Migration Period

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This is an article on European migrations in the early part of the first millennium AD. For a discussion of prehistoric migrations, see Human migration. For the 2003 Canadian film, see Les Invasions barbares

The Migration Period, also called Barbarian Invasions or Völkerwanderung (German for "wandering of peoples"), is a name given by historians to a human migration which occurred within the period of roughly AD 300–700 in Europe, marking the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages.

The migration included the Goths, Vandals, Suebi and Franks, among other Germanic, Bulgar and Slavic tribes. The migration may have been triggered by the incursions of the Huns, in turn connected to the Turkic migration in Central Asia, population pressures, or climate changes.

Migrations would continue well beyond AD 1000, successive waves of Slavs, Alans, Avars, Bulgars, Hungarians, Pechenegs, Cumans, and Tatars radically changing the ethnic makeup of Eastern Europe. Western European historians, however, tend to emphasize the migrations most relevant to Western Europe.

Modern account

The migration movement may be divided into two phases; the first phase, between AD 300 and 500, largely seen from the Mediterranean perspective of Greek and Latin historians, with the aid of some archaeology, put Germanic peoples in control of most areas of the former Western Roman Empire. (See also: Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Burgundians, Alans, Langobards, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Suebi, Alamanni, Vandals). The first to formally enter Roman territory — as refugees from the Huns — were the Visigoths in 376. Tolerated by the Romans on condition that they defend the Danube frontier, they rebelled, eventually invading Italy and sacking Rome itself (410) before settling in Iberia and founding a 300-year-long kingdom there. They were followed into Roman territory by the Ostrogoths led by Theodoric the Great, settling in Italy itself.

In Gaul, the Franks, a fusion of western Germanic tribes whose leaders had been strongly aligned with Rome, entered Roman lands more gradually and peacefully during the 5th century, and were generally accepted as rulers by the Roman-Gaulish population. Fending off challenges from the Allemanni, Burgundians and Visigoths, the Frankish kingdom became the nucleus of the future states of France and Germany. Meanwhile Roman Britain was more slowly conquered by Angles and Saxons.

The second phase, between AD 500 and 700, saw Slavic tribes settling in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly in eastern Magna Germania, and gradually making it predominantly Slavic. The Bulgars, who had been present in far eastern Europe since the second century, in the seventh century conquered the eastern Balkan territory of the Byzantine Empire. The Lombards, a Germanic people, settled northern italy, the region now known as Lombardy.

The Arabs tried to invade Europe via Asia Minor in the second half of the seventh century and the early eighth century, but were eventually defeated at the siege of Constantinople by the joint forces of Byzantium and Bulgaria in 717-18. At the same time, they invaded Europe via Gibraltar, conquering Hispania (the Iberian Peninsula) from the Visigoths in 711 before finally being halted by the Franks at the Battle of Tours in 732. These battles largely fixed the frontier between Christendom and Islam for the next three centuries.

During the eighth to tenth centuries, not usually counted as part of the Migrations Period but still within the Early Middle Ages, new waves of migration, first of the Magyars and later of the Turkic peoples, as well as Viking expansion from Scandinavia, threatened the newly established order of the Frankish Empire in Central Europe.

Migration vs Invasion

The German term Völkerwanderung [ˈfœlkɐˌvandəʁʊŋ] ("migration of peoples"), is still used as an alternative label for the Migration Period in English-language historiography..

However, the term Völkerwanderung is also strongly associated with a certain romantic historical style which has strong roots in the German-speaking world of the 19th century, perhaps associated with the same cultural process which included the music of Wagner and the writings of Nietzsche and Goethe.

The Völkerwanderung, the forceful expansion of the Germanic tribes into France, England, Northern Italy and Iberia, is seen an indication of cultural energy and dynamism. This analysis became associated with nineteenth century German Romantic nationalism.

Even the term "barbarian invasion" is still in use in some English works; It has its roots in the Latin point of view about the migration period: if Germans and Slavic peoples use the term "migration" (Völkerwanderung in German, Stěhování národů in Czech, etc.), in cultures that are heirs to Latin language (French, Italians, Spanish, etc.), these migrations are called "barbarian invasions" (e.g. the Italian term Invasioni barbariche). Barbarian historically has the neutral meaning of "foreigner but it also has a pejorative meaning of "uncivilized" and "cruel", making it problematic as a neutral historical descriptor.

Even the old romantic vision of the Migration age differs between differing cultures: on one side the Völkerwanderung: the myth of young and vigorous people who succeeded the old and decadent Roman society; on the other side there is the stereotype of uncivilized and savage 'barbarians', who destroyed the highly developed Roman Civilization, starting a Dark Age of disorder and violence.

Today, the notion of the "invasions" of pre-Romantic-generation historians has also fallen out of favour: many scholars today hold that a great deal of the migration did not represent hostile invasion so much as tribes taking the opportunity to enter and settle lands already thinly populated and weakly held by a divided Roman state whose economy was shrinking at a time when the climate was cooling.

While there were certainly battles, and sieges of cities, and death of innocent civilians fought between the tribes and the Roman peoples, the migration period did not see the kind of wholesale destruction carried out in later centuries by the Mongols or by industrial-era armies.

Some twentieth-century English-language historiography largely abandoned the German and Latin terms, replacing them with the term "Migration Period" arguing that it is more neutral, as in the series Studies in Historical Archaeoethnology or Gyula László's The Art of the Migration Period.

Timeline

Notes

References

J.B. Bury (1923). History of the Later Roman Empire Available online.

pl: Wielka wędrówka ludów

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