by Simon Winder
The archaeology of this pre-literate Europe has simply added layer upon layer of frustrating mystery. At Glauberg, just outside Frankfurt, there is a sequence of elaborate Iron Age remains, initially excavated just before the Second World War. In later digs an extraordinary figure was found, almost undamaged – a six-foot sandstone statue of an armoured man with a shield, neckerchief and bizarre headgear combining a cap and what look like gigantic flaps almost like rabbit ears. The figure seems to have been carved in around 500 BC and it has an undeniably Roswell alien-invader atmosphere. It may be a prince, a cult object or the much-loved logo of a chain of chariot-repair shops. But we don’t know – the statue is both fascinating and boring in a highly unstable mix. With no context and no narrative, I felt almost resentful that this figure had safely stayed underground for two and half millennia just to mess us about now. All we can say is that the north-western Europe which we live in has vast substrata of human achievement about which we can understand next to nothing.
Once the Romans arrive, and particularly once Julius Caesar writes The Gallic War, it is as though a huge, Continent-wide curtain has been lifted and what we see – written about by a direct eye-witness, indeed by the man most responsible for messing it up – is a series of highly organized, sophisticated societies, in terms of military technology hard for the Romans to defeat and with large, complex and tough ships designed for the harsh weather of the Atlantic. Reading Caesar’s account one immediately feels more confident about the nature of north-western Europe, with the proviso that everyone should nonetheless remain wary: surviving written-down words and more readily understandable remains give an illusion of new solidity and purpose and yet everyone was just as articulate, aggressive, faithless, heroic, haunted and incompetent before some unpleasantly over-militarized Italians arrived.
Perhaps the most striking pre-Roman place in north-west Europe is on a high hill near Otzenhausen in a wooded area of the Saarland. Fewer locations give a stronger sense of how human life in much of Europe is dictated by trees. Pine and beech forests were the great enemies, their seeds creeping forward and within a generation stamping out any areas abandoned by humans. In the medieval period settlers were given special privileges during the ‘mattock’ years needed to tear out roots and make farmland: extensive warfare, plague or crop failure might be human disasters, but they were arboreal opportunities. The Celtic fortified town built up here over a couple of centuries was enormous. It has been worked out that in its final form (around the time of Caesar’s invasion) it was made from some thirty-five miles of tree trunks and 315,000 cubic yards of stone (helpfully re-imagined by archaeologists as some nine thousand railway trucks’ worth). This extraordinary need for wood, both for the structure and for fires, would have meant that what is now again a convincingly dense region of woodland would have been largely stripped and its ecology – presumably of farms and readily visible wide tracks – too different to be imagined. The town site is protected by a (for me) grimly steep climb to the top and nourished by a spring at its centre which still flows.
The fort was built by the Treveri to defend themselves against marauding Suebi. The Treveri were the enemy most respected by Caesar, repeatedly mentioned in The Gallic War, and they caused him endless problems during nine years of campaigning. The Romans became so obsessed with their leader, Indutiomarus, that they adopted the unusual battle strategy of every Roman simply hacking his way directly towards Indutiomarus to ensure his being killed regardless of casualties. As the Treveri were always on the offensive their Saarland base never came into use – or at least is unmentioned by Caesar. It was abandoned in the same year that a Roman camp was set up nearby, but there is no evidence either way as to whether it was abandoned voluntarily or through battle. The Treveri survive in the name of the city of Trier (more clearly in its French version as Trèves) and genetically, it can be assumed, all over the place. All memory of the meaning of the fort was long lost – and even today it is still known entirely ahistorically as the Ring of the Huns, adding an enjoyable flavour of dark doings.
It is possible to be immobilized by The Gallic War as it is such a relief to move on in a flash from second- or third-hand Greek rumours about the nature of north-west Europe mingled with the analysis of bone pits to sudden, brilliant Technicolor. Caesar is nothing if not self-aggrandizing, but he is also just very interested, as would his original audience have been. He talks about the region between the Rivers Waal and Meuse as ‘the island of the Batavii’, which accidentally preserves the sense of the Dutch river system as once being vastly more wide, unruly and isolating. He also talks about the ease with which enemies could flee into the hilly Ardennes or into ‘the marshes’ – now non-existent but once an almost Amazonian quagmire that spread through the many meanders of the Rhine and Meuse – or onto coastal islands protected by high tides. He discusses the Belgae and the Helvetii, talking about their exceptional bravery and making The Gallic Wars the founding document for two modern nationalisms as well as generating a lot of rather mediocre (if richly enjoyable) nineteenth-century town-hall frescoes of people with big moustaches and sandals. He builds the first bridge over the Rhine, probably near Koblenz. Above all, the book is an account of violence – of the superiority of Roman violence over Celtic violence and, when resistance was broken, of massacres and destruction.
My own view of the Romans in Gaul (and of Julius Caesar) is entirely coloured by a lifelong love (happily shared with my sons) of Goscinny and Uderzo’s Asterix books, set in the aftermath of Caesar’s return to Rome from Gaul, so there is no aspect of real Roman culture which is not swamped for me by these books’ vivid ridicule. In some moods (and I do not think I am alone in this) I am fairly convinced that Asterix the Legionary may be the funniest book ever written, although, in fairness, Asterix and Cleopatra can make an equally convincing claim. This adds an interest to visiting the in other ways drearily exhaustive collections of Roman stuff in the museums of places such as Metz, Cologne and Mainz, where anything from a legionary helmet to a toga-clad figure on a tombstone acts merely as a reminder of various hilarious episodes. The roots of the Asterix books are complex and deserve more study – they were a response to the Nazi invasion and occupation, a satire on the French army (in which Goscinny served), a response to Goscinny’s being Jewish, an attack on Americanization, and so on. But they have also acted more broadly as a sort of wrecking-ball, smashing up through utter derision all traces of fascism, whether of the kind first invented by Mussolini or the variant embraced by Vichy, all of which took deeply seriously the imagined values, discipline, order and frowning gravity of the Roman Empire. The Asterix books made it no longer possible to see perfect rows of steel-helmeted troops with their square-jawed officers without them being merely a prelude to some farcical humiliation by the Gallic heroes. As Obelix says in, I think, every one of the books, ‘These Romans are crazy.’
The warlord
With his entire cavalcade strongly smelling, as usual, of moustache wax, pricey toilet waters and Brasso, Kaiser Wilhelm II on 11 October 1900 inaugurated one of the funnest things ever to happen to the Taunus hills north of Frankfurt. In a flurry of bizarre hunting caps, badges, special cloaks and sashes he laid the foundation stone to mark the rebuilding of the Roman fort known as the Saalburg.
Kaiser Wilhelm had many failings, but his storybook attitude towards history has left us all in his debt. North-west Europe is dotted with fair-to-middling Roman leftovers but none have the atmosphere of the Saalburg. Tossing aside the usual academic fuss and havering, it was decided to rebuild from scratch the whole thing just as it used to be. This being 1900 one can imagine the complex flavour of the enterprise and the very non-Asterix sense of imperial destiny that would have hung in the air even more heavily than the eau de toilette. This was very much a personal project of the Kaiser’s, egged on by a handful of toady archaeologists who should have known better. For instance, the Kaiser insisted on a Temple of Mithras being built, because Mithraism had a soldierly
, band-of-brothers, initiation-rite, all-male flavour, although there was literally no evidence whatsoever for its existence at the Saalburg. The inside of the temple is a joy: it has the air of an old-fashioned nightclub long gone out of business, with the ceiling painted blue with stars and a gigantic painted carving of a half-clad youth killing a white bull.
The fort itself is more serious and felt particularly so as I was there mid-winter – and therefore missed all the dressing-up and the reconstructed Roman meals at the taverna. Being there with snow on the ground and skeletal trees was of course ideal for getting some sense of those poor Roman sentries far from home, stuck in a temperature-defective variant of Beau Geste, looking wearily into the murk to the east, dreaming of lemon trees and waiting for yet another German attack.
The Saalburg was the furthest point the Romans reached across the Rhine. It must have been a glum posting, but it was protecting a range of Roman towns which still exist, with their names twisted about a bit by time, scattered along the Rhenus (Rhine): Colonia Agrippina (Cologne), Confluentes (the confluence of the Rhine and Mosel: Koblenz), Bonna (Bonn, straightforward enough), Moguntiacum (Mainz), Bingium (Bingen), Novaesium (Neuss).
Once you start walking the ramparts you feel very slightly Roman, blowing into your hands to keep them warm, looking out for the stern-but-fair officer of the watch. The walls do seem a bit low though, whether a reflection of reality or to save Wilhelm money it is unclear – in either event they do suggest an over-reliance by the Romans on Germanic tribes not developing small-ladder technology. The Roman-style storage rooms are used as a museum, packed with the usual ancient things hard-wearing enough not to have rotted – any number of spear-points, votive-oil lamps, figurines, trowels, gutters, pots. It seems unfair that the nature of some Roman materials allows them to survive, while the surrounding wood-and-fibre cultures have largely vanished. There is even a disconcerting little clothing pin with a swastika, a Roman appropriation of an Indian symbol. There is also an excellent display of the size of different Roman military units using Playmobil figures, which catch the mood very well, although probably not as Wilhelm intended. And to bolster the fraudulent temple, there is great stuff on Mithraism, with its wholly mysterious use of stone spheres, and the way that the initiate could move up through the ranks from Lion to Persian to Courier of the Sun (the wonderful word Heliodromus) and all the way up to Father – but we do not know, and never will know, how or why. It certainly fits though with the Kaiser’s rather redeemingly confused feelings about masculinity.
The organization of the Roman Empire in the north-west changed at various points – but the main units were Germania Inferior, Gallia Belgica and Germania Superior (i.e., superior in the sense of further upstream on the Rhine). Germania Inferior ran through the modern southern Netherlands, its key northern metropolis being Noviomagus (Nijmegen) guarding the split in the Rhine between the southern arm of the Waal and the northern Nederrjin. All points further north, a maze of complex swamps and unrewarding waterways, were shunned. Germania Inferior then continued down the Rhine to Bonn. Gallia Belgica covered what became Flanders and south to the Somme and then ballooned out to the east to cover areas such as Champagne, Luxembourg, Lorraine almost up to the Rhine – it was later split in two parts, one in the west, and the other in the east with its capital at Trier. One curiosity is that the area known as ‘Civitas Tungrorum’ was moved from Gallia Belgica to Germania Inferior but kept its separate integrity in obscure ways which made it later into the physical territory of Bishopric of Liège – an amazingly persistent, sprawling absurdity on the map which drove all manner of would-be world conquerors mad until at last chucked into the dumpster by Revolutionaries in 1795. The last of the three provinces, Germania Superior, stretched down the Rhine, bulging onto the right bank of which the Saalburg was a notable element, and then down to Lake Zürich and Lake Geneva. Its principal cities were Mainz and Argentum (Strasbourg), with Mainz the main military hub for supplying the forts (result: a particularly numbing museum filled with pots, short swords and spearheads accidentally dropped in the Rhine on the way across). In the mid-third century waves of attackers and a wider crisis in the empire meant that the Saalburg and other forts were abandoned and the line taken back to the Rhine. Roman rule continued long enough to establish Christianity, from the Emperor Constantine’s capital at Trier, to create structures and institutional memories which have existed, albeit sometimes under acute pressure, ever since.
To cap the whole joyous Saalburg experience there is above a statue of Hadrian a stone plaque pronouncing: WILLIAM II, SON OF FREDERICK III, GRANDSON OF WILLIAM THE GREAT IN THE FIFTEENTH YEAR OF HIS REIGN HAS REBUILT THE ROMAN BOUNDARY FORTRESS OF SAALBURG IN HONOURED MEMORY OF HIS PARENTS and then on the statue itself three great names are linked: IMPERATORI ROMANORUM TITO AELIO HADRIANO ANTONINO AUGUSTO PIO (i.e. Emperors Hadrian and Antoninus Pius) GUILELMUS II IMPERATOR GERMANORUM (i.e. our old friend the Kaiser).
From Wilhelm’s point of view the most confusing aspect of the Saalburg must have been that all the time, while capering about on the ramparts, pretending to be a deeply professional yet humane Roman commander, staring into the savage-filled murk, waiting for the next attack, he was a German looking in the wrong direction. It was against people like him that the Saalburg had been built.
Bees and buckles
There can be few more damning or more useless terms than ‘the Dark Ages’. They sound fun in an orcs-and-elves sort of way and suggest a very low benchmark from which we have since, as a race, raised ourselves up into the light – with the present day using as its soundtrack the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. But the damage the term does is immense. A simple little mental test is just to quickly imagine a European scene from that era. Now: was the sun shining? Of course not. The default way of thinking about the long, complex era that lasted from the final decades of the Roman Empire to somewhere around the Battle of Hastings is to assume it all looked like the cover of a heavy metal album.
One problem is that the older the period the more chances there are for its material production to be destroyed. Across Lotharingia there has been century after century of rebuilding (with the re-use of every available piece of old dressed stone) with most evidence of earlier churches and palaces removed in the process. In practical terms one cannot really imagine that the vast, humourless bulk of Cologne Cathedral is merely the latest in a series stretching back to a Roman temple. Many of the great religious buildings of the Rhine have a display table showing somewhat conjectural models of their ancient predecessors, usually starting with a patronizing little wooden block, looking something like a skew-whiff Wendy-house. So great is the weight of ‘the Dark Ages’ on our shoulders that it is almost impossible not to think of the makers of this wonky church slithering about on the mud floor cursing the way the roof was leaking and how nobody could design a door that shut properly, resigned to the occasional fiasco when the walls would simply fall in on the gurning, fur-clad, battle-axe-wielding communicants. In practice, these now non-existent buildings would have been extremely beautiful – drawing on Roman and Byzantine models, and stuffed with all kinds of wonderful stuff from the Roman Empire which now no longer exists.
This is the related problem suffered by ‘the Dark Ages’ – our towns often occupy exactly the same sites as they did then (the same river crossing, the same harbour) and are built on top of them, but there have been simply innumerable points at which older material has been destroyed. There is probably some rough mathematical calculation about how each passing century lowers your chance of anything much surviving at all. The famous fat boy of 1666 – who was meant to be watching the baker’s oven, but instead gorged on pies, fell asleep and as a result burned down London – is only one of an elite group who caused mayhem through their momentary inattention over the centuries. With every household routinely handling flames in wooden surroundings it is unsurprising that so many towns would often find themselves having to start again from scratch. We know far
more about more recent horrors – for example, the gunpowder accident that destroyed much of Delft in 1654 – but any twenty-four-hour period over the centuries was always fraught with some potential fumble-fingered disaster somewhere.
The unrelenting impact of warfare has of course done far more damage, wrecking town after town. There is a lot of warfare in this book, but I have tried to minimize it because it is really quite repetitive if you are a citizen of the southern Netherlands, for example, or the Palatinate. Any breakdown in order or lunge for supremacy ends up with further pyres of the material past. Simply looking at recent disasters, many thousands of ancient records, treasures, histories, valued for centuries by custodians, were destroyed in the 1870 Siege of Strasbourg and the 1914 destruction of much of the Catholic University of Leuven. The true ‘dark age’, of course, was the early 1940s when, simply as a side effect of industrial killing, great swathes of the past disappeared. One small yet major example – the extraordinary series of paintings of the visions of Hildegard of Bingen, made in the 1170s either by the saint herself or under her supervision, disappeared in the general catastrophe that unfolded in Dresden in early 1945. We only know what they looked like (except from black-and-white photos) through accurate and beautiful copies painted by a group of nuns, by sheer chance, in the 1930s. So these frail little works of disturbing genius survived nearly eight centuries before succumbing, and exist today only through the most ancient form of devotional copying.