Aurelian campaigns relentlessly to restore the Roman empire, and the inhabitants of the former province of Dacia must negotiate a working relationship with the migratory peoples that are now settling near them.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to A history of Romania.

Season 1, Episode 16: The empire minus one

Last episode, we covered the tumultuous period from the end of the 240s to the beginning of the 270s CE. Raids, invasions, plague, and famine had ravaged the countryside, devastated cities, emptied forts, and isolated communities. Simultaneously, the provinces bordering the Atlantic had seceded to form what is known as the Gallic empire, while those in the East had left to create the Palmyrene empire. These combined crises brought Rome to the brink of collapse, and we saw how, when Aurelian came to the throne, he decided to abandon Dacia and use its armies to save what remained of his empire. We’ll start of today by following the emperor on his grand quest.

Aurelian had begun his reign on the battlefield. Late in 270, Germanic tribes had penetrated the Rhine frontier, crossed the Alps, and invaded northern Italy. It took months of fighting, but by the middle of 271, Aurelian had defeated them, pushed them out of the empire, and gained the title of Germanicus Maximus.

Meanwhile, messengers had delivered his orders to the governor of Dacia, and he had evacuated the province, taking his staff, his legions, and as many citizens as would come south of the Danube. With Italy secured, Aurelian marched to meet him and added the Dacian legions to his army. And he arrived just in time.

A Gothic force had taken advantage of the chaos in Italy to raid the empire. Aurelian used his expanded army to repulse them, and even chased them across the Danube, where he won a stunning victory. Though it was a risk, he had followed them into their own lands because he hoped to sap Gothic strength enough to prevent them from attacking again at least for a few years. A period of calm would hopefully give his garrisons on the frontier time to recover and reinforce their positions.

While north of the Danube, Aurelian also fought the Carpi living in the area. After beating their army, he forcibly moved some of their civilians into Moesia Inferior; the goal was to weaken the Carpi by decreasing their numbers while simultaneously repopulating Roman land that had been abandoned during the previous decades. This wasn’t a new idea. Back in episode five, we’ve seen how, when the empire first reached the shores of the Danube three hundred years before, it displaced thousands of Getae from the north to the south to reduce the size of their tribes and strengthen Roman holdings.

Aurelian’s repeated victories over the barbarians stabilized the frontiers from the Alps to the Danube, and with the addition of the Dacian legions, he felt he could focus on the breakaway states on the fringes of the empire. He had bought himself some time, and he needed to act now, before another crisis redirected his attention elsewhere.

Aurelian decided to start with the Palmyrene empire. As you’ll recall, when the Roman emperor in the East was captured by the Persians in 260, the ruler of Palmyra declared himself king and took over several eastern provinces. By now, that founder had been assassinated, and since his son was still a minor, it was his wife, Zenobia, who ruled the state. She was an intelligent and energetic leader, and had turned her husband’s kingdom into an empire by conquering Egypt. An effect of that expansion is that the city of Rome no longer received its regular shipments of grain, and, within a few months, it risked running out of food, which may have pushed Aurelian to act sooner rather than later.

Accordingly, in 272, the emperor marched his army across the Bosphorus. Though he initially sacked cities that opposed him, he soon turned to a policy of clemency, forgiving those who came to his side. Seeing that the emperor wouldn’t exact revenge, a flood of cities surrendered to him and, within six months, the Roman army entered Syria, which was the heartland of the Palmyrene empire. Zenobia withdrew her armies from Egypt and concentrated them near her capital; she knew that Aurelian was an experienced general and that she needed to combine all her forces if she hoped to defeat him. But all her forces weren’t enough; Aurelian won every battle in Syria, and he soon began a siege of Palmyra.

As supplies dwindled and negotiations failed, Zenobia realized that it was just a matter of time before the city’s defenses would be breached. So, she saddled the fastest camel she could find and fled towards the Persian empire, hoping to strike an alliance against the Romans. But the queen was caught before she crossed the border, and her capital surrendered as soon as news of her capture spread.

A few Palmyrene units continued to resist, and the Persians tried to take advantage of the chaos, but Aurelian defeated all of them. After a year of fighting, he reintegrated the eastern provinces into the empire, for which he was given the title of Restitutor Orientis, meaning the “Restorer of the East.”

Aurelian was a ball of energy, and as soon as he was done with the East, he turned his focus towards the West. In the spring of 274, he marched his army into the Gallic empire, met its forces on the battlefield, and once again proved victorious. The ruler of the Gallic empire, Tetricus, decided not to resist any further after this defeat; he surrendered and let Aurelian take control of the western provinces. The war had been won with only a single battle.

And so, that same year, Aurelian returned to Rome as Restitutor Orbis, or the “Restorer of the World.” It’s a nice title, but it omits the fact that the empire wasn’t quite all there; it had all its former provinces minus one – Dacia. But as we’ve seen last episode, Aurelian had camouflaged its loss by creating a new province of the same name south of the Danube. Accordingly, he was able to style himself as the man who had reversed all the empire’s losses, and such an accomplishment merited a fitting party. So, he held a spectacular triumph with exotic beasts, lavish treasures, Gothic women dressed as Amazons, Tetricus wearing Gallic trousers, and Zenobia humiliated in chains. After his moment of glory, Aurelian decided to show clemency to his former nemeses; he pardoned Tetricus and made him the governor of a province, while he placed Zenobia in a villa near Rome for the rest of her days.

Yet Aurelian was not one to sit still. The next year, in 275, he headed East to campaign against the Persian empire. But the emperor never made it beyond the Bosphorus. Aurelian was known for his high standards and strict discipline, and his senior officials feared his severe punishments; one of them happened to make a mistake, and instead of facing retribution, he convinced his comrades to kill the emperor. Which they did, bringing to a close Aurelian’s explosively energetic 5-year reign.

Aurelian’s death led to infighting between his generals to decide which one would be the next emperor. After a year of violence, a man named Probus emerged as the victor in 276. The new emperor had to deal with invasions from several barbarian tribes, including the Franks, the Alemanni, and the Goths. He successfully repelled them from imperial territory, and then crossed the border to campaign in their own lands.

After defeating some Germanic tribes, he forced them to provide warriors to the Roman army, and, in a continuation of Aurelian’s policy, he settled some of their civilians within the empire to repopulate deserted villages and reinvigorate the agricultural sector. In the following years, Probus also restored fortifications along the frontiers and, when there was no fighting to be done, he put his soldiers to work on rebuilding the infrastructure of the empire; they dug canals, built bridges, drained marshes, planted vines – and never enjoyed a single week of idleness.

The emperor was actively trying to bring the Roman world back to what it had been before the crisis. Aurelian had stitched the empire’s wounds, and now Probus was working to ensure that they would heal.

At this point at the beginning of the 280s, a decade had passed since the Roman government had abandoned Dacia. The wealthy citizens of the province had left with the administration and the army, taking their riches south of the river beyond the reach of barbarians. Many ordinary people had also left: farmers, shepherds, blacksmiths, and mule drivers who feared the approach of the Goths and the Carpi.

All of them had to restart their lives in the new province of Dacia created by Aurelian. The rich, of course, had an easier time, as they came with bags of coin and retinues of servants, and looked to establish themselves as landholders and regain their positions by entering public service. For their part, the poor who had walked alongside them had nothing more than what they could carry on their person. Yet they were eagerly welcomed by the government, which gave them abandoned land to cultivate, and the displaced workers now sought to integrate the communities into which they were settled and forge a stable life for themselves.

These refugees represented a minority of the population of Dacia. As we’ve seen last episode, the evidence points to the fact that the majority of the inhabitants of the province decided to stay north of the Danube. Every person had their own reasons for doing so, but there were also some common ones: some people simply could not make the journey south, maybe because of their health, or because they lived in isolated communities and couldn’t get to a military camp in time for the evacuation; others could not envision abandoning the land that had housed their family for generations, and restarting elsewhere from nothing; some others stood to gain from the departure of the wealthy, as the enslaved would become free, the exploited would work for themselves, and the poor would take over what the rich had left behind.

By the way, for the moment, I’ll continue to call the inhabitants of the former province of Dacia “Romans” because, while they were no longer living within the empire, they had been born Romans, had lived all their lives till now in the empire, and continued to speak Latin, worship the Roman pantheon, and adhere to Roman values. These people didn’t instantly lose their identity just because the governor hopped on the other side of the river. They were no longer citizens of the empire, it’s true, but they were still Romans.

It didn’t take long for the peoples beyond the frontier to notice that the legions had abandoned their positions, and they soon migrated on the territory of the former province. We don’t have any literary sources that talk about the situation in Dacia after its abandonment – writers at this time were focused on the exploits of emperors, kings, and generals, and even those sources are sometimes vague with the details and chronology. So, when we’re reconstructing what happened north of the Danube after the evacuation, we have to rely on archeology; and when archeologists seek to determine the ethnic makeup of communities, they look at ceramics, tools, jewellery, and funeral practices to make educated guesses as to who lived where.

When it comes to decoding the dynamics between the Romans who remained and the peoples who migrated into the area, archeology can give us some clues. But objects can’t tell the full story. To piece together what the everyday reality looked like, historians combine the physical evidence with what they know about the ways of life of the Iazyges, Carpi, Goths, and Romans, as well as their interactions before and after this period. So while the archeological findings that I’ll share in the next few minutes are undeniable physical evidence, the dynamics between the different peoples in the region are open to debate; what I’ll present is a probable scenario based on inferences from archeological evidence and what we know about the different actors in this story.

To start, the Iazyges who lived west of Dacia crossed the Tisza River that had acted as a border for centuries. They moved into the less densely populated part of Dacia west of the Carpathian Mountains, which was dotted with villages and a few towns. The Iazyges had a completely different lifestyle than that of the settled Romans they encountered. The lives of these former imperial subjects depended entirely on the land they cultivated. In the spring, they would plant seeds; in the summer they would tend to their crops; in the autumn they would bring in the harvest; in the winter, they would survive on their stores of food; and next year, they would do it all over again. These farmers stayed on the same plot of land year after year, and often, generation after generation. Their small piece of the Earth was their home, and they relied on it for their survival.

The nomadic Iazyges, on the other hand, lived off their herds. They weren’t fixed to a specific spot, but drove their sheep, goats, cows, and horses in valleys and on plains in search of fresh pastures; they then set up camp and lived off of what they could extract from these animals: meat, milk, cheese, wool, leather, tallow. And when the cold weather approached, the Iazyges stopped their wanderings and pitched sturdier camps to last the winter and wait out the snows.

Nomadic tribes were seldom self-sufficient and had to trade with settled peoples for the things they couldn’t make themselves: flour, pots, lamps, swords, jewellery. And so, when the Iazyges entered the western part of Dacia and encountered the Romans living there, they took the best pastureland – whether the Romans liked it or not. But they didn’t drive them from the region, since they still needed them for trade. The Iazyges were happy to let the Romans live in their little enclaves, tied to the land, while they themselves galloped freely with their herds and came around periodically to trade; they also undoubtedly demanded some form of tribute from these settled communities – because why not? The Romans had no one to protect them, and so couldn’t refuse nor resist.

If we look at the other migratory peoples, the Carpi and other smaller Dacian tribes that had lived around the province moved inside the arc of the Carpathian Mountains; whereas the Goths marched into the area between the Carpathians and the Danube. Both of these regions had numerous villages, towns, and cities.

When they arrived in these areas, the Dacians and Goths didn’t sack the settlements they encountered. The archeological record shows that some fortifications in the former province were destroyed, but that most defensive works remained intact, as the Roman legions abandoned their positions and the barbarians didn’t have to fight for them. More than that, there’s little sign of violence in the Dacian cities. It may seem strange that the barbarians that had raided the empire for decades didn’t destroy these urban centres; but we have to remember that the reason they raided was to acquire valuables, and the wealthy Romans had left during the evacuation, taking with them their coins, jewellery, gemstones, and luxury goods. The Romans who stayed behind were ordinary people who owned little more than a pair of clothes, a pot and knife, the tools of their trade, a bed, table, and maybe a cupboard; in reality, they didn’t have much more than the average Dacian or Goth, and certainly not much worth taking. No, the barbarian warbands looked to much better targets inside the empire. In 276, for example, the Goths and their allies launched yet another expedition along the coast of the Black Sea, and again made it into Anatolia, raiding the rich interior of the empire.

Meanwhile, the Dacian and Gothic clans that had migrated into Dacia looked to settle on the best land they could find, since they were farmers just like the Romans. It’s worth recalling that these tribes weren’t led by a single king; they were composed of numerous leaders that protected their own clans and provided for them, but there was no centralized strategy when they migrated into the area. When a clan encountered a Roman settlement, their warriors probably took the best land and gave it to their own families, and convinced the Roman community to pay them a tribute. But the Dacians and Goths didn’t expel the Romans from the region; once they got the land they wanted, it was much more advantageous to trade with the inhabitants of the former province.

In the countryside, for instance, Roman workers continued to live near the villas which their employers and masters had abandoned; the population took over the property and goods which the rich had left, and worked the lands themselves. On the bank of the Mureș River, for example, a villa was found around which people continued to cultivate land and bury their dead for decades until the 4^th century. We also know of several villages that kept the rhythm of their activities the same as before the evacuation, especially those communities in more isolated areas.

People also continued to live in and around abandoned castra and the civilian settlements that had development next to them. We have evidence of the use of ceramics, lamps, tools, rings, and coins in former army camps across the region. For example, west of the Olt River, a castrum was discovered which once had walls, towers, a headquarters, and a granary; it had been burned by the Carpi during their raids in the 240s, but had been reoccupied by civilians, who enlarged the moat, blocked the gate, and lived in wooden shacks inside.

As for the cities of Dacia, all of them show signs of continued habitation after the retreat, but the character of their urban life changed. Cities in the Roman empire served as administrative hubs for the government, markets for the agricultural produce of the surrounding area, centres of culture and entertainment, and focal points for religious festivities. But now the governor’s staff was gone, and nobody was collecting taxes or writing records in government offices; marketplaces were reduced to a few stalls as goods were no longer brought from faraway places, and only local ones made it into the city; amphitheatres lay deserted as the rich patrons who had funded them had fled; and the priests of the imperial cult were gone, and nobody put on lavish celebrations for the imperial family or the gods and goddesses of the pantheon.

Those who had stayed behind sometimes moved into public buildings or the houses of their richer neighbours who had left. And they continued to ply their trade, baking bread, forging tools, butchering animals, crafting pottery, and so on.

But the economic activity of these cities was greatly reduced as much of the exploitation of natural resources that had occurred under the empire now ceased. The goldmines which depended on enslaved labour were abandoned, and the precious metal was only extracted on a small scale by local communities who washed the sediment of gold-bearing rivers. Brickyards and stone quarriers were deserted, and people returned to building homes out of wood and clay. Iron extraction devolved from large operations meant for workshops and export, to groups of locals getting what they needed for their scythes, axes, hoes, hammers, chisels, and knives.

While we find plenty of Roman objects in cities after the evacuation, there’s no archeological evidence of Dacians or Goths. These migrating peoples don’t seem to have settled inside urban centres, at least as groups, and this makes sense. They had never lived in such settlements before and didn’t see the need for them now; they were happy to make their homes in the surrounding countryside and simply trade with the Romans in the cities.

And so, a decade after having migrated into the former province, the Dacians and Goths had established a working relationship with the Romans throughout the region. But it’s worth noting that their societies remained distinct. The differences between them – language, religion, culture – were still too great for their communities to actively mingle, especially as many Romans no doubt held out hope that the empire may soon return.

Indeed, the empire still had a direct presence north of the Danube. You see, not all of Dacia had been abandoned. When Aurelian had ordered his governor to evacuate, he instructed him to maintain a few bridgeheads across the river, and so the Romans kept control of the cities of Dierna, Drobeta, and Sucidava on the north bank of the Danube. Of course, the vibrancy of urban life in these cities diminished considerably as they now became frontier settlements; they lost their large agricultural holdings to the north, and they no longer served as trade links between the Dacian cities in the mountains and the rest of the empire. Their main goal became to act as fortified bases for army units.

The legions formerly stationed in Dacia now garrisoned castra all along the river, and had detachments in the cities of Dierna, Drobeta, and Sucidava. From there, the legions could patrol the plains north of the Danube, supervise the movements of the barbarians, prevent them from crossing the river, and launch pre-emptive attacks if any threats materialized. So although the Roman state no longer controlled Dacia, its influence was still felt in parts of it.

As the 280s went on, things were looking up for the empire. Although Probus had to deal with several usurpers and barbarian raids, these threats were nowhere near as dire as they had been twenty years ago. Things were so good in fact, that Probus planned to do what had basically become a job requirement for Roman emperors: fight a war against the Persians. But while the army marched East, the commander of the Praetorian guard instigated a mutiny, murdered Probus, and proclaimed himself emperor.

His rule would not last long though; within a year, he died under mysterious circumstances and his sons were unable to maintain the loyalty of the army. The generals chose one of their own, a man named Diocletian, as their emperor. He was a skilled commander and led them to victory in 285, securing for himself sole rule over the Roman world.

This must be a familiar story to you by now: a rebellious general gains the throne through the acclamation of his soldiers and success on the battlefield. But Diocletian had something that no other rebellious general had had before him: a unique vision for the empire and the will to change it. Next time, we’ll dive into Diocletian’s reign, explore his grand plans, and see the Roman world enter a new era.