what i was thinking about was the open question of whether the germanic, celtic, slavic and other migrations that ended the roman empire were actually seen not as the rampaging barbarians that the church historians recorded them as but actually as liberators of christian-enforced slavery by the vast majority of the population, who rejected this weird middle-eastern religion that was enforced on them with violence by strange foreigners. i'm not going to prove this claim, so much as i'm going to generate an argument that it is a reasonable supposition by using a series of analogies within more standard, recorded history. a characteristic of this period, c. 450 to c 1000, is that there was little remembered writing outside of the churches, which were governmental and administrative bodies throughout most of europe under a system called 'papal supremacy', where the pope essentially assumed the powers of the emperor. this didn't formally end until it was dismantled by napoleon, in 1806.
first, i want to present an unrelated model that i've used to try to understand the nature of migrations into europe over a long time frame. there's this heated debate in pre-european archaeological circles over whether the indo-european migration was violent or peaceful, with the peaceniks pointing out a lack of clear evidence of violence in the record itself and the war mongers arguing that the central motifs in indo-european culture were all about war, and drawing conclusions. i've tried to resolve this debate by looking at recorded history and pointing out that there has been an essentially unbroken stream of violent horse-backed warriors moving from the steppes for as long as there has been historical records (something that was only really resolved when the russians overwhelmed the horse-backed warriors with superior technology, and eventually with tanks. horses can't fight tanks. at all. hence this giant country called russia, that formed in response to this constant stream of violence.), and almost none of that could be found in the archaeological record if it were searched for, so it's really incumbent on the peaceniks to present their positive case, which they can't. violent migrations from asia into europe were likely a near constant reality going back 6000-8000 years before present, and only ending around the year 1700.
likewise, i think we can look at the question of how northerners were seen by romans by looking at existing history, but we have the ability to look both before and after the period that middle eastern christian colonizers occupied the bulk of europe.
first, consider the byzantine response to advancing turks and arabs in the late dark ages, which was to call on the franks and germans (then seen by the byzantnes as barbarians) to liberate them. we call this the crusades, which from a byzantine roman perspective was a war of liberation (although it suffered from the unfortunate reality that the remnants of roman civilization in the middle east left several centuries previous, in a depopulation event cause by plague, war and economic collapse that peaked in the late 7th century and made it easy for arab bedouin groups to take over in syria and israel). there has also been some serious scholarly research (not some trans girl with a blog) looking into the idea that the viking invasion of christian europe was a response to charlemagne threatening to invade scandinavia, that they targeted the churches for this reason and that they met a minimal response outside of the cities because much of the rural population wasn't christianized at all, and did in truth see them as liberators. we spend a fair amount of time criticizing the inquisition, which lasted into the age of enlightenment (and may have claimed netwon, who was himself a secret alchemist, had he not been very careful about it), without stopping to realize that they were killing witches because they were pagans. this is in truth clear evidence of indigenous religious practices carrying on in europe very late into history. the great peasants revolt likely had a pagan religious slant to it (as did many of the attempts to ward off the plague in the first place). while they have sadly not survived, there are records of indigenous scottish religious practices being practiced in remote locations as last as the 17th century. eastern europe, which had crusades launched against it, did not itself convert until roughly that late, and there are in fact some baltic and finnish tribes in russia that never converted at all and are the last known legitimate vestiges of the old ways in europe. it is reasonable to suggest that perhaps the farmers and peasants in france let the vikings walk in to fight the church, which they despised, precisely because they were still worshiping derivatives of odin, themselves....at least until the vikings became corrupted by christianity, themselves, and became worse oppressors than the remnants of roman rule were.
so, we can see that the idea that the germans were seen as liberators is recorded in several places in history after roman rule, notably with the crusades (well documented in constantinople) and the viking invasions (well documented, at least from the church perspective). there are also undertones of pagan practices in major events like the great peasants revolt (the centrality of the grove, for instance) and the inquisition that draw into question how christianized europe really was, and how they might view a foreign pagan force to come to fight the church for them.
it is also possible to look at roman attitudes towards germans and celts at the dawn of constantine and the beginning of roman christianity and deduce ideas about how the people viewed their chiristian oppressors and how they may have viewed germanic warriors coming to fight against them.
there were in fact several late roman emperors that saw the goths (a swedish warrior group that migrated into the empire from the region around today's crimea, fleeing the huns) as having noble and ideal qualities, which is something the romans also projected onto the celts, even in the form of late classical art. this is very well documented. our contemporary concept of the noble savage - naked, naive, pure, just, honest but void of civilization and law- was in fact created by roman art, depicting the celtic warrior class. there are surviving statues in rome of celtic warriors that demonstrate how the romans literally placed the naked celtic warriors on a pedestal, as ideal representatives of humanity in a pure and raw state. it is easy to deduce that, in the celts, the romans saw themselves, which is true; italic tribes likely only separated from celtic tribes some time around the halstatt period (c. 1000 bce), and the celtic and italian are the most closely related dialects, which might even be why spain and france so easily converted to latin as the lingua franca. you can contrast this to how the romans saw the carthaginians, which was as creepy foreigners with weird customs. there is a very large amount of evidence from the late classical period that the romans saw the germans and celts as something closer to themselves, and that they contrasted this with their middle eastern slaves (the romans literally brought millions of semitic slaves to europe from syria, and it is these people that eventually became italian and french and spanish christians), who were foreigners that had weird customs that were not like them. there is also actually archaeological evidence of roman pagan cultural practices (like sacrifices) in italy that is contemporary to the germanic invasions, and which seems to suggest either a reversion out of fear (the christian perspective) or a brief return to free cultural activity, which is what i'm hinting at.
this is an important consideration, as the history of europe is decolonized to present indigenous perspectives, and remove introduced christian concepts. we can easily construct the earlier period - we still have the statues of celtic noble savages on display in roman museums - and we know all about the renaissance and what followed, but this historical gap of christian occupation still suffers from the fact that it was written by the occupiers, and the bulk of historians are frankly not cognizant of the depth of the biases. we know the history was written by the church. we say it. we don't understand it and we've yet to put the pieces together to build a history of europe that eliminates and expels christianity, which is overdue and necessary to complete the decolonization of europe and allow it to return to it's indigenous roots in roman, greek, celtic and germanic cultural practices.