The period of grandiose ethnic migrations at the turn of antiquity and the Middle Ages is called the Great Migration of Peoples. Its culmination is the fall of the Western Roman Empire at the end of the 5th century. Among scientists there is no consensus regarding either the reasons or even the chronological framework of this phenomenon. Usually indicate the time between IV and VI centuries. AD But some attribute to it the first invasions of the Germans (Cimbri and Teutons) into the Roman Empire at the end of the II century BC, and end with the Mongol conquests in the XIII century. And yet, the majority is inclined to consider the IPN only those migrations that destroyed the ancient Roman Empire.
Great is not the greatest
It is named great from the point of view of ancient Rome. If you look at the scale of the history of all of Eurasia, then in it the great migrations took place almost continuously, and many were more significant than the VNP. So, the most grandiose of the known was the movement of the peoples of the 3rd millennium BC from the steppes of Eastern Europe to Western Europe. According to most scholars, this migration, which created the Corded Ware and Battle Ax cultures, was the resettlement of Indo-European tribes from their ancestral homeland. It radically changed the ethnic picture of Europe and, as some believe, destroyed the matriarchal civilization of the ancient inhabitants of this part of the world.
In the II millennium BC. Indo-Europeans moved to the Balkans, the Middle East, Iran and India. They created the ancient Greek, Persian and Vedic civilizations. All the 1st millennium BC. there were migrations of successive peoples in the steppes of Eastern Europe: Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans. Moreover, the Cimmerians and Scythians reached the Middle East and founded their kingdoms there. In the IV-III centuries. BC. Celts from Central Europe settled throughout Western Europe and in Britain, in the Danube region, even reached Asia Minor and created their own state there, and also once took Rome. The migrations of the Turkic peoples to Europe, which began with the resettlement of the Huns in the 4th century, and ended with the expansion of the Ottoman Turks more than a thousand years later, were an equally large ethnic movement that redrawn the world map.
Who were these peoples
The ethnicity of many peoples who participated in the IPN still cannot be established with absolute accuracy. The stereotypical notion that the barbarians who destroyed Rome were Germanic collapses on closer examination. There, undoubtedly, Iranian and some other tribes, including, probably, Slavic, participated.
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The ethnicity of not only the Huns, who are believed to have displaced the entire mass, but also the Goths, who destroyed Rome, are controversial. In the description of the Huns by ancient authors, such Slavic origin "Huns" words as "strava" (meaning feast), "honey" and "kvass" are cited. The Gothic author Jordan called his people Getae, and this name was known from ancient times among one of the largest peoples of the Lower Danube, akin to the Dacians and Thracians. Some historians rightly point to the closeness of the tribal name of the Vandals to the ancient name of the Slavs - the Wends.
Nations did not move entirely
According to the description of the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, barbarians moved in whole tribes - with wives, children and slaves, with livestock, wagons, and other movable property. These were not campaigns of only individual military squads. However, modern scientists believe that this picture cannot be absolutized. Both took place.
There is ample evidence that part of the migrating tribe always remained in the old place. So, after the Goths at the end of the IV century moved from the Northern Black Sea region to the Roman Empire, some of them did not move anywhere. The state of the Goths in Crimea existed until the 15th century. And some of the Goths remained at all in their ancestral homeland in Scandinavia. This is evidenced by the name of the island of Gotland and the fact that its inhabitants, up to the 18th century, spoke a special language, different from Swedish.
The Huns, who, as it is believed, came from somewhere in the depths of Central Asia or Siberia, also not all people moved to Europe. Because at the same time, when the hordes of Attila instilled fear in the Roman Empire, other Huns - "white" - attacked the Indian Gupta Empire. The Alans, as you know, participated in the UPN and, together with the vandals, founded a kingdom in North Africa, and in 455 they took Rome with a battle. But most of the Alans remained in the North Caucasus and gave rise to the Ossetians. The Suevi created their kingdom in northwestern Spain, but their name still bears a state in a completely different part of Europe - Sweden.
Are they such barbarians
The widespread idea is that the "barbarians" and "vandals" who destroyed the Roman Empire fully corresponded to their common names. But we judge them by the descriptions of their enemies. But at all times, enemies were described as the fiend of hell, they were denied belonging to the human race. The objective picture emerging from the data of archeology and not biased testimonies of contemporaries is completely different.
Thus, the Byzantine ambassador to Attila Priscus met there with a Greek who emigrated to the Huns from the great lies that reigned in the Roman Empire and extolled the order of his new homeland. Attila himself was distinguished by the cleanliness and neatness of his attire and appearance. Archeology shows that all the lands from which the movement of "barbarian" tribes took place, in the 1st-4th centuries. were distinguished by a highly developed material culture, which developed under the influence of Roman culture and copied its samples.
And in military affairs the barbarians were sometimes higher than the legions of degenerated Rome. So, in the battle of Adrianople in 378, where the East Roman army of Emperor Valens was completely destroyed by the Ostrogoth army (the emperor himself died), the Romans could not do anything with the armored Gothic cavalry, created on the model of the Persian cataphracts.
And it was not for nothing that at this time the Romans hired barbarian leaders and their entire tribes for their service in order to oppose other barbarians. If not for this, the Empire would have fallen much earlier. Its existence was prolonged by such "barbarians" as Frank Stilicho, under whose command the imperial troops beat the Goths more than once. But Stilicho was killed by the machinations of the Roman nobility. The Goths lost their most dangerous enemy and only then took Rome.
The fact that "barbarians" plundered Roman cities does not speak of their "lack of culture", since robbery in war was characteristic of civilized peoples in the twentieth century. But the fact that they liberated the slaves at the same time cannot but tune, rather, in their favor. In addition, we can take into account that the Goths who took Rome were Christians for almost a century, and they adopted Christianity earlier than most of the Romans. Well, and the legend that the king of the Huns Attila was buried at the bottom of the Danube, having previously diverted the river to another channel, then let it go again along the old channel, and the slaves who did this, were killed, should be attributed to the category of fables - there were no in those days technical capabilities to block the Danube.
Yaroslav Butakov