Founding the Second Burgundian Kingdom

In the Gallic Chronicle of 452, under the year A.D. 443, it is written “Sapaudia was given to the remnants of the Burgundians to be divided with the native inhabitants.” Though their first kingdom ended in catastrophic failure, the Burgundians survived. For the twenty years between the fall of the first Burgundian kingdom and the re-settlement in Sapaudia, no Burgundian King has been identified, but in A.D. 456 Gundioc was first mentioned. He may have been related to Gundahar, though he probably was the scion of a minor line of the Burgundians. It was also possible that he may have been related to the Goths as stories of the mid-sixth century said that Gundioc was a descendant of the old Goth king Athanaric.

The region called Sapaudia covered land that now comprises present-day eastern Switzerland and the southern portion of the Jura Mountains, near Geneva. It is generally believed that Aetius settled the Burgundians in Sapaudia in A.D. 443 because he intended that they serve as a buffer between the Romans of southern Gaul and the traditional Burgundian rivals, the Alamanni, who wanted to expand into the region. However, others have found it hard to believe that Aetius would have placed the recently defeated, and thus severely weakened, Burgundians in such a strategic position.

Even if the Burgundians were not severely weakened, it is doubtful that a brilliant tactician such as Aetius would have placed a strong and resentful Burgundian tribe in a strategic position. Thus, instead of the Alamanni, the problem Aetius hoped to solve by placing the Burgundians as he did was probably the rebellious Bacaudae and their allies in Gaul. Aetius had settled the Visigoths in Aquitania to quell a similar uprising at about the same time. Given this, the Burgundians, though still weakened by their encounter with Aetius and the Huns, were of sufficient strength to deal effectively with a peasant and slave uprising.

The relationship of the Bishop Hilary of Arles and Aetius has also been proposed by Georg Langgartner as a reason for the relocation of the Burgundians to Sapaudia. Hilary enjoyed widespread ecclesiastical support in the region, with a strong base centered at Lerins. He also had strong secular support outside of his own province. One of his strongest proponents was Aetius, who could have moved the Burgundians to Sapaudia to protect Hilary while he was at Besancon. This latter theory does not necessarily exclude the possibility that the Burgundians were placed in the region to quell a rebellion. Taken together, both may offer a more plausible scenario than that of a weakened people being placed in a key defensive position within the empire.

There are other theories. Some believed the Burgundians were too unsophisticated to realize they were being played as dupes by Aetius. The earlier Burgundian support for Jovinus has been cited as proof for this contention, which asserts that the Burgundians were too naïve in imperial politics to realize that they were being rebellious against Rome. Accordingly, the Burgundians applied a kind of circular logic whereby their support of Jovinus legitimized his imperial claim which in term legitimized their support. Thus, with the precedent of a Burgundian collective of circular logicians established, some historians have suggested that Aetius cleverly placed these “loyal if naïve barbarians” in an area that needed to be protected while simultaneously implying to the Gallic aristocrats that these same barbarians may be manipulated or agree with them on a grander plan for Gauls’ place within the empire.

Another, perhaps more likely reason, was that Aetius realized the benefit of having the allegiance and obligations, guaranteed under foederati status, of a group of barbarians who knew what it meant to face the Huns. Perhaps Aetius realized that the Huns were getting too powerful and were a potential problem with whom he would soon have to deal. The Burgundians were only one of a few key alliances he made to vouchsafe against an eventual loss of the control of his Hunnish mercenaries. On the Burgundian’s part, the desire to ingratiate themselves with Rome also cannot be discounted, thus they may have not been so much naïve as having few other options.

Finally, perhaps J.M. Wallace-Hadrill offered perhaps the most measured (if contrarian) opinion that no one knew precisely why the Burgundians were settled in “Savoy” by Aetius in A.D. 443. As he points out, Savoy didn’t seem to be in any danger of internal uprising and the Alamans were possibly too far away to pose an immediate threat.

Whether the Burgundians were settled to perform their duties as garrison troops, constables, or bodyguards, they were eventually called upon by Aetius to provide warriors for military action in other regions of Gaul. In A.D. 451, a faction of Burgundians followed Aetius and Theodoric, king of the Visigoths, when they faced Attila and his Huns and allies on the Catalaunian Plains, near the city of Troyes. Another faction of Burgundians joined Attila.

Attila’s Burgundians were from among those that still lived on the eastern shore of the Rhine and were part of the Hun army that entered the Belgic provinces, took Metz on April 7, 451, and pillaged and burned many other cities. These Burgundians were probably those who had split from the main body during the Vandal assault of A.D. 406. They were also those whom had purportedly turned to Christianity after defeating the Hun Uptar, but later must have been defeated and integrated into the Hunnic horde. The opposing Burgundians illustrates that Germanic tribes didn’t operate in the classically believed mono-ethnic manner. Germans prioritized booty and strength over racial or social loyalty. (Wolfram theorizes that this group seems to have slowly dispersed after the defeat of Attila, and some of them eventually found their way to the kingdom of their tribesmen along the Rhone).

Aetius’ tactic of pitting one Germanic tribe against another, while often successful, resulted in serious repercussions for the Roman Empire. The Empire’s policy of employing barbarians as mercenaries resulted in the gradual consolidation of military power into the hands of various barbarian generals. Roman rulers had concluded that it was safer to have foreign defenders in lieu of Roman armies because foreign chiefs were excluded by their nationality from having a legitimate claim on the throne. They attracted these chiefs by settling their people on Roman lands and extracting a pledge that they and their people would protect Rome from foreign invaders.

The specific nature of the Roman practice of providing land, or some other form of payment, to barbarians in return for their service as defenders has been much debated by historians. All agree that the Roman legal concept called hospitalitas played a role in this mixing of Germans and Romans within a province, but there has been disagreement over the specific characteristics of this system.

The system of hospitalitas was used to settle the Burgundians in their new kingdom of Sapaudia in A.D. 443. Earlier historians believed that Rome gave one-third to two-thirds of the Roman landowners’ estates, including the people on them, to the Germanic troops billeted there. More recent studies, particularly the work of Walter Goffart, have argued that, while there was probably a system of land allotment, this evolved into a system of tax revenue transfer. According to this theory, the Burgundians, and other Germanic tribes, were actually given a fixed portion of taxes assessed on land held by Romans rather than a portion of the actual land thus occupied. Finally, this transfer of tax revenue was made easier because the collection and distribution stayed in the hands of the Roman municipal office holders, the curiales, and did not fall to the barbarians themselves.

Over the years, the Burgundian king gave royal gifts and every loyal Burgundian retainer gained land to go with their share of the tax revenue, if they had not received land already. This informal system turned the Burgundians into landowners. Further, in a series of trade-offs with Roman landowners, they consolidated and centralized their estates, as did the Romans, and a system of Burgundian/Roman land ownership evolved.

Goffart has argued that these results caused confusion in later historical analysis as they were taken to be the form of the original design rather than the evolved result. Additionally, the system of tax reapportionment made sense because settled Barbarian troops did not cost anymore to the taxpayers than Roman troops. According to C.D. Gordon, the “dignity and eminence” of the existing aristocracies and clergy were not adversely affected by the presence of these barbarians.

[W]hen they finally occupied the Roman lands of the west, they had reached a state of civilization which enabled them to appreciate and to make some effort to preserve the civilization they had taken over. This is to be credited in large measure to the subsidies they had received for so long.

The acute instinct of the vastly outnumbered Burgundians to be inoffensive to the Gallo-Romans probably helped them gain the acceptance of their more tenured neighbors. Some historians believe that the Gallo-Romans even welcomed any Germans as a new source of manpower to till Roman lands, or that, specifically in the Burgundians case, that old memories of joining together in support of Jovinus had eased the way for sharing Roman lands.

There were barbarians within the Roman Empire prior to the “invasions,” mostly former or current members of the Roman army or prisoners and their descendants who had been used to repopulate militarily devastated regions. It has also been determined that the Burgundians modified their military unit structure to include Gallo-Romans within the ranks. As such, military, and later political, command, originally in the hands of chiefs or strong warriors who led comitatus, fell to the counts, or comes, of both Romans and Burgundians.

While the Burgundians attempted to smooth relations between their tribe and their Gallo-Roman neighbors, they also took proactive steps to maintain their own tribal unity within their new kingdom. They prescribed common laws and fostered a “common sense of identity” among their Germanic population while at the same time they tried to segregate between the Germans and the Roman or Gallo-Roman people who made up the majority of their new lands. Part of this Germanic unification process was accomplished by kings associating themselves with heroes of often mythical royal families or, at the very least, storied families from the history of their people, as did the Burgundian kings by associating themselves with the Gibechungs (or Nibelungs).

Most of the German tribes used religion as a unifying element and most, including the Burgundians, were Arian, a heretical Christianity that became a sort of cultural unifier, particularly as it became identified with the members of the royal families. The Burgundians also established law codes that drew from both traditional Germanic codes and probably some “local vulgar” Roman law traditions. Unfortunately, while these actions and beliefs were true for the free men who fought for their king, the opinions and thoughts of the peasants and slaves will probably never be known.

Up Next: Expansion

SOURCES:

Chronicle of 452, in Murray, Merovingian Gaul.
Wolfram, Germanic Peoples.
Musset, Germanic Invasions.
Edward James, The Origins of France: From Clovis to the Capetians, 500-1000 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982).
Anthony King, Roman Gaul and Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
E.A. Thompson, “The Settlement of the Barbarians in Southern Gaul,” The Journal of Roman Studies 46, parts 1 and 2 (1956).
Justine Davis Randers-Pehrson, Barbarians and Romans: The Birth Struggle of Europe, A.D. 400-700 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983).
J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Long-Haired Kings and other studies in Frankish History (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1962).
Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism.
Heinzelmann, Bischofsherrschaft in Gallien: Zur Kontinuitat romischer Fuhrungsschichten von 4. Bis zum 7. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1976) in Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism
Georg Langgartner, Die Galliepolitik der Papste im 5. Und 6. Jahrhundert. Eine Studie uber den apostolische Vikariat von Arles (Bonn, 1964) in Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism.
Jordanes, Goths.
Bury, Invasion of Europe.
C. Delisle Burns, “Christianity and the First Europe,” in The Barbarian Invasions: Catalyst of a New Order, ed. Katherine Fischer Drew (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970).
Collins, Early Medieval Europe.
Goffart, Barbarians and Romans.
Geary, The Myth of Nations.
Goffart, “Rome, Constantinople, and the Barbarians.”
Gordon, “Subsidies in Roman Imperial Defence,”
James, The Origins of France.

Germanic Contact with the Roman Empire - Conflict and Commerce

The Roman trade policy did gradually establish a certain, albeit inconsistent, cultural equivalency between the Empire and the barbarians. However, it also caused conflict within individual tribes as both competition for favors from Rome and between pro- and anti-Roman factions splintered old tribes and formed new ones based on relationships to Rome. These factions resorted to violence to press their case, some at the behest of Rome, which had the money so desirable to barbarian leaders. These leaders held, or desired, political power that was acquired and reinforced through their ability to control trade in their region. As C.R. Whitaker surmised, "It is reasonable to conclude that soldiers, particularly officers, on active service became increasingly powerful locally through their attachment to the land in the regions where they served."

Thus, the result of Roman and barbarian interaction along the limes was a destabilization. Rome, with her money and political power, enabled some chiefs to gain riches previously unimagined. More importantly, these chiefs were trained in the politics and economics of Rome and were able apply these principles successfully among their tribes. At the same time, those barbarian groups not embraced by Rome often grouped into large confederations and wreaked havoc along the borderlands. These new groups formed and re-formed continually, some around a strong, Romanized barbarian and others around a particular leader at the head of a barbarian confederation. These new “tribes” often associated themselves with much older traditions for the sake of unity and continuity.

The incessant barbarian conflicts that occurred during the latter part of the second century increased the importance of the military leaders in the tribes. As Patrick Geary observed, these reiks often attributed their military prowess as “a sign of the gods’ favor,” which enabled them to “add a religious aura to their position.”

The god Tiwaz was a war god (his rune is to the left), influential on the battlefield, but was also more importantly the god of law and order and was associated with the Germanic Thing, the essential governing body of a traditional tribe. As the tribe began to identify itself less with its land of origin, it also de-emphasized the role of the god Tiwaz, and the thiudans, and identified itself more with the new, successful war leader and the corresponding god of war, Woden.

According to Geary, “[v]ictories created new traditions,” and, according to Malcolm Todd, regardless of race, language, or political origin, if an individual fought along side a certain war leader, he was a member of that war leader’s tribe. Geary also believes that the Marcomannic Wars were evidence of “a radical restructuring of the Germanic world” and “the last decades of the second century were the most vital period of ethnogenesis in Germanic history.”

Barbarians had been used by Rome for her armies almost from their first exposure to the Empire. Caesar used Germanic troops during his Gaul campaign. Initially serving as separate, tribe-based auxiliary forces, they were eventually merged into the general Roman auxiliary forces. Some were picked to be special body guards for the emperor, which formed an important political counterweight to the Praetorian Guard. Most important were the German leaders who learned the Roman way of war and brought their knowledge back to their tribes. Barbarian war-leaders also identified themselves as both members of barbarian society and Roman officers and often used one position to advance the other. Some, such as Arbogast, used their position as Roman generals to marshal the necessary forces to attack their barbarian rivals, as Arbogast did by attacking Marcomer and Sunno across the Rhine. However, most often, accepting a high position in the Roman army usually meant forfeiting tribal political power.

Roman money was important, especially to the barbarian leader, because victory alone could not maintain a king’s prestige against other leaders in the tribe. Money equaled power, and Rome had a seemingly endless supply of the former. In exchange for money, barbarian kings provided Rome with military manpower. They used Roman money and booty acquired while pursuing Roman military ventures to satisfy their supporters and attract more warriors to their tribe. As such, military leaders did not rely solely on strict tribal bonds to attract warriors. Warrior bands, called comitatus, were based on personal loyalty to a leader rather than tribal bonds, and these became prevalent and added to the confusion among tribal society.

Often, individual members of these bands participated in raids against tribes with whom their ancestral tribe was ostensibly at peace. This in turn caused more widespread conflict. Also, when a tribe moved, and inevitably encountered and fought other tribes, a natural upward social mobility occurred within its ranks as warriors proved themselves on the battlefield. Skill was prime, not ethnic or social background, and those that distinctly exhibited these characteristics emerged as leaders. This near-constant state of warfare resulted in the splintering and reformation of tribes, often with a war leader and his comitatus serving as the nucleus for a new tribe. The war leaders of these new or reformed tribes called upon their own tribal heritage to provide an identity for their new tribe, often recycling remembered and revered tribal names to add an air of authenticity and respect. While probable that the mixed ethnicity of a comitatus could cause problems for a leader, being able to overcome such internal unrest would bolster his reputation. Further, according to Lucien Musset, perhaps the solutions reached by such successful leaders eventually led them "to modify their institutions, and thus pav[ed] the way for an eventual reconciliation with the Romans.”

The Romans did not recruit barbarians for only military purposes. They also settled them on their lands to provide a needed workforce in regions that had been ravaged of their former population by war or famine. These barbarian were usually those who themselves had been defeated in war and were either held by the Romans or had asked the emperor for permission to settle on Roman lands. In exchange, these groups paid tribute and lived under Roman law, though they were not considered to be freemen and were subject to the emperor’s whim. “Privileges could not be accorded to those whose origin lay beyond the boundaries of the Roman state.” Thus, barbarian workers in the Roman Empire helped to convert uncultivated land into cultivated and taxable land and provided manpower for other endeavors, such as mining.

This constant state of societal flux as tribes formed, splintered, and re-formed both within and outside of lands under imperial control has revealed that tribes “were more processes than stable structures.” In essence, the tribes were similar to modern political parties. Each exalted a founding father, or concept, and included people and families of different ethnic stock, but shared cultural values. Additionally, given the inability of the Germans to act in concert at the tribal level, the traditional belief that they had acted in concert to raid the Roman Empire en masse has been shown as incorrect.

Geary has argued that the Romans applied a faulty template to the Germanic tribes in an attempt to put a familiar societal structure over the chaotic Germanic tribal world, which strengthened the perception that Germans were both similar and even united in action. Further, Walter Goffart has concluded that this faulty theory of united Germanic action led to the belief that Germanic tribes consciously set out to set up kingdoms on Roman soil and these mistaken assumptions contributed to the flawed motif of Barbarian Invasions. It also implied that a single, united German entity opposed the Roman Empire and that both entities were conscious of being on opposing sides. Conversely, Peter Heather asserts that, while the independent Germanic tribes didn’t act in concert to attack the Roman Empire, the widespread displacement caused by the Huns effectively produced this effect. Finally, Malcolm Todd observes that while:

...the history of the Germanic peoples in the fourth and fifth centuries, particularly in western Europe, is inextricably bound up with that of the declining Roman provinces… the tale is by no means always one of destruction and waste. Barbarians were by this time better equipped for life inside the empire than most ancient writers believed.

UP NEXT: Evolution of Barbarian Arms and Tactics

SOURCES:
Geary, Before France and Germany.
Goffart, Barbarians and Romans.
Ralph Whitney Mathisen, Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul: Strategies for Survival in an Age of Transition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993).
Whittaker, Frontiers of the Roman Empire.
Todd, The Northern Barbarians.
Musset, Germanic Invasions.
Miroslava Mirkovic, “The Later Roman Colonate and Freedom,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 87, no.2 (1997).
Peter Heather, in “The Huns and the End of the Roman Empire in Western Europe,” The English Historical Review 110, no.435 (1995).

Characteristics of Early Germanic Migrations

Although it has been generally accepted that those we refer to as the Germans moved from their original lands into Western Europe, the reasons for which they did so continues to be debated. As Herwig Wolfram (The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples) pithily observed, the “[d]ebates concerning the Germanic identity of the Germanic tribes who lived east of the Rhine fill entire libraries.” The most questionable early historical discussions centered on attempts to pinpoint the specific migratory path of certain Germanic tribes. Yet, as C.R. Whittaker (Frontiers of the Roman Empire: A Social and Economic Study) cautioned:

We have to break away from the stereotypes of ‘tribal’ history and mass movements of tribal migration, which, when we can trace them archaeologically…seem to be slow movements of infiltration by small groups of warriors.

Originally, historians believed that the Burgundians were among what came to be classified as the East Germans. These tribes left their lands beyond the Elbe River in the third and fourth centuries in search of new lands on a journey that took them towards the Black Sea and the Danube. Historians hypothesized that growing population and a related need for better food resources, as well as migratory pressure from other tribes, were probably the motivating factors in East German migration. Two good examples of this traditional theory are in Bury's Invasion of Europe Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Both Gibbon and Bury thought the wars fought by Marcus Aurelius during the end of the second century provided evidence for the movement of the East Germans because, they concluded, the barbarians Aurelius fought had been displaced by migrating East Germans.

These theories are still generally sound, though the attempt to specify migratory paths has been criticized by historians such as Walter Goffart (Barbarians and Romans. Additionally, Herwig Wolfram (Germanic Peoples) discounted the role of hunger or desire for goods as motivation for the migrations. Instead, he attributed pressure from constant warfare within barbarian society. According to Wolfram, this constant warfare was a direct result of “the driving force of tribal life [which] was the pathos of heroism. Barbarian traditions are the tales of the ‘deeds of brave men’—only the warrior matters; tribe and army are one.”

More recent scholarship has relied primarily on archeological evidence and has re-classified the Burgundians as Elbe Germans (Geary in Before France and Germany). Wolfram (Germanic Peoples) noted that linguists used to consider the Burgundians as East Germans, but are no longer so sure. The Burgundians were traditionally classified as a Gothic people, but this may have been because they were Arian Christians. Sidonius himself considered them to be Germanic, not Goths, a classification that a contemporary ethnographer would not confuse, according to Wolfram.

Their appearance in written sources clearly indicates that a Germanic tribe known as Burgundians existed, though their specific migration route remains unknown. As Malcolm Todd (Everyday Life of The Barbarians: Goths, Franks, and Vandals) argues, it is impossible to link a tribe mentioned by Tacitus and others of that era with so-called “archeological cultures” and most modern archeologists “prefer to leave on one side questions concerning the ethnic significance of archeological mater.” For his part, Todd placed the Burgundians among an eastern group of Germans, living between the Oder and Vistula, with the Goths, Vandals and Rugii.

An analysis of the few Burgundian remains, primarily skulls, indicated characteristics similar to those of people of Asiatic origin. Additionally, some historians have detected Asiatic themes and styles in the artwork of various Germanic tribes, including the Burgundians, during the migration period. Lucien Musset(Germanic Invasions), in particular, mentioned that analysis of Burgundian skulls indicated Asian characteristics and he also pointed out that it had been conjectured that the second part of the name of a later king, Gundiocus (Gundioc), showed Hunnic influence (based on Herbert Kuhn's “Asiatic Influences on the Art of the Migrations,” Parnassus 9).

Other archeological evidence taken from the area around the lower Vistula, traditionally believed to be a home to the Burgundians, indicated that the region experienced a population loss some time toward the end of the third century. Some historians took this as evidence of a western migration of the Burgundians at this time. However, this by itself is not enough to determine the specific migratory movements of the Burgundians.

Todd (The Northern Barbarians) and Patrick Geary (The Myth of Nations) each offer a substantive recounting of the problems associated with relying on nineteenth century interpretations of the history of the Germanic tribes from the time of Caesar to the migration period. Geary detailed how the compilation of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH) lay at the root of many of these problems as its composition relied heavily on the science of philology which resulted in classifying people according to a language family, from which tribal nationalities were then developed.

UP NEXT: Burgundian Contact with the Roman Empire

SOURCES:
Herwig Wolfram, The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1997).
C.R. Whittaker, Frontiers of the Roman Empire: A Social and Economic Study (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
Bury, Invasion of Europe.
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Great Books of the Western World, vol.40-41 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952).
Goffart, Barbarians and Romans.
Patrick Geary, Before France and Germany.
Malcolm Todd, Everyday Life of The Barbarians: Goths, Franks, and Vandals. (New York: Dorset Press, 1972).
Musset, Germanic Invasions.
Herbert Kuhn, “Asiatic Influences on the Art of the Migrations,” Parnassus 9, no.1 (1937).
Todd, The Northern Barbarians.
Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations.