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In the year 400 CE the frontiers of the Roman empire were much as they had been for centuries. By 500, however,
North Africa was in the hands of the Vandals; Spain and southwest Gaul under the Visigoths: there was a
Burgundian kingdom in southeast Gaul and a Frankish kingdom further north. Italy was in the hands of the
Ostrogoths, while Britain was being fought over by the residue of the Romano-British population and Germanic
incomers. The Byzantine empire reconquered Africa in 533, Italy between 535 and 553, and a large part of the
Mediterranean coast of Spain in circa 551, while the Franks drove the Visigoths out of most of the Gallic territories
after 507 and destroyed the Burgundian kingdom in circa 534. By 600 the Lombards had seized much of northern
and central Italy from the Byzantines, while a number of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had emerged in eastern and
central England. A century later North Africa had fallen to the forces of Islam, and much of Spain would follow suit
after 711. In 774 the Franks took over most of the Lombard kingdom. By the end of the eighth century the Frankish
empire, Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and Christian states of northern Spain can scarcely be called successor states
of the Roman empire: they are better seen as the forerunners of the great kingdoms of the Middle Ages.
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Certainly the Vandals fought to establish themselves in Africa, though their control of the territory was
subsequently recognized by treaty, first in 435 and second in 442 (Courtois 1955, 15585; Schwarcz 2004). The
military element was less significant in the establishment of other states. When the Visigoths were admitted into the
Roman empire in 376, it was no doubt assumed that they would act as Roman federates. As it so happened,
mistreatment at the hands of those charged with organizing their reception led them to rebel against the empire.
Subsequently they marched through the Balkans and Italy, but, having sacked Rome in 410 when their leader,
Alaric I, lost patience with the imperial government, they were finally settled in Aquitaine in 418 or 419 (Wood 1998,
532). The Ostrogoths, who also retained their identity as a separate people, were sent to Italy in 489 as imperial
agents to challenge Odoacer, who had deposed the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, thirteen years
earlier (Moorhead 1992, 1131). The Ostrogothic leader, Theodoric, gained the upper hand in a series of
encounters in the Po basin, ultimately confining Odoacer to the city of Ravenna, which fell after a siege of four
years. The Burgundians may have been rather different, in that they were savaged by the Huns in the mid-430s,
apparently at the behest of the Roman general Aetius. What remained of them, which may have been little more
than the military following of their leading family, was officially placed in Sapaudia, a region that certainly included
territory to the north of Geneva, in circa 443 (Favrod 1997, 100117; Kaiser 2004, 3846). Different again were the
Franks, who included peoples that had been settled inside the empire since the late third century, probably with
major obligations in frontier defense (James 1988, 3477). Their kings were certainly fighting alongside Roman
generals in the mid-fifth century (Gregory of Tours, Decem Libri Historiarum 2.18). Cloviss position was
recognized by the emperor in 508 (Gregory of Tours, Decem Libri Historiarum 2.38), while Provence appears to
have been ceded to the Franks by Justinian in the 530s (Wood 2008, 341342). Only in Britain does settlement not
seem to have been officially sanctioned by the empire, but as in northern Gaul, there had been Germanic troops in
the region for a long period (Orton, Wood, and Lees 2007, 113114). Moreover, even after the supposed end of
Roman rule in the island, the remaining provincial government that maintained some sort of authority up to the
middle of the fifth century seems to have decided to recruit federate troops from the Germanic peoples from just
beyond the Rhine frontier, much as the emperors had done for centuries (Gildas, De Excidio Britonum 23). Further,
the Byzantines were perfectly willing to countenance the (p. 500) (p. 501) official transfer of Britain to the Goths
in the mid-sixth century (Procopius, Wars 6.6.28)! Nowhere, except possibly in Africa, was there a straightforward
act of conquest. On the other hand, once officially established on Roman soil, most barbarian groupscertainly
some, if not all, who were successful for any length of timeexpanded into territory that had not been granted to
them. Thus the Visigoths moved beyond Aquitaine into Provence and Spain and the Burgundians took over the
Rhne valley. And while there may have been little in the way of deliberate destruction, it is likely that the extended
period of disruption itself led to a decline in living standards.
Although we have dates for settlement and for other forms of official recognition, it is not always clear what was at
stake: were the barbarians given land, or were they granted tax revenues, and merely billeted on the population or
kept in barracks (Goffart 1980)? Unfortunately the evidence for the grants is laconic in the extreme, being
contained for the most part in one-line annual entries (Wood 1998, 523524). These have to be fleshed out largely
through the examination of legal texts, most of which relate to the situation several decades after the original
concession. It is possible that in some cases tax concessions were originally what was granted, though where, in
that situation, the barbarians were housed remains an open question. What is clear is that within a few decades the
barbarians were settled on estates. The fact that little or no opposition was recorded, except in Vandal Africa, has
been held to be one indication that tax income rather than land was initially granted. Yet there are other possible
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Germanic Kingdoms
This raises the question of the extent to which these early states can be called Germanic. Here there is a
problem of the weight of past perceptions, which saw the kings of the successor states as continuing traditions
noted in Caesars Wars or in Tacituss Germania, or inferred from later literary works such as Beowulf or the
Scandinavian sagas. Caesar and Tacitus are scarcely useful in this context: Germanic leadership had changed
radically in the period before the barbarian migrations. If the Germanic tribes brought any traditions with them, it will
have been those in existence immediately before their migration, by which time most of the tribes had long been
absorbing Roman influence. Unfortunately even our best source for the barbarians of the fourth century, Ammianus
Marcellinus, tells us next to nothing about kingship among the premigration peoples. In any case there is little
reason to think that the structures in place immediately before the migration survived the ensuing dislocation intact
except perhaps attitudes toward military service. Gothic kings before 376 may de facto have had more authority
in times of crisis than of peace, though this is by no means certain (Heather 1991, 99107). The sustained crisis of
a long period of migration must have altered whatever power structures there were, and this must also have held
true for the Vandals. Burgundian kingship would seem to be very little other than Roman office-holding (Wood
2003, 254256). As for the Franks, the fact that many of them were descendants of people long settled in the
imperial provinces of Belgica and Germania means that their traditions were at least in part those of long-term
Roman federates (Geary 1988, 7882). Anglo-Saxon kingship might have drawn more on Germanic tradition
(Wallace-Hadrill 1971, 2126), but again the act of migration, and especially of maritime migration, which would
have limited the size of the individual groups entering Britain (Jones 1996, 72107), is likely to mean that it was
largely developed inside what had been imperial territory (Wood 1997).
Essentially the same point can be made of royal succession. Historians have argued that the so-called tanistry of
the Vandals, that is, the succession in turn of all the sons of a king, and the succession patterns of the
Merovingians, which involved the division of the Frankish kingdom among the recognized heirs of a (p. 503) dead
ruler, represent Germanic tradition. There is, however, nothing to suggest that Gaiserics wish that each of his sons
should inherit in turn was anything other than an experiment to ensure that the new kingdom was led by adults
rather than minors (Wood 2006, 5961). So too, the division of the Frankish kingdom between all the recognized
surviving sons of a king can be shown quite clearly not to reflect ancient Frankish tradition: we hear of royal
brothers in the late fifth or early sixth centuries. Rather the Merovingian divisions, which did in fact become
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Roman Continuities
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Economic Conditions
Land, however, raises a further set of issues of importance, being basic to the economic foundations of any state
before the modern period. Estates and agriculture, rather than trade and industry, had been the dominant feature
of the economy of the western empire. There had, of course, been state factories, producing military necessities,
and mines. There had also been centers of ceramic production. The factories vanished with the empire, and
although ceramic production continued, (p. 513) it was largely of lower-quality wares, which were distributed over
relatively small areas (Wickham 2005, 700706; Ward-Perkins 2005, 104108). Land and its produce was the
mainstay of the economy. Kings, aristocrats, and great landowners, like the Church, needed little that they could
not produce from their own estates, which might well have been scattered over a large region, thus giving access
to a variety of products, including grain, wine, and salt, as well as an assortment of meats, reared and hunted. A
major landowner had no need to go to market for any of these staples, though tolls would be paid on them as they
were moved around the country (Wood 1994, 214217)for these were among the taxes that did not decline in
the post-Roman period. At this highest level of society the most important trade was in luxury goods, which were
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Conclusion
The overall image of the successor kingdoms is, indeed, one of a run-down version of the late empire, and on a
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