Bagauden

Bagauden ( Bagaudes ; possibly derived from Celtic baga "fight" and thus to be interpreted as "fighters" or "fighters") were called armed farmers and shepherds in Gaul and Hispania who opposed the Roman in the 3rd century and in late antiquity Government raised. Much about the Bagauden, their origin and their motives is unclear due to the difficult source situation . Perhaps they revolted against the Schollenbinding (the binding of the peasants to a certain piece of land) and the increasing tax pressure. According to some ancient historians , the Bagauden were more like local militias who, in times of a weakened central power, organized the defense on their own and then broke away from the empire. It is possible that the name Bagauden also conceals very different groups (such as impoverished colonists , runaway slaves , deserters, socially declassified) and phenomena , which could at least explain the contradictions of the sources.

Bagauden are mentioned for the first time during the so-called imperial crisis of the 3rd century (around 286). They were fought at the beginning of the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian ; Aurelius Victor ( Caesares 39.17) names two men named Aelianus and Amandus as their leaders . According to an eulogy for Maximian , Diocletian's co-emperor, he is said to have chastised the Bagauden: "... who wanted to be horsemen and behaved like hostile barbarians." Some of them moved as far as northern Spain (and at the beginning of the 5th century even across the Alps ). During the 4th century, when the Roman Empire was stabilized again, the sources are silent about Bagauden. In the 5th century, the Christian chronicler Salvian von Marseilles described the Bagauden as barbarians, who accepted into their ranks all those who wanted to escape the unjust and corrupt Roman order. It is believed that Salvian wanted to formulate a warning to the elites to treat their subjects in a more humane way so as not to ultimately be overrun by the barbarians. Around the middle of the 5th century, after great revolts under Tibatto and Basilius , they were defeated by regular Western Roman troops and the Visigoths allied with them and are subsequently no longer mentioned.

Source collection

• Béla Czuth: The sources of the history of the Bagauden . Szeged 1965.

literature

• Alexander Demandt : The late antiquity. Roman history from Diocletian to Justinian. 284–565 AD. 2nd fully revised and expanded edition. Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-55993-8 , especially p. 370f. ( Handbook of Classical Studies , Section 3, Part 6).
• John F. Drinkwater: The Bacaudae of fifth-century Gaul. In: John F. Drinkwater, Hugh Elton (Eds.): Fifth-century Gaul. A crisis of identity? Cambridge 1992, ISBN 0-521-41485-7 , pp. 208-217.
• J. Sánches León: Los Bagaudas. Rebeldes, demonios, mártires. Jaén 1996.
• Otto Seeck : Bagaudae . In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume II, 2, Stuttgart 1896, Col. 2766 f.
• Roland Steinacher: What is a barbarian? In: Spectrum of Science Special Archeology - History - Culture 1 (2015), pp. 20-25.