Size of Barbarian Migrations

[Robert Vermaat]

This fighting force, if 1/5 of the Pannonian Alanic population, accounts for a civilian number of 150,000 people... yet this was perhaps only 1/2 (or less) of the original migrating group from the eastern steppes. If so, the Alanic migration was absolutely MASSIVE.

But was it a ‘migration’ in the sense of a large group of people trekking from a departure point to a planned goal, taking all their posessions with them? Or is it a different process, in which grazing lands are under pressure, so that new grazing lands are taken over in the other direction? In such a process, which takes decades, tribes also ‘migrate’, but much more gradual and not pre-planned.

Much of the Frankish ‘migration’ is more comparable to that of modern workers moving to another country. They fought for the Romans, and for a long time many went back home (which is shown by the funerary items) although more and more remain within the Empire after retirement. Gradually you sse the original settlements becoming smaller, until the 5th century there is a clear move towards the new Frankish-dominated lands in modern Belgium and France.
The Alans, too, were employed by the Romans in small groups, spread out in time and space.

Add to that the ethnogenese, which makes it very unclear to us which people actually belonged to those ‘migrating tribes’, and you get a different picture from that of the ‘fixed’ groups who force their way into the Empire, ox-carts and all.

I’d say that ‘defining’ the actual number of people in a migration is next to impossible, because even for the groups that we know from the sources the information by no means tells us what we want to know.