Previously we considered how large the groups of people who moved around the ancient world actually were and what challenges such large groups faced in migrating from one place to another.

The idea of large, cohesive groups traveling across the map to resettle elsewhere is largely a product of two things: ancient literary conventions and modern historiography. Ancient Mediterranean writers had their own literary habits. Among them was positing large groups of people picking up and resettling elsewhere as a way of explaining cultural relationships (such as, for instance, the legend that the Romans were the descendants of Trojans, or that the Spartans were long-lost kin of the Jews). These stories were not based in any reality but served the literary and political needs of those who told them.

Modern historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries approached ancient history with the assumption that ethnic groups were coherent units with definable traits whose history could be traced across time and space. There was, they believed, a distinct “Gothic” or “Celtic” character that could be identified in literature and art and that marked the movement of whole peoples to replace or subjugate others. These assumptions were grounded in the systems of modern imperialism and the ideals of Romantic nationalist movements, not the realities of ancient history, but they shaped how scholars read ancient literary sources. The idea that there were mass migrations across Europe at any point in antiquity is largely a figment of the modern imagination.

When we revisit the ancient sources and the archaeological evidence, we can identify several different kinds of movement, each of which faced different versions of the problems outlined above and had different ways of dealing with them.

Long-term movement: Many of the “migrations” identified by nineteenth-century scholars are better understood as the result of small groups of people such as families, extended kin groups, or raiding parties taking similar routes over time. Each individual group was small enough to travel without overstraining the resources of the lands they moved through, but many such groups taking the same journey over an extended time period could eventually lead to significant shifts in population and local culture. This kind of movement can be seen for example in the migration of Gaulish warbands into northern Italy in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE and the large-scale shift of populations from northern and western Europe into the southern and eastern Mediterranean in the later centuries of the Roman Empire.

Armies: Other movements did involve large groups of people moving within a short time frame, and are best understood as armies on the march, attended by followers and hangers-on. The frontier peoples of the late Roman period were deeply interconnected with the Roman world. Under their own leaders, they competed for power and wealth in much the same way that Roman armies competed to put their leaders into power. Many of these groups included veterans of the Roman army and had diplomatic relations with the Roman elite. Their movements were directed at political ends, and they drew on the same resources that Roman armies did to manage the logistics of travel. The late Roman Franks and Vandals, for example, functioned essentially as armies with large civilian followings.

Refugees: Other groups of people moved en masse not by choice but because the alternative was worse. Economic and political changes could uproot some people and force them to relocate, whether they were prepared for a journey or not. Those forced to relocate could face extreme hardship, just as modern refugees too often do. We can get an idea of how desperate ancient refugees could be from accounts of peoples crossing into eastern Roman territory in the late fourth century selling their fellow refugees to the Romans as slaves at bargain prices just to feed themselves. Refugees faced the same challenges that traveling armies did, but with none of the same support; these groups probably lost many members along the way to illness, hunger, combat, or enslavement. Refugee groups include the Cimbri and Teutones in the late second century BCE and the Visigoths in the fourth century CE.

Migrating groups in antiquity were mostly small. The idea of barbarian hordes hundred of thousands strong is more fiction than history. Those who did travel in large groups mostly did so either as organized armies drawing on the same logistical resources that other ancient armies did or as refugees driven by desperation who managed the best they could under terrible circumstances.

The idea of massive hordes of barbarians migrating at once across the ancient landscape is a figment of the imagination, but that doesn’t mean that they ancient world was static. People moved, and sometimes they moved in large groups, but any such group faced enormous practical challenges. Some groups were in a position to overcome these challenges; many were not. “Barbarian” peoples did not have any special way of overcoming the practical problems of migration. They solved those problems the same way that other peoples did, in small groups, as armies, or as refugees.

Image: “Battle of Guadalete,” photograph by Christie’s via Wikimedia (1882; oil on panel; by Mariano Barbasán Lagueruela)

History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.

In a previous post, we considered the sizes of migrating groups in antiquity. We can probably dismiss any idea of hundreds of thousands of people pouring across the Roman Empire, but the challenges of moving even 10,000 people long distances in ancient conditions are significant.

People need things: clothing, bedding, medicine, tools, weapons, and most of all food and water. People on the road have to make do with less, but some things are still essential for survival and must be either carried with the group or found along the way. The more stuff people carry with them, the slower they move and the longer it takes for them to get to a place where they can settle down and start rebuilding; the faster people move, the less they can carry with them and the more they have to either rely on finding what they need along the way or suffer without. The logistics for moving a large group of people are always a compromise between stuff and speed.

The amount of stuff people can carry is limited. A healthy adult can typically carry around 20-25 kilos and still manage to walk long distances. Trained individuals can carry more, but people who can manage this feat are few, and in a large group will be outweighed by the young, elderly, sick, and disabled who can carry less. Animals can add to carrying capacity, but they also create greater demands for food, water, and medical care; carts or sledges can add capacity, but they are slower and limit what terrain a group can cover. The best way to carry large amounts of stuff long distances is over water, but this also limits what routes a group can take.

Healthy adults traveling by foot in good conditions can typically maintain a walking pace of about 4-5 kilometers an hour, and keep up that pace for hours at a time, covering between 20 and 40 km a day, but large migrating groups were not all made up of healthy adults and did not always have the luxury of traveling in fair conditions. A large group traveling across country would have been slow, and the larger the group, the slower it would have traveled.

The most important supplies for a traveling group are food and water. In extreme circumstances people can do without bedding, tools, weapons, even clothes, but if they run out of food and water they are done for. The average adult needs about 1.5 kilos of food and 1.5 liters of drinking water every day to sustain the exertion of long-distance travel by foot. Fresh water is available from wild sources across many parts of the temperate world, but large groups can exhaust local supplies. Some amount of food can be foraged or hunted in the wild, but there are very few landscapes anywhere rich enough in wild food sources to sustain a group of 10,000 while still allowing them time to make significant progress on their journey. A large group of people traveling across an ancient landscape had only two practical choices: carry food with them, or acquire it from the farms and fields of the regions they passed through.

Carrying your own food for a journey is helpful, but it has limits. Considering that typical adult carrying capacity is 20-25 kilos, and an adult needs 1.5 kilos of food a day, even a person carrying nothing but food can only carry about two weeks’ worth of rations. Carrying that much food means sacrificing any other gear, even the tools to prepare and cook the food with. In a large group including young, old, sick, and disabled, some people have to carry food for others. Even in the best conditions, a large group traveling overland could carry its own food for only about 10 days. Adding pack animals does not help the situation, because the proportion between what a horse, donkey, or camel eats and how much food it needs to sustain itself is the same as for a human being: even a pack animal loaded with nothing but food will eat up its entire cargo in less than two weeks. Allowing animals to graze extends the number of days they can go, but also slows them down. A large group traveling for 10 days might just be able to carry all their essential supplies with them. 10 days of travel would allow them to cover a distance of at best around 200 km, but in practice most migrating groups could not maintain such a speed. Realistically, any large group undertaking a long journey would have to acquire food (and other supplies) from the regions they traveled through.

Acquiring supplies locally is its own challenge. Ancient agriculture was of limited productivity. Most ancient farming towns did not produce a large surplus. Large migrating groups were unlikely to be carrying with them either trade goods or cash sufficient to buy or barter for all the food they needed (unless they were willing to sell off some of their own number as slaves). Any large migrating group probably reached a point, willingly or not, where they had no option but to take by force the food they needed to keep going. Such raiding surely provoked the local population to either fight back or hide their food supplies, either of which was another problem for the migrating group that slowed down their travel and stretched their resources.

Now, all of these problems did have solutions in ancient conditions. They are essentially the same problems that an army on the march faced, and there were plenty of armies in the ancient world, some of which may even have numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Armies, though, had two advantages that migrating groups did not: 1) they were mostly made up of healthy adults, and 2) they had the financial and logistical support of a state behind them. Groups of people that did not have these two advantages faced serious challenges if they wanted to move long distances en masse.

Next time, we’ll put together what we know about the realities of numbers and logistics to see what we can say about what a “barbarian migration” might have actually looked like.

Image: Huns via Wikimedia (1910; painting; by Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse)

History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.