Trouble was now building up from two sources. First there were the tribes of northern Europe. The Romans gave the name German to the wide variety of peoples who occupied the area from the Rhine and Danube valleys to the North Sea and the Baltic and as far east as the river Vistula. The Romans had long accepted that the Germans could not be incorporated into the empire. Experience had shown that their heavily wooded lands were impossible to conquer. Instead a variety of relationships had been built up. Many of them were peaceful, trading and diplomatic relationships underwritten with Roman subsidies. On occasions there was conflict but shrewd emperors realized the importance of playing the tribes off against each other rather than risking direct confrontation. As a result many Germans had adopted aspects of Roman culture and in some activities, metalworking, for instance, were as adept as the Romans. The Germans lacked an efficient centralized system of administration, but in certain respects their standard of living may not have been far below that of many parts of the empire. Romanization was not confined to the empire.
However, during the second and third centuries there were important changes taking place in the societies of northern and eastern Europe, although these are still impossible to define clearly. The difficulty lies in relating Roman sources that talk of large, relatively well-organized tribes assaulting the empire and the archaeological evidence that, insofar as it can give a coherent interpretation, suggests a much wider range of interactions on both sides of the border, many of which may not have involved any destruction. There seems to have been steady population growth together with the emergence of new, often expansionist, tribal groups. In the Black Sea area the Goths appear in the middle of the third century. Traditionally they have been seen as a single people with origins in Scandinavia but more recent research suggests that they were an amalgam of various migratory peoples, eastern German tribes, and the original settlers of the Black Sea region. The term never described an ethnic grouping but rather those whom Gothic leaders managed to forge into a fighting force. (This should be borne in mind when the term is used later in this book: the distinct tribal groups that gave their allegiance to Gothic leaders probably shifted with time.) They gathered their resources around the Black Sea and eventually were strong enough to threaten Asia Minor and the Balkans. In south-east Europe they came into conflict with the Sarma-tians, nomadic peoples of Asian origin, who had established themselves on the Hungarian plain. The Sarmatians in their turn were pushed towards the Roman frontier.
This period also sees the emergence of new Germanic cultures further north. One of them, the so-called Przeworsk culture that appeared in the late second century between the Vistula and Oder rivers, stands out because of its rich warrior burials. Another is the so-called Oksywie culture on the lower Vistula. These cultures were more highly militarized than was usual with the German tribes (for whom warfare was typically low level and seasonal) and it has been suggested that they were organized around the capture and trading of slaves. Although the evidence is still controversial there is some that indicates these cultures were expansionist. The Wielbark culture replaced the Oksywie and moved from the Baltic coast towards what is now the Ukraine. Archaeological evidence suggests that a new tribe, the Burgundians, emerged on the Elbe to the west of the Vistula about the same time as the homeland of the Oksywie/Wielbark cultures became deserted. Similarly another German tribe, the Vandals, may have been the successors of the people of the Przeworsk culture. All these attempts to link peoples to defined cultures need to be taken with great caution: allegiances to tribal chiefs shifted easily, and groups of warriors broke up and reformed often without leaving archaeological traces.
The emergence and expansion of these peoples put the German tribes along the Roman frontier under increasing pressure. One result was to force the smaller scattered peoples into larger tribal units. The process probably began in the early third century. The central German tribes were drawn together as a confederation known as the Alamanni (‘all men’), first attested in 213. The Franks emerged slightly later along the lower Rhine while the Saxons appear along the coast of the North Sea. The Germans also seem to have become more sophisticated fighters, probably as a result of service in the Roman armies. They had originally used short slashing swords that would not have been effective against Roman infantry. Now they were using long two-edged swords or rapiers that could penetrate armour more easily.
There is also evidence of skilled bowmen armed with weighted arrows, again an effective weapon against armoured troops. For the first time the Germans could face the Romans with some confidence, and as pressures built up on them from the north the riches and lands of the empire became more tempting. By the middle of the third century the Romans were vulnerable along the whole northern border from Saxons, Franks, Alamanni, Sarmatians, Goths, and other smaller tribes. Their raids were often small scale with the limited objective of obtaining plunder but they were bound to be frightening (which is why the Roman sources may have exaggerated them) and if left unchecked might lead to the gradual dislocation of the empire.
The strategic problems involved in meeting the threat were considerable. The border was so extended it could not be effectively guarded along its whole length. So long as the pressures from the north and north-east and the ceaseless regrouping of peoples beyond the borders continued, even a major victory over the German tribes could not bring a lasting peace. The Romans were to try a variety of policies from straightforward military confrontation to making treaties with individual tribes or buying them off with payments of cash. Garrisons were sometimes stationed over the border in German territory so that trouble could be snuffed out before it reached the empire, while on other occasions invaders were allowed to settle within the empire in the hope that they would defend their land against any future incomers (as well as providing troops for the Roman armies). None of these policies provided a permanent solution.
It was unlucky that the empire also faced a fresh threat from the east. Campaigns by the Romans against the Parthians in the 160s and 190s were relatively successful but this was partly because the Parthian empire was in decay. It was under threat from the Kushan empire in the east and it also faced internal disintegration because of its policy of relying on independent local leaders who were allowed their own armies and control of their own finances. In the early third century the last of the Parthian kings, Artabanus V, was overthrown by one Arda-shir, king of a tiny state in the southern province of Persis, the birthplace of the Achaemenid empire (see p. 104). Ardashir proclaimed himself to be heir of Achae-menids (though his dynasty took the name Sasanian after Sasan, a king from whom Ardashir claimed descent) and he was crowned in the tradition of Darius and Xerxes as King of Kings at Ctesiphon, on the Tigris, in 226. The Sasanian state was fervently nationalist, purged Persia of foreign influences, including those lingering from the Greeks, and revived the traditional religion of Zoroaster. Ardashir was succeeded by the formidable Shapur I (ad 240-70), the most accomplished campaigner the Romans had had to face for centuries. (Hannibal is the closest equivalent.) Shapur’s many victories over the Romans lay in his close study of the legions and their conservative tactics, an ability to move troops fast and to use sophisticated methods of siege warfare. He extended his empire into Armenia and Georgia and there was some talk, perhaps again exaggerated by the threatened Roman population, of his ambition to win back the traditional boundaries of the Achaemenid empire beyond the Bosporus.
Map 15 Invaders of the Roman Empire, ad 170-370
World History
