Migration Period

It's pretty crazy how far some people travelled

>call themselves Germans
>not Germans
what?
Scandinavians are not Germans, they are barely Germanic if that's what you're getting at. There is no wider pan-Germanic race or identity.
The Central European peoples are the true Germanic peoples. No one else can claim to be German or Germanic without Central European descent. Even Tacitus says how the Northern "Germanics" were more servile and weak and they did not carry their weapons with them nor did they fight for Independence or resist tributes, instead they submitted to a king as a slave submits to a master and they had slaves who looked after their weapons in large caches.
Nordics claiming to be the same as or similar to the Germanic people is the greatest act of autism in all of history.
Germans all had red hair, translated from orange/red like the sunset. The sun isn't even yellow itself it is orange and red.
Remove Nordics, promote Gallo-Germanic hegemony.

Suevi and Hari, not Rugii and Suione.

Well for a detailed explanation, I'd recommend you check out Peter Heather's "Empires and Barbarians" - it does a really good job explaining the mechanics of the Migration Period.

>how does large-scale migration work? Do thousands of people just march together through the wilderness in a big train?
It really varied. There were some instances of exactly that, notably Alaric's Visigoths as they traveled from the Balkans through Italy. But in plenty of other cases, it was more complicated. The idea of a people picking up as a single unit and moving from point A to point B is mostly wrong and incredibly rare in practice, and more often than not migrations happen as a flow. Evidence in Eastern Europe suggests that the original migrations of the Goths into what is now Ukraine were a flow rather than a single large movement. In migration flows like that, the migration is disorganized, takes place over a longer period, and often is incomplete. Adding to that, with how fluid identities were at the time, assigning a single name to a migrating group isn't always accurate, as they would often pick up various "other" people along the way.

So ultimately the migration picture gets more complicated than the popular notion - you didn't have whole groups just transplant themselves from one area to another, but more often than not gradually escalating flows in which the group's culture didn't always entirely leave its old home and the locals in the new home often assimilated or blended their culture in with the migrants. For more rapid migrations like during the 3rd Century, you still had migrating groups pick up plenty of "foreigners" along the way, as the kinds of pressures that would cause a group to make such a drastic decision would likely be affecting more than just them.

>cont

Adding to that, in Northern Europe you often had the end result of the migration resembling more of an Elite Transfer. The best example of Elite Transfer - where a new group ousts the old leaders while leaving society mostly intact - is the Norman conquest of England, although most instances weren't nearly as clean as that. This tends to come about because of the importance of patronage among migrating groups - with little money, leaders needed to ensure the loyalty of important followers by promising conquered land. The Anglo Saxons and Franks are the best examples of this process. The Anglo Saxons were a particularly strange case. Supposedly they started arriving in Romano-British England as mercenaries, and, as word got back of the region's wealth, bands of Saxon raiders started to arrive for plunder. Ultimately, the Romano-British succumbed to invading Saxons, but, because the number of important patrons were more numerous than the Romano-British estates, the old estates were broken up and parceled out to supporters - a distinct difference from the relatively clean estate transfer seen in 1066.

The Franks were similar, although they had the benefit of not having to cross the sea, so they could migrate in larger numbers and bring more non-combatants (families) with them. Post-Roman Francia would end up seeing different versions of Elite Transfer depending on how far west one was - IIRC, in the East, the land was heavily parceled and Roman culture mostly eliminated, while in areas with fewer Franks to claim the lands, there were even instances of old pre-Frankish elites retaining some importance.

>cont

>Do migrating bands have an army that marches with them, or does migration come gradually after a military conquest?
Again, it all depends on the specific case. For many of the barbarian tribes that fled south across the Danube in the late 4th century, there really wasn't much of an army at all. The environment and economics north of the Danube generally didn't support an army in a traditional sense, although centuries of cross-border interactions with Romans did mean that peoples across the border were able to support larger forces than in the past. But the migrations into the Balkans weren't really armies so much as migrant groups that were taking all they had - including arms - with them.

Groups like Alaric's Visigoths were more of an army followed by its peoples, but that was a rare case. On the other end of the spectrum, the Saxon migrations appeared to be more of a conquest followed by migration (on more of a continuum), as the smaller boats used for raiding generally weren't conducive to bringing whole families along. That's a trend seen more prominently in later Viking migrations - Scandinavian populations in the British Isles seem to have been disproportionately male, with their women being locals. Even in their migrations in the North Atlantic, the populations that settled places like Iceland and Greenland had women from the British Isles, not Scandinavia like the men were.

>cont

There was also the unique case of the Huns. Though it's hard to tell exactly what happened with the Huns because the lack of primary sources, they seem to have arrived in Europe following large scouting parties that would lead the way. These parties subjugated peoples in the areas they moved through, and these subjugated peoples would often join the Huns in military campaigns. When the Huns settled in Pannonia, this hegemonic system would resemble most other Barbarian tribes, albeit on a larger scale. Usually leveraging off of the personal power of a leader who would unite them, the Huns would subjugate tribes and press them into military service, allowing them to subjugate further, snowballing their state. These kinds of states didn't really have definite borders so much as zones of control - the closer you were to the leader's power base, the less autonomy you had. For the Huns, that meant that, while tribes like the Gepids or Goths were very closely controlled, distant peoples like the Franks and Saxons may suffer from the occasional attempt to interfere in court intrigues, but otherwise be unmolested.

Note that these tribal hegemonies are very unstable. They usually rely on the personal power of the leader, meaning that each new leader has to assert his authority just over his own people to keep them united before trying to keep its subjects in line. And the subjects too were an issue, as there was the ever present threat of defection or subjects banding together to overthrow the hegemonic power. For the Huns, that meant their "empire" didn't last long - Attila's grandsons had to flee their old state and became refugees in Eastern Rome.

interesting, thanks

What the fuck am i reading ?

>in the East, the land was heavily parceled and Roman culture mostly eliminated,

It's the contrary actually

The most populated land was in the East cause it was there that all Roman went (Cologne, Treves, Trierj, and so on)

Imagine if Vandals sticked around. A germanic tounisia .. hnnggg

Ah thanks for catching that. It's been a while since I read Heather's book and it's hard to keep track of all the details with how dense it was.

Wouldn't have really done much. They never really were present in large enough numbers for their culture to displace or assimilate the people already there, and they were suffering from endemic succession disputes and power struggles common among the barbarian tribes. Justinian's decision to send Belisarius in the first place was taking advantage of a succession dispute, and his invasion was mostly just kicking the door down and letting the whole Vandal state collapse.