̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Holy Roman Empire

Tiller the Hun? Farmers in Roman Empire converted to Hun lifestyle – and vice versa

fpjl2 — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 18:43:46 +0000

Marauding hordes of barbarian Huns, under their ferocious leader Attila, are often credited with triggering the fall of one of history’s greatest empires: Rome.

Historians believe Hunnic incursions into Roman provinces bordering the Danube during the 5th century AD opened the floodgates for nomadic tribes to encroach on the empire. This caused a destabilisation that contributed to collapse of Roman power in the West.

According to Roman accounts, the Huns brought only terror and destruction. However, research from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge on gravesite remains in the Roman frontier region of Pannonia (now Hungary) has revealed for the first time how ordinary people may have dealt with the arrival of the Huns.

Biochemical analyses of teeth and bone to test for diet and mobility suggest that, over the course of a lifetime, some farmers on the edge of empire left their homesteads to become Hun-like roaming herdsmen, and consequently, perhaps, took up arms with the tribes.

Other remains from the same gravesites show a dietary shift indicating some Hun discovered a settled way of life and the joys of agriculture – leaving their wanderlust, and possibly their bloodlust, behind.

Lead researcher Dr Susanne Hakenbeck, from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology, says the Huns may have brought ways of life that appealed to some farmers in the area, as well learning from and settling among the locals. She says this could be evidence of the steady infiltration that shook an empire.

“We know from contemporary accounts that this was a time when treaties between tribes and Romans were forged and fractured, loyalties sworn and broken. ̽��ֱ��lifestyle shifts we see in the skeletons may reflect that turmoil,” says Hakenbeck.

“However, while written accounts of the last century of the Roman Empire focus on convulsions of violence, our new data appear to show some degree of cooperation and coexistence of people living in the frontier zone. Far from being a clash of cultures, alternating between lifestyles may have been an insurance policy in unstable political times.”

For the study, published today in the journal PLOS ONE, Hakenbeck and colleagues tested skeletal remains at five 5th-century sites around Pannonia, including one in a former civic centre as well as rural homesteads.

̽��ֱ��team analysed the isotope ratios of carbon, nitrogen, strontium and oxygen in bones and teeth. They compared this data to sites in central Germany, where typical farmers of the time lived, and locations in Siberia and Mongolia, home to nomadic herders up to the Mongol period and beyond.

̽��ֱ��results allowed researchers to distinguish between settled agricultural populations and nomadic animal herders in the former Roman border area through isotopic traces of diet and mobility in the skeletons.

All the Pannonian gravesites not only held examples of both lifestyles, but also many individuals that shifted between lifestyles in both directions over the course of a lifetime. “ ̽��ֱ��exchange of subsistence strategies is evidence for a way of life we don’t see anywhere else in Europe at this time,” says Hakenbeck.

She says there are no clear lifestyle patterns based on sex or accompanying grave goods, or even ‘skull modification’ – the binding of the head as a baby to create a pointed skull – commonly associated with the Hun.

“Nomadic animal herding and skull modification may be practices imported by Hun tribes into the bounds of empire and adopted by some of the agriculturalist inhabitants.”

̽��ֱ��diet of farmers was relatively boring, says Hakenbeck, consisting primarily of plants such as wheat, vegetables and pulses, with a modicum of meat and almost no fish.

̽��ֱ��herders’ diet on the other hand was high in animal protein and augmented with fish. They also ate large quantities of millet, which has a distinctive carbon isotope ratio that can be identified in human bones. Millet is a hardy plant that was hugely popular with nomadic populations of central Asia because it grows in a few short weeks.

Roman sources of the time were dismissive of this lifestyle. Ammianus Marcellinus, a Roman official, wrote of the Hun that they “care nothing for using the ploughshare, but they live upon flesh and an abundance of milk.”

“While Roman authors considered them incomprehensibly uncivilised and barely human, it seems many of citizens at the edge of Rome’s empire were drawn to the Hun lifestyle, just as some nomads took to a more settled way of life,” says Hakenbeck.

However, there is one account that hints at the appeal of the Hun, that of Roman politician Priscus. While on a diplomatic mission to the court of Attila, he describes encountering a former merchant who had abandoned life in the Empire for that of the Hun enemy as, after war, they “live in inactivity, enjoying what they have got, and not at all, or very little, harassed.”

New archaeological analysis suggests people of Western Roman Empire switched between Hunnic nomadism and settled farming over a lifetime. Findings may be evidence of tribal encroachment that undermined Roman Empire during 5th century AD, contributing to its fall.

While Roman authors considered them incomprehensibly uncivilised and barely human, it seems many of citizens at the edge of Rome’s empire were drawn to the Hun lifestyle, just as some nomads took to a more settled way of life

Susanne Hakenbeck

Erzsébet Fóthi, Hungarian Natural History Museum Budapest

Example of a modified skull, a practice assumed to be Hunnic that may have been appropriated by local farmers within the bounds of the Western Roman Empire.

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Roman dig ‘transforms understanding’ of ancient port

sjr81 — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 14:18:28 +0000

A team, led by Cambridge’s Professor Martin Millett (Fitzwilliam College) and Professor Simon Keay (Southampton), has been conducting a survey of an area of land lying between Ostia and another Roman port called Portus – both about thirty miles from Rome. ̽��ֱ��work has been undertaken as part of the Southampton led ‘Portus Project’, in collaboration with the British School at Rome and the Soprintendenza Speciale per I Beni Archeologici di Roma.

Millett said: " ̽��ֱ��results of our work completely transform our understanding of one of the key cities of the Roman Empire. ̽��ֱ��enormous scale of the newly discovered warehouses will require a rethinking about the scale of commerce passing through the port. ̽��ֱ��results also illustrate yet again the power of contemporary survey methods in providing important new evidence about even very well-known archaeological sites."

Previously, scholars thought that the Tiber formed the northern edge of Ostia, but this new research, using geophysical survey techniques to examine the site, has shown that Ostia’s city wall also continued on the other side of the river. ̽��ֱ��researchers have shown this newly discovered area enclosed three huge, previously unknown warehouses – the largest of which was the size of a football pitch.

Director of the Portus Project, Professor Simon Keay, said: “Our research not only increases the known area of the ancient city, but it also shows that the Tiber bisected Ostia, rather than defining its northern side. ̽��ֱ��presence of the warehouses along the northern bank of the river provides us with further evidence for the commercial activities that took place there in the first two centuries.”

̽��ֱ��researchers have been using an established technique known as magnetometry, which involves systematically and rapidly scanning the landscape with small handheld instruments in order to identify localised magnetic anomalies relating to buried ancient structures. These are then mapped out with specialised computer software, providing images similar to aerial photographs, which can be interpreted by archaeologists.

In antiquity, the landscape in this recent study was known as the Isola Sacra and was surrounded by a major canal to the north, the river Tiber to the east and south, and the Tyrrhenian sea to the west. At the southernmost side of the Isola Sacra, the geophysical survey revealed very clear evidence for the town wall of Roman Ostia, interspersed by large towers several metres thick, and running east to west for about half a kilometre. In an area close by, known to archaeologists as the Trastevere Ostiense, the team also found very clear evidence for at least four major buildings.

Professor Keay added: “Three of these buildings were probably warehouses that are similar in layout to those that have been previously excavated at Ostia itself, however the newly discovered buildings seem to be much larger. In addition, there is a massive 142 metre by 110 metre fourth building – composed of rows of columns running from north to south, but whose function is unknown.

“Our results are of major importance for our understanding of Roman Ostia and the discoveries will lead to a major re-think of the topography of one of the iconic Roman cities in the Mediterranean.”

For more information about the Portus Project, visit www.portusproject.org

Researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Southampton have discovered a new section of the boundary wall of the ancient Roman port of Ostia, proving the city was much larger than previously estimated.

̽��ֱ��results of our work completely transform our understanding of one of the key cities of the Roman Empire.

Martin Millett

DigitalGlobe Inc.

̽��ֱ��roman port of Ostia

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Kaiser, Reich and the making of modern Germany

bjb42 — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:00:19 +0000

An epic new history of the final 300 years of Germany's first Reich reveals how the period gave birth to modern German identity and principles that still underpin its attempts to lead Europe today.

A decade in the making, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire (1493-1806), by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge historian Dr Joachim Whaley, is the most comprehensive survey of Germany's early modern history ever undertaken, the first book of its kind since the 1950s, and one of the most substantial works of historical scholarship published in the UK this year.

̽��ֱ��two-volume study tells the story of more than 300 principalities and about 1,500 other minor territories. Together, these made up the later Holy Roman Empire, which covered much of northern and central Europe and constituted Germany's original Reich.

Whaley believes that their story challenges much of what we think we know about Germany and its people today. With Europe in crisis and many nations looking to Germany for leadership, he argues that the period reveals a deeper history of political co-operation and consensus, which is usually overlooked because of Germany's recent, often darker past. Today, the very word "Reich", which has associations with the disastrous Third Reich, has become taboo. ̽��ֱ��first Reich was very different.

Historians themselves have also neglected the last three centuries of the Holy Roman Empire. Typically, the period has been portrayed as one of decline, in which the Empire fragmented into warring territories, was split by the Catholic-Protestant divide of the Reformation, was ravaged by the Thirty Years War, and eventually became meaningless. Even some well-respected histories of Germany give its final decades only a handful of pages.

After 10 years researching and writing the book, Whaley argues that it is time to look again. Rather than a weak, dysfunctional precursor of the strong Germany that emerged in the 19th century, the new study suggests that the latter-day Holy Roman Empire was a successful political entity in itself.

What we struggle with, he adds, is that its model was very different to our own idea of what a "state" should be. In an era before nations, the Empire was a "federative state" - made up of territories with interlocking identities. People saw themselves as both local and German, but there was no Imperial capital and ‘Germany’ comprised territories that today are part of France, Belgium, Poland, the Czech Republic and Austria, as well as the Federal Republic of Germany. While this political system may sound alien now, the book argues that by and large, it worked.

" ̽��ֱ��history of German-speaking Europe in this period has been seen as the history of localities and territories, but it is also the history of the union of those entities and their survival," Whaley said. "Usually historians see this time as one of division in which the Empire failed to function as a nation state. What we forget is that for 300 years, it also held the German-speaking territories together as a legal and cultural community, in spite of numerous changes and external threats."

This community, the study suggests, laid much of the groundwork for German identity today. It began in the 1490s, when the Emperor Maximilian I and the German princes and cities carved out a two-tier system of government based on the concept of Kaiser und Reich. At one level, the Emperor provided governance in negotiation with the princes through the diet, the Reichstag. At the same time, however, all of the territories essentially governed themselves.

Although subject to their immediate ruler, people were also vassals of the Emperor and could appeal to the laws of the Reich as a greater authority. While this led to some periods of instability and even war, Whaley argues that overall, it created a political climate of negotiation, consensus and co-operation, and the recognition that each sub-region of the Empire had certain freedoms.

̽��ֱ��result was a 300-year period of evolution. Maximilian's changes were just the first of different phases of reform which usually emerged because of religious differences, economic problems, social unrest, or wars. Each time, the two-tier system adapted to accommodate the hundreds of territories it contained.

̽��ֱ��Holy Roman Empire never experienced a direct equivalent of the English Civil War or the French Revolution, but the Thirty Years War was perhaps an equivalent. At one level, this was a European war fought largely on German soil. At another level, it was a conflict over the German constitution and another, albeit traumatic evolutionary phase: Ferdinand II aimed to subvert the constitution and establish a strong monarchy; the German princes ultimately succeeded in having the old balance of powers restored. In 1648 the Peace of Westphalia refined and renewed the principles established by Maximilian and the German princes around 1500 and this treaty remained the fundamental constitutional law of the Reich for the next 150 years.

̽��ֱ��study argues that this gave early-modern Germany a progressive system of governance. In spite of its highly fragmented state, there was a consistency about the way the different territories dealt with issues like judicial reform, welfare or education. As a result, the community constantly evolved a picture of itself as German: "There was a clear sense of the difference between the extensive rights and liberties they enjoyed as subjects of the Empire compared with, say, the subjects of the king of France," Whaley says.

In times of war, the Emperor was still therefore able to raise an army that had the patriotic fervour needed to defend the Empire's borders. Critically, however, German identity became associated with the principles of the federative state - the protection and preservation of local rights, and unity in diversity. It failed only when it came under overwhelming military pressure from France after 1792 and was dissolved at Napoleon’s insistence in 1806.

Whaley's analysis stops short of claiming that the later Holy Roman Empire was the forerunner of a modern federal Europe. He does, however, suggest that it helps to explain how Germany perceives Europe, and why Germans find the notion of a united Europe more palatable than, for example, the British.

"There is a history here of co-operation, consensus and compromise in German politics which is rarely acknowledged," he says. "For Germans, there is a federal mentality and habit that is deeply ingrained. This expects to deal with things by compromise and works slowly to broker deals and find ways to move forwards. Understanding the history of the Reich cannot help us to construct a blueprint for the future of Europe, but it can help us understand how Germany and Europe have become what they are today."

Germany and the Holy Roman Empire (1493-1806) is published by Oxford ̽��ֱ�� Press.

Europe is in crisis and its future is said to depend on Germany. ̽��ֱ��most comprehensive study of Germany's early modern history ever undertaken, published this week, questions just how much we know about its past - and how much we understand it as a result.

Understanding the history of the Reich cannot help us to construct a blueprint for Europe's future, but it can help us understand how Germany and Europe have become what they are today.

Joachim Whaley

Jo Whaley

Detail of a map of the Holy Roman Empire, 1492 - 1618.

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