8. The Formation of the State Among the Germans¶
Core Argument¶
In the centuries surrounding the dawn of our era, the Germanic peoples were far more numerous than classical sources often suggest. Tacitus describes them as a vast population; Caesar’s encounter with the Usipetans and Tencterans, numbering 180,000 including women and children, implies roughly 100,000 per tribe. Extrapolating from this, Germania Magna likely held five million inhabitants, a considerable figure for a barbarian society, though minuscule by modern standards. Including Gothic tribes along the Carpathians and Danube, the total at the beginning of our era was at least six million. Following permanent settlement, population growth accelerated, evidenced by advanced metal and textile industries on the Baltic, vigorous trade with the Roman Empire, and a degree of luxury among the wealthy. This demographic pressure drove the sustained Germanic assault along the entire Roman frontier—the Rhine, the wall, and the Danube—from the North Sea to the Black Sea, a struggle lasting three centuries. By the end of the fifth century, an exhausted and bleeding Roman Empire lay helpless before the invaders.
The declining Empire’s social stratification and property distribution were inevitable given its stagnant level of production, which persisted for four centuries. Consequently, the same classes and property relations necessarily re-emerged under German rule. Towns never regained supremacy over the countryside. Charlemagne’s experiments with large-scale imperial estates failed almost entirely; only the monasteries, as abnormal celibate institutions, produced isolated exceptions. Yet genuine progress occurred: ancient slavery and its attendant contempt for labour had vanished. Between the Roman colonus and the medieval bondsman stood the free Frankish peasant. The new social classes were born from a new civilisation, not a decaying one. The relation of powerful landowners and subject peasants became the starting point of new development, not final ruin. The great product of these four centuries was the formation of modern nationalities. The Germans rejuvenated Europe not through innate racial qualities but through their barbarism and gentile constitution: their democratic instinct, their modification of monogamy which raised women’s status, their preservation of mark communities providing peasants a means of resistance, and their milder servitude allowing gradual collective liberation. Only barbarians at the highest stage could rejuvenate a collapsing civilisation.