Barbarians

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“Consequently when they had conquered their new kingdoms in the West, they found no difficulty in establishing a ‘modus vivendi’ with the Roman population and in admitting the nominal supremacy of the Empire.”

It is not a lie to say that the barbarians used a part of the Roman Empire’s system to generate their state. The Empire, which on the whole had been developing fairly well, had its system in laws; laws that were followed and their (Roman’s) way of running their Empire was more or less like a role model for others such as the barbarians. The barbarians were not really keen to take over the actual Empire; their aim seems to have been to destroy the actual “Roman Empire”, make of it as a new state, but to continue with not the exact “same”, but a system close to what the Romans had. The barbarians were surely aware of the fact that the Roman Empire was succeeding throughout their system and laws and thought of it as a good idea to adapt some of those rules to their new state.
The barbarians were already getting ready to establish their state before they invaded Rome; their development of warfare is one good example. The Sarmatians influenced the Ostrogoths, one of the Gothic people of the eastern section of the Germanic people. The Ostrogoth’s culture was not purely Germanic and they acquired the new style of art and warfare. This was what the Sarmatians influenced; they introduced the use of stirrups and spurs, which dominated European warfare for the next thousand years. The Ostrogothic Kingdom was the culture of the barbarians. Together with the help of the Visigoths, the Balkan provinces were invaded and later, the Visigothic Kingdom sacked Rome.

It seems like Rome wasn’t expected to fall apart, as it was the glory of its people along with its communicating countries. Rome always seemed to stay on top, without getting any injures or defeats. That’s why it was an Empire that others looked up to – they were disciplined. Barbarians on the other hand, were undisciplined and this may have caused barbarians to simply create a state with the laws of Rome to become and remain powerful, preferring the glory of using the Gothic power to restore the Roman name (Orosius VII, 48). In other words, barbarians looked for a guideline to follow, and found this in the Romans – their organization and state being disciplined, and their way of dealing with the population in the system.

As soon as Clovis, king in 486 conquered the territory between the Loire and the Somme, the kingdom became a mixture of the Roman-Germanic tribe. Yet here, there is a ‘modus vivendi’ to the Roman culture. Afterwards, Catholic Christianity was adapted. In a concise meaning, this interpretation of Dawson’s text was about the barbarians’ way of adapting something (in this case their law) of ...