Barbarian Kingdoms of Medieval Europe

Okay, today and Friday we shall look at the emergence and history of what we call sometimes the Barbarian Kingdoms, a series of states changing in composition, in many cases, which emerge at the end of the Roman period and into the very early Middle Ages. So we're talking kind of roughly, in some cases, second half of the 5th century down to kind of into the 7th century or whatever, okay. And these kingdoms we see as the kind of heirs or successors of what had been the Roman Empire in Western Europe. Here is a map which shows the situation as it's kind of developing in the 5th century and similar maps we've seen from I think probably both presenters last week, so we'll just repeat ourselves very slightly, but we have the border of the Roman Empire as it had been for quite a long time, okay, and in Western Europe it's essentially the Rhine and the Danube which form that border. And along that border in various places during the 5th and into the 6th centuries we see various groups that we call Germanic, and we had all our discussions about the language stuff last week, but we define them as Germanic peoples in one way or another, creeping in, sometimes being invited in as warriors, as kind of hired mercenaries effectively or whatever, and sometimes bursting in across the border and causing various degrees of problems, changes, political transformation and so on. And as one of the presenters mentioned last week, the English word vandal, which is used to mean someone who does destructive things to someone else's property or whatever, actually comes from the name of one of these groups that crept in along here, went through France, went through what is now Spain, and ended up briefly having a kingdom in North Africa about which we know very little and many documents survive from that, okay. And what is the Arabic name for Spain or the Iberian Peninsula? Do we know? What is the name for this area in Arabic? Andalusia, Andal-Andalus or something, Andalusia it's called, okay, and that is connected probably through the suburba, the North African peoples' interpretation of the vandals, because for them these guys came from there and so on, okay, so Andalusia connected to there as well. So they've contributed to English, they've contributed to one of the names for Spain. They're not very important for us today, however. In particular, today and in more detail on Friday, we shall be discussing firstly the Ostrogoths, as we heard, a group of Germanic peoples, probably more of a confederation up to a point, we can call them the Eastern Goths, in contrast to the Visigoths over here. So the Ostrogoths end up in what is Italy, the Visigoths end up in what is now Spain, Portugal and so on, and in addition we shall be looking at the Franks who creep in here right in the northern parts of what was Gaul and end up creating the Frankish Kingdom, which eventually pushes the Visigoths and the Burgundians and creates basically what becomes France. The next week we shall be doing a similar study but looking at what goes on in the British Isles, though this is meant to be a kind of Europe-wide course so I don't look at British or English history too much, we will do that occasionally. So we shall do continent today and then the origins of the Anglo-Saxons and so on next week, similar issues. And then briefly this week we shall also look at this group, the Lombards, who end up kind of succeeding the Ostrogoths after a while in Italy as well, another group there. Okay, so that's the kind of pattern of movements and so on, we don't need to worry about the finer details too much here. What we're probably going to do, because Ravel and I were talking before, he's going to prepare something on the Ostrogothic Kingdom, which is kind of vaguely what I was thinking of doing today. So we'll talk very, very generally today, we'll talk more general issues and matters and then we shall look at Ostrogothic Italy, maybe a little bit about the Visigoths in Spain and quite a lot about the Franks, the Merovingian Franks in Gaul on Friday. So we'll look at the details on Friday. And all of you should print out those two documents, the letters of Theoderic and Gregory of Tours' accounts of Clovis and be prepared to discuss those at the last part of the class. Hopefully what Ravel will tell us about the Ostrogoths, what I will say about the Franks will help us to put those two sets of documents into a kind of a context. And I'll probably put some questions, I'll try and remember to put some questions on Moodle, some things for you to kind of think about that might help you with that as well. Okay, so one of the big issues that we need to stress, and we talked about it during last week as well, is this idea of continuity or change, and we used the word kind of transition or something last week. In many respects what we see, perhaps we go to roundabout 600, so we have a different map here, but this is kind of a simpler map. What we see here are a series of kingdoms ruled by people that we regard as Germanic barbarians, dividing up what we see as the Western Roman Empire in a very different way. So from one perspective we see change, from one point of view we see big change. This political map, very different from the map of Western Europe that we would see a few hundred years earlier when we see it as part of the Roman world as a single entity ruled from somewhere in Italy at that point. So on the one hand we have change, we have big change being marked by this political map here. However, as I also said last week, for many of the people who figure in our documents, for many of the people writing documents at that time, and we don't have a lot of them as I've said before, but for many of the people living in the 6th century for example, they didn't perceive it quite as black and white, as distinct as this, that we have Rome and then we have these barbarian kingdoms appearing during the 5th and into the 6th centuries or whatever. They saw themselves as the heirs, as providing some kind of continuity from the Roman world and we see this in various ways and that's one of the things I want you to think about when reading those documents for Friday. When reading the documents about Clovis, when reading the letters written by or on behalf of King Theoderic, think how are these guys behaving and in what ways are they feeling themselves or trying to provide some connection with the Roman past, okay, because they certainly didn't think of themselves necessarily as complete outsiders and as barbarians. They saw themselves as representing some kind of continuity. And of course, how do we define Romanitas, Roman-ness or whatever? As I've said before, the Roman world, the Roman history covering many hundreds of years was not a monolithic single thing, so we cannot actually say necessarily that we have change or we have continuity, we have to understand each period, but primarily we have to think what is going on here with the shifting perspectives and so on, what happens to Romanitas. How do we define Roman-ness then? Any ideas? If you want to define Roman world or Romanitas, Roman-ness and to say that somehow it's been changed or gone, what things would we look at? How would we define the Roman world? Or if you picked someone and said here is a Roman person and we call him Roman because of this, this and this. Any ideas? How would we define someone as being a Roman at some point? Right, okay. Civilized, okay. They certainly, many big empires of course saw themselves as civilized. We went through the whole, it was edging, we're actually defining the concepts of barbarian and what that means and so on. But yeah, they would have seen themselves as somehow civilized as opposed to the non-civilized others. Sorry? Settled, all right. And we can put with that urban, did someone just say? Okay, right. Catholic. Obviously very, very early Romans were not Catholics but the late Romans were, thanks and we'll discuss the history of the church in a few weeks' time, thanks to Constantine the Great to a large extent. So Christian or Catholic, in the West of course, a slightly different Christianity in the East, but Christian perhaps better here. Anything else? Citizens, okay. You could say people perceived themselves as formally or legally part of the Roman world, not just culturally. So there was the concept of citizenship, very, very important in the early Roman Empire, slightly differently perceived or controlled later on of course. Anything else? Right. What about language? Okay, well yeah, Latin, obviously a very important part of being Roman and so on. What were you saying? These other people, we came from here, but the Roman myth of themselves. Origin, myth, identity, something like that, okay. You have an identity in the stories you tell, the ideas you have about yourselves as a community or something like that, okay. Yes. Anything else to add to this? Well this is a good, right, yes, let's put Latin language literature together, okay. Architecture and all sorts of things, the way that they try and construct buildings. Oh hang on, we're not, we're not saying, we're not comparing at the moment, we're going to do that in a minute. First we're just taking our Roman man, okay, and saying, okay, what things will we expect him or her, be sexist and say him, but what will they expect from this person, okay. Now we're not necessarily going to be guaranteeing all of these, because as I said, we can't simplify things, we're picking up a number of things that we might look for. What? For the Romans, right, okay, in the early empire as well, I mean the basis of the Roman empire obviously was military conquest and the military spirit which Romans had and so on. How are we going to simplify this one? But let's just put military there or something as that's obviously a very, very big thing. But yeah, when we think of Romans, we think of those legionnaires marching along with their skirts and with the funny hats and things like that or whatever, early Romans at least, but the late Roman army was very different in a sense. Okay, so here's a kind of checklist of things. Now we're not saying that every single Roman individual who would be defined as a Roman citizen or whatever necessarily met all of these and certainly didn't, we couldn't say every single person who was part of the Roman empire would meet all of these criteria from the year, I don't know, 1 AD, AD 1 right down to 450 or later or something, but it's a kind of rough guide to issues and so on, but they had some kind of identity often given through the stories and their perceived origin, all societies have that. We've got the law, okay, their society was they believed governed in some way by law. They lived a largely urban and settled lifestyle, they were not moving around following animals or whatever and we can connect that to this concept of civilised. After the time of Constantine increasingly Roman people were also Christian of one sort or another. We have the concept of citizenship which we could perhaps connect with law. Culturally speaking they spoke Latin, they wrote in Latin, they contributed or heard literature in Latin and so on and they lived in buildings and designed in a certain way and we've got the military idea here. So lots of stuff that we can kind of bunch together and say this is in one way or another Roman. If we take the kind of change perspective here and say barbarian and Roman and somewhere around about the late 5th century things break down, then we would expect to see this list kind of disappearing, okay, that the people who succeed, the people that set up these kingdoms here and the way that they live their lives, the way they organise themselves is somehow in stark contrast, very, very different to what we have in our list here. But as I hope we'll see today a little bit and as I hope we'll see more detail on Friday and then next week and throughout the course, okay, many of these things we actually encounter increasingly in different combinations. So Romanitas will not disappear. Let's postpone that question to a bit later because I've got another thing where I'm going to look at names again and how we look at the peoples but the names thing is very important. I discussed it two weeks ago, onomastics and so on and we'll come back to that. And if I come on to onomastics and I have a different focus, make sure you remind me of that particular question as well, okay. But yeah, names is part of identity. We identify ourselves vaguely through the name. I talk about my name, David, comes from my Welshness in a sense, my Welsh, my mother's Welsh origins and things like that. So it's part of my identity and people tend to give names for cultural but also for other reasons, part of their group identity. So we'll come back to that one as well. Okay, another question which we shall expand on shortly but just pick up on one of these, Latin, okay. Okay, here is the kingdom of the Visigoths. Here's the kingdom of the Franks. Here are the, well earlier the Ostrogoths who we have here, the Lombards, okay. In this part of the world today, what do they speak? What do the common people, what do most people speak in this part of the world? Castilian Spanish or Catalan or Portuguese, whatever, okay. Iberian languages. What do people speak here mostly? French, again, okay. You have the Languedoc, you have a bit of Catalan down here and you have the things but they're all largely also what we call Romance languages and obviously in Italy we have all sorts of different dialects which we classify as Romance, Italian Romance as well. The Romance languages are just Latin in a simplified form, okay. So the people living today in those areas are speaking Latin in a sense in different forms and in the roundabout 600 to a large extent the people in those places continue to speak a popular, vulgar form of Latin, okay. So we don't see in these areas the disappearance of Latin and the arrival of Germanic. The only exception to that is here where we do see eventually the disappearance of use of Celtic and Latin and its replacement by a Germanic language which is English, okay, and that's the main strange exception which we can talk about today but mainly next week, okay. So Latin still there. What do we know? Do we know anything about the religion of the Germanic peoples? Do we know about their religion? We can either refer to, sorry, originally when they were outside of the Roman world to a large extent they were polytheistic, what we would call pagan peoples worshipping many different gods, okay. We know a little bit about their gods. We can make strong comparisons with the fuller information we have about the Viking gods, also Germanic peoples, and we can kind of say that perhaps it was similar or whatever, okay. But during the 5th and 6th centuries most of the kings of the Germanic kingdoms, these barbarian kingdoms, became Christian, okay, either Catholic Christian or Aryan Christian. Aryanism was what becomes a heresy, a wrong interpretation where they say, anyone know what Aryan heresy, anyone come across that before? Not with a why, not concepts of Aryanism and of Hitler and so on, but Aryanism here, Arius was a Christian thinker from the Roman period, late Roman period, who believed or argued that the Trinity, the three persons of the Trinity were not equal and that God the Father was somehow superior and separate from, a little bit separate from God the Son, Jesus, and things like that. Now in most Christian beliefs today, after the Council of Nicaea where Arius' ideas were condemned subsequently, okay, they have a different interpretation, the standard Catholic and Orthodox interpretations of this. But at this time things were a bit in flux and we have people ruling in these different kingdoms who were either Catholics or Aryan Christians, okay. So they became, to a large extent, Christian, we've left that Catholic there, we should say, Christian, let's put that one in or whatever, okay. To study these early kingdoms, we find that they wrote laws. We can study their societies by looking at the laws that they wrote down, okay. They wrote down laws, they began to write them down, previously they just had oral law, perhaps as a way of organising their society. Once they moved into Western Europe they began to write things down and write down their laws about how to control people when they're fighting and so on and things like that, alright. So a number of these things already fitting and coming into what we see and in addition, even though clearly they have a certain identity as the Franks or the Ostrogoths or whatever, when we look at the history of, or the histories of these people, and that moves me into the next sort of image for you to see, we see a trend by a number of writers, themselves not necessarily Germanic people, which are trying to fit these Germanic people into Roman and Christian history. They need to fit in. They're the bosses now, they're the rulers, they're the patron of the society and so we need to fit them into the existing historical framework, which is partly a Roman tradition and partly a Judeo-Christian tradition that they have in the Bible, so they're fitting them into these things, okay. So this brings me to this list here. For a historical approach to this period, in order to study the history of these kingdoms during the 5th, 6th, 7th centuries, we are lucky enough to have a series of books, accounts, histories, all rather different from one another, but which do give some kind of chronological narrative to these kingdoms. I won't say too much about all of them in detail, but it's worth mentioning them because they are very, very important. We have a few books about these in the library. For the Ostrogoths, we have a book written in the middle of the 6th century by a guy called Giordanese, Getica, Gothica, okay, about the Goths, something like that, okay. Sounds like the name of some kind of heavy metal band or something, but let's leave that out for the moment. This was probably to a large extent based upon the Gothic history written earlier in the same century by Cassiodorus. Cassiodorus was a Roman writer, intellectual. He was the secretary of Theoderic, so the guy who wrote the letters that you've either read or you will be reading soon, who wrote them down, probably was this guy. So he was a civilized Roman or whatever, Italian Roman, but he was connected to the court of these guys, and he wrote a history of his bosses, okay. They came in, take over, and he writes their history, desperately trying to fit them in to the existing framework. We've lost that, but a little bit later, a similar thing is put down based largely upon his book, okay. The danger with using, well, this, and by extension, especially this, is what? What would be the problem? What would you, the first thing you would think of, perhaps, before you start reading? I'm going to sit down and read this book, which is based on this one, particularly with reference to this. I would, the first thing I would think of as an historian is, okay, careful, be careful, decant, because, sorry? You might be biased. Yes, in what kind of bias? That they'd be called barbarians, because the writer is a Roman writer. Right. And he would have the, in the book with the words, he's writing Romans, or calling these people barbarians, or uncivilized, or. Yeah, okay, but as I said, what, and there is a danger there, but what, this is a bit different. Cassiodorus was connected to the court, to the kingdom, to the ruler of Ostrogothic Italy, Theodoric, okay? He was the one that was his secretary. He was writing his things down. So, yes, whatever he thought, he may have thought all those things in his head every day, having to work with this uncouth, drunken barbarian, or something, or whatever, and we'll talk a little bit about Theodoric on Friday in more detail, but his job was to write an official history, okay, because he was writing it in connection with the king. So, exactly, okay, he's not, he's not going to write too many things in there in which the king, who he worked with, would be angry about, okay? So there's a danger this is going to be a little bit like political propaganda, okay? It will, it will have their myths, it will have their stories, it's trying to integrate them, but we have to be careful that what Cassiodorus said, and therefore perhaps what Giordani's copied down later, is kind of political propaganda. It's their official line, because I'm the boss. They don't have TV, they don't have Facebook pages and things to impress people, but they do have an official history written by, at the court in that sense, okay? Gregory of Tours, a little bit different, very important source, one of the greatest kind of early medieval writers, in fact. He was a bishop of Tours, of the town in Tours, from a well-known Roman or Gaulish Roman family or whatever, and towards the end of the 6th century, he wrote something which we probably should call the Ten Books of History, okay? It's usually called the History of the Franks, but he didn't call it that, and a lot of it isn't actually about the Franks, it's a history of kind of Gaul and his region, and eventually, of course, the Franks come in, because they're the big guys, but he doesn't call it that, so if you look at it elsewhere and see it called the History of the Franks or something, then that's kind of a little bit of a misnomer, a bit of a misleading thing. But a very, very translationate modern edition, so a very, very thick book which goes further back than the Frankish period, as I said, but very important source for the politics of the time, up to his own time. He tells stories that involve himself as well. He was a bishop, so he dealt with the kings and so on at his own time. He also tells lots of stories, what we might call anecdotes, particularly in relation to his own city and elsewhere, okay, which give us a picture of the society and what life was like then and so on. He was a bishop, and there is a religious element to all this, and we'll talk a little bit more about that on Friday when we look at his depiction of King Clovis, the sort of his superhero for him is Clovis in that sense, okay. So he also has a certain bias that's going on. Isidore of Seville, one of the great intellectuals of the very late Roman or early post-Roman period, okay, in what is now Spain, of course, wrote something which we usually call History of the Goths, Vandals and Swabies. The Vandals we mentioned, Swabies, are people who for a time had, the Germanic people who had a kingdom up in what is now Galicia in northwest Iberia, and then eventually they get taken over by the Visigoths, of course, okay. He's famous for writing something called Etymologies, very important evidence for the kind of intellectual traditions of the late Roman and early medieval periods as well, so he had various things going on. And then a bit later, the end of the 7th century, Paul the Deacon writes a kind of an official history of the Lombards as well and their activities in Italy. And as we shall discuss next week, the Venerable Bede, as he's usually called, okay, from the early part of the 8th century in northern England writes his account of the, that was my mistake there, ecclesiastical history, so it's not just a history of the Anglo-Saxons or the English people, it's a religious history. So again, like all these writers who were members of the, to a large extent, members of the church of one sort or another, he was a monk dotted in northern, in a monastery in northern England, but he was writing the history of his people from a religious perspective. So all of the big players in the sort of so-called barbarian period have their own kind of official historian or semi-official historian, as in the case of Gregory of Tours, which we can use, but we have to be careful of this, okay. And as I said, it's specifically stated, I think, in the case of Cassiodorus, that he was trying to fit in his masters, his bosses, into the existing framework. Okay, the world has changed. Politically, we don't have an emperor, we now have a small part of the empire ruled by this particular barbarian king, Germanic king we might call him or whatever. So we better kind of somehow write an official account to make them fit in with what we understand of the history of the past so far. So this is, to some extent, what some of these writers are explicitly trying to do. So we have to understand that point, it's very important, okay. So even origin, ID there, identity, is being kind of taken over by the Germanic peoples. The Roman world was more heavily urbanised when you went further south and a little bit further east, okay. When we move northwards and westwards, we see fewer and fewer cities. And we're dealing with the western regions here. But certainly many, many cities disappeared. They didn't have the infrastructure, politically and economically, to maintain large cities throughout Western Europe in the 6th and 7th centuries. So it's certainly the case in Britain that we see the disappearance of big cities. But not all cities disappeared. Particularly on the Mediterranean, we see urban continuity as well. So these kingdoms did include urban centres and they were largely settled and so on. But the way that they interacted was different. So we could do a kind of half tick there, I suppose. Citizenship, okay, well Romanitas and legally the Roman concept disappears gradually. But as I said, even in the 6th century, okay, in western parts of Britain, right up in the north of the old Roman world, we see one writer, as I mentioned last week, Gildas this important historian for early British history, referring to himself and his fellow Britons as citizens, okay. So he still somehow thinks of themselves as Roman and as Roman citizens. So that concept, to some extent, continuing. So in different combinations, all of these things, or most of these criteria that we set out before us, saying this is how we might define the Romanitas of this person, continue. They may not be perfect. They may not be using the best Latin compared to Julius Caesar or Cicero or something like that, okay. The buildings and the towns they lived in may have been smaller and rather differently planned and so on, okay. They were coming up with a slightly different interpretation of Christianity and so on, but that builds upon what was going before. But to a large extent, okay, we see some or all of these things continuing. So again, this problem. Do we really see it as a big change just because the political map changes, or do we have to see sort of transition and gradual change, or even, to a large extent, continuity? Okay, you can? Well, that's the question. That's what I've been trying to make us think about, and I'm not going to even say I'm necessarily giving an answer to that, because, as I said, these are the questions of people I hope will be still debating in 100, 200 years' time. But traditionally, we've always seen it as a matter of kind of Roman Empire disappears and a different world, a medieval world, appears and so on. And that's certainly the kind of way that, for example, people in the Renaissance wanted us to think about the Middle Ages as this dark period in between themselves and the Roman life. But I've been saying that it was a lot more complicated than that. The Roman world was changing, and also the new world, whatever it is, of the 6th century was, in many ways, just a continuity of certain things from the late Roman Empire. So, yes, I don't think we can necessarily say the Roman Empire collapsed. It may have changed. It just continued with different people in charge. I mean, how we have... And, yeah, that's very important, okay? The economy was localising. Politically, we don't have a single ruler, so the political map with various kingdoms in it is just a political version of that localisation. Perhaps that's something that... Now, Alp's looking kind of puzzled or whatever, so go on. But I'm thinking all these examples, what continues is Roman culture, Roman traditions. But then these barbarians, so-called barbarians, actually go under drastic change when they become Romanised. So we have to be careful with the way we pose the question. Now, am I making sense? From the perspective that they are new players, the political map has changed. And we're asking whether, in spite of this political change, in spite of the change in political map, whether there is continuity, whether the Romans kind of, in a way, with their traditions, their culture, they kind of merge into what then becomes the Middle Ages. Now, there are examples, yes, you know, religion, language, but all of these are examples of how drastic a change these barbarians went through. Their languages changed. Their religion changed. Well, we're not looking at the... Yeah, yeah, I see what you're saying. We're not... We're looking at the Roman side of the coin. We're not looking at the Germanic side of the coin. I mean, at the end, what we end up with is a hybrid, is a mixture of the two. But you might see it as a kind of barbarised form of the Roman world, or you might see it as a kind of Romanised form of the barbarian thing. There are continuity points from both sides. So we don't say that kind of the Roman, the Germanic peoples come in, step over the border, and then start wearing togas and becoming kind of civilised and things like that. I mean, obviously, that's being playing for the joke there. But there are points of continuity and points of change. I'm not denying there wasn't change, but then change was going on all the time. And if we look at it from the perspective of the Germanic people, then they were adopting gradually at different stages, things like Christianity and Latin and so on. Okay, so that also provides change for them. But we were looking at it from the Roman perspective. We were judging it from the other side of the coin, primarily. We'll come to the Germanic bit now, and on Friday, I think. Ravel? You were saying earlier that people in the period wanted to distance themselves from the Middle Ages and wanted to create this idea of a drastic change between the two, between before and after the fall of the Roman Empire. What is it specifically about that time period that they wanted to distance themselves from, and what did they want to say that they were closer to the Romans? All right, well, okay, let's, again, I don't want to keep saying, postpone that question till later. It was something that if we'd had time in the first week, I wanted to address, the concept of medium Ivan, the Middle Ages, okay? And in many kind of people's perspective, we have the great civilized, we've got the word civilized over there already, Roman civilized world, and then somehow the Middle Ages is this kind of decline. And that's probably how in a lot of Turkish schools, it's seen as the Middle Ages as some kind of a dark age or something like that, okay? Now, as a medievalist, of course, naturally, I don't want to see it quite like that, but that's another point of view. But this is, to some extent, what was going on in Italy in the kind of late 14th, 15th, 16th centuries, okay? They were going through a cultural revival that we talk about as the Renaissance, which had a number of issues, and we should look at that in the final topic of the course. And they looked around themselves, and they felt that they wanted to build up a connection, perhaps, with their Roman ancestors, so they were in Italy, that's where Rome began and so on. So they looked at the handwriting that other parts of Europe had been using, they came up with a different handwriting, which they thought was more Roman, they wanted to improve Latin, and in terms of all sorts of artistic creativity, they came up with new things, but also they wanted to pick up on some old things and so on. So this is quite a big question, so I don't want to get sidetracked into that now. It's something I wanted to briefly mention last week but didn't, but we'll definitely pick up on that issue of what was the Renaissance and so on when we come to that later. Okay. Can I just quickly ask one more thing? It's about this history. Why were these people so interested in fitting themselves into the history, I mean into a certain historical understanding that shows a certain continuation? Well they do a bit, yeah, well there's that kind of thing going on. We've got some interesting books in the library and articles that deal with some of these issues. As we said before, myth and origins and stories give you identity, okay, where you come from or the way you think you come from and how you describe your background as an individual or as a group or whatever feeds into your identity now, okay. Your history affects or reflects upon what you think of yourself now. Now these people were coming from outside the Roman world and they were not denying that, but they were now part of and they were largely in charge of the Roman world and they thought themselves as becoming Roman, as being the heirs to the Caesars and things like that. That's certain, we should look at that again on Friday. And so they needed to, I think there was a sense that their identity had to shift a little bit, they had to emphasise certain things. And now that we're part of that world and the writers, I mean Gregory of Tours, Cassiodorus, these people were not Germanic in a more traditional sense, but the situation of the Germanic people had changed and the situation in the Roman world had changed so we had to kind of align these things up. Whereas before we had Tacitus last week just making these comments about the Germanic people over there, not even going to see them, just writing his little thoughts down. Now they were here, now things have changed so they had to be incorporated and they figured in both for themselves but also perhaps for their Roman subjects in a sense. Okay, last thing, and I see time has gone on very, very quickly, but a lot of what we can look at here is primarily to do with the big boys. It's the kings and the bishops and so on, a lot of medieval history focuses on that, a lot of what we're going to do in this course focuses on the big people. But here we have a problem. We've talked about the Germanic world, the barbarian kingdoms as political change, we want to think what other changes happened. The Roman world, the map of the Roman world changed because we now have Clovis and Theodoric and other people ruling where once there had been one Roman emperor or something like that. But in other respects, what about the ordinary Germanic peoples? What about the peoples who were underneath them or the ordinary Roman people, what was going on for them? How can we perhaps find out what was going on on the ground for kind of ordinary people rather than the big guys who were making the big religious and political changes? These are some of the issues we've talked about before. Non-historical approaches may give us a different picture. In particular, something that we should look at this week and also next week with reference to the Anglo-Saxons, settlement. We call these things barbarian kingdoms partly because they're ruled by barbarians. Clovis was a Germanic Frank, Theodoric was an Ostrogothic ruler and so on. What about the lower levels of the kingdom? Were they also Germanic or were they something different? Now I mentioned already the case of the Romance languages. What did that imply? What does this, what did I suggest that this implied about the Visigothic kingdom once gone or about the Frankish kingdom and so on? What does the fact that they speak Spanish and Catalan or French and Provençal or something there, what was my, what was I implying by mentioning that fact? About ordinary people, not about the kings and so on. To some extent they culturally identified themselves with the Romance. They spoke Latin, Latin-based languages. Right, okay, well it was, I think, Edger mentioned a little bit about the influences, the linguistic influences of Germanic. But if people speak Romance languages in this area, okay, in kingdoms that we're calling Germanic barbarian kingdoms, we've kind of got, I suppose, two possibilities. Either lots of Germanic people came in and then they all stopped speaking Frankish or Gothic and they started speaking some form of Latin which then later on becomes Spanish and French and so on. Or else not many Germanic people came in. There wasn't enough Germanic peasants following behind Clovis and Theoderic and so on to actually change the linguistic patterns of these areas. So the bosses and their armies and so on, the guys who actually make the changes with the swords are Germanic, okay, but the actual people on the ground, the majority of people living in these kingdoms were still Roman in the sense that they were speaking some form of Latin, okay, except here where we end up with all these Anglo-Saxons coming in, apparently, but we'll come back to that point later on. So that's one point. And then we come back briefly with three minutes or something, there's more things here, but names again that we talked about, okay. Another way of looking at settlement is to look at names. Firstly, place names. People tend to come in and there's two options here as well. Either we come in and say, okay, we're taking over your village now, go away, what's your village called? And you say, well, it's called Ankara. I say, fair enough, okay, now we're the bosses, we live in Ankara and we're bringing this in. Or else we come in and say, oh, you're here so we'll build somewhere new here and we'll call it and we'll give it a name in our language, okay. So we either get assimilated onomastically and take over politically or whatever it is in your village. Or else we come along and build our own settlements and give them our own names. So we could study the names and we'll certainly do that with the Anglo-Saxons. We could see, and we don't to a large extent find kind of, particularly down here or whatever, we don't find kind of thousands of Germanic place names in France, southern France or in Spain and Italy, okay. Most of the names are derived from Latin elements and things like that. Sometimes we might have a Germanic personal name combined with a Latin suffix, such as in French lots of places called ville. So we've got the ville of a Germanic guy and things like that. But the further south we go those kind of things disappear as well, okay. If we look at archaeology, and just very, this is not a very good map for that, archaeology as well. Graves, as we did last week with that guy, we looked at his grave somewhere on the other side of the Rhine, okay. In France, for example, up kind of there we find some kind of graves that we can identify possibly as Germanic in style, grave goods for example. But again we have to ask the question, like we saw last time, are people adapting to a Roman style? Are the Romans adapting to their style? And a few further south. But language, names, which is part of language, and archaeology to a large extent suggests that we didn't have huge numbers of Germanic peoples coming in and populating these kingdoms. It was the political leaders and the military elite which was basically creating these new kingdoms. Below them, people continued to be speakers of Latin and to be Christian and to do the things that their ancestors had done a couple of hundred years before. Except maybe a different situation in Britain as we shall see next week, okay. So finally, finish off, last thing. Barbarian kingdom, difficult concept. Barbarian in the sense of ruled by someone whose ancestors we could call Germanic barbarians or whatever. He himself didn't see himself quite like that. He was trying to fit into the Roman world and we shall look at two examples of that on Friday with our reading, okay. And even the very populations of these kingdoms were to a large extent direct continuations of the previous populations, living and working the land as their ancestors had done before them as part of the Roman world. So what exactly is the barbarian side? Well, we'll have a look on Friday, see what we can learn about the Ostrogoths and the Franks especially. Okay, thank you very much. It's been very, very hot in here, hasn't it? We've had all the windows closed and I think last week everyone was complaining it was too cold. Look, Emera's thinking, oh, you can't please them, can you? I became aware of getting sweatier and sweatier as we went along. But if the weather's a bit nicer on Friday, we can maybe open a window or two or something like that. Okay.