Germanic Urbanisation & Infrastructure Post Augustus

[Nathan Ross]

do you think this remained a viable policy for the Romans right up until the collapse of the west, or do you think at some point it turned from mostly being a beneficial relationship for Rome to being a mostly disastrous relationship for Rome?

I'd say it probably remained mostly viable up until the very end. We tend to think of the Roman frontier as being under constant pressure from hordes of barbarian invaders, but actual incursions were fairly infrequent and the really big effective ones rare indeed. Most frontier conflict involved the Romans sending expeditions into barbaricum. The Roman frontier was less a defensive perimeter than a zone of control, from which force could be projected outwards when necessary.

In most cases when big invasions happen, it's people from the distant hinterland who are involved, rather than those living on the frontier itself. In the very late 4th century the Romans appear to have contracted out the defence of the Rhine below Mainz to the Franks (although this is controversial) - It was the Franks who mounted the defence against the invasions of Gaul in AD405. They were unsuccessful, but obviously the Franks felt they had more to lose if the frontier collapsed, while the incoming peoples wanted direct access to Roman plunder.

With regard to your question about economics: it's not something I know much about, but as the barbarian peoples had no coinage they must have traded something else with the Romans - after the end of the wars of expansion a constant supply of slaves could only come from barbaricum, and there was amber from the baltic too. Luxury goods for luxury goods, basically.

particularly in the accounts of Ammianus Marcellinus there are often widespread references to armour being used in equal numbers on both sides during Rome’s various battles with the Germans and Goths during the 4th century... there does seem to be a definitive improvement in the German’s ability to ‘take a punch’ after the mid second century.

In his famous description of Strasbourg Ammianus mentions 'gleaming helms and shields' discarded in the Alamannic rout. But he earlier describes the barbarian king Chnodomar as 'conspicuous above others by the gleam of his armour', which would imply that most of the Alamanni did not wear body armour - an implicaiton supported by the details of Roman troops stabbing them in their exposed bodies 'left bare by their frenzied rage'.

We should remember that barbarian peoples of earlier centuries could and did defeat the Romans too: the Cimbri and Teutons, and later the Germanic alliance under Arminius both defeated Roman armies, the Dacians destroyed a Roman expedition in AD85 and the Sarmatians destroyed a legion in AD91. So we perhaps don't need to assume that effective barbarian armies of later eras were necessarily better equipped on any uniform level. If the barbarian peoples themselves had any sort of intensive armoury industry, it has left no trace.

I believe there is also a reference by Priscus to Attila the Hun constructing a Roman Villa in Hunnish territory

Ah yes, well remembered! I think Attila had a sort of folding flat-pack palace made of wooden boards, but his 2nd-in-command had a Roman stone bathhouse that he'd transported in pieces from Pannonia, reconstructed by a captive Roman engineer. We have no way of knowing how common this sort of thing might have been!

why in the roughly 500 years... did the geographical region we now think of as eastern europe seemingly not advance economically like Gaul had... you would think the huge increase in tradable goods flowing across the border would have some kind of impact on Germanic and Gothic transportation infrastructure...

Gaul was inside the empire, of course, while the other areas were not.

I think we'd have to consider what sort of things the Romans were trading, and what they were not. A lot of the Roman stuff that's turned up in 'barbarian' areas has been quite high status metalwork, pottery and arms. Of course, it would be difficult to trace the origin of a lot of the poorer sorts of material culture, but it does seem that the Romans were eager to keep the barbarian elites dependent on their supplies, which perhaps would stop them developing industries of their own. They certainly don't seem to be have been in a rush to start exporting urban planners, engineers and architects.

There seem to have been certain prohibitions on cross border trade as well. Supposedly it was illegal to trade weapons with the barbarians, although so many Roman weapons have been found in barbarian territory that the ban was either widely ignored or sporadic. This paper by Boris Rankov on 'the supposed ban on the export of weapons' is very interesting - the only specific law against arms dealing dates to AD455, and includes a ban on dealing in raw materials as well. Combined with another law (cited in the paper) against teaching barbarians how to build ships, we can perhaps see a deliberate attempt to stop non-Romans gaining any kind of technological parity or possible advantage. A losing battle, as history shows!