Forty years ago, Gerald Bonner said, "Future historians will have to...try to build up a comprehensive picture of the Germanic invasions from both sides" ( Journal of Roman Studies, 56 [1966] 247). The harder part of this prospectus is carried out here by Peter Heather, with the accent on theory, not verbal pictures. He offers a full and very serious rehabilitation of the traditional, " Völkerwanderung" accounts of the barbarian invasions, as well as a firm attack on revisionist positions. This is important work, carrying forward the subject to include the rise of the Slavs and reaching to the end of the first millennium. Empires and Barbarians will deservedly have a prominent and enduring place in barbarian and early medieval studies. Heather brandishes the standard of counterrevolution in a corrective to recent tendencies that, like all positions, are open to debate.
A preliminary caution is needed. The title Empires and Barbarians does not accurately describe a seven-hundred-page book in which the Carolingian and Ottonian empires, together, whiz past in four pages (366-69), and the Roman Empire is largely omitted (333). Christianity, too, is almost wholly absent. Heather's subject is barbarians without empires, and even this adjustment needs qualification. Few detailed accounts of barbarian doings, such as, say, the great western invasion of 406, are supplied. Particulars of these and other high points are outweighed by drawn-out theoretical arguments. Heather's subtitle (of the English edition), "The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe," puts one in mind of Émilienne Demougeot's La formation de l'Europe et les invasions barbares (1969, 1979) or Geoffrey Barraclough's The Crucible of Europe (1976); Gibbon himself observed that "the most civilized nations of modern Europe issued from the forests of Germany." Heather's theme is old, but the execution is different. Where Demougeot assembled many scraps of factual evidence and cemented them with a rhetoric of migrations, Heather prefers social science, such as the "discipline of migration studies" and investigations of "group identity." That seems to be the program of his book: to show what theoretical considerations, intensely argued, can do to bring into being a fully explained history of barbarians from their own "side," Slavic as well as Germanic. And the integrity of that barbarian side, as here conceived, requires that, as much as possible, the histories of the various empires should be left out.
Even when empires are discounted, there are many omissions. The index lists no Wallia, Ricimer, Amalasuntha, Alboin, Leovigild, or Dagobert. Christian dignitaries fare very poorly: no Augustine, Patrick, Caesarius of Arles, Columbanus, Theodore of Tarsus, or Boniface. Charles Martel, who is mentioned once in the text (367), is left out of the index, but indexing flaws cannot account for all the gaps. Startlingly, (Gothic) Arianism is another absentee, though not wholly from the text (310). Clovis's conversion to Catholicism is an afterthought (ibid.). Empires and Barbarians is not meant to be an extended history of falling Rome and the early Middle Ages. What is offered is "the fundamental transformation of barbarian Europe in the first millennium AD" (xvi), often in a systematizing and synoptic presentation: the all-seeing eye. A good example of this approach is the last chapter, whose compressed survey of first millennium A.D. history is largely abstract. To tell from the attached blurbs, non-specialist readers have responded warmly to the book. Perhaps they do not know, or are grateful for, how much of the subject and its complexities is left out.
Although one does not immediately realize it, Heather is writing political history; his subject is the rise of the "Germani," Slavs, and Scandinavians. The originality of the book (much, not all) is its energetic and resourceful striving to establish close-to-scientific explanations for the major political phenomena of a millennium: the extension of the Germanic and Slavic peoples into the space they occupy today. It feels sometimes as though we were in a general staff situation room, moving counters over a map; everything is explained, with generous helpings of the wisdom of hindsight. When evidence runs out, conjectures and "serious guesses" take over; "Although I cannot prove it, I would be willing to bet..." (600). Political history crowds out everything else. Intermittently, the register changes and becomes informal; we sense an instructor jogging awake a roomful of fifteen to twenty-five-year-old males (the eight hundred sex-slaves of a Rus king and twelve wives of Samo [at least twice]; a hearty laugh over the massacre of the Slavniks and its Chicago gangland parallel; "Huns on the Run" as a chapter title; multiple castrations as curtain raiser in the Prologue). But these intrusions are rare. Empires and Barbarians is a sober book of learned controversies, not lacking repetitions, oriented almost wholly to a narrow, well-prepared audience of fellow-specialists, and focusing on an aggregate of arguments that will worry scholars for decades to come. No one in the business can ignore it or fail to be impressed by its evidence and sustained line of reasoning.
Heather's handling of archeology, lots of it, is exemplary. Although filtered by modern commentators, these relics speak more directly for the barbarians than literate witnesses. Heather acquaints us with some discoveries whose significance is self-apparent, but, most of the time, controversy accompanies archeology. He meets these disputes head-on, and at all the length needed to do them justice. Having picked his way through previous arguments, he leads us to his own reasoned interpretation. The discussion of the early Slavs is in itself worth the price of the book. The Anglo-Saxon and Frankish cases are must reading; they may be much contested. The comparably detailed handling of Gothic material also involves vigorous debate, to less profit since it is hard to see (by me at least) how this slice of the Gothic past has much bearing on the Gothic future. Not the least striking of Heather's arguments is that Attila's "imperial" burial was the prototype for all rich barbarian graves, in descending order of splendor. Heather's deployment and analysis of archeological evidence have a large and novel part in his exposition. They are an enduring achievement.
A pair of explanatory cycles play a prominent part. The well known one, which Heather first argued in 1995, concerns the invasion of the Huns. He maintains that the surge of Huns that brought on the Gothic entrance into imperial territory in 376 was complemented by a second Hunnic surge of exactly the same kind thirty years later, a surge that again impelled multiple, fatal barbarian incursions into the Empire. The contention is that, far from there being complex causes of Roman decline and fall, the Huns brought down the Western Empire straightforwardly in consecutive steps. The second, more elaborate replicating scheme concerns the rise of the "Germani" and, later, that of the Slavs. The recurrence here consists of a string of linked causes: a dramatic expansion of barbarian agricultural output made possible large increases in food renders to military kings enabling them to take many additional men into their specialized retinues and feed them the huge meals (sic, 564) they needed in order to exercise strenuously with their new heavier weapons, the result being much greater, first, Germanic, next, Slavic, offensive power. This explanatory package is so readily assimilable that it risks entering countless examination scripts. One wonders, though, whether the terms of the argument are not so abstract that they may be inserted almost anywhere in history. The Hunnic cycle has the advantage of specificity.
Heather's handling of factual details is not always beyond question. The sources tell us that Stilicho, after crushing Radagaisus's invasion, acquired 12,000 new soldiers: the élite of the defeated army; but, to hear Heather tell it, Stilicho detached these 12,000 from Radagaisus before the battle. At best, this is a daring conjecture. The "Vandal-Alan coalition" very often drawn to our attention is based on a misapprehension of the evidence. The conditions of Aadministered settlement" are similarly garbled. The Vita s. Severini contains no Sciri; Heather has them materialize on the assumption that they were Odoacer's companions. Christian matters, on their rare outings, give trouble. Heather apparently believes that an archbishop benefitted from the tithes of the parishes of his suffragans, and also thinks that conversion brought rulers much cash. Yet, kings and laymen loaded churches with lucrative lands, privileges, and powers; this looks rather like an expense or, more kindly, a social investment. Early medieval laws show freedmen permanently attached to their manumitters; this feature, firmly declared to be non-Roman, is the twig on which Heather hangs the immigrants' effect on social structures. But were permanent freedmen really repugnant to late Rome? The main problem with historical details, however, is that masses of them, starting with the empires, are ignored.
After having tracked down the origin of, and deprecated, the iconic, line- and arrow-rich map of the Völkerwanderung, I am faced here with its implicit rehabilitation. I have deplored the message of the map, that unchained migrations were the main content of the centuries in question; Heather contends strongly that this was largely the case. As befits a champion of the Völkerwanderung (though he begs off Völker), he pays much attention to migration and appeals heavily to modern "comparative migration science." He makes strong cases, and this is not the place to argue with him. No one doubts that many people moved in 1-1000 A.D.; "Of migrations there is no end, for man is always on the move" (Hocart). Hardly anything happens in history without humans moving. Heather insists that there is more to this than a generally prevalent condition: migrations are quantifiable and belong more to some ages than to others. The subject certainly cannot be taken as settled. Incidentally, twenty-one black-and-white maps are supplied, many of them original and illuminating. It's hard to understand why they are bunched together at the end rather than distributed throughout the book at the spots where they would be useful to readers.
Rumor suggests that Empires and Barbarians will be likened, mutatis mutandis, to the Pirenne thesis. There is a difference, though. Mohamet and Charlemagne is full of persons, dates, and events; like it or not, the conclusion that Mohamet explains Charlemagne proceeds from historical "facts." Opponents have marshalled other facts to refute it. Heather's thesis, singular or plural, is not of this kind. Grounded in social science, audacious comparisons, and weighty conjectures, it is proof against merely empirical research and calls for a wholly different sort of adhesion from Pirenne's. He challenges us to ask whether we really want "a kind of unified field theory behind the broader transformation of barbarian Europe" (xvii). When faced with statements such as that "entities like Moravia...made it no longer possible for a Mediterranean-based state to exercise supranational hegemony as the Roman Empire had done one thousand years before" (ibid.), or "Move forward a thousand years, and the world has turned" (xv), do we nod assent, or wince? Empires and Barbarians will deservedly be much read and reread; its importance and depth are beyond doubt. But the kind of timeless all-seeing-eye history that much of it embodies is likely to call up a wide variety of responses.