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Raising the status of some leaders above that of their neighbours and natural peers could provide them with both means and motive for military action that they would otherwise have lacked. Leaders buttressed by Roman subsidy were able to attract more warrior clients into their following, thus enlarging the political groups they led. As with Roman soldiers, barbarian warriors were better behaved when kept employed at the tasks for which they were suited. Fighting one’s barbarian neighbours was useful in this respect, but nearby Roman provinces – with their accessible wealth and a road system that made it easy for raiding parties to move rapidly about – became a hugely tempting target when imperial attentions were preoccupied elsewhere. The attractions of Roman wealth, combined with the hostility that might be generated by periodic incursions of Roman soldiers, meant that there were strong structural reasons for barbarian attacks on the Roman frontier. These same structural reasons might occasionally inspire a particularly powerful barbarian king to conceive more grandiose plans.

Examples of this phenomenon are apparent even quite early in the history of the empire, as with the famous Dacian king Decebalus. His power was deliberately shorn up by Trajan (r. 98–117) after that emperor’s first campaigns beyond the Danube. This support, however, made Decebalus locally predominant, so that he felt able to break his agreements with the emperor and menace the imperial provinces. It took two years of costly warfare to suppress a threat that had only emerged because of imperial subsidy. The Marcomannic wars of the second century obeyed a similar dynamic. They broke out in the mid-160s for reasons that remain disputed, but they precipitated invasions into the Balkans and northern Italy by neighbours of the Marcomanni. The settlement which Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–180) initially imposed on the region failed precisely because it punished some of the chieftains on the middle Danube and rewarded others. Favoured chieftains first threatened and then attacked their less favoured neighbours, driving them into the imperial provinces and making further imperial campaigns necessary. Third-century emperors continued to manage barbarian leaders according to these long-standing habits, but they did so from a position of much greater weakness than had their predecessors. For that reason, the third century witnessed the multiplication of barbarian disturbances all along the frontiers.

New Barbarian Confederacies

Three major barbarian collectivities appear along the imperial frontier in the third century: the Alamanni, the Goths, and the Franks. Though previously unknown to the Roman world, all three groups went on to be permanent features of late imperial politics. Of the three, the Alamanni are in many ways the easiest to understand. In the course of the third century, many smaller groups of barbarians along the Upper Rhine came to be described collectively as Alamanni, and to take occasional collective action. In the fourth century, they appear as a loose confederacy of different kings who could unite for major campaigns against the Romans under one of their number. This sort of coordinated action never lasted for very long, but the Alamanni were nonetheless conscious of sharing a closer comradeship than they did with other barbarians who were not Alamanni. Roughly the same process is detectable in the case of the Franks. Both they and the Alamanni had come together as large but loosely connected polities, whose consciousness of a basic kinship was a response to the simultaneous lure and threat of Rome. It is very likely that the same sort of pressures account for the rise of the Goths.

In the regions where Goths are first attested in the third century – north of the lower Danube and the Black Sea, east of the Carpathians and the Roman province of Dacia – centrally organized and powerful barbarian groupings are unknown until the Goths themselves appear on the scene. Instead, a variety