In the wars in the Middle Eastern and Danube frontiers, in which Germanic military contingents fought as allies of the Roman Empire, the barbarian elite often attained high ranks and positions. In 1812 the burial of a Roman military commander who belonged to the Germanic nobility (Showcase 5) was discovered near a place called Conțești in Moldova. A helmet with silver decoration and a folding campaign table point to their owner’s high military rank. The set of ceremonial vessels included silver amphoras and a pail decorated with subjects from Greek myths that are masterpieces of early Byzantine toreutics. The garrisons of the Eastern Roman army on the frontiers of the empire were formed in the main from members of Germanic tribes. The 6th-century spread of a new type of female jewellery – the palmate fibula – is associated with their arrival in the northern Black Sea region. A pair of these fastenings and a belt with an eagle’s-head buckle were an invariable part of the costume of a noble Germanic woman in the Bosporan region (showcase 6).
Outstanding among the rich assortment of glass vessels from burials made in the Kerch necropolis between the second half of the 4th century and the 6th are a blue glass lamp decorated with drops of different colours that was made in Syria or Egypt and an amphora with carved or wheel-cut ornamentation that came from Cologne.
The Crimean Goths (showcase 7) were followers of Christianity and aligned themselves with Byzantium. Materials from the excavation of southern Crimean settlements with a mixed Greco-Germanic population give an idea about the fairly high standard of livings and culture in a provincial Byzantine town of the 500s–700s.
