Rome’s Barbarian Mercenaries
By David G. Frye

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To fill its ranks, the late Roman army resorted to unprecedented measures. Sons of soldiers were required to take up the vocation of their fathers. Foreigners served in record numbers. Some were drawn from defeated barbarian groups that had been settled as subject peoples on Roman lands. Not entirely free, these laeti had no choice but to supply soldiers to the Roman army, where they traditionally served under Roman commanders. Increasingly, however, the army filled its ranks by attracting volunteers from outside the empire. In the fourth century, huge numbers of Germans enlisted, and many of them attained high rank. The army itself—once the most powerful Romanizing force in the world—was rapidly becoming Germanized by its own recruits. German terminology and even German customs—such as the barritus, the old German battle cry—became widespread. Contemporary writers used the terms barbarus (barbarian) and miles (soldier) interchangeably.

The transition from a citizen’s army to a very nearly mercenary one did not go smoothly. To many Romans, the same barbarians so admired for their military prowess were also the enemy. Since the early third century, the empire had been locked in a violent and essentially continuous struggle against barbarian raiders. Rome’s citizens, especially in the frontier provinces, had seen cities burned by barbarians. They had seen their fields pillaged, their treasures plundered, and their neighbors killed. If they felt a certain distrust of barbarian soldiers, they came by it naturally.

By the mid-fourth century, that distrust had begun to manifest itself in an open xenophobia. Roman responses to raids assumed a more brutal and punitive cast. When the Roman general Arinthaeus crossed the Danube in 367, he put a bounty on Goth heads and massacred even women and children. Within the empire a new law of 370 banned intermarriage between Romans and barbarians. But the most dangerous manifestations of late Roman xenophobia came a few years later, after the Germanic Goths had emerged as a dominant presence in the Roman world.

Tags: Ancient-Medieval, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures

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