Migration Period
The Migration Period is a name for a period of migrations into Europe generally, notably the areas of what had been the Western Roman Empire and other migrations associated with this and following it. What groups to include and the starting and the ending dates are disputed. Various earlier and later migrations are not included. This period has also been termed in English by the German loanword Völkerwanderung and also as the barbarian invasions into Europe, the successive waves of Slavs, Alans, Avars, Bulgars, Hungarians, Pechenegs, Cumans, and Tatars radically changing the ethnic makeup of Eastern Europe. The views on this period have recently become influenced by various forms of political correctness, such as race denialism and views on "late antiquity". See also the article on Ancient Rome on the causes of the conquest of the Western Roman Empire.
History
The Migration Period or 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 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. Western European historians, however, tend to emphasize the migrations most relevant to Western Europe.
The modern account
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, among them the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Burgundians, Alans, Langobards, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Suebi, Alamanni and Vandals. The first to formally enter Roman territory — as refugees from the Hun invasion of 375 — were the Visigoths in 376.
Tolerated by the Romans on condition that they defend the Danube frontier, they rebelled after much privation and suffering at the hand of the Romans, eventually conquering what is now known as Italy and sacking Rome itself in 410 before settling in Iberia and founding a 200-year-long kingdom there. In June 455, Vandals and Alans under King Gaiseric captured the city. 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, Roman Britain was more slowly conquered by Angles and Saxons.
The second phase, between AD 500 and 700, 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, in the seventh century expanded their kingdom to eastern Balkan territory of the Byzantine Empire.
The Arabs tried to invade Europe via Asia Minor in the second half of the seventh century and the early eighth century, but were eventually defeated at the siege of Constantinople by the joint forces of Byzantium and Bulgaria in 717-18. At the same time, they 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 fixed the frontier between Christendom and Islam 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.
Völkerwanderung vs. barbarian invasions
The German term Völkerwanderung [ˈfœlkɐˌvandəʁʊŋ] ("migration or wandering of peoples"), is still used as an alternative label for the Migration Period in English-language historiography. The term is also associated with a certain romantic historical style which has strong roots in the German-speaking world of the 19th century, perhaps associated with the same cultural process which included the music of Wagner and the writings of Nietzsche and Goethe.
The forceful expansion of the Germanic peoples in all of Europe is seen an indication of cultural energy and dynamism, young and vigorous people who succeeded the old and decadent Roman society This analysis became associated with nineteenth century German Romantic nationalism.
Today, the notion of an "invasion" of pre-Romantic-generation historians has also fallen out of favour: many scholars today hold that a great deal of 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.
While there were certainly battles, and sieges of cities, and death of innocent civilians fought between the tribes and the Roman peoples, the migration period did not see the kind of wholesale destruction carried out in later centuries by the Mongols or by industrial-era armies.