Introduction
The Roman Achievement
EARLY in the year 376 demoralised and frightened bands of people, in
flight from their homes and deserting many of their former leaders,
began to gather on the northern bank of the river Danube. They
were the Theruingi, later to be called the Visigoths, a Germanic people
whose origins and earliest history now survive in little more than
legendary form. For over a century they had dominated the flat and
fertile lands between the rivers Danube and Dneister, where they had
posed a continuous threat to the security of the frontiers of their
southern neighbour, the Roman Empire. Even within the last decade
the reigning Emperor, Valens (364-378), had been forced to take
the field against them. But now they were fugitives, some taking ref-
uge in the Carpathian Mountains to the west, but perhaps the greater
part congregating on the Danube as humble suppliants of their former
enemy and victim, petitioning the emperor to receive them into his
territories and give them new lands upon which to settle.)
The reasons for this dramatic change in the fortunes of a once
proud and powerful people are complex and far reaching. They have
to do with an alteration in the social and economic structure of a vast
area stretching northwards from the Danube along the shores of the
Black Sea into the steppes of southern Russia. Most overtly this was
represented by the rise to eventual dominance of the whole of this
region of the nomadic confederacy of the Huns, before whom the
power of the Theruings' northern neighbours, the Greuthungi or
Ostrogoths, had foundered. But the emergence of the Huns was more
symptom than cause. This region was a marginal zone between the
fixed area of settled agricultural life around the shores of the Medi-
terranean and the aridity of Central Asia, which could only support
a nomadic pastoral population. Conditions, that we can now only
speculate about, changed gradually during the course of the fourth
century, and, with a dramatic suddenness that probably concealed a
longer and quieter growth, brought the nomad to the frontiers of the
settled. The marginal region, balanced upon an ecological knife-edge,
proved unable any longer to sustain the settled agricultural economy
of the Goths and their resulting size of population, and hence their
collapse and migration.