Changes and transformations in late antique Pannonia: From the Roman province to the multiethnic transit area of ‘populations in movement’

Abstract

One of the fundamental events in the formation of the medieval European continent was the transition to more complex organisational structures, even for the inhabitants of the territories beyond the Roman limes. The historical-social transformation movement of the western European world and the new multiethnic composition of the new Roman-Germanic societies were only two of the consequences of the collapse of the division between the highly-developed Mediterranean world and the areas not directly controlled by Rome where, however, stable socio-economic organisational forms had still developed, involving both the steppe and the Germanic populations. Even if it never was an insuperable boundary for all those who lived in the areas not under Roman control, the limes forever lost that ideological concept of barrier and border between two diverse and opposing worlds. The mechanism that caused such consequences involved very complex processes that, as they occurred, affected the environmental geographic conditions as well as the local traditions and ethnic affinities. The populations that continued to live in the areas beyond the Pannonian border introduced themselves into the stream of cultural transformations that arose in that part of the post-Roman European territories between Late Antiquity and the early medieval centuries. It would still be several centuries before this change would complete its natural cycle. In the end, the tribal societies disappeared and new social and cultural structures arose. This helped to spread new ways of using nature, new standards for social co-existence and a new vision of the world.