The Völkerwanderung

The Migration Period, also the Völkerwanderung, is a name given by historians to a human migration which occurred within the period of roughly AD 300 – 700 in Europe, marking the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages.

The migration included the Goths, Vandals, and Franks, among other Germanic, Bulgar, Hungarian, Tartar, and Slavic tribes. The migration may have been triggered by the incursions of the Huns, in turn connected to the Turkic migration in Central Asia, population pressures, or climate changes.

The migration movement may be divided into two phases; the first phase, between AD 300 and 500, largely seen from the Mediterranean perspective of Greek and Latin historians, with the aid of some archaeology, put Germanic peoples in control of most areas of the former Western Roman Empire (Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Burgundians, Alans, Langobards, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Suebi, Alamanni, Vandals). The first to formally enter Roman territory — as refugees from the Huns — were the Visigoths in 376. Tolerated by the Romans on condition that they defend the Danube frontier, they rebelled, eventually invading Italy and sacking Rome itself (410 A.D.) before settling in Iberia and founding a 200-year-long kingdom there. They were followed into Roman territory by the Ostrogoths led by Theodoric the Great, settling in Italy itself.

In Gaul, the Franks, a fusion of western Germanic tribes whose leaders had been strongly aligned with Rome, entered Roman lands more gradually and peacefully during the 5th century, and were generally accepted as rulers by the Roman- Gaulish population. Fending off challenges from the Allemanni, Burgundians and Visigoths, the Frankish kingdom became the nucleus of the future states of France and Germany. Meanwhile, Angles and Saxons more slowly conquered Roman Britain.

Between AD 500 and 700, the second phase saw Slavic tribes settling in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly in eastern Magna Germania, and gradually making it predominantly Slavic. The Bulgars, who had been present in far eastern Europe since the second century, conquered the eastern Balkan territory of the Byzantine Empire in the seventh century.

The Muslims tried to invade Europe via Asia Minor in the second half of the seventh century and the early eighth century, but Byzantium and Bulgaria managed to defend themselves in 717-18 at the siege of Constantinople. At the same time,

Völkerwanderung – page 1 Islamic armies invaded Europe via Gibraltar, conquering Hispania (the Iberian Peninsula) from the Visigoths in 711 before finally being halted by the Franks at the Battle of Tours in 732. These battles largely halted Islam’s attacks for the next three centuries.

During the eighth to tenth centuries, not usually counted as part of the Migrations Period but still within the Early Middle Ages, new waves of migration, first of the Magyars and later of the Turkic peoples, as well as Viking expansion from Scandinavia, threatened the newly established order of the Frankish Empire in Central Europe.

The German term Völkerwanderung (“migration of nations”) is still used as an alternative label for the Migration Period in English-language historiography.

The Völkerwanderung, the growth of the Germanic tribes into France, England, Northern Italy and Iberia, is seen an indication of cultural energy and dynamism, in the face of a declining and dying Roman Empire: young and vigorous people who succeeded the old and decadent Roman society.

The migration did not represent hostile invasion so much as tribes taking the opportunity to enter and settle lands already thinly populated and weakly held by a divided Roman state whose economy was shrinking at a time when the climate was cooling. The migration period did not see the kind of wholesale destruction carried out in later centuries by the Mongols, by Islamic invaders, or by industrial-era armies.

Völkerwanderung – page 2