Archeology

What is a “fara”?

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This year, Alboin, King of the Longobards, leaving and burning all of Pannonia, his fatherland, with all his army, with wives and all his people occupied Italy in “fara”; and there some were killed by illness, some by hunger, and others by the sword.

Marius Aventicensis,Chronicon, 569.1 (580)

Writing circa 580, the chronicler Marius Aventicensis recorded that the Lombards arrived in Italy in 569. This is one of the earliest attestations of the Lombard migration and a great example of how scant and tantalizing the sources from this period can be!

Marius Aventicensis says that the Lombards undertook their migration “in fara”–a term which he apparently presumed his audience would understand. In decades past, the word has been the topic of sometimes strenuous debate among historians and philologists. More recently, a groundbreaking paleogenetic investigation has shed new light on this controversial subject, and it is this data that informs my own answer to the perennial question: what exactly was a fara?

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Who were the Gepids, Really? New Clues!

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Paleogenetics–the collection, analysis, and interpretation of ancient DNA–sheds new light on the movement and interaction of human populations. The bodies of the dead can sometimes speak, even when their graves are disturbed and the historical record is silent. So I was extremely interested to read a recent paper, Maternal Lineages of Gepids from Transylvania by Alexandra Gîngută, et als., published in the journal Genes.

Grave a Gepid man, discovered in Serbia in 2019. Photo via National Geographic Srbija (https://nationalgeographic.rs/priroda/zemlja/a24230/veliko-otkrice-u-viminacijumu-pronadjen-grob-pripadnika-gepida-foto.html)
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The Gepid State, Part 1–Models of kingship

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Nothing has caused me more of a headache than trying to imagine the political organization of the Gepids. Very little is known about it, aside from a few stray comments in various sources. We know that they had a king, and at various times there may have been more than one. There was, apparently, some sort of a council of nobles or tribal chiefs that had influence over certain military and political decisions. Beyond that, little can be known for certain.

Frankish King Clovis I (~466-511) dictates to a scribe, attended by his retainers and a rather unfriendly hound. Facsimile of an illumination from the 14th century Grandes Chroniques de Saint-Denis.

Other “states” (loosely defined!) of the time are somewhat less mysterious. We have a sense of the complex court and political offices of the Eastern Empire. Among the “barbarians,” the Merovingian court is relatively well documented, but due to the particular circumstances in Frankish kingdom, this many not shed much light on the organization of the Gepids around the same time. The Franks, after all, incorporated a Gallo-Roman elite and Catholic ecclesiastics into their administrative state. I’ve seen no evidence that these factors were present to a significant degree in “Gepidia.” Indeed, for a time the Gepids may have engaged in a project of constituting themselves as a political and ethnic body precisely in contrast to Roman precedent.

The Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian, flanked by members of the imperial court. We see religious officers, aristocrats, and armed retainers. 6th Century mosaic from the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna.

Yet surely there was a Gepidic court. Even Attila had secretaries, after all.

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A Geography of “Gepidia”

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As I prepared to write Rosamund’s story, one of my first tasks was to place her in a political and geographical context.

A topographical view of the relevant region. The sickle-shape of the rugged Carpathians served as a natural bulwark for peoples settled on the Great Hungarian Plain (also known as the Pannonian Basin/Carpathian Basin). Strategic earthworks constructed by the Romans in the 4th century may have provided an additional, man-made line of defense.

When the Gepids first appear in the historical record, they reside along the upper reaches of the Tisza River. This would have been a less than ideal environment, pressed up against the mountains and exposed to peoples funneling off the steppes into the Great Hungarian Plain. The bulk of their population probably remained in this area throughout the period of domination under the Huns. They would have served as a sort of buffer nation. Along with the Goths, they were supposedly the Germanic tribe most favored by Attila. The proximity of their settlement area to nucleus of Attila’s empire on the Hungarian plain probably reflects this preferred status.

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The cup(s) in question–Part 2

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In this battle Alboin killed Cunimund, and made out of his head, which he carried off, a drinking goblet. This kind of a goblet is called among them “scala,” but in the Latin language “patera.”

Paul the Deacon, History of the Lombards, Book I, Chapter XXVII

The most infamous cup in Rosamund’s tale is surely the one fashioned from her father’s skull. When I first read about it, I definitely imagined something (for lack of a better word…) goth–appropriate for what I took to be a particularly macabre trophy.

Wicked goth…For some reason, I felt like teeth should definitely be involved!

But upon further research, I realized my initial impressions were probably pretty far off-base–both in terms of the cup’s likely form and its significance.

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Rosamund’s Sirmium

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Rosamund would have presumably spent some amount of time in Sirmium (now Sremska Mitrovika, Serbia), which was under Gepid control in the mid-6th century. This city on the banks of the Sava was once the capital of the Roman province of Pannonia Inferior and, in the 3rd-century, served as a capital of the empire. It boasted forums, basilicas, enormous baths, an aqueduct, a hippodrome, an imperial palace complex, a fortified circuit wall, an extramural necropolis, and numerous urban villas, to say nothing of its more workaday businesses, marketplaces, and habitations. In its heyday, it would have looked something like this…

A model from the museum in Sremska Mitrovika

There aren’t many novels set in this part of the world in the 5th and 6th centuries (at least in English), but those that I’ve been able to find seem to treat Sirmium as a bastion of Roman society, its glory tarnished by the travails of history but still largely intact. My research suggests this was far from the case.

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The cup(s) in question–Part I

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As is probably apparent by the working title of my manuscript, cups play a central role in Rosamund’s story. Obviously the first cup that comes to mind–and the most infamous–is the one made from her father’s skull which ignites her eventual vengeance. But cups, the liquor they held, and the words spoken over them may have had a special significance in Rosamund’s culture.

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A day at the (virtual) museum

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Feeling cooped up? Missing international travel or the opportunity to visit first-class museums in new and interesting cities? Here’s something the perk up the pandemic winter doldrums!

The Hungarian National Museum is running a wonderful virtual exhibit featuring some of the most spectacular items from their early medieval collection. It is called “A Country for Women?” The exhibit explores the lives of women in the Carpathian basin–from the Hunnic period in the 5th century through the Hungarian conquest in the 10th century–as discerned through the remnants of their material culture. This includes the period of Lombard and Gepid occupation in the 6th century. Some of these object are quite well known, but the photographs taken for the exhibit cast them in a beautiful light. You can really see every detail in high-resolution splendor!

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