[gothic-l] Re: Analogy between fate of Eruli and Burgundians?

[Troels Brandt <trbrandt@post9.tele.dk>]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, george knysh <gknysh at y...> wrote:
> --- "Dr. Dirk Faltin <dirk at s...>"
> <dirk at s...> wrote:

>
> >
> > One (hopefully) final point. The Herulic armies
> > which figured 3,000
> > and 1,500 respectively may at that time already have
> > attracted new
> > followers of the regions where they were stationed.
> > We know that the
> > Visigoths were several times in their history
> > supplemented by large
> > numbers of slaves, Roman peasants and miners who
> > became Visigoths.
> > Similarly, a unit of Heruls does not have to include
> > only the
> > remnants of the once powerful Herulic tribe.
>
> *****GK: That is a good point. How many such "new
> recruits" are to be counted among the 1500+3000 is of
> course difficult to say, but this goes some way
> towards revising your earlier view of the Eruli as an
> insignificant and dilapidated people after 509. *****
>

I am not sure this point is so good. First of all no other people
would join the weak people Dirk describes as you also indicate, and
secondly Procopius used so many words on describing their general
character as the lowest of all low in the society, that they must
have been regarded as a separate ethnical group at that time. I would
rather think that the Heruls going north were followed by other pagan
Germanic people being defeated or threathened at this time of the new
Christian groups as Franks and Lombards. Alamans is one example as
they were pressed from 498 AD - Thuringians is maybe another - and if
Wolfram is right that the letter of Cassiodorus was to the Western
Heruls before 507 AD, where did this group disappear when Theodorics
alliance against the Franks fell apart in 507 AD? We never heard
about these Heruls again though they by Cassiodorus were put at the
same level as the Thuringians and the Varni.

Troels


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