Germanic Urbanisation & Infrastructure Post Augustus

[Nathan Ross]

I doubt that Nathan was looking it that way, because this was by no means a new thing.

Yes, I was perhaps being a bit facetious with the word 'mystery'!

However, I do think we can see the various 'barbarian' groups being considerably more effective in the third century than they were during even the Marcomannic war, when they only got as far as Aquileia. From Gaul to Greece and into Asia Minor we see widespread plundering and destruction, and the Romans suffered several defeats too - Abrittus in 251, most prominently, but also Aurelian's defeat at Placentia twenty years later. I doubt the Heruli got to sack and burn Athens in 267 without overcoming some opposition along the way either.

As I say, though, most actual battles were Roman victories. And, just as with the fifth century, we can no longer claim that barbarian incursions caused the crisis; rather they took advantage of it, exacerbated it, and prolonged it.

So there's no need, on the face of it, to assume that 'barbarian' armies of the 3rd-4th centuries were necessarily better armed or equipped, or better organised, or that their societies were necessarily more advanced than they had been in the 1st-2nd. They probably were in some respects, but in ways that has left little hard evidence. Only by the 5th century do we see a definite change, and by then the 'barbarians' are operating inside the empire anyway.

On the vexed question of ethnogenesis and 'supertribes': the constant movement of new peoples towards the wealth and stability of the imperial frontier, and their constant feed into the empire by one means or another, may have created quite a dynamic flux of population in the immediate 'barbarian' hinterland, disguised by the names Romans used for various foreign peoples.

In other words, were the people the Romans called the Chamavi in the 4th century necessarily descended from the earlier people of the same name? How about the Frisii, the Chatti, or the Batavi? Our evidence in most cases is too thin to permit any assumption, I think.