The most trenchant passage in Walter Goffart’s generally trenchant book, Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire, concerns the Frisians. Unlike most of the tribal groups described in Goffart’s book, the Frisians are still very much with us; their language, distinct from Nederlands and German, lingers on in the remoter wastes of this very inhospitable North Sea territory. And that is the point.

Dwellers in a land that no one would dream of migrating to, the Frisians came from nowhere and went nowhere: they were in place as far into the past as anyone need look and remained so, confidently, into the Middle Ages. The physical evidence of their presence impresses us still in the majesty with which it traverses the centuries, proof of a single-mindedness not to be shaken by so flimsy a historian’s fancy as the Völkerwanderung.

If the Frisians were content to hang on in Friesland — some of them joined the Saxon flow to England, which crossed their land, but most stayed home, eking out an existence on terpen, precarious man-made mounds that rose above the tides (this is before dikes) — why would all those “peoples,” settled at various times and places along the length of the Danube, have felt the need to push toward Italy? Does the very idea of “migration of peoples” (Völkerwanderung) make sense? Goffart thinks not, and I agree with him. It goes without saying that I also concur in his judgment that there was never enough cohesion, internal or across group lines, among Goths and Lombards and others to support the idea of a “Germanic” infiltration of the Later Empire.

That the Later Empire swarmed with barbarian military men is not in question. Some of these barbarians, such as Constantine’s father, came from “backwoods” origins within the perimeters of the Empire; in the Fifth Century, emperors and general came from almost everywhere, inside or out. By Diocletian’s reign (c 290) at the latest, the imperial throne was occupied by military strongmen of varying durability, and a military aristocracy that drew from the top of all the more successful tribes was soon established. (Goffart mentions an eye-popping factoid: twenty-seven family connections link Diocletian to Charlemagne.) This aristocracy was highly meritocratic, if in a somewhat negative way: heirs without leadership capacities were bumped off. But it was already sustained by the sort of dynastic marriage that would characterize the European aristocracy right up to modern times. Already, Goffart tells us, we find that an illustrious family tree was indispensable for the major posts. It would only be in the High Middle Ages that such trees would be expected to go back before the times of renowned grandfathers or invincible uncles; by then, people without such backgrounds rarely had access to equine-centric military training.

Goffart’s book makes it difficult to believe that the Roman Empire ever “collapsed” or came to any kind of end. Its leadership rather passed into the hands of men (and women — women were far more powerful in this early aristocratic age than any Roman matron ever was) with interests completely different from those of the Julians or the Flavians. What did crumble was the veneration for the Athens of Pericles that so obviously motivated a great did of what the Romans of the Late Republic and Early Empire said, did, and, most of all, built. As we’ve been reminded ever since Gibbon, this loss of respect for Greek manners (which was of course even more completely discarded in Imperial Greece itself) is as attributable to the spread of Christianity as it is to anything else. Certainly the idea of “Rome” that Latin humanists have cherished since the Fourteenth Century eventually petered out. But this was because imperial institutions were steered in new directions, not because they were crushed.

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Before reading Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy, I could not have written a hundred words about Transylvania without consulting a very general reference book. Now I could possibly make it to five hundred — not that there’s a need. I might have learned a good deal, had I read it when it came out, from Between the Woods and the Water, the second installment of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “Walk” trilogy, in the second half of which he ventures into Transylvanian territory. He doesn’t penetrate very deep, and he visits none of the places mentioned by Bánffy, but both writers are quite clearly describing the same earthly paradise.

Hills enclosed the north bank of this particular reach and the monastery was hardly out of sight before the tapering ruins of the castle of Solymos jutted on a pedestal of rock: it was a stronghold of the great John Hunyadi but much older than he. Then the trees of the foothills began to pile up in waves, with sprays of wild lilac scattered among the branches. The hills on the other shore stood aloof, and between the two ranges the great river lazily unwound. Sometimes it looped away for a mile or two, then meandered back and the clouds of willows and aspens that marked its windings were interspersed with with poplars tapering in spindles or expanding like butterfly nets. The women in the fields worse kerchiefs on their heads, under hats of soft plaited straw as wide as cart-wheels; leaves like broken assegais plumed the tall maize; an occasional breeze ruffled the wheat; the vines, all sprayed with sulphate, climbed in tiers. Pale cattle with wide, straight horns grazed by the score and the fens and water-meadows that lay about the river were wallows for buffaloes; lustrous as seals, or caked in dried mud as armour against insects, they were sometimes only to be spotted in the slime and the swamps by bubbles or an emerging nostril. Wherever horses and mares with their foals moved loose about the grass, a few ragged tents were sure to be pitched. Everything in these reedy windings was inert and hushed under a sleepy spell of growth and untroubled plenty.

I’d be dying to visit Transylvania myself if I thought that it still bore a strong resemblance to the land laid out in the pages of Bánffy and Fermor, but one might as well wish for a time-machine. But the foothills piling up in waves — perhaps that might still be seen. Every now and then I recall with a jolt that this is not the Transylvania of Bram Stoker or the movies. Nothing could be further from Count Dracula’s predations than Count Bánffy’s dream of a cosmopolitan but agrarian Transylvania.

Fermor is certainly more Virgilian than Bánffy, while the earlier writer’s word paintings are all inflected by a deep possessory pride. Nevertheless it is pleasant to remain tucked in my armchair Transylvania. Fermor’s summary of the local history, with particular bearing on the insolubility of the sovereignty problem — since resolved, by a brutal communist regime, in favor of the Romanians — is a masterpiece of lucidity, and I should happily copy it out if its length did not threaten to carry me far beyond the outermost rim of fair use.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 20th, 2013 at 1:12 pm.