibility with mixed feelings: The emperor would be better than Arian German persecution, but they knew that he would attempt to subordinate the pope to his authority and dictate to the western church on doctrinal questions as he was doing in the eastern empire. Hence the formulation of the Gelasian doctrine at this time, as we have seen. Might not a German king, uncouth and violent but nevertheless a loyal Roman Catholic, be a better ruler for the Eternal City? These were the vital questions at the end of the first phase of the Germanic invasions circa 480. The answers to these questions would appear in the following century, during the second phase of the Germanic invasions, and would determine the destiny of western Europe.
By A.D. 480 three German kingdoms had been established on the continent of western Europe on the ruins of the Roman Empire, but none of them was destined to survive beyond the early eighth century or to have any significant impact on medieval civilization. The kingdom of Odovacar in Italy was an ephemeral institution and collapsed under the force of the Ostrogothic invasions in 489. In the Rhone valley the Burgundian kingdom was absorbed by the Franks and incorporated into their domain in the 520s. The kingdom of the Visigoths stretched through western France and all Spain. In the early sixth century the Franks also drove the Visigoths out of France.
The Visigothic kingdom in Spain affected Iberian history and culture very little. The Visigoths were originally Arians, but converted to Catholicism in the late sixth century. The seventh-century Catholic bishops tried to glamorize the Visigothic monarchy in Spain and to strengthen it with the powers and sanctions of religion. In the eighth century the church adopted the same policy with regard to the Frankish monarchy, with far-reaching effects. But the Visigothic kings were so weak and incompetent that not even the support of the church could save them. Despite the efforts of the church, the Visigothic kingdom yielded instantaneously to the Moslem invaders in 711. Until the eleventh century the Spanish Christian princes survived only in pockets of the far north of the Iberian peninsula. The sole cultural legacy of the Visigoths is found in the work of Bishop Isidore of Seville, who was not even a Visigoth but a scion of the Italian aristocracy.
After the successive failures of all the initial German kingdoms the question arose whether any permanent German kingdom could be established in western Europe. In the last two decades of the fifth century two new kingdoms were created, and it appeared that the political destiny of Europe would be determined by the shape and fate of these two new entities. The Ostrogoths erected their kingdom in Italy, and the Salian Franks became the masters of Gaul. To anyone who lived in western Europe in the year 500, it would have appeared certain that the future lay with the Ostrogoths. Theodoric, the king of the Ostrogoths, wanted to revive Roman culture and reinvigorate Roman administration under his aegis, and at the beginning of the sixth century it seemed that Theodoric would realize this traditional Gothic policy of synthesizing Gothic and Roman institutions. The Frankish kingdom did not appear to have an equal opportunity for success, for its ruler, Clovis I, seemed to be a barbarian with no appreciation of Latin culture or of Roman government. Clovis compared most unfavorably with the great Ostrogothic king as a worthy heir of the Roman emperors. Yet the kingdom of the Franks did survive perpetually while the Ostrogothic state collapsed soon after the death of Theodoric in 526. With Theodoric gone, Italy was reconquered by the Byzantine emperor Justinian, and the Ostrogothic kingdom disappeared from history. The leadership of western Europe therefore passed by default to the Franks. Consequently, Ostrogothic failure and Frankish success were crucial for the development of early medieval Europe, and the causes of these decisive events deserve special consideration.
The Ostrogoths came into the empire from the Danube basin. They had been conquered and enslaved by the Huns in the 370s, but after the death of the Hunnish leader Attila in 453, they gained their freedom. Theodoric, whose name means “leader of the people” and who was one of the Ostrogothic royal family, had been sent while a young boy as a hostage to Constantinople, where he learned to appreciate Roman culture, law, and government. In the 480s he became king of the Ostrogoths through election by the folk.
At the end of the eighth decade of the fifth century Theodoric’s policy of establishing a union of Roman and Gothic interests found favor with the emperor in Constantinople. The Ostrogoths had begun to threaten to invade the Byzantine empire. Instead, the wily emperor convinced Theodoric that he should lead his people into Italy, where Odovacar was beginning to assert his independence of the eastern empire. Thereby the emperor could rescue Byzantium from the Ostrogothic peril. At the same time he could bring Italy more firmly under the official jurisdiction of the eastern empire than was the case in Odovacar’s reign, for Theodoric went to Italy with the understanding that the rights of the emperor in Italy would be preserved. The emperor considered the Ostrogothic king his lieutenant, and he expected that the Ostrogothic invasion would do nothing to decrease imperial sovereignty there, but would increase its strength.
In four years, between 489 and 493, Theodoric and the Ostrogoths destroyed the kingdom of Odovacar and conquered Italy. Theodoric set up his capital in Ravenna, in northeastern Italy, where several of the fifth-century emperors had already taken up residence. What was the legal position of Theodoric in Italy? It was substantially a continuation of the same system under which Odovacar had ruled. Theodoric’s authority consisted of a delegation of imperial power to conduct the general affairs of the government and included a royal title to preserve his prestige over his own people. The Roman people were becoming habituated to a ruler who was the representative of a distant emperor in Constantinople and who was the head of the Germanic people quartered on their soil. Thus they came to accept the notion of a barbarian kingdom exercising general powers of government.
For over a decade Theodoric was satisfied with his role as representative of the emperor and as chief of the Germanic federates. Then he began to adopt a new policy, disquieting to the Byzantine emperor. He began to contemplate the eventual establishment of a Germanic kingdom led by the Goths, comprising both Gaul and Italy, perhaps even Spain. He inaugurated a policy of diplomatic marriages, which eventually could have resulted in such a great kingdom. In 493 he married the sister of Clovis and then gave one of his daughters in marriage to the Burgundian king. He also became the guardian of the Visigothic king, who was a minor. Theodoric seemed, little by little, to be emancipating himself from the distant emperor in the East.
The Byzantines had never renounced Italy because the Roman Empire without Rome was an inconceivable thing to them. Now the emperor became concerned that Theodoric would become too strong, and to counterbalance Theodoric’s power, he recognized Clovis’ hegemony over Gaul and established an alliance with the Frankish king. This was one of Theodoric’s greatest errors. His attempt to make the Ostrogoths a Mediterranean power with influence in France and Spain as well as supremacy in Italy brought about the hostility of the Byzantine emperor and the recognition of the legal hegemony of the Franks in Gaul. This situation proved disastrous for the Ostrogoths when the Byzantine empire, under Justinian, regained enough military strength to attack Italy.
If we ask why Theodoric dared to undertake such a hazardous foreign policy, which in the end united the Franks and the Byzantine emperor against the Ostrogothic kingdom and resulted in its destruction, the reason for the great risk he took is evident. By the 520s, as a result of his internal policy, he thought he had obtained the loyalty of the Italian people and at least the neutrality, perhaps even the support, of the pope and the Catholic church.
From the beginning of his reign Theodoric declared that it was his intention to restore the vigor of Roman government and Roman culture and bring benefits to the Italian people. Such a policy was not new among the Goths; Ataulf, the second Visigothic king, had professed similar intentions. The novelty was that Theodoric had the opportunity to carry out this aim and that he took great pains to do so. His shrewdest move was the preservation of the bureaucratic system of the later empire, which had lingered on, in form at least, through most of the fifth century while the worthless last emperors were holding out in Ravenna. Now Theodoric made Ravenna his capital, completely restored the bureaucratic hierarchy, and recruited officials from the ranks of the Roman aristocracy. By 500 he had found the man to implement his internal policy—Cassiodorus, a scion of an old Roman family, a skilled rhetorician, an able administrator, and a great “press agent” for the Ostrogothic kingdom. Cassiodorus advised Theodoric on how he might win over the Italian people and set about writing various works of propaganda, including an official History of the Goths, which would make Theodoric appear in the best possible light to the Italian people.
It was Cassiodorus who coined the slogan for the new regime—civilitas—which was stamped on the royal coins and proclaimed in numerous royal letters written by Cassiodorus. It was claimed that the Goths were not the enemies of civilization, but that the aim of the new government was to further and preserve Roman civilization. Nor in Cassiodorus’ writings are the Goths ever referred to as “barbarians.” In fact, in his History of the Goths Cassiodorus identified the Goths with the Scythians, a people mentioned in Greek mythology. Cassiodorus’ History of the Goths, which has come down to us in Jordanes’ abridgment, portrayed the Goths as being “almost equal” to the Greeks in culture. This gross historical misinterpretation was the result not of Cassiodorus’ ignorance, but of his ideology. Similarly, the extremely rhetorical style of the letters that Cassiodorus wrote on behalf of Theodoric was the result of a conscious attempt to demonstrate that the Ostrogothic ruler was a defender of the classical tradition.
The program of civilitas was given considerable semblance of reality by Theodoric’s domestic policies. An extensive program of public works was undertaken, and strict measures against brigandage were enforced; the resulting peace encouraged a return of prosperity in Italy probably to the level of the late fourth century (or at least so we are told by the contemporaries). The Italian population continued to live under Roman law, while only the Ostrogoths used Germanic law. To his court Theodoric summoned the leading scholars of Italy and gave them his patronage—not only Cassiodorus but Boethius, another Roman aristocrat who became a high governmental official and began to translate Plato and Aristotle into Latin. Even a Byzantine court historian admitted that Theodoric treated the Italian population with laudable moderation and generosity.
There were two aspects of Theodoric’s policy, however, that could not seem admirable to the Italians and that he was forced to maintain by his position as leader of the Ostrogothic war band: expropriation of Italian land for the Ostrogothic army and Arianism. The Germans were legally federates and were to be quartered on the land of the native Italian population according to the Roman law of “hospitality.” Thus we find Odovacar ordering the Italian landlords to surrender one-third of their land to his soldiers, and Theodoric used the same policy. How else could he provide for his soldiers? We have little information that allows us to determine how the Italian landlords regarded this policy. Some historians have suggested that, in any case, many estates were vacant by this time as a result of the disorders of the previous century, so the amount of land that Theodoric had to expropriate was small. But the fact that Cassiodorus worked hard to justify this act on the grounds that the Goths were the Roman army indicates that the expropriated landlords must have felt some resentment.
On the question of the continued loyalty of Theodoric to Arianism, we historians are also perplexed by the meager quality of our sources. What did Arianism really mean to Theodoric? Theodoric built Arian churches; then who were these Arian priests? Presumably they were native Ostrogoths. About this we know nothing. All we can say is that Arianism had become the folk religion for the Goths, and they could no more give up their customary religion than they could give up their customary law. Theodoric did the next best thing; although he remained an Arian, he did everything he could to appease the Catholic church short of his own conversion. He allowed absolute freedom of religion; he went through a ceremony that implied that he recognized the authority of the pope not only over the Catholic church but over the city of Rome. By 520 it appeared that the pope had been appeased and that the church would continue to support the authority of the Ostrogothic king even after Theodoric’s death. Hence his hazardous foreign policy would succeed because of his skillful domestic policy.
But in the last few years of Theodoric’s reign the delicate balance of forces that he had created swung against him, and it was already apparent before his death in 526 that the collapse of the Ostrogothic kingdom could not long be delayed. Unfortunately, here again our sources are meager, but the dim outline of the changes that occurred is distinguishable. The key to the situation appears to have been the policy of the emperor. Through most of Theodoric’s reign the emperor had been quarreling with the pope; these quarrels produced the denunciation of imperial authority made by Gelasius I in the last decade of the fifth century. The pope believed that the emperor had fallen into heresy and was trying to impose his errors on the church. An Arian who allowed freedom of religion was much to be preferred to the Byzantine emperor as a ruler in such instances. Then, in A.D. 518, there was a change of dynasty in Constantinople. The great aim of the ambitious new ruling house was the reconquest of the West. For this end all else must be sacrificed. The emperor Justin I declared his acceptance of the theological dogmas held by the pope (even though he thus alienated many of his subjects), and the emperor and pope appear to have come to a secret understanding while the pope was acting as Theodoric’s ambassador in Constantinople. A considerable number of Roman aristocracts threw in their lot with the pope and Byzantine emperor, including the leading official Boethius. Probably they were worried that Visigothic kinsmen of Theodoric, who were still vehemently anti-Catholic, had become leading courtiers at Ravenna.
Theodoric discovered the conspiracy, and his reaction was violent. For some time he had been worried about the succession to the throne (untimely deaths in his family had left only a woman and a child as possible successors), if there was not to be a contest for the throne by the leading Ostrogothic generals. In the last two years of his reign Theodoric abandoned civilitas. He imprisoned the pope and executed Boethius and several leading members of the Roman aristocracy. But his kingdom was doomed. In the decade following his death the Byzantines began their reconquest.
In his personal qualities Theodoric was the greatest German king before Charlemagne, and his policy of civilitas parallels in many ways the aims of the Frankish monarchy in A.D. 800. Theodoric’s failure to establish a permanent kingdom was therefore of the greatest consequence to medieval Europe. Theodoric was able to establish in his lifetime a de facto supreme power in Italy, but he did not destroy the continuity of Roman political ideas and political institutions in Italy; indeed, he had no intention of doing so, for he himself had the greatest respect for the glory of Rome. He wished to reconstitute the empire in the West, but under the rule of a Gothic king.
His policy turned out to be mistaken. He aroused the fear of the Byzantine emperors that the Ostrogothic kingdom would become so powerful that the reassertion of Byzantine authority in Italy would become impossible and that the Ostrogothic kingdom would emerge as a great Mediterranean power to compete with Byzantium for domination of the Mediterranean world. At the same time, because of his respect for Roman institutions and ideas, Theodoric made no attempt to break the continuity of Roman civilization and political organization in Italy. He allowed the Ostrogoths to remain an alien band of Germanic soldiers who played no part in the political and religious life of the country. As powerful as the Ostrogothic monarchy seemed to be in his day, he left his successors in an impossible position. They were left prey to a counterattack by the revived military power of Byzantium under Justinian, but Theodoric had not gained for the Ostrogothic kingdom sufficient loyalty among the Italian people to withstand the Greek reconquest.
The early history of the Franks exhibits marked contrasts in every way with the Ostrogothic development. The Franks were much less influenced by Roman culture—their kings were markedly inferior to Theodoric the Ostrogoth—yet the Frankish kingdom survived the confusions of the fifth and sixth centuries. It became the largest and most important kingdom to be created on what had been Latin soil, and therefore until the tenth century the political development of western Europe, and to a considerable extent its cultural and ecclesiastical history, was determined by the destiny of the Frankish monarchy.
There were at least two important branches of the Frankish people; the one that was to play the important role in history was the Salian Franks, whose original homeland lay in what is today west central Germany. The Salian Franks lived far beyond the Rhenish frontier and had little contact with the Romans, either economically or culturally. Unlike the Visigoths, they had not been converted by Arian missionaries, and when they entered the empire they were heathens. In Frankish society the independent free peasant predominated; a class of nobility, if there was one, was not powerful, and even in the early sixth century the Frankish army consisted mainly of peasant infantry, with little use of cavalry. The only civilized aspect of early Frankish society was an interest in agriculture. Because of this interest and because, like all Germans, they wanted to get closer to the wealth of the empire, the Franks obtained from the emperor Julian the Apostate, in the middle of the fourth century, the right to settle along the northern border of the empire in Flanders. Here the outstanding characteristic of Frankish migration immediately became apparent: Unlike the other Germanic invaders, the Franks intensively colonized their new homeland. They devoted themselves to agriculture and left a strong demographic, economic, and linguistic impact on the region.
Our only important literary source for the early history of the Franks is the comprehensive and detailed work of Bishop Gregory of Tours, written in the late sixth century. Gregory’s information was naturally fullest on the period closest to his own day, but from oral traditions he was able to provide fragmentary information on fifth-century Frankish history. Gregory’s History of the Franks, in spite of certain weaknesses in style and the author’s vehement prejudices, is the fullest account we have of any Germanic people. We also have the benefit of place-name evidence for the early history of the Franks. The study of the linguistic roots of the place names of Flanders and northern France allows us to construct the pattern of Frankish migration southward from Flanders into Gaul.
As Roman power disintegrated in the early fifth century, the Franks began to move slowly southward into imperial territory. Here again their settlement consisted not merely of a military occupation, as was the case with other Germanic peoples, but of extensive colonization. It is probably at this time that one family began to exercise leadership in the Frankish folk and was elevated to the privileged position of a royal dynasty. Until the middle of the eighth century the Frankish monarchy was regarded as the private property of this one family, irrespective of the personal inadequacies of many of its scions. The Frankish royal family, as was common among the Germans, claimed descent from the gods, and in tradition they ascribed the founding of the family to a certain mythical hero named Merovech. The fifth-century Merovingians varied in quality; some of them appeared to have been quite inadequate as warriors and leaders, but what characterized all the early Frankish rulers as late as A.D. 500 was their intense hostility toward Roman civilization. It is probable that for a decade or so in the mid-fifth century, the Franks came under the domination of one of the last Roman generals in Gaul. This “very hard yoke of the Romans,” as it is described in the prologue to the Salic law, when combined with the native savagery and barbarism of the Franks, accounts for their hatred of the Romans. This negative attitude finds no parallel among any previous Germanic invader of the empire, as R. Latouche emphasized.
By the eighth decade of the fifth century the Franks had intensively colonized the northern part of Gaul, stretching north from the old Roman city of Paris. As they moved into the central and southern regions, they encountered a relatively dense Gallo-Roman population, and the Frankish influence on language and institutions was consequently small in this part of the country. Because the Gallo-Romans greatly outnumbered the invading Franks, the native vulgar Latin continued to be the language of the whole country, and even the Franks themselves rapidly adopted the Roman tongue.
With the disorganized condition of fifth-century Gaul, the Franks needed only a strong leader to advance from their northern stronghold to conquer the whole country, and this leader was found in the greatest of the Merovingian kings, Clovis I (481–511), whose long reign established Frankish hegemony west of the Rhine. In the pages of Gregory of Tours, Clovis’ crude and savage qualities are painfully evident; at the same time, he appears as a formidable war leader and a shrewd strategist. After crushing the Gallo-Roman armies for the last time, Clovis subdued other Germanic peoples who had been living along the west bank of the Rhine. He then prepared for further conquest by receiving baptism, along with his whole army, at the hands of the archbishop of Rheims. Although later shrouded in legend of one sort or another, the reason for Clovis’ conversion in 496 was simple: He saw that if he would accept the Catholic religion, he would be the only orthodox Germanic king in Gaul—in fact, in all western Europe. Thereby, as the Catholic champion, he would find it easier to gain the allegiance of the Gallo-Romans as his conquests proceeded. Furthermore, by his conversion he would gain the support of the episcopate, the only political, economic, and moral power that still existed throughout Gaul. The enthusiasm of Gregory of Tours, the spokesman for the Frankish church in the sixth century, shows not only that Clovis guessed rightly, but that he succeeded in surrounding himself with an aura of sanctity. In Gregory’s account the savage leader of the Frankish war band is suddenly transformed by his conversion into a new Constantine.
His power reinforced by the support of the church, Clovis proceeded in his conquests. First he moved into the northwest, the land between the Seine and the Loire, and brought it under his allegiance, although this area remained separatist throughout the greater part of medieval French history. Finally Clovis was ready for his great enterprise: the conquest of Visigothic Gaul, Aquitaine. First he neutralized the Burgundians in the year 500, making a treaty of alliance with them. He left it to his sons to conquer Burgundy in the third decade of the sixth century. Although the Visigoths had established a vast kingdom stretching from Spain to Brittany and centered in Toulouse, their kingdom was vulnerable for many of the same reasons that brought down the Ostrogothic kingdom: They were merely military occupiers, not colonizers, and they were Arians. Clovis’ victory over the Visigoths was quick and decisive, and the church gave him full support in his conquest. In Gregory’s account the Frankish conquest of Toulouse is portrayed as a holy war. About the same time, Clovis effected an alliance with the eastern emperor against the Ostrogoths. In 507 the Frankish conquest of Gaul received the sanction of the emperor, who accorded Clovis the titles of consul and Augustus. These titles were purely honorary; they were meant to consecrate under a solemn form the alliance of the emperor and the Frankish king against the Ostrogoths and to recognize the supremacy of Clovis in Gaul. Thus, even though Clovis had no respect for Roman institutions and ideas, he was able to obtain imperial approval for his conquests.
One step remained in the foundation of the Frankish kingdom: the designation of Paris as the capital. Paris was within the area that had been heavily colonized by the Salian Franks. But the new Gallo-Roman-Frankish church was able to find a greater glory for Paris. At the beginning of the sixth century the tradition that St. Denis, the disciple of St. Paul, had been the first bishop of Paris and had been martyred there took on a new importance. Clovis and the episcopate encouraged this legend; Paris became one of the holy cities of Christianity, and Montmartre the site of a popular shrine. By associating Paris with St. Denis, Clovis emphasized his position as the Germanic champion of Catholic Christianity. He well knew that this role had greatly facilitated the Frankish conquest of Gaul.
It was one thing to conquer Gaul, another to govern it. And the Merovingians turned out to be much less effective as rulers than as leaders of the Frankish war band. Under any circumstances the Merovingian dynasty was bound to run into trouble, given the inadequate political conceptions of the Germanic people. Furthermore, the Merovingians’ kingdom, which included not only what is today France but a large part of the southern half of western Germany, covered far too much territory for the limited institutions of the sixth century. But the mistakes made by Clovis and his successors and the personal inadequacies of most of the Merovingian rulers served to make the situation much worse, with the result that by the early seventh century political power in France was in the hands of the provincial aristocracy, while the royal family held the crown and not much else.
Certainly the Merovingian ruler started out, in Clovis’ reign, in a position of apparent strength—even, it could be said, of autocracy—and with enormous material resources. Clovis and his successors regarded the whole country as their personal possession. As a result, whenever a king had more than one son, he decreed that the royal fisc (property) simply be divided among his heirs and that the crown be similarly divided. The Merovingian rulers, holding the crown and its resources as their private property, further decided to rule without consulting anyone. The result was an almost incredible combination of primitive autocracy and anarchy. The Merovingian rulers did nothing for the people except to lead an occasional military expedition. They spent their time satisfying their gross desires and enriching their relatives and dependents. When there was more than one king, as was frequent in the century following Clovis’ death, the rulers’ chief interest was in fighting and killing each other, so the history of the Merovingian family in the sixth and early seventh centuries is mostly a bewildering tale of carnage and dishonor.
Almost no attempt was made by these primitive chieftains to maintain the Roman administrative system; almost no governmental documents survive from Merovingian France except a few badly drafted charters, and apparently the work of monarchy, so far as there was any, was carried on almost without literacy. The only aspect of Roman government that the Merovingians tried to maintain was the taxation system, but they lacked sufficient loyal and able administrators, as well as any public feeling that taxes were worth paying. By 600 the vestiges of Roman taxation had all but disappeared, and a Merovingian king who wanted to get rid of one of his officials simply sent him out to collect taxes; the man would never be heard from again.
The Frankish and Gallo-Roman nobility, who were rapidly coalescing, were unanimous in their hostility to a monarchy that contributed nothing to their welfare and that presented a miserable spectacle of greed and incompetence. The Merovingians tried to win over some of the nobility to their service by granting them offices accompanied by benefices (benefits), that is, property attached to the offices to ensure the loyal service of the holders to the king. The favored nobility rapidly made these offices and benefices their private property and established themselves as provincial dynasts. Thus the title of duke, originally the king’s local military representative, and count, originally a royal legal representative, were transformed into aristocratic titles that were inherited along with the accompanying benefices in the great aristocratic families.
By the early seventh century the monarchy was being robbed blind by the provincial aristocracy, and the Merovingians were left with only a shadow of their original power and only a small part of the enormous royal fisc of the time of Clovis I. Merovingian France presented a picture of an intensely disorganized kingdom politically, with all loyalty going to the local big shots and none to the king. The sixth-century kings, given to fratricidal war, made possible the aristocratic usurpation of the governmental power and wealth of the Merovingian family. Nearly all the seventh-century Merovingian rulers were either children, women, or mental deficients. Such “unthrone-worthy” rulers always signified the death of royal power during the early Middle Ages.
The church, or rather the bishops of Gaul who provided all the leadership in the church, was greatly disappointed by the Merovingian decline. The episcopate had established an alliance with Clovis, and great hopes were held out for mutual benefit from this union of the royal family and the Catholic bishops. But Clovis’ successors turned out to be so incompetent and savage that by the end of the sixth century the bishops had taken their stand with the great nobility against the monarchy. One of the last of the Gallo-Roman bishops, Gregory of Tours, revealed the outlook of the late sixth-century episcopate in his History. Although Grégory was better educated than any of his episcopal colleagues, his perspective was nevertheless limited and selfish. He turned away from Clovis’ successors in revulsion at their crimes and stupidity and bewailed the breaking up of the alliance between the monarchy and the church of the early sixth century. If only Clovis’ grandchildren would emulate the Frankish “new Constantine”! But since Gregory saw little hope of the happy reconstruction of the old alliance between the royal family and the episcopate, he devoted himself mainly to building up the wealth and prestige of the church of Tours, just as any duke or count would devote himself chiefly to the interests of his own family.
Thus, by the end of the sixth century the political future of the Frankish kingdom, with its effects of localism and provincialism, had driven the episcopate to throw in their lot with the nobility. The church, by separating itself from Frankish kingship in the sixth and seventh centuries, made more certain the ever-increasing impotence of the Merovingian dynasty. Only the church could have provided sufficient leadership and literacy to have created an effective royal government in France. But the bishops, in pursuing this policy of separation from the monarchy, however justified they may have been in view of the gross personal inadequacies of the Merovingian family, had taken a step that harmed the church itself. The old Gallo-Roman church, which was renowned for its learning and devotion in 400, was notorious for its ignorance and lack of energy in 700. A major reason for this development was the tendency of Gregory of Tours and his colleagues to identify their interests with those of the nobility, whose selfishness and provincialism became characteristic of the seventh-century French episcopate. If the Merovingians had produced a few rulers of the caliber of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, the decline of the French church, as well as of the French monarchy, in the later sixth and seventh centuries would certainly have been averted.
The Merovingian monarchy played only a small part in influencing the great social changes that occurred in France in the sixth and seventh centuries. Although royal and ecclesiastical leadership between 500 and 700 did little to establish permanent institutions, the coalescing of Frankish and Gallo-Roman society during this period provided the social context with which later leaders had to contend. Frankish society in the early fifth century was organized along simple lines. The royal family and the nobility made up no more than 10 percent of the population of the Frankish folk. At the bottom of the Salian social scale was a group, constituting perhaps 20 percent of the population, in various stages of dependence, including personal slavery. The largest group in early Frankish society, taking in as much as 70 percent of the folk, consisted of the free peasants and soldiers. Under the pressure of the invasions and wars of the fifth century this large central group was polarized. A small part emerged as war leaders and joined the ranks of the nobility, while many were pushed down into unfree status.
The coalescence of the native Gallo-Roman population with Frankish society gave added impetus to the decline into dependence of many of the original Frankish freemen. As the Frankish nobility associated themselves with the Gallo-Roman aristocracy, they naturally attempted to force the Frankish peasant soldiers into a servile status that somewhat paralleled the bottom groups of the Gallo-Roman society. About half the population of Gaul in A.D. 400 consisted of people in an unfree status; at least 30 percent were slaves outright, and another 20 percent were the semiservile coloni. At the top of the social scale were the wealthy landlords, from whose ranks also came the bishops and other important churchmen. This lordly class constituted somewhere around 15 percent of the population, and free peasants and the lower clergy made up another 15 percent. Finally, in 400, especially in the south of France where the Gallo-Roman population was most dense, there were many townsmen who were separate from both the landlord group and the various classes of peasants; these bourgeois, who engaged in trade and industry, probably constituted 20 percent of the population of Gaul.
By 600 the Gallo-Roman and Frankish societies had thoroughly mingled, and a new French social structure had appeared. Intermarriage between Frankish and Gallo-Roman families was both rapid and extensive. Gregory of Tours was the last bishop in Gaul who could claim descent entirely from the old Gallo-Roman aristocracy. The new French society was marked by a large group of dependent serfs at the bottom of the social scale, perhaps as much as 60 percent of the entire population consisting of the unfree of both the Gallo-Roman and early Frankish societies, as well as many depressed free Frankish peasants. The serf was not a personal slave to his lord; rather, he was bound to the land and retained certain legal and economic rights. The lord was supposed to protect him and to provide him with the means of economic sustenance, although frequently the lord neglected to do both. What he wanted of the serf was labor on his own estates and/or a share of the serf’s own crop. There was great gradation within the serf ranks; some serfs were prosperous, while others were perpetually on the verge of starvation. Yet, if there was economic heterogeneity among the servile class, there was also legal uniformity: The serf and his family could not leave the lord’s estate—the manor, as it came to be called; he owed the lord servile dues and labor, and he was subject to the jurisdiction of the lord’s manorial court.
The serf was probably better off than the slave on the Roman estates; he may often have had less to eat, but he had much greater personal freedom. Hence some historians have talked about the process of “social amelioration” in sixth-century France as the Roman slave system gave way to medieval serfdom. This judgment may be justified; total misery was replaced by partial misery. But the transformation of the economic and legal status of the peasantry did not raise the largest and lowest social group above an animal existence. At least until the twelfth century the lives of medieval peasants differed little from that of beasts of the field. They toiled, they bred, and they died. In the sixth century they even lacked whatever comfort and inspiration a local curate could provide because there was as yet no parish clergy. The religious needs of the peasantry were met by a priest who was occasionally sent out from the cathedral clergy of the nearest episcopal center. If a sixth- or seventh-century peasant saw a priest and received the sacraments once a year, he was doing well. Under these conditions it is not a surprise that the Christianity of the serf class was frequently nominal. Whether the peasant was baptized, he continued to worship the forces of nature, as he had always done. And even when he thought himself a Christian, his religious outlook was dominated by superstitions and fertility cults. The Christianity of the early medieval peasant was a hodgepodge of saints, relics, and demons.
This is what anthropologists call a religion based on magic, one that uses material things and tribal rituals to connect with the godhead. The more intellectual among the clergy in the sixth century challenged the high magical component of Frankish (and other Germanic peoples’) religion for a time. But under the aegis of Pope Gregory I the Great, a subtle Roman aristocrat, the church relaxed its opposition and came to cultivate the popular religion of saint worship, relics, holy places, and incessant miracles. Gregory recalled St. Augustine’s teaching that divine providence had sent the German peoples into the Roman Empire to be converted to the Christian faith. How was such a conversion to be meaningful, how could the episcopate and the missionary monks communicate with the masses except in terms of their own culture? There were ample precedents in the ancient church for a magical religion. For one, the church in the Roman Empire certainly had its share of holy men and women; now it had many more, some perhaps not quite as elevated and ethereal as in earlier days. In addition, the sacramental nature of the Christian faith was itself a kind of magical religion. To go from there and absorb a wide array of popular practices and a full-fledged culture of saints and relics was not difficult, and the clergy soon sensed that along this route lay power, influence, and social leadership for themselves in Frankish society.
By 600 the numbers of the middle group of both early Frankish and Gallo-Roman society had greatly declined. Probably no more than 10 percent of the peasant population including the lower clergy, had managed to maintain a free status. With the economic decline of France and the rapid deurbanization that took place following the Frankish invasions, the bourgeois class all but disappeared. Certainly not more than 3 percent of the French population were townspeople in 600.
At the top of the social scale was a small group of people who possessed great private wealth and power. This group consisted of the royal family and the great provincial aristocracy—the dukes and counts, with their vast estates and territorial authority. This class of great lords, in which the bishops and more important abbots may be included, could not have constituted more than 2 percent of the population. In addition to this great aristocracy there was a large group of modest lords and ordinary free soldiers, who made up as much as 25 percent of the population of France in 600. Some of this group were wealthy landlords, but others were merely hired thugs who made up the armies of kings and aristocrats.
The social structure that had emerged in France, the most important kingdom created on the ruins of the western Roman Empire, was dominated by lords and serfs. Urban life had almost entirely disappeared, and all leadership had passed to a small group of royal princes and great aristocrats. These men were interested mainly in building up the wealth and power of their own families. Most of their lives were spent in warfare, they were ignorant of the arts of government, they were blind to the ideals of justice and peace, and they had no understanding of economic problems; for them, Christianity was a system of magic, miracles, and hagiography. A comparison of these leaders of French society at the beginning of the seventh century with men of the quality of Theodosius I, Ambrose, Augustine, and Symmachus must lead to the conclusion that the collapse of the western Roman Empire was a political, economic, and cultural disaster of the greatest magnitude.
Yet there is one important exception in this gloomy picture. An important way in which Frankish society differed from that of the later Roman Empire was the greater degree of freedom enjoyed by women, at least of the nobility and class of freemen and soldiers and landlords. Women in Frankish society were more independent of their fathers and brothers, more capable of making decisions about their lives, and allowed to hold landed property and to play a role in political life than in Roman times. A feature of narratives of the Frankish monarchy in its first two centuries is the intrigues and manipulations that women of the Merovingian family engaged in. That their intrigues seem just as volatile and violent as those of the men in the family may be regarded as another sign of the women’s freedom and equality.
This liberated condition of women conflicted with Roman family, legal, and political practice, and some bishops regarded it as conflicting with St. Paul’s myognyic view of women, whom he wanted, in Jewish fashion, to keep quiet and take a back seat in the churches and contemplate their divine dispensations to be chaste and perfectly celibate vessels of the Lord.
One of the intriguing aspects of medieval social history is to watch the tension between the Roman male chauvinist and the Frankish more egalitarian and liberated view of women. The more the Frankish nobility became Romanized and Christianized, the more the traditions of Roman law came into play and the more the status of women declined into subservience. But even in the eleventh century in frontier places like England or northern Germany there were still survivals of the independent German condition of at least wealthy high-born women that characterized Frankish society before 700.
Among Latinized countries of the West—France itself by 900—the autonomous figure of a woman of the lay nobility did not endure, but high-born wealthy Frankish women nonetheless created a viable legacy that persisted in the society of the High Middle Ages. The sisters, widows, and daughters of Frankish kings, dukes, and counts chose not to marry (or remarry again) and urged by their confident priestly confessors, took the veil and became nuns. In many instances these women brought with them to the nunneries they entered their private wealth in the form of land or treasure, which became part of the endowment of the convents. Frequently such a wealthy and aristocratic woman, if she entered the convent at a mature enough age, became the abbess of the community or succeeded to it eventually. It was considered good conduct in the ecclesiastical perspective for a widow or unmarried daughter or sister of a king or duke to found a convent, bringing with her other women of her class to establish a new community. The high-born abbess provided a substantial part of the nunnery’s endowment and got her father and other relatives to provide additional support. The nunnery would thus become a favorite family charity. It would not only receive women from the same family into its community in later decades and generations, but gain further gifts from the family.
It was women of the Frankish nobility, building on some Roman precedents, who created a familiar-model institution on the medieval scene, the well-endowed nunnery with a community heavily populated by daughters of the rich and powerful, leading to an ambience that combined quiet devotion, moderate learning, and disciplined spiritual exercises with a kind of remote aristocratic fastidiousness. The nunnery was as much a facet of the culture of the nobility as a variety of religious experience.
A majority of the Benedictine nunneries of the twelfth century in France and elsewhere in western Europe exhibited this profile. The women of the early medieval Frankish nobility played an important role in getting this tradition started. It was the most continuing, least controversial, and universally admired form of medieval feminist spirituality. It is much admired by women medievalists today who trek the route of the backwaters of the Loire or Rhine seeking frail manuscripts and other memorabilia that recall this lost world of well-born and comfortable sublimity.