Federal rates

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The Romans basically referred to any group of non-Romans with whom a contract ( foedus ) had been concluded as federates (Latin singular foederatus , plural foederati ) . In research, the term is mostly used in relation to late antiquity (4th to 6th centuries AD) and denotes "barbaric" contingents, i.e. non-Roman warriors who fought under their own leaders for the Romans and in return for supplies and goods were often assigned land in the Roman Empire . The character of the settlement and the role that these foederati played in the fall of the Western Roman Empire are controversial in research.

Origins in the republic

A foedus was a contract between Romans and non-Romans and could have different contents. In the Roman Empire, foederatus was in principle any community that was not a Roman colony and that had not been granted Roman or Latin citizenship ( civitas ), but with which Rome was linked through the form of an interstate treaty ( foedus ), which as a rule promised the Roman Empire a contingent of warriors if needed. The Latins were considered blood relatives, the rest as allies ( socii ).

The friction between these contractual obligations without the corresponding benefit of romanitas eventually led to war between the Romans and a small group of close allies on the one hand, and the disaffected socii on the other. A law from 90 BC BC ( Lex Iulia ) offered Roman citizenship to allied states that accepted the terms of the treaty. Not all cities (for example Heraclea and Naples ) were ready to be absorbed in the Roman res publica . But since Caesar at the latest, practically all of Italy's free inhabitants were Roman citizens.

Other foederati settled outside Italy : Gades (Cádiz) in Hispania or Massilia (Marseille) in Gaul . At the latest with the granting of Roman citizenship to almost all free residents of the empire by the Constitutio Antoniniana in 212 AD, but probably earlier, the category of foederati initially lost its importance and was apparently completely out of use for a long time.

Late antiquity

Foederati did not appear again in Roman sources until the late 4th century AD . In late antiquity and especially with regard to the so-called migration of peoples , the term was mainly used in connection with the Roman practice of connecting foedera with the leaders of barbaric groups - for example with Franks , Saxons , Vandals , Alans and, above all, Visigoths  - who were exchanged for Money, food or land (the latter is controversial in research) fought for the Romans without being formally integrated into the imperial army. Basically, they were mercenary troops from outside the empire. Although there were forerunners, this type of foederati became typical especially from the last quarter of the 4th century.

In 376, a large Gothic association, including women and children, sought permission from Emperor Valens to settle on the southern Roman bank of the Danube and was accepted into the empire. Whether this is a "people" (as was generally assumed in the past) or a group of warriors with entourage is controversial. In any case, two years later the Visigoths (or Visigoths), who felt they had been betrayed, rose up and defeated the Romans in the bloody battle of Adrianople . This loss of regular soldiers, which could not be made up for by recruitment in the short term, forced the Roman Empire at the same time to rely more on foederati . Therefore, Emperor Theodosius I concluded a foedus with the Visigoths in October 382 . This Gothic treaty, the exact terms of which, if any, are unclear, presumably provided for the settlement of the Goths in Thrace ; the territory remained Roman. The Goths, who had previously submitted to the Romans, were supposed to recognize the emperor as overlord, but remain autonomous and not become Roman citizens; In the event of war they had to serve the emperor under their own leaders, but were under Roman command and received a relatively high annual fee for their military service . According to researchers such as Ralf Scharf, however, there was no foedus with the Visigoths in 382 , since they had previously submitted and Rome did not close a foedera with such dediticii ; Scharf and others assume that the first late antique foederati were Goths and Huns, who were recruited as mercenaries by Theodosius I in 394.

Be that as it may: The main interest of the Federation was to acquire the right to regular supplies ( annona militaris ) from the Roman state . At first it took the form of food, later also of money, and the foederati probably had to submit to the emperor before the contract was signed. From the Roman point of view, they were so attractive because they combined high fighting power with low costs: This is how a law of the emperor Valentinian III. from the year 440 we can see that a regular soldier cost the state 30 solidi a year , while a federated warrior only costs five. Originally the foreign mercenaries were subordinate to Roman officers ( comites foederatorum ), but in the course of time this principle could in fact be observed less and less, especially in the West. In the Greek sources, the foederati are either directly referred to using the Latin loan word φοιδεράτοι or, more often, as ὑπόσπονδοι.

The loyalty of the federated units and their leaders, who were mostly referred to as rex , was mostly, but not consistently, reliable. The downfall of Westrom was certainly not a necessary consequence of the federal government. However, there is much to suggest that many foedera were closed as hospitium publicum and could therefore in fact be extinguished or terminated as soon as the army master or emperor, who had acted as the Roman "host", died. In the year 395 the Visigoths rose under Alaric because the Romans apparently no longer felt bound to the foedus after the death of Theodosius I. Something similar was repeated in later years. When the tax revenue dwindled in the 5th century AD and the military situation of West Rome worsened, the foederati were more and more allowed to settle on Roman territory in order to secure their supplies.

The recruitment of Frankish federations in northern Gaul was of great importance for the development of the Frankish empire. Germanic federations from central Germany and Bohemia contributed perhaps decisively to the emergence of the Bavarian tribe , just as the recruitment of federated Saxons by the Roman administration was the beginning of the Germanic immigration to the British main island, in order to subsequently form the collective nation of the Anglo-Saxons .

Federation as the backbone of the army

In the 5th century, the Western Roman military relied increasingly on federates, as Westrom lost control of economically important provinces and recruiting federates was much cheaper than equipping Roman units. In 451 Attila was also defeated with the help of foederati (including the Visigoths and Alans). From the late 5th century onwards, foederati could also mean mixed Roman-barbaric associations that were regularly paid. The foederati played a role in the fall of the Western Roman Empire insofar as their Germanic commander Odoaker 476 deposed the last Western Roman emperor Romulus Augustulus (according to the traditional count) and took over the government himself in the course of a mutiny of the Federation .

In Ostrom, on the other hand, the federates, but above all the army masters , who in the 5th century mostly exercised greater influence than the emperors in the west, were largely kept under control. In addition, the difference between regular and federated units was becoming increasingly blurred and, according to contemporary Prokopios of Caesarea, had almost disappeared around the middle of the 6th century , even if the original meaning of the name was still known.

Archeological

Archeology can hardly make any statements on the specific role of the foederati because of its non-written source base, but it is still involved in the discussion on important aspects. The late antique graves of “barbaric” warriors have become the subject of research controversy in recent years. Until well into the 1990s, the vast majority of archaeologists assumed that they could reliably infer the ethnic identity of the buried person from the material legacy and the type of burial. This was done by interpreting certain grave finds with weapons additions in northeastern France and Belgium, as well as in England around the area along the Danube Limes to Pannonia as an indication of foederati .

The row grave cemeteries are characterized by the new burial custom of giving the dead more or less jewelry, women's brooches and weapons such as sword, lance and ax, in which they differ significantly from older Roman burial customs.

To the origin of the row grave culture and the interpretation of their burial practice, it was discussed in the 1970s which ancient ethnic group could be found here - Laeten , Dediticii , foederati , Gentiles or Germanic mercenaries of Roman auxiliary departments in Gaul. Since the 1980s, research has generally ascribed arms-equipped graves to non-Roman foederati using a very broad definition . The research concentrated on the “un-Roman” burial custom of adding weapons and its derivation. Insofar as a military elite can be proven in the finds of the early row grave culture, Laeten are ruled out as bearers of this grave custom; however, as Horst Wolfgang Böhme assumed in 1974  , free Germanic warriors, most likely gentiles of the Roman federation formations in Gaul, could be assumed to be the bearers of this custom . At least for the second half of the 5th century Böhme explicitly accepted “federated Germanic warbands” -  foederati  . Rich grave ensembles and the addition of weapons, especially with swords, reveal the buried as free as well as high-ranking military leaders in the service of Rome. Such archaeological finds are found in the entire area around the Limes, from Britain to southern Germany to Pannonia.

A changed culture of row graves, which is recognizable in addition to the burial custom through west-east facing burials, began in the later 5th century. It has been repeatedly associated in research with the emerging and expanding Merovingian Empire. On the other hand, the south-north facing graves with enclosed weapons, which were most likely linked to the foederati , would still testify to an older independent row grave culture.

In recent years, however, the methodological approach of inferring the ethnicity of an individual from burial customs and grave goods has been vehemently criticized. In addition, more and more recent archaeological research is taking the position that only members of a late Roman military elite could be found in the graves in question; whose "barbaric" style of equipment and clothing ( habitus barbarus ) was widespread among both Romans and non-Romans. If so, it would mean that foederati were not necessarily buried in the late antique soldier graves ; the hypotheses of older research, which believed that certain graves could be assigned to certain ethnic groups or foederati , would in this case be obsolete.

literature

  • Horst Wolfgang Böhme : Germanic grave finds from the 4th to 5th centuries between the lower Elbe and Loire (= studies of chronology and population history. Munich contributions to pre- and early history. Volume 9). Munich 1974, ISBN 3-406-00489-X .
  • Horst Wolfgang Böhme: The end of Roman rule in Britain and the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England in the 5th century. In: Yearbook of the Roman-Germanic Central Museum Mainz (RGZM) 33, 1986, pp. 469-574.
  • Horst Wolfgang Böhme: The Frankish King Childerich between Attila and Aëtius. To the golden grip spathes of the migration period. In: Horst Wolfgang Böhme, Claus Dobiat (Hrsg.): Festschrift for Otto-Herman Frey. Marburg 1994, pp. 69-110.
  • Manfred Clauss : Federates . In: Lexicon of the Middle Ages . Volume 4, 1989, Col. 601 (there also further references).
  • Walter Goffart : Barbarians and Romans AD 418-584. The Techniques of Accommodation. Princeton 1988, ISBN 0-691-05303-0 (very influential and controversial historical study which advocates the thesis that the late antique foederati were not assigned land but a share of tax revenue).
  • Peter J. Heather : Fourth-Century Foedera and Foederati. In: Walter Pohl (Ed.): Kingdoms of the Empire. The Integration of Barbarians in late Antiquity (= The Transformation of the Roman World 1). Suffering u. a. 1997, ISBN 90-04-10845-9 , pp. 85–97 (this volume contains further articles on the subject).
  • Ralf Scharf : Foederati. From the international legal category to the Byzantine military class . Vienna 2001.
  • Andreas Schwarcz, Heiko Steuer :  Foederati. In: Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde (RGA). 2nd Edition. Volume 9, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1995, ISBN 3-11-014642-8 , pp. 290-301.
  • Timo Stickler : The Foederati . In: Paul Erdkamp (Ed.): The Blackwell Companion to the Roman Army . Oxford 2007, pp. 495-514.

Remarks

  1. ↑ Overview with Walter Pohl : The migration of people. 2nd edition Stuttgart 2005.
  2. ↑ See the overview in Henning Börm : Westrom. From Honorius to Justinian. Stuttgart 2018, pp. 177-183.
  3. ↑ See Nov. Valent. 5, 4. See also Cod. Theod. 11, 18.
  4. ↑ See e.g. Malchos , fragment 15.
  5. ↑ Prokopios, Historien 3,11,3 f.
  6. ↑ See Walter Pohl: Telling the Difference: Signs of ethnic Identity. In: Walter Pohl, Helmut Reimitz (eds.): Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300-800. Suffering u. a. 1998, pp. 17-69, summarizing ibid. Pp. 61ff.
  7. ↑ Cf. Horst Wolfgang Böhme : Germanic grave finds from the 4th to 5th centuries between the lower Elbe and Loire (= studies on chronology and population history. Munich contributions on pre- and early history 9). Munich 1974, ISBN 3-406-00489-X .
  8. ↑ Cf. Horst Wolfgang Böhme: The Frankish King Childerich between Attila and Aëtius. To the golden grip spathes of the migration period. In: Horst Wolfgang Böhme, Claus Dobiat (Hrsg.): Festschrift for Otto-Herman Frey. Marburg 1994, pp. 69-110.
  9. ↑ See Hermann Ament :  Row grave cemeteries. In: Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde (RGA). 2nd Edition. Volume 24, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, ISBN 3-11-017575-4 , pp. 362–365 ( books.google.de ).
  10. ^ Manfred Clauss : Federates . In: Lexicon of the Middle Ages . Volume 4, 1989, Col. 601.
  11. ↑ Horst Wolfgang Böhme: Germanic grave finds from the 4th to 5th centuries between the lower Elbe and Loire (= studies on chronology and population history. Munich contributions on pre- and early history. Vol. 9). Munich 1974, p. 207.
  12. ↑ Horst Wolfgang Böhme: The end of Roman rule in Britain and the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England in the 5th century. In: Yearbook of the Roman-Germanic Central Museum Mainz 33, 1986, p. 541; Horst Wolfgang Böhme: The Frankish King Childerich between Attila and Aëtius. To the golden grip spathes of the migration period. In: Horst Wolfgang Böhme, Claus Dobiat (Hrsg.): Festschrift for Otto-Herman Frey. Marburg 1994, p. 102.
  13. ↑ a b Heiko Steuer :  Foederati. In: Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde (RGA). 2nd Edition. Volume 9, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1995, ISBN 3-11-014642-8 , p. 300.
  14. ↑ See Hermann Ament , Ian N. Wood :  Merowingerzeit. In: Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde (RGA). 2nd Edition. Volume 19, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2001, ISBN 3-11-017163-5 , pp. 579–597.
  15. ↑ See for example Sebastian Brather: Ethnic identities as constructs of early historical archeology. In: Germania 78, 2000, pp. 139–171, and Patrick J. Geary: European peoples in the early Middle Ages. To the legend of the becoming of the nations. Frankfurt / Main 2002, p. 45 ff. See also Michael Kulikowski: Rome's Gothic Wars . Cambridge 2007, p. 60 ff.
  16. ↑ See Philipp von Rummel: Habitus barbarus . Berlin / New York 2007.
  17. ↑ Volker Bierbrauer, for his part, turns against the fundamental criticism of Sebastian Brather: On the ethnic interpretation in prehistoric archeology. In: Walter Pohl (Ed.): The search for the origins. On the importance of the early Middle Ages . Vienna 2004, pp. 45–84.