While Roman generals remained preoccupied with the Visigoths, a second irruption of refugee outsiders appeared inside the traditional boundaries of empire. On the last day of the year 405, a full generation after the Visigoths' arrival, a disparate group—comprising various people who called themselves Vandals, Alans, Sueves, and others—made its way west across the Rhine. The invaders took advantage of a brief lapse in official Rome's attention to the Rhine frontier, when troops were distracted fending off a usurper from Britain and blocking Alaric's movements in Italy. Once again, Rome reacted to the symptom rather than the cause. Historians used to theorize that the Huns on the lower Danube pressured this group to move, but that has proved to be not a very good guess. Opportunity, ambition, and chance are probably enough to explain this arrival.

These immigrants seem to have bottled themselves up quickly in northern Gaul, and they settled quietly enough for a while. Then a few years later, pressed by Roman forces, they made a successful break for the Pyrenees and Spain beyond, where they gradually made themselves at home. They had discovered the true secret of empire: that once they breached the perimeter, there were few internal protections for people, cities, or farms. A mobile and resourceful group like theirs could do quite well for itself, without being in any hurry to settle. Of the Alans and Sueves we hear little more, but the ones who went by the name of Vandals had quite a future ahead of them.

Visigoths and Vandals had much in common. Both peoples pursued a line of least resistance, while proving to themselves that the long, long history of Roman strategy amounted to little more than frontier defense combined with ignorance and lack of interest in what lay beyond. What the Romans had perfected was really just elaborate preparation to fail in handling invasions. The very Roman society that was terrified of outsiders had earlier nurtured them and paradoxically given them their identity. Bands of refugees were by nature poorly organized, so they made up no functioning polity. Once inside Roman boundaries, once they sniffed their own power, and once they were demonized by those they passed among, they became what the empire feared they were: better organized, more internally self-conscious, with an ideology about themselves that didn't have to be true to be convincing.

Theoderic in the fifth century and the Lombards

A minimalist reading of history could argue that the Visigoths were the first and the Vandals the last peoples normally resident outside the boundaries of the Roman empire to make their way across the northern frontier and settle permanently inside. The other moments marked as "invasions" of the Roman empire—notably those of Theoderic in the fifth century and the Lombards in the sixth century in Italy—are better understood as resettlements from one Roman region to another. There are some small exceptions to this minimalist generalization, and there are many complicated scholarly debates, but the point to take away is that the total number of invasions and invaders, at the most generous count, is still triflingly small compared with the wealth and military force that Rome had at its disposal balkan tours 2023.

As these groups passed across the Roman landscape for two or three decades on their way to final settlements, moreover, they were still in flux. Some fell away by attrition, as individuals and small groups found places to settle while permitting the larger community to move on. Accretion brought others to join the migration and soldiers acquired wives and fathered children along the way. If you traveled with the group, you absorbed the name and the identity that went along with it, and perhaps you took it seriously.

In the late 410s, a Spanish churchman visiting Bethlehem picked up and eagerly reported a story about the king of the Visigoths.19 Alaric had died not long after his terror strike on Rome, and his successor, Athaulf (Ataulphus), had been heard to say that when he was a young man, he had imagined he could overthrow "Romania," replacing it with "Gothia," but that now he understood that his Goths were too undisciplined and needed Roman excellence to form an orderly society. The story is most likely a rumor of the kind we would now find in a tabloid, voicing a popular sentiment that anxious Romans needed to think an invader general might say. If it is true, though, we have to remember that this man was speaking almost forty years after the Visigoths came into the empire. That ambition to outdo "Romania" was an ambition, in other words, almost certainly formed inside the Roman empire by a man who was in many ways indistinguishable from many other Romans and Roman soldiers. Most important, it is a vote in favor of civilization. The barbarians who settled in the Roman empire by choice were always attracted to its virtues and prosperity and were in no way interested in destroying them.

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