Walter Pohl

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Walter Pohl

The transition from the Roman Empire to early medieval society is neglected historical period in many respects. The Viennese historian Walter Pohl has established a new approach to studying this time in history. He asks how peoples and their social and ethnic identities came into being in the first place, and what consequences this had for subsequent eras. When compared to other cultures, the findings shed new light on the global history of civilization.

A baptism in the now French city of Reims around the year 500 of the common era was to have a major impact on the entire European Middle Ages. In the course of the decline of Roman imperial structures, many cities had become local kingdoms, ruled by former Roman governors, mostly of Frankish origin. One of these governors, Clovis from the House of Merovingia, defeated many local kingdoms and united them into one Frankish kingdom. Clovis then converted to Christianity and was baptized in Reims. The King of the Franks hoped that this would bring him divine assistance on the battlefield and strengthen his worldly power. But the effect of this conversion went far beyond that: Clovis I created a model of medieval ruling systems in which a ruler, legitimized by God, ruled in the name of a people. This was the model that became established in Europe and ultimately led to the emergence of modern nations.

But what made up the ‘people’ under Clovis’ rule? Ethnically, it was by no means uniform. The Germanic Franks and other warlike immigrants were only a minority. The much larger proportion were Gallo-Romans, i.e., Gauls who had been influenced by the now vanished Western Roman Empire. Clovis’ Frankish empire was a mixture of Roman, Gallic, and Germanic cultural elements, held together by the definition of a folk with a new relationship to an omnipotent God.

In a nutshell

With his research, Walter Pohl has revolutionized the long-standing historical view of migrations in the early Middle Ages. His work shows that belonging to a people is not biologically determined, but is rather a historical and cultural development. Walter Pohl’s global comparisons of the formations of peoples and identities has contributed to a new way of looking at historical circumstances.

Portrait Walter Pohl — The historian Walter Pohl is an FWF Wittgenstein Award winner and is one of the world’s most sought-after experts on the early Middle Ages. © FWF/Luiza Puiu

Illustration of a world map — With his research, Walter Pohl has revolutionized the long-standing historical view of global migrations in the early Middle Ages. © Marjan Blan/Unsplash

Regardless of their actual genesis, peoples such as the Franks were often regarded in later history as natural entities that provided an obvious basis for the formation of modern nations. But why did the Western Roman Empire break up into kingdoms named after peoples in the first place? How could the idea of a people with a demarcated area of rule arise at all? And what role did the Christian religion play in this context? The historian Walter Pohl recognized that no one had ever asked these fundamental – and actually quite obvious – questions in an academic context before. Together with historian Herwig Wolfram, Pohl had studied the ethnogenesis of the early Middle Ages – in other words, the question of how Germanic and other peoples came into being. Inspired by this work, he developed new theoretical concepts that take a fundamental look at how peoples and identities are formed. A look at the history of other cultures shows that the collapse of empires does not necessarily lead to the emergence of new peoples and their kingdoms. In most cases, new powers were named after the ruling dynasties. So what was different in Europe? For Pohl, finding answers to these new questions is his greatest insight to date.

The historian showed that the early Middle Ages, with their extensive migratory movements and many military conflicts, gave rise to new social and political identities. The Frankish identity combined Germanic names, a Romance language, and Roman-inspired culture. Pohl refers to a tradition from the 6th century in which a man with the Roman name Lupus (Latin for “wolf”) called his son Romwulf, which is ambiguous in meaning: depending on whether you interpreted it as Germanic or Latin, it could mean either the “glorious” or the “Roman” wolf. “This example illustrates how you could go from being a Roman to a Frank. Ethnic identity was something you could assume by choice,” says Pohl. His “HistoGenes” project on various populations, which used comprehensive genetic analyses to augment archaeological and historical studies, also showed in many cases that biological communities, or ancestry, are not necessarily the same as ethnic and cultural communities.

The kingdoms of the Franks, Goths, and Vandals, into which ancient Rome disintegrated, disappeared themselves over time. However, the concept of kingship by the grace of God, derived from a specific people, remained and was exported throughout Europe. All through history, rulers have repeatedly tried to align themselves with the idea of the Roman Empire – the best example is Napoleon, who saw himself as a new Caesar. However, despite all attempts, a return to lasting imperial empires in Western and Central Europe was not possible, in stark contrast to historical developments in other parts of the world. In China, for example, the political consensus that a united and powerful China is the “natural order” and that times of disintegration disrupt this order persists to this day. And although the collapse of the great medieval Abbasid Caliphate in the 10th century was followed by a series of short-lived dynastic rulers who left hardly any trace behind in the political world, the Ottomans succeeded in achieving a new imperial integration.

Pohl’s global comparisons of the formations of peoples and identities has contributed to a new way of looking at historical circumstances. A fresh interest in research into a “global Middle Ages” has emerged and is being pursued in scientific networks around the world. The European bias, which tends to apply a Western standard to historical studies, needs to be overcome. “Young researchers have to develop new theories from their sources,” says Pohl. “The complex comparisons between religions, peoples, empires, and identities has to be a bottom-up process, not a top-down assessment based on existing historical concepts.” This research approach is being further developed in the FWF Cluster of Excellence “EurAsia.”

A global and unbiased comparative approach allows historical thinking to be placed on a broader theoretical basis and advanced. The end of the Chinese Han dynasty in the 3rd century was similar in many respects to the end of the Roman Empire. Here it was not Germanic barbarians but Eurasian nomads who gradually took power in many regions. The Northern Wei Dynasty was the most successful of these nomadic empires at the time and conquered a large part of northern China. Similar to Clovis, who was baptized, their emperor Xiaowen also broke with tradition at almost exactly the same time: In 494/95, he turned away from nomadic culture and decreed integration into the culture of China, a step that ultimately led to the resurgence of the Chinese empire. In Europe, on the other hand, the new “barbarian” kingdoms integrated successfully, with cultural differences gradually converging. As you can see: Decisions made at the crossroads of history can change the world for millennia.

Short bio

Walter Pohl is a historian specialized in the early Middle Ages. He is a researcher at the Institute for Medieval Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where he was director until 2021. He was also a professor at the Department of History and the Institute of Austrian Historical Research at the University of Vienna. The FWF Wittgenstein Award winner is one of the leading experts on the time known as the Migration Period and has been awarded several ERC grants. The FWF has supported many of his research projects over the past 20 years.

The central question in the FWF Special Research Programme (SFB) “Visions of Community” is, how universal religions shaped the construction of particular communities and identities. Under the direction of the renowned expert for the medieval ages, Walter Pohl, an interdisciplinary group of researchers studies the influence of Christianity, Islam and Buddhism on the conception of religious and political communities in the medieval period.