bilblogz

There were many non-Europeans in the Roman army. The Levis Armatura the skirmishers, were mostly foreign mercenaries with particular national weapons skills, including Cretan archers and African spearmen. Almost all the cavalry were foreigners, and were considered as separate from the legions proper. The general term for foreign soldiers was auxilia.
The four legions which were sent under Aulus Plautius to pacify Britain in 43 AD, together with auxiliaries, would have totalled at least 40,000 men, perhaps as many as 55,000, of which approximately half would have been auxilia. A significant number at a time when the total population of the island of Britain was around half a million.
The legions were repatriated and replaced at odd intervals, but always a residue was left behind: of camp-followers, deserters and traders. New auxiliaries were brought in from time to time from far frontiers, amongst them at least one group of black Africans, but almost certainly more. In addition to the legions, a substantial fleet was kept in Britain, the Classis Britannica, based mainly at Dover, but with offices at Londinium, and probably at other ports. Numbers of men in such a fleet must remain uncertain, but can be guessed at by considering the logistics for the transport of legions, and their supplies : a few thousand men at least.
In 221 Caracalla granted citizenship to the whole Empire, and the main distinction between legionaries and auxiliaries was eliminated. A new levy of men was instituted called numeri, units who had to serve in frontier areas far from their homelands, and generally known by their nationality. There were Greeks, Mesopotamians, Syrians, Africans and Sarmatians serving in Britain, and British numeri served in many other parts of the Empire. A numerus of “Moors” is known to have been stationed at Aballava near Luguvallium, the modern Carlisle, from 253-258, and was possibly there much earlier. Septimius Severus, himself an African born in Leptis Magna, who for a while ruled the entire Empire from Britain early in the third century, is recorded as having been upset by an “Aethiopian” who mocked him on his arrival at Luguvallium after the defeat of the Caledonians in 210.
In addition, traders moved constantly throughout the very efficient road system carrying goods from one end of the vast Empire to the other.
By the end of the second century, London, Colchester and other Romano-British cities were well established. Slaves were brought to the markets from all over the known world, as they were to other European cities and to Rome itself. Mixed offspring were born to marriages between soldiers and locals, and at another level there were flourishing brothels: lupanaria and fornices, which, despite rudimentary contraceptive devices, will have produced a flock of children of multifarious origins.
Of the foreign merchants who came to Britain, there are two well known examples. The first is Barates of Palmyra in Syria, whose set up a lavish tomb in South Shields to his British wife, Regina, the stone is inscribed in Latin and Syriac. The other is Salmanes, probably a Syrian trader, who died at Auchendavy on the Antonine Wall.
Thus by the time the Roman armies left Britain in the fifth century, a great deal of its inheritance was left behind, not only materially and culturally, but in the very genes of the Romano-Britons. So to some extent traces will have been passed down to present-day populations of British and their own descendants all over the world.