Hi all, I´m currently writing an essay with some other guys for my A- levels about mass migration events in the past and today. I have to cover the Migration Period at the end of the roman age and am mostly done, but just started to wonder how big such a tribe actually is. After all its stupid to write 10 pages about the topic without ever mentioning how many people were actually on the move. I expected something like up to 40.000 in one moving tribe but couldnt find a source anywhere that confirms or dismisses my guess. Does anyone of you know something about this? And where can I find a legitimate source to verify it? I bet my teacher wouldnt be happy if I quote some reddit comment Thanks in advance :)
Hello there!
Well the problem is that this is sort of a convention of 19th Century Migration Theory, not Modern Migration theory. Barring some circumstances, like the Vandal Invasion of North Africa, for the most part the migrations were not mass movements of concentrated populations - it was mostly the aristocracy and military class. And these peoples weren't purely of one identity - many of those "Vandals" would have been Alans, Suebes, and Roman Spaniards.
I would strongly recommend you read Peter Heather's "Empires and Barbarians" on this topic. It goes into far more detail than I can off the top of my head. He does a great job of explaining it and it's also very accessible - a mere 30 dollars (or less) compared to most Scholarly monographs on the topic which will run you over 100. It may be at a local library or your university library, it's a pretty common book.
That being said there are a couple examples where we do have some sort of number - Radagasius' Goths allegedly had 40,000 slaves and military recruits taken from them, while the Vandals of North Africa crossed with 80,000 men, women, children, and slaves according to Procopius.
For the most part the bulk of the population - the lower classes - was just SOL and got stuck with whomever decided to move in when their local aristocracy left.
Hope this helps. Migration Era Ethnogenesis is a painful topic to understand and difficult for me to reiterate.
I've answered a similar question here https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ryn1z/how_large_were_the_celtic_and_germanic_tribes/
I know it isn't a direct answer to your question, the unfortunate truth is that there's a lot of competing information on this subject.