Barbarian kingdoms

20th-century painting of Alaric I, leader of the Visigoths 395–410, entering Athens after capturing the city in 395

The rise of the barbarian kingdoms in the territory previously governed by the Western Roman Empire was a gradual, complex and largely unintentional process.[5] The starting point of the process that led to their formation were the migrations of large numbers of barbarian (i.e. non-Roman) peoples into the territory of the Roman Empire. The migrations were spurred by both invasions and invitations. Inviting peoples from beyond the imperial frontier to settle Roman territory was not a new policy, and something that had been done several times by emperors in the past, mostly for economic, agricultural or military purposes. The capacity for immigration in a state as large and powerful as the Roman Empire was nearly infinite, but several events and accidents in the fourth through fifth centuries complicated the situation.[5]

In 376, the Visigoths, fleeing before the Ostrogoths, who in turn were fleeing before the Huns, were allowed to cross the Danube river and settle in the Balkans by the government of the Eastern Roman Empire. Mistreatment of the Gothic refugees caused a full-scale rebellion, and in 378 they inflicted a crippling defeat on the Eastern Roman field army in the Battle of Adrianople, in which Emperor Valens (r. 364–378) was also killed. The defeat at Adrianople was shocking to the Romans, and forced them to negotiate with and settle the Visigoths within the borders of the Empire, where they would become semi-independent foederati under their own leader.[6] Roman civil wars in the late 4th century, as well as periods of cold war between the imperial courts of the Western and Eastern Roman empires, allowed the Visigoths under their leader Alaric I (r. 395–410) to become an active force in imperial politics, only tenuously linked to the imperial government itself.[5] The arrival of the Visigoths in the Balkans was followed by the Alans, Vandals and Suebi migrating into Gaul between 405 and 407 in the crossing of the Rhine.[5] Though the barbarians on the Rhine were effectively kept in check and managed by the usurper-emperor Constantine III (r. 407–411), the end of his reign due to further internal Roman conflict led to the tribes being able to penetrate deep into Gaul and Hispania.[7]

Map of the Eastern Roman Empire (red) and the new barbarian kingdoms in the west in 460

With the barbarians settling within the imperial borders in large numbers, the second stage in the formation of the barbarian kingdoms was imperial acceptance of the status quo. Though Romans did not see the existence of the barbarian realms as desirable, they began to be tolerated through the 420s and 430s.[5] It was not the goal of either the Romans or the barbarians to found lasting territorial kingdoms in the sense of replacing the imperial government; their formation derived not from an interest by the barbarians in founding them but rather from failures in Roman governance and the failure to grant the barbarian rulers a place within the Roman imperial systems.[8] The early barbarian kings were tolerated only on the terms of the empire. Early kingdoms, such as those of the Suebi and Vandals in Hispania, were relegated to the edges of less important provinces. In 418, Emperor Honorius (r. 393–423) settled the Visigoths in Aquitania in southern Gaul, the beginning of the Visigothic Kingdom. The Romans envisioned the settlement as a provisional settlement of loyal clients of the imperial government, whose support could be relied on in internal struggles, and not a ceding of territory given that the imperial government was also envisioned as continuing in the granted lands.[7] Though Roman generals in the time of Honorius had worked to curb the influence and power of the barbarian kings, the number of civil wars that followed Honorius's death made the status of the barbarians a secondary concern. Instead of suppressing the barbarian kings, emperors and usurpers in the 4th century viewed them as useful internal players.[9]

The third stage was the imperial government of the Western Roman Empire recognizing that it could no longer effectively administer its territories. This led the empire to cede effective control of more lands to the barbarian kings, whose realms now formed a permanent part of the landscape, though this did not mean that the lands within the former imperial borders ceased to be part of the empire on a conceptual level.[5] Treaties made with the Visigoths in 439 and the Vandals, who had conquered North Africa, in 442 effectively recognized the rulers of those peoples as territorial governors of parts of imperial territory, ceasing the pretension of active imperial administration. These treaties, though not seen as irrevocable, laid the foundations of true territorial kingdoms.[10]

Almost nowhere in the west were the kings firmly linked to territorial kingdoms until the very late fifth century or even later.[11] The fourth and final stage in the formation of the barbarian kingdoms was the barbarian kings, left to their own devices, slowly losing the habit of waiting for the empire to again function properly and instead starting to take on the roles of the former emperors, becoming proper territorial kings.[5] This process was only possible through the acceptance of the barbarian rulers by local Roman aristocrats, who in many cases supported the barbarian kings as they saw the possibility of restored Western Roman central control as an increasingly futile prospect.[12] The exact process in which the barbarian kings took on certain functions and prerogatives previously ascribed to the Roman emperors is not entirely clear but it was a highly drawn-out process.[13] Alaric I, the generally recognised first king of the Visigoths, is only seen as a king retroactively; contemporary sources call him only dux or at times hegemon, and he did not rule a kingdom, but rather spent much of his career unsuccessfully trying to integrate himself into the Roman imperial system as a Roman military officer. The earliest Visigoth ruler to unambiguously call himself king, and to issue documents from something resembling an imperial chancery, was Alaric II (r. 484–507), though contemporary writings allude to widespread acceptance and recognition of a Visigothic kingdom in Gaul by the 450s.[14] The Visigoths did not establish a secure power-base as a consciously post-imperial kingdom until the 560s under Liuvigild, after slow and often brutal conquests in Hispania.[11]

Despite being divided into several smaller realms, the populace of the barbarian kingdoms maintained strong cultural and religious connections with each other, and continued to speak Latin.[1] The barbarian kings adopted both Christianity (at this point firmly established as the Roman religion) and the Latin language themselves, thus inheriting and maintaining Rome's cultural heritage. At the same time, they also remained connected to their non-Roman identity and made efforts to establish their own distinct identities.[4] The Eastern Roman Empire emphasizing its own unique Roman legitimacy, sometimes through waging war on the barbarian kingdoms, and the barbarian ruling class and Roman population merging ethnically, led to the gradual disappearance of Roman identity in the west.[28][29] The fading connectivity to the Roman Empire and the political division of the west led to a gradual fragmentation of culture and language, eventually giving rise to the modern Romance peoples and Romance languages.[30]

Political map of Europe in 814

The barbarian kingdoms proved to be extremely fragile states.[31] Even out of the most powerful and longest-lasting kingdoms, those of the Visigoths, Franks and Lombards, only that of the Franks survived the Early Middle Ages.[32] The Visigothic realm had collapsed already in the sixth century and had to be restored almost from scratch under Liuvigild in the 560s and 570s. It was finally destroyed when it was conquered by the Umayyad Caliphate in the early 8th century. In a series of wars in the 6th century, the Eastern Roman Empire under Justinian I (r. 527–565) conquered and destroyed the kingdoms of the Vandals in Africa and that of the Ostrogoths in Italy. Most of the smaller kingdoms in Gaul were conquered and absorbed into the Frankish kingdom or disappear from historical sources entirely.[31]

The new realms that emerged in the seventh through ninth centuries represented a new order largely disconnected from the old Roman world. The Umayyad Caliphate, which conquered Hispania from the Visigoths and North Africa from the Eastern Romans, made no pretences of Roman continuity. The Lombard kingdom, though often counted among the other barbarian kingdoms, ruled an Italy destroyed by conflict between the Ostrogoths and the Eastern Roman Empire.[31] Their rule in Italy came to an end when their kingdom was conquered by the Franks in 774.[33] The small successor kingdoms of the Visigoths in Hispania, the predecessors of medieval kingdoms such as León, Castile and Aragon, were fundamentally sub-Frankish, culturally and administratively closer to the Frankish kingdom than the fallen Visigothic realm.[31]

As the sole survivor of the old kingdoms, the Frankish realm provided the model of early medieval kingship that would later inspire medieval monarchs throughout the rest of the medieval period.[11] Though the Frankish rulers remembered Roman ideals and often aspired to vague ideas of imperial restoration, the centuries of their rule had transformed the governance of their kingdom into something that resembled the Roman Empire very little. The new form of government was a personal one, based on powers of and relationships between individuals, rather than the heavily administrated, judicial and bureaucratic system of the Roman Empire.[31] The time of the barbarian kingdoms came to an end with the coronation of Charlemagne, king of the Franks, as Roman emperor by Pope Leo III in 800,[34] in opposition to the authority of the remaining Eastern Roman Empire.[35] Charlemagne's Carolingian Empire, a predecessor of France and Germany, was in reality more similar to a collection of kingdoms united only by Charlemagne's authority than a realm with a meaningful connection to the old Western Roman Empire.[36]