A few years ago I linked to this meme on Roman coinage versus late-Antique coinage. O'Neill, he don' like it but the Damascene casbah can't be rocked. Couldn't from Europe and North-Africa, anyway. Instead, the centre of traffic shifted to the Rhineland.
On that topic, Berber S. van der Meulen-van der Veen since wrote a book about Germania Secunda. Craig Davis, one of the best of Bryn Mawr's crew, is reviewing it. The thesis is that this frontier wasn't invaded as such; it was always porous so always involved a negotiation between the Roman army out there (not all of them Italian) and the locals, whom we'd recognise as German since at least the rampage of Germanicus. (I remain unsure where Arminius' Cherusci sat, on this division.)
I could add that, in turn, the Romans retained "embassies" - fully armed - deep beyond the Rhine. As long as they weren't overstepping like Varus overstepped, the Germans tolerated this presence.
This Austrasian borderland got wealthy and powerful enough it could fuel rival Emperors long before Childeric AD 463 "governed" on behalf of... well, it wasn't Majorian. I had to look it up: Libius Severus or "Severus III". Pretty much Ricimer, then. Anyway if Domitian II could be laughed off, Constantine III and Macsen Wledig could not.
This suggests that some "barbarian invasions" might have been viewed, by the barbarians themselves, as Avitus viewed himself: a Roman provincial rebellion then expanding its territory at the expense of other dubiously-Roman "governors" - read, fellow warlords. How well was Ricimer speaking Latin?
BACKDATE 3/20
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