“This book has taken me an extremely long time to write,” Peter Heather acknowledges in the first sentence of “Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Modern Europe,” and no wonder: its nearly eight hundred pages detail the end of the Roman Empire and its relation to each of the dominant barbarian societies of Europe in the first millennium A.D. Heather, a professor of medieval history at King’s College London, also has written “The Goths,” “The Visigoths in the Migration Period,” “The Fall of the Roman Empire,” and “Goths and Romans”; he recently took the time to answer my questions on Rome, migration, and the competing schools of barbarian scholarship.
Why Rome?
My original interest in things Roman goes back a long way into childhood. My mother was a great history nut, so we always visited a lot of ancient sites (only within the U.K., in fact; my parents were classic English and didn’t like it “abroad”). The Roman ones were totally astonishing even to my very young eyes for the quality of workmanship and the overwhelming scale of it all. It’s not only the subject matter which is so interesting to me, but also—I found—the whole way of working. Because of the nature of the evidence, you can never just go away and look up the answer you're after in some dusty archive. The available materials are always massively incomplete and you’re always having to think of ways of deriving some kind of reasonably likely answer from intractable data. For me, that’s the great intellectual excitement in the mode of working: it’s like a huge cryptic crossword puzzle with lots of bad and incomplete clues.
Why did you pick this particular time period—the first millennium A.D.—as your book’s focus?
I felt that such a wide canvas was necessary to tell the story that it contains, and also to put the fall of the western Roman Empire into proper perspective. Saying that might sound a bit odd, given that the last western emperor was deposed in 476 A.D., but remember Chairman Mao’s famous response when asked in the nineteen-fifties if the French Revolution was a good thing: “It’s too early to tell.”
What the book is trying to show is that the Roman Empire came into existence at a point where the relative underdevelopment of central, eastern, and northern Europe meant that the comparatively more developed Mediterranean world could provide a powerbase of sufficient strength to dominate the continent. As soon as development in northern Europe caught up, however, that relationship was bound to reverse, no matter what any Roman ruler might have tried to do about it. You can also see the first millennium as the time when Europe as some kind of unitary entity comes into being. By the end of it, dynasties are in place across the vast majority of its territory, and their subsequent history will lead pretty directly to the modern map of states. The same had not been remotely true at the birth of Christ a thousand years before.
The book’s goal seems to be nothing less than the resolution and integration of two approaches to the evolution of barbarian civilization: migration and group identity. Why have these concepts been at odds, and why do you view them as complementary?
Up to the nineteen-sixties, the key element that people focussed on in the story of Europe’s existence was migration. The influence of nineteenth-century nationalism made Europeans want to trace the ancestry of their modern nations back to a distinct set of ancestors, who were different from—and usually thought of as better than—any of their immediate neighbors. That kind of claim was easier to sustain if you portrayed your ancestral community as having arrived in what would then become its permanent home as a result of mass migration: such as the Anglo-Saxons to England, Bulgars to Bulgaria, and countless other examples. It also fitted in with a view of the ancient past, which saw one population group after another replacing each other as the dominant force in the landscape.
Dissatisfaction with this very simple view of the past was building up, however, and, since the nineteen-sixties, has exploded into the field. Study of nationalism itself made it clear that modern nations were built in observable time out of lots of disparate units, and not the direct descendants of ancient populations at all. At the same time, archaeologists rightly asserted that there were a million reasons why patterns of material cultural remains might change—such as the adoption of new technologies, new religious beliefs, or processes of adapting to changing environments—other than the arrival of new outside population mass to replace the whoever the current sitting tenants happened to be. Much of this reaction was absolutely necessary, but because mass migration had played such a massive role in the previous general vision of the past, it has led—particularly among archaeologists—to an almost total rejection of migration as having played any major role in important developments of the past.
What I’ve tried to do is use the complex understandings of modern migration that have been developed in the past fifty years or so to try to make better sense of the ancient records. What has emerged, I think, suggests without much doubt that migration played only a secondary role alongside developments such as massive population increase—the product of better agriculture so that food increased hugely in availability—and slow evolutions in social and political structure. But this secondary role was by no means insignificant, and the types of migration being reported in the first millennium make sense against modern understandings of human population movement, when due allowance is made for the structural differences between the first millennium and the third.
What lessons from the past on migration and group identity are relevant today?
To my mind, the most relevant finding is that this whole process of economic development and state formation in the non-imperial Europe of the first millennium was the result of a developing range of contacts with the more developed imperial world. In a process highly analogous to modern globalization, flows of wealth, weaponry, technology, and ideas ran from more developed Europe into its less developed periphery in increasing quantities and over a wider geographical area as the first millennium progressed. And, as in modern globalization, the benefits of all this were not shared equally by the totality of the population in non-imperial Europe, but were largely monopolized by particular groupings who used the wealth weaponry and ideologies to build new political structures which put themselves firmly at the head of their own societies.
Sometimes it’s impossible to remain imperial. If your imperial power—as it often is—is based on a pattern of precocious regional development, then as soon as surrounding regions catch up, as they undoubtedly will, that power must ebb (the fate of the Mediterranean in the first millennium). In these circumstances, it is important to accept the inevitable and gracefully renegotiate a new strategic balance of power, or one is likely to be imposed by force.
