According to Taci-tus, Germans held land based on social staTaci-tus, councils met regularly, leaders may have been elected for life, and landless warriors attached themselves to particu
Trang 1to the attitudes and behaviors of warriors According to
Taci-tus, Germans held land based on social staTaci-tus, councils met
regularly, leaders may have been elected for life, and landless
warriors attached themselves to particularly eff ective chiefs
in anticipation of the glory and spoils of battle A pithy quote
tells how spiritless it is to toil over a plow when one’s needs
could be met by the loss of a little blood
In Caesar’s time land was not held privately, and
agricul-ture was deemphasized in favor of pastoralism Animals were
oft en acquired through raiding, and warfare was endemic
Roman coinage provides clues to the pressures that warfare
placed upon the empire Coins were a widely distributed
me-dium of communication that leave little doubt that the
Ro-mans felt a continual need to reinforce the image of victory
over German peoples in commemorative issues for individual
Roman leaders and, in some cases, for specifi c confl icts Most
images of Germans depicted on coinage were of bound and
subjugated Germans, both male and female Oft en when the
images of German people were absent, they were represented
by their distinctive weaponry
In the account of Caesar’s meeting with the German
chief Ariovistus (fl ca 71–58 b.c.e.), who was spending the
summer in lands held by the Celtic Sequani near the Seine,
Caesar indicates that the Germans had been joined by a
num-ber of other groups, all of them eager to take advantage of
the seasonal fruits extracted from the harassed Sequani
Ar-iovistus had led his people into the region to reduce stress on
the valuable resources of his home territory across the Rhine
River He boasted that his undefeated people were superior to
Caesar’s own soldiers in courage and pointed out that their
skill with weapons had enabled them to avoid living under
a roof for 14 years Caesar ultimately interceded with force,
defeating Ariovistus and his multitribal army and pushing
them back across the Rhine, but the account promotes an
un-derstanding of the Germans’ esteem for independence and
for the role of mobility in maintaining it
Th e movement of waves of Germans marks the
begin-ning of a period of migration that started around 300 c.e
and continued well past the collapse of the Roman Empire
Extraordinary disruption, both internal to the imperial
Ro-man provinces and external among various GerRo-manic groups
competing for resources, may have favored the most
aggres-sive or persuaaggres-sive warriors, and tribal or group affi liation
ap-pears relatively fl uid, depending upon the motivations and
objectives of the group members Entry into temporary
alli-ances between otherwise competitive groups was facilitated
by common cultural referents that promoted petty warfare as
an economic strategy and by the Germanic warrior-class
ide-ology Th is type of economic base diff ered dramatically from
the Roman system of agrarian estates and town markets that
immediately preceded it
Breaches of the frontier by migrating peoples cut swaths
into imperial territory, further decimating the Roman
sys-tem of distribution and communication Th e initial phases
of German resettlement, the mechanism by which one group
successfully replaced another on the landscape, can be said to follow models proposed for Britain: that is, a complex com-bination of internal uprisings against a crumbling Roman regime coupled with continual external assaults by groups
of people attempting to be incorporated into the various systems, whether for trade, general access to goods, relative stability and security, or access to land Th ere seem to have been many reasons for migrating people to try to get into Ro-man-held regions
Germanic peoples who migrated into Roman-controlled territories included groups such as the Friedenhain-Prestov-ice from Bohemia, the present-day Czech Republic and Slova-kia, who had been on the Roman payroll in defense of towns
on the Danube and were settled before the withdrawal of Ro-man forces from Raetia Moving westward, the AlaRo-manni or Swabians occupied the area of present-day Switzerland, the German state of Baden-Württemberg, and the Bavarian ad-ministrative district of Swabia Th e Bavarii, also identifi ed
as Boioarians (again from Bohemia), occupied southeastern Bavaria and Austria, having moved into territory vacated by the Ostrogoths Th ese peoples were associated with the Mar-comanni and with the Celtic Boii from Bohemia Th ey ap-pear to have been forced west into Raetia under pressure from Czechs in Bohemia, who were being pressed by Serbs and Slavs All of these groups were moving westward in advance
of the Huns, who had reached the Danube in 376 c.e
Th e period of stress and resettlement lasted for several centuries Changes apparent from the archaeological record indicate a pattern of settlement, conquest, and consolidation and the development of tribal coalitions that, in some ways, are diff erentiated between central and western Europe In the
fi rst place, the degree of Romanization in eastern-central Eu-rope appears to have been less tenacious than farther west in Gaul and East Anglia In the second, the demographic struc-ture of the resettled populations is more varied Th e collapse
of the Roman estates happened relatively quickly Th is can
be seen in examples such as that provided by the Gutshof (a private farmstead or estate) at Nördlingen, a site of Alamanni conquest in Schwaben, where the Roman-style estate was gutted and a large German wooden house was constructed in the middle of the complex between the ruined Roman struc-tures In addition to the relative weakness of institutional-ized Roman systems in place by the mid-fourth century c.e., the demographic breakdown for Austria, Germany, Switzer-land, and France diff ers from that of Anglo-Saxon Britain if models are accurate that assert that invading forces in Britain were predominantly male Burial evidence for other parts of Europe demonstrates an inclusive population
GREECE
BY JEFFREY S CARNES
What is now mainland Greece was settled during the early Neolithic Era (ca 7000 b.c.e.) by peoples about whom little
is known Th e arrival of Greek speakers came considerably
710 migration and population movements: Greece