The preoccupation with Alaric’s Goths had left the western government paralysed while far more serious incursions were taking place to the north. At the end of 406 there had been a major invasion of northern Gaul, over the frozen Rhine, by Vandals, Sueves, and Alamanni. This time they were largely unopposed (although the Franks, now settled along the border, did honour early promises and offer some resistance) and spread quickly southwards. The Romans were forced to replace their command centre at Trier with Arles in the far south of Gaul. The collapse of the Roman defences was viewed with dismay in Britain, which was itself suffering raids from Saxons and others. The British legions took matters into their own hands. An abandoned Gaul meant an isolated and indefensible Britain. The legions elevated one of their number, Constantine, as emperor and it was Constantine who crossed into Gaul to lead a counter-attack. In the short term he was astonishingly successful. He gained some kind of control over both Gaul and Spain and in 409 Honorius was temporarily forced to accept him as a fellow Augustus.
However, Constantine’s ‘empire’, which he ruled from Arles, was short-lived. His Spanish commanders proclaimed their own emperor and Britain proved too distant from Arles to be controlled. The Roman administration there seems simply to have fallen apart and was never revived. By 430 coinage had ceased and urban life was already in decay. Rival invaders, Scots, Saxons, Angles, and Jutes, took over the country and no central rule was to be reimposed for centuries. In Gaul itself another German people, the Burgundians, appear now to have crossed into the empire and established themselves south of Trier. Constantine was reduced to holding out in Arles, where he was eventually captured by Honorius’ new magister militum, Constantius, in 411 and put to death.
It appears that from now on the western empire was unable to launch any major military initiatives with its own troops. Quite what had happened to the Roman armies is difficult to discover. The Notitia Dignitatum, the ‘Register of Civil and Military Dignitaries, compiled some time after 395 and surviving in a western copy, lists military units with a nominal total of 250,000 men in the west but in reality there seem to have been only about 65,000 troops, perhaps 30,000 each in Gaul and Italy. Most of these were probably Germans. Germans had served as mercenaries for centuries, making their fortunes in Roman service and then returning to their homes. More recently prisoners of war, Sueves, Sarmatians, and Burgundians among them, had been settled and bound to military service but now there were also whole contingents of Franks and Goths serving under their own officers. (The cemeteries of Roman forts of the late fourth and early fifth centuries in Belgium show a proportion of German troops ranging from 20 to 70 per cent.) The Germans had usually proved to be loyal and hardy fighters but by the early fifth century the armies do not seem to have operated as effective and controlled units. Increasingly the administration had to rely on the unsatisfactory alternative of using one tribe directly against another. The Visigoths, for instance, were used against the Burgundians in the north and then sent into Spain against the Vandals. They were then settled in 418 in Aquitaine between Toulouse and the Atlantic as a ‘federate’ kingdom.
The details of this new arrangement, in effect the recognition of a German kingdom within the empire, remain obscure. One view put forward by Walter Gof-fart in his Barbarians and Romans (Princeton, 1987) is that a proportion of the tax revenue from the area they settled in was diverted directly to Germans, in effect depriving the Roman state of it. If this is true the Visigoths had secured some independence while further diminishing the resources of the imperial government. The trouble was that the Visigoths had no incentive to remain within the boundaries allocated them and they were soon set on further expansion. The same was true of the Sueves who had settled in Galicia (north-western Spain). They too were given federate status but by the 430s were migrating further into Spain.
Meanwhile, the Vandals, who had crossed into Spain with the Sueves in 409, had come to rest in the south of the country. In 429 they moved on. Their leader Gai-seric, perhaps the most successful of all the Germanic leaders, led them across the straits into Africa. Twenty thousand men and their families, 80,000 in all, made the crossing. It was a shrewd move. Not only was the land fertile but Italy still drew on its surplus of corn. Gaiseric knew that by holding Africa he could put direct pressure on the centre of the empire. Once ashore the Vandals moved quickly along the coast taking the main ports. (The elderly Augustine died in Hippo in 430 while the city was under siege.) In 435 the Romans were forced to give the Vandal kingdom federate status but this did not stop further expansion. Carthage was sacked in 439 and Gaiseric then seized the islands of the western Mediterranean. These were the greatest defeats the empire had yet suffered, not least in the loss of yet more desperately needed resources.
World History
