Anthropology Archive

The Marcomannic Wars and the Emergence of Aggressive Tribal Confederacies

From 166 to 180 c.e. the Romans responded to these pressures in a series of what have been called the Marcomannic Wars, although the Quadi and Sarmatians were also major players in them. At the end of these conflicts the Romans had reestablished the Middle Danube frontier for the time being.

Probably in reaction to the Marcomannic Wars and conflicts along the Rhine frontier, many among the Germanic tribes underwent a sociopolitical transformation. By the next century a new phenomenon had appeared among the Germanics: large, aggressive confederacies of tribes led by permanent war-leaders-cum-

kings. The first of these mentioned in historical sources were the Alamanni, driven out of Upper Germany by the Roman emperor Caracalla in 213 c.e. The name Alamanni meant "all men" or "everyone," a characterization that indicates that Germanic society was transcending the simple tribalism of the past. Their territory lay between the Upper Elbe and the Rhine, formerly the land of the Suebi and Semnones. The Alamannic confederacy had staying power, and 20 years later they again broke through the Rhine border and wreaked havoc in the frontier provinces. Their incursions led to the abandonment of the Roman frontier system along the Rhine and Danube Rivers in 260 c.e.

The Franks east of the Rhine were another such tribal grouping, first mentioned in sources after 250 c.e., which probably emerged early in the third century c.e., as signs of the weakening Roman grip on the Rhine border tempted war bands to try forays into imperial territory. Their central political cohesiveness seems to have been rather less than that of the Alamanni until later, and they had a much closer relationship with Romans as well—Frankish groups were settled under Roman authority west of the Lower Rhine in the late third century. Franks were also sea raiders on the rich North Sea coastal trade, and their disruption of this trade perhaps was a factor in the systems crisis fueling the mass migrations of the time. A series of Frankish graves between the Rhine and the Seine in Gaul dating to the late fourth century were richly furnished with fine weaponry and other elite goods, many of them produced east of the Rhine. These included female burials, a sign that kin groups were part of this trans-Rhenish settlement of Germanic Franks. Frankish warriors may have been marshaled to protect Roman estates in the region from their fellow Germanics, as evidenced by a Germanic settlement that has been found in the Meuse River valley close to a Roman villa; many other such sites have been found.

Tensions in the interior of Germania affected Germanic tribes in the east as well, and in the second century c.e. war bands from there, among them members of the tribe called the Gutones, moved to their east into the Black Sea coastal region, where they met and mingled with nomadic steppe peoples and populations gathered around the Greek and Roman cities along the Black Sea. German war bands entered into alliances with the various groups, who became increasingly unified under the command of a single overall war leader or king. The king became the focus of a system or network of personal loyalties that fanned out from him to greater, then lesser chieftains on down to individual free warriors. The peoples of this confederacy were called by the Romans the Goths, a name possibly derived from Gutones, perhaps an ancestral tribe. The great heterogeneity of the members of this congeries of war bands, tribes, and other groupings required that all accept a single leader whose significance transcended ethnicity. In this the king of the Goths was to some extent a barbarian version of the emperor of Rome. (A legend of the Goths maintained that they began their migrations southward after a group of foreign nobles reached Goth territory from the far south and either took control of or influenced the leaders of the tribe—possibly a folk memory of the emergence of this rank of king so foreign to Germanics—and it is possible that the Goths adopted kingship on the advice of expatriate Romans.)

The Goths first made themselves known to the Romans in 238 c.e. and thereafter, carrying out raids in the Lower Danube region. In 251 c.e. the Gothic king Cniva led his warriors to a great victory over a Roman army at Abrittus in the Balkans, where they killed the Roman emperor, Decius. His successor was forced to pay them huge sums in bribes. Later they moved into Asia Minor, attacking coastal cities from fleets, and invaded Greece in 257 c.e. After they were forced out of Greece, their invasions ceased, probably because the Romans began trying to negotiate with them, a process that culminated in a formal treaty in 332 c.e. Among its provisions the Goths were to receive annual payments; in return they would supply men for the Roman military and promised to stay out of Greece.