Empires and Barbarians: Migration, Development and the Birth of Europe
by Peter Heather
Macmillan, £25
Remember the Laurie Anderson chorus: “Big Science! Hallelujah! Big Science!”? Well, here we have Big History. Peter Heather is a Big Historian, whose 2005 study of The Fall of the Roman Empire thrillingly reassessed the reasons for the slow disintegration of that great power, which culminated in a walloping from the Huns.
In the earlier book – long yet fast-flowing, deeply serious yet twinkling with wit – Heather served up the juicy red meat of late classical history. In Empires and Barbarians, he is left, one has to say, with the rather more gristly and indigestible bits.
His subject is the massive shift of power which occurred in Europe between the birth of Jesus and the rise of Emperor Otto III. The first millennium began with a swaggering Rome in control of the Mediterranean shores while the rest of Europe wallowed in disunity, confusion and poverty. It ended with Rome’s empire blown away while new and mighty nation states had risen up in the north. The Western world had been turned upside down.
This is certainly Big History. Slavs, Goths, Saxons, Vikings and Magyars trundle inexorably across the vast face of Europe, overrunning each other and the borders of the Roman Empire. The impulse and the need to migrate filled up the continent, changed the world order and led to the creation of the first nation states.
How did these gigantic migrations occur? In recent years, historians have tended to discount the traditional view that these were clearly defined “peoples” on the move, armies with leaders in front and women and children behind. Far more likely they were looseknit, fissile bands of wanderers, who came in much smaller numbers than originally thought. The effects of migration had, according to the new doctrine, been greatly overrated.
Professor Heather begs to differ. “Migration,” he says, “must be taken seriously as a major theme of the first millennium” – but it must also be carefully reassessed. He overhauls some of the old migration models in the light of recent archaeological finds, and of his own exhaustive researches.
For example, around 166AD Marcus Aurelius launched a series of campaigns against various Germanic tribes along the Danube (the Marcomannic Wars). Many modern historians tend to regard these as simply punitive expeditions, but Heather combs through the fragments of contemporary chronicles for evidence that they were much more than that – a confused and desperate prelude to the Germanic and Slavic incursions of the next century.
The subtlety and complexity of this big book can seem forbidding. Peter Heather’s argument has a long, long line which is sometimes hard to cling onto amid the welter of obscure tribes and questionable texts and political convolutions. Yet his prose is unfailingly clear and bright, and he laces it with enough nutty summaries and moments of dramatic action to cheer the reader along.
Andrew Langley
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