10: The Late Roman Army, Barbarians, and the Frontier

I'm Patrick Weiman, and this is the Fall of Rome. The pre-Don light is rising in the east beyond the broad expanse of the Rhine River, and the wooden floorboards of the balcony that wraps around the upper floor of your watchtower creek under your feet as you keep dutiful watch. The year is 355, and you're a soldier of the Limitanei, the frontier troops guarding the edges of the Roman Empire. Your dozen bunkmates, your Contubernales, are snoring away inside the watchtower, but maybe a couple have begun to stir for the day's work. What's there? Are they allomani raiders coming to attack the watchtower? Are they scouts trying to suss out the strength of the army units in your region? Is it a deputation from the local king, come to parly with the regional army commander? Are they new recruits on their way to join the army? Or are they traitors, agricultural contractors bringing needed supplies of grain and meat for the provisioning of you and your mates? These are all possibilities that you might face on a daily basis as a soldier in the late Roman army, part of a lived experience that ran the gamut from pitched battles to the drudgery of garrison work, all carried out within the diverse, blended context of the Roman frontier. War generally, and the army in particular, were central to the political, social, cultural, and economic life of the later Roman Empire. The army was the single most important institution in the late Roman world. It contained hundreds of thousands of troops. Roman soldiers guarded the empire's frontiers, both the external ones that faced the barbarian lands, and the internal lines that demarcated provinces. But the army was more than just a fighting force. It was a prime mover of the Roman Empire's economy, the biggest reason for the state's resistance, and for every soldier under arms, it employed several more people to keep it fed and equipped. At least 50% of the empire's annual revenues went towards supplying and paying the army, which gives you a sense of its sheer size and scale. More importantly though, the army was the center of society and culture on Rome's frontiers. It was the institution through which the barbarians interacted with and assimilated to Roman society and culture. Think back to the early episodes of this show, an art friend Wulfila the Goth. Wulfila and his fellow Goths, and the barbarians in general, didn't get to know Rome through its literature, its art, the monumental architecture of its cities, or even through its politics. They knew Rome through its army. They fought Roman troops on raiding expeditions, deep inside Roman territory, and experienced its wrath on punitive expeditions on the barbarian side of the border. It's more complicated than that though. They also joined the army in their hundreds and thousands, traded with its supply officers, and spent time in the military towns that grew up around its forts. The spectrum of interactions between the barbarians and the army, which ranged from trade and marriage to full-scale warfare, created a specific kind of frontier culture. This was a melting pot of language, identity, social practices, structures, and organizations that blended the barbarian and the military into a seamless whole. The frontier was a zone of interactions that extended for dozens or hundreds of miles on both sides of the frontier, rather than a dividing line. Within this militarized frontier culture, the difference between a Frankish noble and a Roman officer, between a Roman landholder and an army general, or between a fort and a trading post might be hard to discern. In fact, one way of viewing the political end of the Roman Empire is to see this militarized, barbarized frontier culture with all its norms and values and practices, gradually seeping from the borders to the interior of the provinces until it have subsumed the entirety of the Western Empire. This is what we'll talk about in today's episode. We'll discuss the army of the fourth and fifth centuries and how it had changed from the classic Roman army of the early empire with which you're probably more familiar. These weren't the legions of Julius Caesar, Augustus, or Marcus Aurelius, but a force that was organized, equipped, and garrisoned differently in order to meet much more varied and much more serious threats from beyond the frontier. Next, we'll discuss the army as an institution, whom it recruited, why historians have talked about the barbarization of the later Roman army and whether that was actually a bad thing, how it was supplied, and how it fit more generally into Roman society as a whole, especially frontier society. Finally, we'll bring all these threads together to try to understand the life of a soldier in the late Roman army in the context of that frontier society that I just mentioned. How that soldier might have formed his identity around his profession, and what he could expect to experience between the drudgery of garrison duty and the horrors of pitched battles. We'll close with a few comments on the decline and disappearance of the Roman army, and to what extent that tied into the broader disintegration or transformation of the Western Empire in the fifth century. So let's start by grappling with the transformation of the Roman army. The army of the late empire faced an inherently different set of strategic and tactical challenges than the army of Augustus or Hadrian, much less that of Caesar, Marius, and the Skipios. The evolution of the army was reactive, not proactive, and consisted of ad hoc, temporary responses to these new and greater challenges. With a few exceptions, this was a haphazard accretion of transformations rather than essentially planned initiative or series of initiatives. The Roman army hadn't been a static institution at any point in its history. It had evolved before and would evolve again. In the middle republic, the period of the Punic Wars, the army was a universal force consisting of property holding Roman citizens who served for a few years at a time in addition to the Italian allies of Rome. Rome's constant wars in the late third and second centuries BC, though, badly strained the available manpower. A farmer might be called away for years at a time, fighting the salucids in Syria, the Macedonians and the Balkans for a few seasons before returning to the farm, and then being called up again, this time to fight in a guerrilla war against tribesmen in Iberia. This was a punishing regimen for Rome's citizen soldiers. While there are ongoing debates about just how much this constant warfare and absence negatively affected the small farmer class at the end of the republic, it's not really hard to see how a system designed for seasonal warfare close to home eventually proved inadequate to the demands of an empire that had come to span the entire Mediterranean. What replaced that system of military organization toward the end of the second century BC was a professional army of long-service soldiers. This was less a sharp break with past practice than a recognition of the fact that through long years of continuous warfare, Rome already had something like a professional army, and all that really changed in a basic sense was the property requirement, which disappeared, and how it would be equipped. The long-run effects of this were enormous, though, because these professional armies came to depend on their general to guarantee their pay and retirement packages. In effect, it severed the state's control over its armed forces, and this dynamic of personal loyalty between generals and soldiers is precisely what powered the 60 years of instability between Sula's march on Rome in 88 BC and Octavian's victory at the Battle of Actium in 31. The army of Augustus and his successors got around this bond between generals and soldiers by making the emperor the primary benefactor of the military establishment. At the end of the day, the early empire rested on the fact that the army's loyalty was to the emperor, and all of his other power flowed from that basic fact. For most of the first two centuries AD, with the exception of a brief flare-up in 69 AD after the death of Nero, this basic bond between the army and the emperor held true, and civil war was avoided. Throughout this period, the dominance of the Roman army was basically unchallenged, and its only major defeat in this time was the loss of the three legions of Varus at the Battle of the Tuta Berg Forest in 9 AD. Things changed in the 3rd century. The crisis of the 3rd century, something we discussed at length in the 5th episode of this show, was at heart a crisis of the relationship between high politics and the army. Practically everything else that went wrong in that century, aside from plague, can be traced to the failures of the army as an institution, and its increasing tendency to put its generals on the throne. The ties of legitimacy that bound the army to the emperors, weakened to the point that any ambitious general who could win the support of his troops was a potential emperor. Now this created a few different issues. First, it made it difficult for an Emperor to delegate military authority because doing so automatically created a potential rival for the throne. Second, when the army did declare its general Emperor, those troops almost always left their posts on the frontier to go fight another Roman army in order to put that newly proclaimed Emperor on the throne. You can see how this would be a problem. Any threat from beyond the frontiers demanded the first hand attention of the Emperor, so it became impossible to deal effectively with more than one threat at the same time. If the Franks on the lower Rhine and the Goths on the Danube were acting up simultaneously, let alone the Persians on the Syrian border a couple thousand miles away, how was the Emperor supposed to deal with them? If the general he sent to deal with the other threat were successful, there was a good chance that his troops would declare him Emperor. Usurperians created a secondary problem. As we have discussed in a few episodes, the Barbarians were tied in closely to what was happening along the frontiers. They weren't idiots. The moment a whole army picked up stakes and headed into the interior of the provinces to fight for its usurping general, the Barbarians would take notice and either start raiding or launch a full scale invasion while troops were busy elsewhere. When given a choice between dealing with some alamani raiders in Noracom or Raetia and a battle-hardened army marching down into Italy to remove you from your throne, which would you address first. Usurpers were an existential threat for the Emperor's in a way that Barbarians weren't. This was the basic dynamic that produced the crisis of the 3rd century. With armies leaving the frontiers so frequently, the Barbarians took advantage of Roman attention being focused elsewhere to raid and invade. After Goths crossed the Danube and got as far as southern Greece and Asia Minor, the alamani and Franks raided into Gaul. In Britain, the Picts and Saxons made their presence felt. The Persians struck deep into Syria. One of the long and ongoing debates about the crisis is whether these Barbarian groupings that emerged in the 3rd century, the Goths, the Franks, the alamani, were really any more threatening than the ones who had occasionally troubled Rome's frontiers in the first couple of centuries AD. Or whether they're success in the 3rd century was simply a product of Roman disinterest in what was happening beyond the border, increasing concern with usurpations and the like. I've said this before, and I remain surprised that this isn't the clear scholarly consensus on the topic. It's both. Roman policy toward the Barbarians had been focused on a combination of the velvet glove and iron fist, of both prestigious gifts and the exercise of military force, intended to prevent any one chieftain or tribal grouping beyond the frontier from becoming too powerful. When Roman attention went elsewhere, that policy fell apart. It required constant attention. It's not a coincidence that these new and newly powerful tribal groupings like the Franks, Goths, alamani all pop up in a context where the Roman army and political establishment was worried about other things. In effect, Roman civil wars indirectly created the enemies that would trouble the empire for the rest of its existence. As the crisis wore on, the Romans eventually got their acts together and adapted to meet the new threats. The emperors who brought the empire out of the crisis were all military men, many of them of relatively humble origin, and this in itself marked a major shift from the early empire. These were soldiers, not administrators or aristocrats, and they understood how the army needed to change to regain its effectiveness. These changes took the form of piecemeal changes that culminated in the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine between 284 and 337. There were a number of different transformations, every one of which we could talk for hours about, but we can skip the minutiae and summarize them like this. First, we see a shift away from the large blocks of heavy infantry, the legions of 5,000 or more men supplemented by more lightly armed units of auxiliaries, including cavalry, and toward a more flexible and diverse fighting force. The historian Alexander Serrantis summarizes the shift like this, quote, "Rather than predominantly relying on either infantry or cavalry, the late Roman army was characterized by tactical adaptability and variety," end quote. The distinction between citizen legionaries and non-citizen auxiliaries that had characterized the early empire was gone, and we see tactical plans that incorporate light infantry, heavy infantry, light cavalry, heavy cavalry, horse archers, foot archers, and artillery. The result was a much more integrated and diverse force. In general, it was a little more lightly armed and armored, though extremely heavy cavalry, the fully armored catafracts became a standard part of the tactical package. Second, and as a corollary to that first piece, cavalry came to play a much greater role. Fast-moving raiders from beyond the frontier were the primary threat that the army had to deal with on a day-to-day basis, and the best way to combat fast-moving raiders was a mounted response force. Some historians argue that there was an entire mobile cavalry reserve force that could be shuttled from incursion to incursion by the 270s or so. That's not implausible, but whether that force existed or not, what's clear is that a far greater proportion of the troops under arms were cavalry by the time of Constantine. Third, a basic division arose between the troops manning the frontiers, the Limitane, and the mobile field army stationed in the interior, the Comita Tensis. This is a topic of major debate. What exactly did this happen? Was it under Diocletian, under the other tetraarchs, under Constantine, or even after? Which troops went with which designation? Were the Limitane, a lower quality of soldier than the Comita Tensis? Or is that just some prejudicial writing in a much later source? Could units be transferred between the two bodies? None of the answers to these questions are clear, and it's possible that the distinction between the two has been overstated. It brought outline, though, there was a split between Comita Tensis stationed in the interior of the provinces and Limitane, who guarded the frontiers. Fourth, the units themselves were smaller. This shift had been happening for a while, and throughout the early empire it became a trend for small units of a thousand or so men, called Vexilationes, to be separated from their parent legions and stationed separately on the frontiers. By the time of Diocletian, this smaller unit size became a permanent fixture of the later Roman army. Diocletian expanded the number of "legens", but in the early fourth century, a legion was probably something closer to the size of one of these thousand or fifteen hundred men Vexilationes than the five thousand soldiers of the old school legions. These smaller units were more flexible, and as we just mentioned, they were more varied in terms of equipment and tactical role. Fifth, equipment, tactics, and strategy all changed. The short sword, the Gladius that had characterized the early imperial legions, was gone, replaced by a longer slashing sword, the Spathas. The specialized Javilan's, Pila, were replaced by more basic spears that could be used for both throwing and stamping. Chainmail armor became the norm, replacing the Lorica segmentata, the armor of overlapping plates that had been the standard. The rectangular inward curving shield was replaced by an oval or round shield. These changes spoke to a shift in tactics away from close order infantry, operating in mass formations, and toward more fighting on horseback, and loose skirmishes, and in rough terrain. Finally, there was a new emphasis on fortifications. Whether this amounts to a shift toward a centrally planned grand strategy of defense in depth, as the political scientist Edward Lutvack argued at length in the 1970s, is up for debate. But the simple fact that the Roman Empire invested in massive layers of new fortifications in the third and fourth centuries isn't in question. This investment took multiple forms, refurbishing forts along the frontiers and building new ones, a huge program of building city walls around every major population center. Rhoads were built around roads, rivers, and mountain passes inside the empire, and watchtowers with small garrisons, like the one we started with, were constructed both along the frontier, and along major routes of communication and movement. The experience of the crisis of the third century had shown that once barbarians got past the frontiers, whether we're talking about a raiding party or a full-scale invasion, there really wasn't much stopping them from running a muck through the interior of the provinces. At that point, the best way to catch raiders was as they headed back toward the border, laden with booty. Predictably, that didn't make the victims of these constant raiding expeditions particularly happy, especially when the troops didn't give the stolen items back after catching the barbarians, which happened on several occasions. Now all of the shifts that we've talked about here were intended to address these issues. The new emphasis on fortifications prevented the barbarians from making easy scores on unprotected cities. They gave troops someplace to retreat to in the face of overwhelming force, and allowed the army to control the major lines of communication and strategic chokepoints within the provinces, all the while keeping an eye on the barbarians and gathering necessary intelligence. Smaller, more flexible units could hold this multitude of points in the interior and garrison city walls, while a greater proportion of mobile cavalry could chase down fast moving barbarians. lightly equipped Raiders, demanded different equipment and tactics. than pitched battles, hence the shift toward longer swords, spears, and looser formations. Now, the army of the early empire would have met an invading force with a mass army of heavy infantry, legionaries, in pitched battles. The army of the late empire would try to contain the enemy on the frontiers, but then withdraw to fortifications, pick away with ambushes and raids while denying necessary supplies and the booty of the raider's sought, and only then would they confront a weakened force and open battle. They might not even fight an enemy force in the field, but instead pick them off one foraging party at a time, or as they retreated back toward the border. Operating within their own territory, the late Roman army knew the terrain, they knew where and how to catch intruders, and they had the roads and supply lines necessary to maintain themselves while denying that to the enemy. The late Roman army had the infrastructure and flexibility to deal with these much more numerous, consistent, and serious threats, and way the army of the early empire simply couldn't have matched. So, we've covered the transformation of the Roman army as a result of the third century crisis and what came after. Now let's try to understand it as an institution, its size, its organization, who joined it, its norms and values, and how it fit into society more broadly. The scale of the late Roman army is simply mind-boggling. It was huge, estimates range from a low end of 300,000 men under arms to as many as 600,000 men, that you won't find much support for the high end estimate. As part of Diocletian's contribution to the army reforms, the size had been increased even as the overall population of the empire dropped a bit from its peak in the second century. Now those are paper strengths on the basis of a much later source called the notitia dignitata, and in reality there would have been far fewer soldiers available for duty at any given moment. But even those broad numbers give you a sense for the massive scale of the army. Roughly speaking, one of every 150 or 200 Romans would have been a soldier, and that proportion would have been much, much, much higher in the frontier provinces. That's a huge proportion of the population, for example. That's a larger proportion of the population, for example, than the United States keeps on active duty military service today. For us it's about 1 in every 217, at the very low end, 30% of the Roman budget went to the army, and 50% is much more likely, in times of war, as much as 80% of the budget went to military expenditures. Compare that to about 16% of the United States government's budget, 6% in the United Kingdom, and 10% in Russia. It's not an exaggeration to say that the army was the single most important institution in the Roman world. Why did the Roman Empire need such a complex system of taxation, one that had developed over the course of the 3rd century to include both money taxes and taxes in kind? Well to pay and feed the army. The need to pay the army, for example, is a major part of what drove the debasement of the coinage and the currency crisis of the 3rd century. Troops always needed to be paid to ensure their loyalty. There's an argument to be made that the Roman state essentially existed to service the army rather than the other way around. This went both ways, though, and the army was a tremendous economic driver for the whole empire. It encouraged economic specialization of particular localities and regions, especially during and after the reign of Diocletian, since one of Diocletian's major reforms was to reshape the tax system away from money and toward payments in kind. Locality that specialized in wheat would produce some of it for tax. There would also be a surplus left over for sale on the market. The same might hold true for a region specializing in livestock. As well as this system worked for most of the 4th century, it still wasn't sufficient to feed the entire army with taxes in kind, and there was money to be made in growing wheat or raising livestock to sell to the army supply officers. Wine in olive oil were other staples, and those were always purchased from sellers rather than being provided in kind. The key point to remember with the supplying of the army is that these localities that were producing supplies weren't necessarily adjacent to where the troops were stationed. These staples had to be transported, often over long distances, to get from the point of origin to the soldiers who would consume them. Amianus Marcellinus tells us that grain from "aquitain" and "britten" fed the troops along the Rhine Frontier in the mid-4th century, while pottery sherds found in forts along the lower Danube, around the same time, are evidence of the importation of olive oil from producers in the Aegean. The entire local economy, around the mouth of the Rhine River and the present-day Netherlands, was organized around supplying the army with the livestock it needed, including cattle and horses. There's even some intriguing evidence from this region that suggests the presence of specialized horse breeders, presumably for military use. These are just a few specific examples, but when we bear in mind the sheer scale of the Roman army, you can see how central it would have been to organizing the agricultural and pastoral economies of whole regions. Now think about not just the farmers and herders that took to grow the food and raise the livestock, but the drovers who brought the cattle to market, the butchers who prepared the meat, the bakers who baked the bread. Even more importantly, required thousands of people to drive the wagons and tend the beasts of burden that carried the supplies from place to place. Sailors decree the river boats and ships that carried the supplies. They did porters and longshoremen to unload the supplies. There were workers to tend the staging posts and the animals that supplied the people who worked in transport. Still other people maintained the infrastructure, the roads and ports, that allowed those supplies to move in the first place. Just supplying the army created a whole parallel economy, a book transport even beyond the production of food in itself. Those are just the staples. The Roman army needed a lot more than just food. They needed wool and the clothing made from it. It had leather, shoes, saddles, firewood, dishes, and building materials. Needed horses and draft animals. Of course, it needed weapons and armor, arrows and missiles for its artillery. For those last things, the materials specific to waging more, there was another whole infrastructure of state-owned and run factories called Fabricai. These Fabricai were generally located in major urban centers, close enough to the frontier that they could easily supply the troops, but far enough away that they weren't vulnerable to a lightning fast invasion. You don't want barbarians stealing all of your freshly made armor and weapons. Now these Fabricai could produce all the staples, swords and shields and the like, but they all had specializations. The Fabricai at Otoon, for example, specialized in the full suits of armor worn by the men and horses of the heavy cavalry, while the factory at Rems was best known for swords. The Serbian facility specialized in shields. Working in one of these factories seems to have been fairly prestigious. One elderly man named Flavius Kaladinos thought that it was meaningful enough to remark on his tombstone that he had served as a worker in a Fabricai that made arrows. To manage all of this, you needed a huge administration. The army kept voluminous records of personnel, finance and supply. Of shipments received and payments owed and everything else necessary to ensure the running of an institution that touched the lives of millions of people on a daily basis. That administration was carried out at three levels, Empire-wide, Provincial and Local. More than anything else, it was this administrative system and the logistics that it enabled that set the Roman army apart from every other force in the ancient world. This is how they could move hundreds of thousands of people around. Troops supplied from one place to another over long distances, produced sufficient quantities of weapons and equipment, and paid troops what they were owed. Troops can't fight without food and material, and they won't fight without pay. Ensuring they got both was the task of this administrative system. So we've covered the supplies and the organization. Now let's go over recruitment. Who served in the army? Well, the army got its recruits in a few different ways. One was the big one. The sons of soldiers were automatically obliged to serve as a form of hereditary duty, providing one major source of manpower. Another was conscription in the form of attacks on landholders, either they could provide a suitable number of able-bodied men from their tenants, or they could pay attacks in gold. Depending on the manpower and financial needs of the government at any given moment, the state might choose to emphasize one or the other, either gold or manpower. Now prisoners of war settled in the empire were automatically subject to conscription, usually as an explicit term of their settlement. We'll come back to this. What's clear is that by the late empire, military service was not a popular career path, though precisely why that was the case is kind of hard to say. Not wanting to leave home seems to have been the big reason, and at least for the literate elite, soldiering wasn't a high status occupation. One letter of the early 5th century, for example, called it "a cheap and despicable game of death, and questioned whether a man who was considering allowing his son to enter the military, presumably as an officer, had taken complete leave of his senses." numerous laws from the Fourth century that imposed harsh punishments on men who deserted on the way to join their units, or whom mutilated themselves by removing fingers or a thumb in order to avoid service. One exasperated law of the late fourth century required even the mutilated to serve. While materially speaking, the military life wasn't a bad profession. Pay was better than day-laboring or tenant farming, and rations were both plentiful and regular. There was a real chance of advancement if a soldier should competence, even for barbarian recruits born beyond the frontiers. Bear in mind that the military emperor's of the late third century had all started off as low-level officers, if not in the ranks. Soldiers who completed their required 20 or 24 years of service were exempt from most taxes. They received retirement bonuses of cash, land, and other goods, and all soldiers, both serving and retired, had special legal statuses that set them apart from regular citizens. Still, there's no denying the unpopularity of the military life for most recruits, and that brings us around to the thorny question of the "barbarization" of the army. Simply put, this line of reasoning states that the Roman army became increasingly staff with troops of barbarian origin in the late third, fourth, and into the fifth century. A corollary point to the thesis of barbarization is that the army became increasingly less effective as a result of that. Now, there's no real question that barbarians did provide an increasing share of military manpower for the army as this period wore on. Why is harder to say? We've already noted the unpopularity of military service among those subject to it, and landowners were loathed to give up "prime-aged working men" to the army. There's also the possibility that the pool of manpower was smaller to begin with at this point, as the repeated plagues of the third century took a chunk of population, and the repeated collapses of the frontier defenses allowed the barbarians to ravage the frontier provinces that had formerly provided a large share of the recruits. That's an old idea, though, and one that has fallen out of popularity in recent years. The more likely explanation is that men of barbarian origin genuinely found military service to be an attractive option, or at least they found it more attractive than Roman citizens did. Barbarians entered the Roman army in several different ways. First, as individual recruits coming across the borders, second, as the children or grandchildren of barbarians settled inside the Roman Empire by treaty, something I already alluded to, or third, as allies presumably serving a shorter stint under the terms of a treaty. Now, individual recruits are pretty straightforward. You've already remarked on the close connections that bound together both sides of the frontier, and we should probably see these men as aspirational migrants who had grown up with some level of familiarity with the military, who had family members who had crossed the border to serve, and who saw the Roman army as a path to a better life. There was a real genuine chance for these men to succeed if they showed competence and initiative, and the high ranks of the late Roman army are full of Goths, Franks, Fandals, and many other barbarian groups who rose to become generals or even more. While some Roman authors questioned the loyalties of these kinds of recruits, there's zero indication that they ever really had conflicted loyalties. They served in regular army units, were trained to fight as Roman soldiers, were led by Roman officers, and learned to speak Latin. One epitaph on a tombstone, for example, refers to its owner as a "Frank by Birth" but a Roman-Censurian in death. The next category consisted of settled barbarians, known in our sources by the term "Gentelace and Lighty". The difference between those statuses is hard to suss out from the surviving source material, and it's possible that there were some technical differences that were clear to the Romans, but which have been lost to us. Essentially, a large mass of barbarians would be settled by treaty, Bastarani by Probus or Masons by Constantine, Franks on several occasions kind of scattered throughout Northern Gal, and they would be either obligated by that treaty to provide frontier defense, or more likely to provide military service as recruits. They could also be inducted in large numbers after losing a war as part of a treaty settlement, which happened with vandals, burgundians, and Goths in the 3rd century and after. These troops served in regular army units, were led by Roman or Romanized officers. As with individual recruits, there is very little to indicate disloyalty. Even the Goths settled in 382, the survivors of Adrienne Opal, acted less like renegade barbarians between 395 and 410, then a dissatisfied Roman army. Finally, there were allies, which is what we see increasingly over the course of the 5th century, settled groups like the Visigoths and Burgundians serving in their own units under their own officers, or alternatively the large groups of Huns acting as personal allies of the general Iatias. Now there's real debate as to whether the Goths settled by the Treaty of 382, the ones who had crossed the Danube in 376 and defeated valines at Adrienne Opal, fell into this category. Some historians say yes that this was the first settlement of allies within the empire, and that they served under their own commanders, and they were a separate group. But I think the evidence points more clearly to the fact that they fell into the general category of settled barbarians, which would mean that they were recruited into regular units of the Roman army, were led by Roman officers. There isn't really much to go on either way. In this category, though, more generally, questions of loyalty and incentive do have a real place. These weren't just units of the Roman army that happened to have barbarian recruits, but troops that might belong to a separate political entity that just happened to be a lie for the moment, for the month, for the year, with Rome. This doesn't necessarily mean that they were ineffective, think about Iatias as a success in using the Huns. But they might have had their own interests to consider along with those of the Roman Empire. The real question is whether this barbarization of the army was a bad thing. You may have sussed this out, but I don't really think so. At least as long as they were being recruited into regular army units and were being trained and disciplined as such. There's zero indication that these barbarians were ever any less reliable or effective than any other troops, and on the contrary, a good deal to suggest that they were substantially more so. This was the case for most of the 4th century, until a pair of military disasters, the Battle of Adrianople in 378 and the Battle of the Frigidus in 394, robbed the army of much of its trained manpower. The reliance on allies came afterward, and there you can make a real argument for a less effective military establishment. So that's the Roman army as an institution. It supplies and logistics, its composition, and its effectiveness. In this last segment, we'll try to understand the army as a social and cultural space, and its role in the world of the frontier from the perspective of one soldier. Let's start by introducing our soldier friend, and locating him in a specific time and place. Call him "Flavius Arbogostes", and say he was born around 335 on the middle Rhine. It was just Arbogostes, the Frank, when he was born on the far side of the Rhine to a family of modest landholders, living on a modest parcel of land where they farmed wheat. Sunken Florida huts held supplies while the whole family and their livestock lived inside a post-built wooden house. Growing up close to the Rhine and therefore the border, the Roman world was a constant presence in young Arbogostes life. As family were subsistence farmers, but occasionally they came up with a surplus of wheat that they might sell directly to a Roman supply officer or turn into beer, another commodity that the army occasionally purchased. Extra livestock, too, might be sold to the Roman army. Every once in a while his father would take Arbogostes and his brothers to trade at the Roman fort at Ramagan, around which a thriving market town had grown up. First, timber and slaves were exchanged for imported wine, olive oil, glassware, ceramics, and luxury items, and Arbogostes in his family could either trade some of their own produce, in kind, or they could use the Roman coinage that could be found everywhere on the barbarian side of the border. Now a Roman observer probably would have called Arbogostes a Frank, but that wasn't a particularly important designation to him, and really feel like a Frank didn't mean much. He might have considered himself a member of the Chate tribe, or perhaps a smaller subgrouping whose name hasn't come down to us. The idea of being a Frank would have been much more important to the big men who lived beyond the frontiers, political authority figures we'd call nobles or petty kings. Like Arbogostes and his family, these big men, too, had their dealings with the Romans. As part of the regular management of the frontier, the Romans paid subsidies or gave gifts to these chieftains and played them off against each other, making allies of some and targeting others for elimination. The sons of these big men might be raised among Romans as something like voluntary hostages, many of them joined the Roman army as officers. Roman money and luxury gifts helped these chieftains consolidate their own position among their subordinates and served as an incentive to keep the peace. It was rare for all the disparate groups of Franks to come together into anything like a united front. This was a society of petty kings and nobles who fought each other just as much as they fought the Roman. and that was exactly the way the Romans liked it. They did everything they could to encourage this state of affairs because any one figure who became too powerful might turn the whole barbarian nations beyond the frontier against Rome. Violence, too, tied together the two sides of the frontier. Arbagoste's father, older brothers, might occasionally leave the farm to join the war band of one of these big men as they slipped across the Rhine to raid and pillage the Roman countryside. The fine glass dishes that Arbagoste's family sometimes used had come from a villa, 100 miles inside the border that his father had sacked. On the money that had paid for a few M4I of nice wine had come from a military payroll stolen before it could reach a frontier garrison. Sometimes these war bands returned home loaded down with treasures, gold, silver, silks, other luxuries, along with less impressive but every bit is useful things like weapons and armor. Perhaps just as often the raiders returned home with nothing of value but short a few men. Other times the raiding parties didn't return at all. That violence went both ways, of course. Arbagoste's family farm had escaped the tender attentions of Roman punitive expeditions but they knew to run and hide in the forest when a Roman cavalry patrol crossed the river and came calling. Some of their neighbors hadn't been so lucky. Now they're part of the frontier had been relatively quiet, avoiding a major expedition or a war for a couple of decades but the unspoken thread of Rome's overwhelming force and violence was never far from their minds. The Roman army wasn't an unfamiliar thing for Arbagoste's and his family. They saw it soldiers in the fort at Rumaagan and on the punitive expeditions and patrols they carried out beyond the frontier or when they themselves raided beyond the frontier, though hopefully not. Male friends and relatives had joined the army too, heading to the fort to sign up to serve under the eagles and the hopes of finding a better life. One of Arbagoste's uncles had done well in Roman service, rising to command a whole unit of cavalry during the Emperor Constantine's boars against the Sarmations and the Persians. They had heard about this from other Franks who'd returned back beyond the frontier at the end of their term of service. The most who left never came back. A deserter from the army who had set himself up with the local king had filled them in on the fate of a cousin who had been killed fighting the Saxons in Britain. He wasn't so lucky. It wasn't a hard choice for Arbagoste's to join the army himself around the age of 20, around 355. The farming life didn't suit him and he'd always been more drawn to fighting. He'd listened with wrapped attention to the stories of wars and raiding that his fathers and brothers had told. Life beyond the frontier could be violent. The big men fought each other more than they fought the Romans and Arbagoste's had first been called to fight for the local king just after he turned 16. The fighting life he decided suited him better. He had raided into Roman territory only once and had come back empty handed but the orderly roads, walled cities, and imposing fortresses he'd seen left in impression. If he were going to fight for a living, why try to scrabble his way into the retinue of some petty king to live a life of raiding and occasional feasting in some drafty wooden hall? Why not go where the real rewards were and join the Roman army? Arbagoste's left his family behind, knowing that there was a good chance he would never see them again and presented himself to the recruiting officer at Ramagan. He adopted the name Flavius to help him fit in and was assigned to a unit of cavalry stationed at Trier, some 60 miles away. He received his official tattoo on the back of his hand, marking him out as a soldier once in forever. We don't know exactly what that tattoo would have been though at best guess might be an eagle for infantry or the characteristic dragon standard, the drako for cavalry. Alternatively, it might have been something like an ID badge. We don't really know for sure our only good source on this comes from the 6th century, a couple centuries after we're talking about with Arbagoste's. The discipline took some getting used to for Arbagoste's as the local king's temporary war band hadn't been big on marching in formation or constant drilling. He only spoke a few words of Latin before coming to the army, but luckily for him, the soldiers' talk was easier for him to pick up. Wasn't the fancy speech of some soft well-educated aristocrat, but almost like a cradle that mixed a low-class Latin, called vulgar Latin, with a generous helping of words derived from Gothic, Alamonic and Frankish among other sources. This "Setomo Militaris", military language, would have immediately marked out soldiers as being separate from the rest of society. It was one of many things that gave the army a sense of corporate identity, along with distinctive dress. Soldiers wore trousers and special belts and pinned their cloaks, usually red, with distinctive crossbow-shaped broches. Even if recruits hadn't come from beyond the empire like Arbagoste's, they were often drawn from minority populations living inside it, like the settled populations of defeated barbarians we talked about earlier. Still others wore soldiers' sons and had grown up in and around the army. This helped to create a sense of separateness, of otherness, that defined the army as an institution. On a more granular level, many of the army's units had their own histories that went back hundreds of years, little miniature institutional identities within the broader institution of the army. For Roman observers who weren't especially familiar with the army, telling the difference between a barbarian and a soldier might not have been easy. Their speech was spiced with words that obviously weren't Roman. The clothes they wore looked nothing like those of a civilian. They had tattoos and scars and they carried weapons. In short, soldiers formed a distinctive class within society and were a product of this frontier culture that tightly bound together both sides of the border. Some historians have argued that the army was actually much better integrated into society in the late empire, since soldiers were so much more likely to be stationed in and around cities, where in the early empire they were segregated off at their bases and camps. I actually think it was the opposite, that as soldiers spent more time around civilians, they emphasized their otherness and separate professional identity even more. Familiarity, as the saying goes, can breed contempt. So this is what Flavius Arbigostes entered around the year 355. The army was a thriving force at this point, at the peak of its effectiveness in this later period. There hadn't been a serious defeat or an incursion in quite some time, and the frontiers were largely stable. Every emperor from Diocletian onward had invested in frontier defense, renovating some forts and building entirely new ones, while strengthening the interior lines of defense. The fort at Rumoggen that Arbigostes knew so well had its walls thickened in the late third century, for example. With the frontier line of defense in good shape, the army even felt comfortable placing watchtowers, forts, and other outposts well beyond the Rhine in the Danube, patrolling regularly and presumably engaging in small-scale fighting as necessary. These were the kinds of punitive expeditions with which Arbigostes had grown up. The first few years of Arbigostes' time in the army would have been busy. Just as he finished training, he went on his first major expedition under the leadership of the new Emperor Julian, heading back to the Rhine and fighting several major engagements against Franks who had captured towns on the Roman side of the border, including Cologne. His first major pitched battle came the next year in 357 against the Alamani at the battle of Strasbourg. Outnumbered nearly 3-1, the Romans managed a crushing victory, and Arbigostes was one of the cavalry squadron who captured the head Alamani king, Knodomar, as he tried to escape the battlefield. Further campaigns beyond the Rhine followed that one, then another against the Franks to the north the next year. Arbigostes might have even been able to stop by his home and see his family. He wouldn't see them again for a long while. There were major campaigns practically every year between 358 and 361, alternating between the Franks and Alamani, and after that, Arbigostes was part of the army that fought for Julian in a brief civil war. He and his unit of cavalry may even have gone all the way to the east, with Julian to Persian 363. We know some units from the Gallic army went with Julian on this disastrous expedition. So within 8 years of joining the army, our friend Arbigostes would have fought Franks, Alamani, Burgundians, and now Persians. He had traveled thousands of miles. He had crossed the Alps and the Aegean, seen great cities like Milan, Aqueleia, Constantinople, and Antioch. He had besieged the Persian capital at Catecifan, thousands of miles from where he was born, and he had fought in the Syrian desert, the forests of Gharmania, the rocky foothills of the Alps, and the plains of northern Italy. He had fought everyone from lightly armored Alamani raiders with barely more than a spear to other Roman soldiers, long service professionals, to Persian catafracts who were covered in armor from head to toe. If he survived all of this constant campaigning, Arbigostes had to be at least competent, and if he were competent, he could advance through the ranks. He spoke Latin now, and not just the crude soldiers' cradle that he'd learned after joining up. If he became an officer, he'd learn to read as well. By this point, it's safe to say that our friend Arbigostes had been assimilated to the institution of the army. To say that he'd become Roman kind of misses the point. He'd become a very specific kind of Roman, a Roman soldier. By the time the new emperor of Valentinian headed back to the west, with Arbigostes and the few survivors of his unit in tow after the disastrous losses of the Persian campaign, it would have been men like our friend who formed the backbone of the army. They were the institution now, these long service professionals, and fresh recruits learned the ropes of army life from them. Arbigosteys had the look, good or bad, to enter the army at its most active time in decades. Valentinian campaigned practically every year of his 10-year reign, fighting major campaigns against the Alamani on both sides of the Rhine, the quality of the Upper Danube, and Saxon raiders in Northern Gaul. Arbigosteys wouldn't have necessarily fought in all of these campaigns, but as a member of a mobile cavalry unit attached to the Komita Tensase, he was part of the field army, not the Limitanei, who were relatively settled in their frontier fortifications. Valentinian wasn't a snob, and he knew military talent as well as any emperor of the 4th century. If our friend Arbigosteys managed to survive into the middle of the 370s, he might have risen still higher. There were generals of barbarian descent under Valentinian. My Arbigosteys or someone like him have been one of them. It's entirely plausible. By the time Arbigosteys' service came to an end in 375 or 379, depending on the term of enlistment, he'd enlisted for either 20 or 24 years. He could count on a nice retirement package, or he could try to stay in the army to advance still further. After a lifetime of campaigning, though, Arbigosteys was tired. Old injuries and wounds, the product of a dozen pitched battles and countless small fights against this or that group of raiders, had left him with a limp, missing fingers on his right hand, and headaches that never truly went away. Still, Arbigosteys had accumulated a fair bit of wealth over the course of his many expeditions, plunder taken from this group or that. And when you combine that with his retirement, which he took in the form of cash, it was pretty well off. So Arbigosteys headed back to Ramaghan, where he purchased land and slaves and set himself up as a supplier of wheat, beer, and livestock for the local garrison. He now had a favorite legal status and was exempt from most taxation, giving him a leg up on the local competitors. This family still lived on the other side of the border, and they kept in touch regularly. Using his connections in the military, he found a favorite appointment for a nephew in the Imperial Bodyguard, a position of great status that could lead to high rank, even out of Magistar Militum, the Supreme Commander. And that's how Frontier culture was made. It's not just that people on both sides of the border fought and traded with each other. Links of blood and profession united them, creating a common culture that made it hard to distinguish frankish warriors from army officers, and alamani raiders from potential recruits. The participants in this Frontier culture, barbarian and Roman military alike, had far more in common with each other than they did with Romans and the great cities of the provinces, or barbarians further removed from the border. The career of men like Arbigoste is how and why that came to be. So what happened to the Roman army? Well, several major defeats robbed it of the kinds of long service professionals who formed its backbone, men like Arbigoste is who were two decades into their term of service and who could assimilate new recruits to its norms and values. The Battle of Adrianople in 378 was one of these, and the bloody Battle of the Frigidus in 394, which pitted the field armies of the east and west against each other, was another. There was simply no replacing these troops, at least not without a long break in which to recruit and train replacements, and the Western Empire never got that break. The disaster at the Frigidus, and the shortage of troops that it created, is why Aladic and his goss had so much leverage leading up to the sack of Rome. The Roman army needed them. The army in the west never had the time or the ability to replace these losses, and so it was forced to rely ever more heavily on allies. The loss of provinces to these allies destroyed the tax base that had paid and supplied the regular army, and slowly but surely, piece by piece, the regular army disappeared over the course of the 5th century. There's an anecdote from the life of St. Severinus who lived in Norricum, kind of modern Austria in the 470s, that has always stuck with me. There were still troops in Norricum there, even as the imperial government had collapsed, and barbarians raided, pillaged, and burned around them. Now these troops sent a few soldiers to try to check on their pay. They never came back, but their corpses washed up on the bank of a river shortly thereafter. The regular army, this century's old force of long service professionals, didn't disappear all at once, and just faded away, swept down river by a world in which it no longer had a place. Thank you for joining me for today's episode. If you have a spare moment, I'd appreciate it if you left a rating and a review. You can follow me on Twitter at Patrick Underscore Wyman or on Facebook at Patrick Wyman MMA, and if you have questions, comments, or concerns, or if you just want to chat about the fall of the Roman Empire, drop me a line. If you're looking for more history podcasts, check out History Matters on iTunes and SoundCloud, a historian friend of mine and I are talking about present-day issues and historical perspective, tackling topics like the idea of progress, political breakdown, the economy, settlement patterns, and much, much more. Thanks again for listening. Until next time, this has been The Fall of Rome. [Music]