How Large-Scale Human Migration Reshaped Europe More Than a Thousand Years Ago
As Europe reached the end of the Roman Empire, the world was changing, and new types of language and culture were on the way. There was a power vacuum to be filled in a part of the Roman Empire that was now defunct. Many also yearned for a simpler way of life outside of Roman society.
Thus, a great migration began.
We don’t know for sure why these populations began to migrate in so quickly and so widely, but we do have some ideas. As rising pressures from a crumbling empire, a shifting climate, and other factors emerged, populations began to shift. And that shift would change the face of Europe as we know it.
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Why The Great Migration Happened
In the second half of the first millennium, from 501 to 1000 A.D., the Eastern Roman Empire sought soldiers from outside its territories to defend its empire. New migrant groups from the east made their way in to establish their own power structures and start their own societies.
Migrating groups were also attracted by a better way of life, with access to land and resources still present in the Roman territories. At the same time, it was getting colder in some parts of Asia, and these migrants were on the hunt for a more suitable climate for their crops and way of life, Joscha Gretzinger, a German researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, told Discover.
There was also pressure from the Huns, a nomadic group from Central Asia, who began invading and pressuring populations to move west. Plagues occurring around this time also diminished populations in Western Europe, leaving the lands open to large-scale migrations from the east.
“It was just a logical idea to go west and south into this empty territory,” Gretzinger told Discover. He adds that it was most likely a combination of factors that made it time to migrate to new lands and form new ways of life.
A New World After the Fall of the Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was huge, and its fall didn’t happen all at the same time, according to Britannica. While Constantinople and Anatolia would endure for hundreds of years longer, parts of Italy and France would become home to outsiders who had come from Germany and the east to populate towns and change society. These societies would become simpler and less hierarchical with fewer taxes and little division of labor.
“These were local self-sufficient communities with hardly any endurable objects found,” Walter Pohl, a historian of sciences and medieval history at the University of Vienna, told Discover.
Research published by both Gretzinger and Pohl in Nature went further, taking a genetic perspective to examine whether these populations mixed or inhabited the same land but remained mostly separate. Researchers found that they sometimes lived completely separate lives, and that DNA in some gravesites was monolithic, but in others it was mixed, Pohl said.
For example, the Avars migrated into Central Europe from Asia between the 6th and the 9th century because they were defeated by the Turks, said Pohl. This was considered one of the fastest migrations in premodern times.
“This group mixed with the local populations very hesitantly; it was a slow process,” Pohl told Discover.
This could also be the result of the Avars bringing many of their women with them on that treacherous 3,106-mile (5,000 km) journey across Asia to Europe. Additionally, they might have been of a higher status than the groups that they inhabited.
We know this because, when they intermarried, it was more likely that a higher-status male would marry a lower-status female so he could convert her to the correct religion, which is less likely to happen the other way around, said Pohl. On the other hand, Slavic groups that come in from the northeastern parts of Europe mixed much more readily with the local population.
Pohl explained that what we learn from the genetic side of the coin is that some groups mixed and some didn’t, which means that many nationalist ideas of being of pure blood and related to certain groups aren’t always genetically accurate. Most of us are made up of all sorts of people, not just one.
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Article Sources
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