Simon, your novel Para Bellum is set during the Gothic Wars and this is we’re towards the end of the fourth century, but we’re talking the Gothic Wars, specifically 376AD to 382BC. It is the slow but certain disintegration of the Roman Empire. It’s momentous times, momentous events and a moment of great change. Mass migration is the main cause of the war, isn’t it?
It’s the Gothic tribes north of the Danube, there’s the Thervingi and the Greuthungi, who come down to the Danube because they’re being pressured by the onrush of the Huns coming in from the north and the east. They’re seeking safety, they’re seeking a place to be, to exist. Rome is beyond the Danube, so they apply to the emperor and say, “please can we come, please can we settle?”
That is the start of it all. It gets horribly complex pretty quickly, but it is the mass migration, the Huns pushing the Gothic tribes, who then butt up against the Roman Empire, and the friction starts.
The temptation is to dismiss the Huns, the Vandals, the Goths, as this kind of mass of savages. That’s really not right, is it?
No, increasingly, as Roman history goes on, the bleed between the, what they would call the barbarian peoples and the Empire itself is more and more pronounced. So, by the end, by 410AD, you’ve got the most senior general in the entire Roman Empire is Stilicho, and Stilicho is half-Goth. You get these names, Ricimer is a Roman general at this time, and then Stilicho, and these are Gothic names, so there is similarity in some ways between the two peoples.
The Goths were very much desperate to become part of the Empire, to protect themselves from the Huns, as you say. Why were the Huns pushing up against the Goths, and therefore then the Roman Empire?
The Huns have come from the east seeking better land, because they’re a horse tribe. We look at the end of the Hunnic invasions, it’s the Battle of Châlons in the fifth century. And the only reason I think that a lot of the pressure lifts is because there’s just not sufficient land.
We should mention the hero of your book, Lavius Focales, he’s a legionary, and he’s been involved in something that will help to start the Gothic War, is that right?
A great calamity, a really, really ridiculously stupid moment in history, triggered by a really ridiculously stupid man in history. ,his event is the whole reason I wrote the book. A lot of my impetus for writing books comes from stumbling across historical events that I’d previously overlooked or were fairly obscure or historical characters that are obscure and interesting. It’s not that this is a particularly obscure event, but because my focus is usually earlier Imperial Rome or Republican Rome, I’d never really considered writing about it.
I got reading it one day, and I thought, “Wow, that’s a book waiting to happen.”
Thervingi and the Greuthungi. The Thervingi cross the river, they send a message, which is delivered to the Emperor Valens who is in Antioch at the time, preparing to invade the east, saying, “we need land to settle, we are being pressed, we want to settle within your lands, let us in.”
There is a tradition of Romans letting barbarians settle within their lands – they produce good farm-workers, manpower for the military, it’s quite useful. But Rome is usually very careful about these things – it usually disarms them, sets a lot of conditions, splits them up so that there can’t be a danger of a rising against the empire.
Unfortunately, at this time Valens is off in Antioch, and most of the army is with him, and so there’s very little military supporting the Danube border. Valens knows damn well that if he says no, he’s facing a huge invasion of Goths across the river, because they might not take no for an answer.
He’s pressured, he has to say yes, he has to say, “by all means come in,” and he gives them very favourable conditions because he’s over a barrel. He says, ”yes, come on in, you can stay together, you can have your land, we’ll feed you until you get yourself settled and we’ll sort it all out.”
He does have what’s left of the military stop the Greuthungi from crossing the river, so he’s only dealing with half the problem at once, which is sensible.
The problem then comes with his lesser officers dealing with the situation in his absence while he’s in Antioch. The next thing you get is the Gothic tribes, the Thervingi south of the river, en masse, a large number of them, and they’re getting hungry. When you have a large influx of people, they go through the foodstuffs in that area very quickly, so they start to starve. There are records of them selling their children to the Romans for dog meat. It’s a horrendous situation.
The problem is the idiots in charge at the time in the Thracian and Byzantine area, south of the Danube, everywhere from Constantinople across to Serbia. The general in charge of settling them, is called Lupicinus, who is up for top five idiots in Roman history. He and his various sidekicks are horribly corrupt and sideline a lot of the food that should be going to the Thervingi, sell it on private sales, and essentially are stiffing the Thervingi over what the emperor has promised them. They’re starving. So they start to get balshy, they start to get angry, they march south, and when they get to the main imperial city in the area, Lupicinus invites them to a dinner.
By this time they’ve also got the Greuthungi coming across the river because they won’t be stopped now. So he takes the two senior kings of the Greuthungi and the Thervingi and invites them to a grand dinner in the palace at Marcianople where they will hammer out all the problems and sort out peace deals.
Brilliant, except for the fact that during that meal, the Goths outside the walls start to get restive because they’re unable to buy food, the Romans won’t let them buy food from the local traders. They start to argue, to fight, and when the tidings of this reach Lupicinus and his people inside, Lupicinus, who is a little bit the worst for wear on drink at this point in the party, loses his rag completely and demands that his soldiers round up the two kings, take them into custody and kill their men. He panics and makes the most god-awful decision ever made, I think, in probably late Roman history. One of the kings is almost certainly slain because we never hear anything about him from this moment onwards. The other, Fritigern, who is clearly quite wily, talks his way out of it, essentially threatens them, says, “if I don’t walk out of here, think what’s going to happen outside these walls.”
So they relent, they let Fritigern go, which is maybe the next bad decision, because then Fritigern starts a war that will take place over a number of years and will end with an emperor dead on a battlefield. I think it’s a really important moment, and it’s the turning point, I think, in all Romano-Gothic politics,in the whole system of dealing with the barbarians, and the start of a decline that never really gets arrested.
And that’s the beginning of your story, that dinner?
It is indeed, yes, because the thing is, I looked at it and I thought, Lupicinus is an idiot. I’m not going to write anything from his point of view because I don’t want to write from an idiot’s point of view. I didn’t want to write from the Goth’s point of view. So I thought, who else is involved? Well, of course, there’s the men who actually do the deed for the emperor, for the general. When Lupicinus says, take them, kill these people, who is it who does the taking and the killing? And that’s my character, because these are unsung characters in history, but they played a really pivotal role. So I wanted them to have their moment.
Many of your novels are set in the Republic, the fall of the Republic, then the Civil War – The Empire and Principate. When you embark on a kind of new period of history, is this quite a kind of daunting prospect for you? Because I get the impression there is very little you don’t know about the Roman Empire.
I wish that were the case. I’m very conversant with the era from Julius Caesar through to maybe Septimius Severus.I get a lot vaguer from the crisis of the third century onwards, because really, you can study the Roman Empire for an entire lifetime and there will be many, many things you never get the hang of. There’s just so much of it. When you’re talking about a civilization that lasted from 753 BC to 1453 in the end. You’re only ever going to know part of it. My view is, as I said, largely, as you said, because in which Christianity is the main religion of the Empire. And writing, you know, it’s the first time I’m ever really different, of course, but also it’s strange moment when Christianity has been made legal, but paganism has not been made illegal. So the majority of people are Christian, but there are still pagans and everything is legal. So it’s all around at the time. And so it’s a really strange time, I think.
So you’ve got this clash of, paganism and – is that a different moral outlook for Romans around this time?
That’s a good question, because of course, Christianity at that time is not the Christianity we have now. It’s not as formalized, it’s not as codified. It doesn’t have the set church there as we have now. It’s a much different thing. As is evidenced by the fact that at this time, there are two great branches of Christianity going on. There’s an Arian and Nicene Christianity.
What do you think is special about historical fiction?
There is always something to write about. There are always stories that want to be told. My Ottoman Empire series of books, all sprang from one event which was in 1481, when a church in Constantinople and used as a gunpowder store by the Turks, detonated in a lightning strike, and bits of it came down on the other side of the Bosphorus leaving a huge crater. What a story! Why does nobody know about this? It needs to be in a book. I think that’s what historical fiction is. Just as the writer wants to write these stories I think readers want to know these things readers want these amazing events.
I was at an event recently, I was talking down in near Northampton and discussing this this very subject with them. I think it’s amazing how many people I speak to who say, “I get my history from historical fiction. I don’t read textbooks are dry.”
Well most textbooks are dry, or don’t concentrate on what I’m interested in. I read historical fiction so that I can really feel like I’m in there, I’m part of the subject, and I’m entertained while I’m learning these things, which also led me to the discussion about the value of historicity in historical fiction.
There’s a belief that any historical fiction has to be fitted in the historical framework as closely as possible. Use real events use real people and don’t play around with the history.
Simon Turney is a bestselling novelist and historian and author of Para Bellum and his latest novel, Agricola: Invader.
Deborah Swift Deborah Swift Deborah Swift
