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2 Reasons for the Recruiting of Barbarians
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Published:April 1990
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Abstract
The reasons why the Roman government came to rely to such a large extent on barbarians are not at all clear, even if some of the factors can be identified. In the second and third centuries the Roman army was recruited from sons of soldiers, and from inhabitants of the province in which the units were stationed.• Frontier areas, especially the lands along the Rhine and Danube were devastated in the third century, and their ability to furnish recruits was surely much reduced. Loss of farmers was made good by settlement of barbarian prisoners of war on a very large scale-over so long a period and so large a scale that social historians of the Later Empire still have to explain how there could have been so much empty space within the Empire. Devastation must be part of the answer, but probably not the whole. The conditions of settlement varied a great deal. Settlers who had volunteered to enter the Empire peacefully, and others who had entered violently, and whose settlement was not so much permitted as acquiesced in by the government, received freehold. The Visigoths who were settled in Moesia in 382 even kept the right to be ruled by their own chieftains. Others, usually prisoners of war who had surrendered and were compulsorily settled, might be handed over as tenants, or even as landless agricultural workers, to landowners. In either case their status was humble.
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