As noted by Walter Pohl in the acknowledgments (vii), "This volume is the result of a series of meetings held by an international group of scholars in the course of the ESF [viz. European Science Foundation] project 'Transformation of the Roman World'." The project investigated the changes that occurred in the politics, economy, society, and culture of the Mediterranean and European worlds between the fourth and ninth centuries. This particular compilation is one of several resulting from the work of a project sub-group that dealt with the topic of "Imperium, gentes, et regna". Another volume resulting from the work of this sub-group is Walter Pohl, Helmut Reimitz eds., Strategies of Distinction. The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300-800 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1998), reviewed in 2000 in TMR by Deborah M. Deliyannis and Ralph Mathisen.
In the Foreward to this volume, Ian Wood notes that the "Transformation" project is significant because "so many of today's 'nations' rightly or wrongly trace their origins to the post-Roman period". (ix) With regard to disciplinary perceptions, Wood goes on to {tate that "there are barriers between the various national traditions of scholarship", with differences among the views of German, Italian, French, Spanish, and British scholars. He notes that the project "was created specifically as a foyer for breaking down such barriers". This being the case, one might hope to see in the volume being reviewed here, the first to be produced by the project, examples, on the one hand, of some of these differing perceptions, and, on the other, of some positive results of the cross-fertilization resulting from the three years of meetings that it encompassed.
Along with Wood's Foreward, an Introduction by the volume's editor Walter Pohl, and a Conclusion by Evangelos Chrysos, the volume contains six contributions, by Gerhard Wirth, Peter Heather, Walter Pohl, Wolf Liebeschuetz, Jean Durliat, and Herwig Wolfram, relating to the accommodation and integration of barbarian peoples within the imperial frontiers in the fourth through the sixth centuries.
The first study, by Gerhard Wirth, is entitled "Rome and its Germanic Partners in the Fourth Century" (pp. 13-55), and looks at Rome's foreign policy from a technical, legalistic viewpoint. Wirth begins by suggesting the need to deconstruct overly subtle definitions of "legal categories" and terms such as hospitium, clientela, and deditio, and to adopt "a simpler way of thinking". Legal sources, he suggests, "can be interpreted only provisionally", for the language was intended to be ambiguous so as to give officials "freedom to make the decision they deemed appropriate". In addition, modern assessments are distorted by scholars' "self- understanding" and "educational background". Roman foreign policy, Wirth continues, "is distinguished by a surprising degree of internal consistency" (15) in the Republican and early imperial periods, as concepts like amicitia, societas, and foedus evolved into the idea of imperium.
The term deditio is considered first. Wirth argues that this practice, which had originated in the Republic, continued right through into Late Antiquity as a concept for dealing with barbarian peoples. Dedition could occur in both war or peace, and "was almost always followed by the restitution of the punished state" (17); it resulted in "the perfect abolition of the public and private existence of the dediticii". Wirth notes that "the dediticius would no longer be a contract partner" (21), and that "deditio created a structure of protective relationships" that "did not compete with that of foedera". (23) After the Romans' experiences with supporting "half-barbarian" monarchies in the east, "it was no major step to apply this to the northern barbarians" in order "to preserve the continuity of a certain order in a world of constant fluctuation". Wirth suggests that "what seems to be tribute...is nothing more than foreign aid in an almost modern sense". Such policies may have "made the barbarians want to participate directly in the advantages of imperial civilization". (24) The old Republican concept of "destruction and restitution", however, was no longer valid in the later Principate, and it is unclear to what extent, in the new form of dedition, "capitulation played a role after a military conflict"; one finds instead "peaceful reception, which means a continuous deditio of small groups". (27) For the "peregrini dediticii", "prospects of Romanization must have been good" and "one can assume that...their tribes easily dissolved under such circumstances, and no more than a memory of them remained". (30) The designations of gentiles and laeti also are discussed. In the fourth century, the institution of deditio continued to provide a model for the integration of barbarians, and the Praefectus laetorum was "supervising a now deliberately initiated assimilation process". (44) Small Frankish groups, after dedition, were "immediately incorporated into the army". (45)
As for federates, they "were state-like political structures found along all of Rome's borders", which "were sustained by Rome and...seem to have been part of the Empire". (31-2) After the collapse of Roman authority in the third century, the concept of the "federate state" was "resurrected" in the fourth with the "creation of the Visigothic federation on the lower Danube". (41) This provided "an element of security that was absent on the Rhine frontier, where the federate tribes were smaller". (46) Wirth suggests that the Visigoths who begged admission into the empire in 376 "must have had dedition in mind...preceded by the abandonment of one's own existence". (47) In this regard, Wirth challenges the long-held view that the Visigoths entered the empire as federates, something inconsistent with his view of dediticii vis-a-vis federates: the term federate, he suggests, "fits only the sixth century" (53) because "a federate state...did not exist anymore". (54) Only in 395, Wirth argues, when Alaric declared himself king of the Goths, did he create "something like a new kind of state". (54) In sum, the word "partners" in Wirth's title lets the cat out of the bag regarding his editorial slant. He concludes that the long-standing concept of dedition, in an evolved state, provided a model for the integration and assimilation of northern barbarians into the Roman world as both soldiers and settlers in the fourth century and later.
Next comes Peter Heather discussing "Foedera and foederati of the Fourth Century" (pp. 57-74). He first considers legal theory and asks whether Roman treaties "followed a clearly-defined and universally applied legal form", and "whether groups bound by such treaties--so-called foederati--really had a precise and comparable status from one end of the Empire to another". (57) The way the questions are worded, with their stress on easily disputable absolutes, leads one inevitably to suspect that the answer to both will be "no".
Like Wirth, Heather sees the Hunnic invasions as marking a watershed in Roman relations with their neighbors, so he, too, proposes to focus on the pre-Hunnic period, beginning with Constantine's treaty with the Goths in 332. He begins by deconstructing the evidence of Jordanes as "fraudulent", even though it has won "general acceptance". (58) This view is based largely on the sixth-century sense of foederati as "foreigners acting as imperial troops". (59) But contemporary evidence does "not suggest that Constantine granted the Goths such a special relationship". (60) Rather, Ammianus, for example, uses the word foedus "indiscriminately of every kind of agreement the Roman state made with its neighbours", and primarily "of diplomatic agreements which followed capitulations by...'barbarians'". (61) This shows that deditio did not rule out a subsequent foedus, as once was thought; indeed, it seems to have been standard practice. But the other kind of foedus, an equal one involving no submission, still existed, as in the case of the Persians. Heather also makes the point, based on the Latin panegyrics, that any group that had submitted to the Romans could legitimately be portrayed as being "part of the Empire...not as full citizens, but as dependent subjects...even if no provincial organization was established and their existing social order continued". (63) Constantineos Gothic treaty of 332, therefore, becomes an example of "foedus after deditio". (64)
Heather then turns to "the consequences to foreign groups of becoming foederati of the Roman Empire". He proposes that there was no one-size-fits-all standard, but that the "precise terms negotiated...varied from case to case". (66) Terms could include payments, the sending of hostages, the rendering of military service, and trade arrangements. The Gothic treaty of 369, moreover, "established a totally different regime...a much more equal relationship", and was a totally different kind of diplomatic relation from that of 332. (67) The same diplomatic framework, therefore, sufficed for very different situations on the ground. All the peoples with whom agreements were made served as valuable sources of military manpower. Heather goes on to provide examples of how the "form of agreements...varied enormously". (69) Subsidies paid to barbarian peoples are seen here as a method of establishing "peace and stability" on the frontier. In sum, the "clearly defined and universally applied legal form" (57) that Heather proposed to seek never could have existed; each case had its own special circumstances. The Romans of course knew this, and Heather's conclusion makes perfect sense: any "diplomatic framework" had to be flexible enough to encompass many different kinds of initial conditions and final settlements.
Walter Pohl then considers "The Empire and the Lombards: Treaties and Negotiations in the Sixth Century", suggesting that "sixth-century Lombard history is as much about treaties...as about swords". (75) Relying primarily on Procopius and Gregory the Great, Pohl, like Heather, notes the "endless compromises" that Roman diplomacy had to make with barbarians. The Lombard invasion, Pohl suggests, disrupted generally successful "attempts to restore the empire". (77) Diplomatic dealings with barbarians, he concludes, "cannot be subsumed under any clearly defined type or model". (78) After a discussion of terminology (foedus, symmachia, homaichmia, enspondoi, katekooi, hypoforoi) (pp. 78-87), Pohl turns to the relations among Lombards, Gepids, and the empire. He describes the accommodation of the Lombards on Italian soil as "Integration ohne Anerkennung" (112), and proposes that the "modalities of their settlement" involved various sorts of agreements among Lombards kings and dukes, Byzantines, Italian bishops, and Italian cities. A lengthy discussion of possible means of the distribution of taxes and property, based on Paul the Deacon, results in the suggestion that "this arrangement involved some partition through which specific Romans became directly responsible for maintaining specific Lombards [involving] a fixed proportion of their gains". (121) Pohl concludes, not unexpectedly, that imperial treaties with the Lombards "show a variety of forms". (131)
The issues of taxes and accommodation are picked up by Wolf Liebeschuetz in his contribution entitled "Cities, Taxes and the Accommodation of the Barbarians: The Theories of Durliat and Goffart". Focusing on the Ostrogothic settlement of Italy, Liebeschuetz argues that barbarian settlers were assigned land rather than shares of tax revenues, and his study provides a prolegomenon for "a full refutation of the theory that the barbarian settlements after 418 involved grants not of land but of tax revenues". (149)
An opposing viewpoint is provided by Jean Durliat, who, in his "Cite, impot et integration des barbares", begins by discussing city revenues, distinguishing between the "reditus rei publicae" (fixed "canonical" taxes collected by the Praetorian Prefect) and the "tituli" or "vectigalia" (diverse other taxes collected by the Count of the Sacred Largesses). Two-thirds of these revenues were rendered to the imperial government; the rest was allocated to local administration. Durliat argues that references to property even in the law codes may refer not to land-qua-land, but to the tax income that emanated from it.
Durliat then focuses on the Ostrogothic settlement of Italy, suggesting that it was funded by the re-allocation not of land but of tax revenues, as evidenced, he argues, by Cassiodorus Variae 2. It is difficult to accept, however, that Variae 2.16.4 refers specifically to a recadastration; indeed, the phrase "censum non addendo, sed conservando" would seem to suggest exactly the opposite. In addition, this section may mean no more than that Theoderic conciliatorily did not raise the level of taxation, an interpretation consistent with the following clause, which refers to the "tertiae" allocated to Goths and Romans. Durliat's arguments that these tertiae refer to taxes due and not to landed property are difficult to accept in light of the many references to land (possessiones, cespitis, agri, substantiae, terminos constitutos) in the section (an objection Durliat attempts to ward of by claiming, as argued earlier, that such terms also can refer, by a kind of metonymy, to the taxes due upon the land [p. 171-2]).
Durliat's primary argument rests on his view of probability: he suggests that the Senate of Rome would not have flattered Theoderic "if they had really lost an important part of their property". (165) He also presumes that finding land for "20,000 to 30,000 Ostrogothic families" (153), or "20,000 to 25,000 warriors" (167), amounts to "an absurdity," and surely would have left some sign in the historical record. Durliat nowhere, however, offers any justification for this number of distributions. Indeed, one also might suggest that even if these numbers are valid, such distributions might not have been as disruptive as Durliat presumes. Land changed hands all the time. Lots of it. When it was done peacefully, no trace remained of it having been done. Only when violence intervened, as in the partitions near Orleans in the 440s, were reports made. More telling, perhaps, is Durliat's point that after the Justinianic reconquest of Italy in 554 there do not seem to have been any large-scale demands for the restitution of expropriated property. (168) But here one might take into account the deleterious effects of 25 years of warfare on both property and population. Moreover, were Goths who had occupied the said properties still around to contest their re-occupation by their original owners, presuming that the latter were themselves still around? Furthermore, we simply know too little about how barbarian settlers came into possession of landed property, which they surely did by one means or other (as noted by Durliat further on), to be able to be dogmatic on methods for its return. Perhaps the supposedly dispossessed Romans in fact viewed the original transaction as legal (and in this regard the Code of Euric offers valuable insights).
The final study is a brief 2 1/2 page (pp. 181-3) collection of three notes by Herwig Wolfram regarding "whether the settlement...involved the transfer of actual land or the apportioning of taxes". In the first, he offers a new translation of a passage from Malchus, although the failure to cite the original Greek leaves the reader at sea in assessing the value of the different translations presented (on which see also Chrysos). The second contains a cry~tic reference to the third edition of his Die Goten (Vienna, 1990) being "overlooked" regarding the role of the Roman collaborator Seronatus in assessing taxes in the Visigothic kingdom. And in the third he asserts, regarding a passage in the Vita Lupicini, that it has "hitherto been consistently overlooked", neglecting the extensive discussion, with full translation, in, e.g., R. Mathisen, Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul: Strategies for Survival in an Age of Transition (Austin, 1993) pp. 75, 101, 122-3, 128. Like others, Wolfram suggests that there can not be single model that fits all of the barbarian settlements.
The book ends with a "Conclusion: De foederatis iterum" by Evangelos Chrysos, which begins with a detailed survey of scholarship on Rome and the barbarians from the end of World War II to the present, subsuming both historical and archaeological studies. Referring to the meaning of terms such as foedus and deditio, Chrysos notes that the growing significance of vulgar Latin "effectively divested the technical terms of their exact meaning". (193) He sees a late- antique treaty as a "political bargain", and suggests that the sources usually do not distinguish between deditio and foedus. Much as in the modern day, the nuts and bolts of diplomatic settlements were agreed upon in advance; the concluding meeting on Roman soil was purely ceremonial. Finally, regarding emoluments, Chrysos comes down firmly in favor of land rather than tax-revenue distributions to barbarian settlers, at least for the fourth and fifth century.
In general, what results from these studies is not a growing sense of synthesis and coherence, but rather the deconstruction of "what we thought we knew", and the feeling we know less and less about more and more, a sentiment echoed by Chrysos, who called for "more caution and less certainty in our conclusions". (206) Treaties now are seen by some of the contributors as, practically speaking, ad-hoc affairs with no fixed rules whose only consistency and coherence were rhetorical. Barbarian settlements are viewed as being funded by either land distributions or tax-revenue allocations--the holders of the respective views remain as entrenched as ever. Although there is good evidence here for the existence of varied opinions, the hoped-for "barrier-breaking" mentioned by Wood in his Foreward is hardly manifested. What one finds, for example, is a recapitulation of several of the authors' past positions. But even if the contributors failed to convince each other to alter their views in any substantive manner, their exposition of them does provide an essential starting point for students and scholars who wish to go on from there.
A few corrigenda: p. 27: for "operatio" read "operation. p. 113: for "584" read "In 584"