Whatever became of the Roman Army in the West

[elagababbalus]

I agree about the Roman habit to adopt successful practices or weapons from other peoples, but I must add that neither the spatha (Celtic) nor the draco (Sarmatian) were originally Germanic.

My apologies, I conflated Germanic with Barbarian. All Germans were Barbarians but not all Barbarians were Germans.

The Roman army had plenty of Roman recruits. their is simply put no evidence for a 'Germanised Roman army' other than the grumblings of a few historians. When we find names that 'Germanisation' is simple not born out by the evidence.

But how Roman is a Roman? If service in the military becomes a hereditary chore, and lots of Germans continually get settled on Roman lands on the contingency of military service then gradually the soldiers become more Germanish even if they are not recruited across the border. The fact they recruit extra soliders across the border for their routine civil wars just adds to the trend.

I would suggest a good analogy for the late roman army is the Afghan army, sure it probably has a paper strength of x but a military planner wouldnt count on them being a reliable manpower source. They are poorly paid (thus extremely corrupt and hated by the ordinary people) and poorly motivated given they really have no conception of loyalty to a abstract construct called the Afghan State. Compare that to the Taliban who are extremely well motivated and willing to fight. Once the NATO forces leave the whole construct of an Afghan state will collapse, the Taliban can wreck a weak economy with little effort, no economy equals no taxes. No taxes equals no army and no legitimacy.

Likewise the late Roman soldier has little chance of getting the big paydays like days of old through conquest (thus little prestige), poorly paid and thus extremely unmotivated. The ruling elite whose property the army is supposed, utterly despise the commoners (foreigners or citizens) who make up the army so the army has little love for the system. The sources often mention the army more interested in extortion than doing their job and this trend got worse in late antiquity. At least in the early empire the army was nasty but effective, the late army was nasty and useless. The sources mention that mercenaries such as the Huns were extremely well valued because they would actually do the job they paid for. No doubt when the Huns see they get recruited to do simple stuff like put down peasant uprisings they realise they can rob the empire blind.

This probably also partly explains the rise of private armed retainers the bucellarii. Local potentate surely could see the weakness of the central state and the ineffectiveness of the army and worry that greedy barbarians and uppity tenants might have designs to upset the social order and thus the incentive to create their own private militias.

Whether the imperial army was made up predominately of Latin Romans, Provincials, Germanics, or whomever, is tangential to the larger issue of: what became of those tens of thousands of soldiers armed under the imperial crown? Again, I would think that somehow they would have been disarmed and disbanded—either by force or choice or both—or else reconstituted elsewhere.

Like the Afghan army, there is such a thing on paper, but it doesn't really have any worth in a meaningful sense when it gets put to the test. The army and the state are two sides of the same coin, when one sinks so does the other. To me, it seems implausible that the West could have been overrun so easily if the forces in the Notitia actually were all combat capable. The East was in a similar boat but didn't seem to have the wealth inequalities, demographic problems of the West and was lucky it faced a state like itself and was at peace during much of the 5th century, so there was no means that the East could collapse like in the West.