by Dan Carlin
Rome’s most dangerous “barbarian” foes would originate from locations that, unlike relatively nearby Gaul, were beyond Rome’s reach—places that appeared to belch forth fierce new tribes and peoples the way volcanoes do new islands. It’s a fascinating historical human geographical phenomenon. The most famous of these regions sometimes referred to as “wombs of nations” or “factories of tribes” was in the general area of the Altay Mountains in Mongolia.* This very remote, oft-frozen, rugged steppe country may have been ground zero for a whole slew of central Asian nomadic horse tribes over the ages—the Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, Avars, Turks, and Mongols all may have first appeared* in this region. If this is true, it’s quite a “barbarian” pedigree. It’s also an enormous distance from Rome. The Romans would have had to conquer to the borders of modern-day China to shut down this wellspring of barbarism at the source the way they did in Gaul.
Scandinavia was another region that seemed to be a sort of womb of nations. It was also another place that would have been difficult for Rome to permanently subdue and colonize: comparatively remote, with a low carrying capacity in terms of food to support growing populations, and a harsh environment. It certainly didn’t look like a rich and enticing place to invade. In fact, the inhabitants themselves periodically left in search of better things. Large, enthusiastic blond, blue-eyed warriors had for centuries been both a willing and unwilling export from the far north. The Vikings were one of the last of the great eruptions of these traders, seafarers, colonizers, pirates, and warriors from Scandinavia, but that region is popularly credited with producing many more offspring over recorded history. This is where Germanic tribes like the Goths, Lombards, Vandals, and many others were supposed to have originated before at some point moving southward.* Those specific tribes, however, all arrived (or coalesced) in central Europe centuries after the Romans first encountered peoples there that they classified broadly as “Germans.”*
“Germany” is a modern creation. Territories that include peoples or cultures often identified as “Germanic” encompass a much larger area than that occupied by the modern nation-state we know as Germany. Stretching roughly west to east between the Rhine and Vistula Rivers, and from the North Sea and the Baltic south to the Danube and even the Black Sea, an ever-changing number of several dozen tribes and tribal confederations the Romans would (usually) classify as Germanic made their home.*
For much of ancient history, most of this area was off the known map, the terrestrial equivalent of the dragons and sea monsters that inhabited the oceanic edge of the world or the unknown interiors of “darkest Africa” on early charts and globes. Certainly, traders and friendly barbarian tribes would have provided some secondhand information about what the people were like in the interior across the Rhine, but it’s doubtful that what they’d heard prepared the Romans for the furor teutonicus when they finally got to experience it firsthand.
The “first contact” moment—when German tribes en masse ran into the world of the Mediterranean (where the cultures were literate and could record information like this)—occurred when the supposedly enormous Cimbri and Teuton* tribes started to migrate south as part of what’s known as “the Cimbric War.”* In 113 BCE, these tribes moved into the territory of a Celtic people allied with Rome. According to (basically hostile) writers in the ancient world, both the Cimbri and the Teutons were huge tribes of particularly intractable “barbarians” in search of new homes; they had brought their families, possessions, and wagons with them.* Those authors claimed that these tribes were joined by other tribes and individuals as they moved along, swelling their numbers even more.*
By this time, Rome had been squaring off with so-called barbarians for centuries. But this new group was portrayed as extreme even by the standards of the uncivilized: they scared other barbarians. The ancient writers depicted them as physically enormous human beings with white hair and gray eyes. They were dressed primitively in the skins of animals, were inhumanly strong, and nearly crazed with bloodlust. They destroyed Roman army after Roman army seemingly with ease as they moved toward Italy, threatening the Eternal City itself. The battlefield casualties among the Roman legionaries were horrendous, and desperation gripped the Roman state.
And then, as the ancient writers describe it, the barbarian tribes, like a bunch of distractible children, saw the equivalent of something shiny over in the regions of modern Spain and France, and took a detour in that direction, giving the Romans time to come up with an emergency backup plan, which, as the Romans often did, was to find a transcendent leader and vest him with command.
By the time the Cimbri and Teutons (and friends) resumed their march on Rome in 104 BCE, the Romans had put the army general and multiple-time consul Gaius Marius in charge. This man—who would actually play an important role in the Roman Republic’s downward spiral—arguably saved it from one of the worst threats it ever faced when he first smashed the Teutons and their allies at the Battle of Aquae Sextiae in 102 BCE (and supposedly left 90,000 dead Germans on the field). Gaius Marius then did the same to the Cimbri at the Battle of Vercellae the following year (killing a further 65,000 to 160,000 tribesmen).* So ended the first terrible German menace in Rome’s history.
A generation later (55 BCE-ish), one of the greatest figures in Rome’s history, Julius Caesar (a nephew of Gaius Marius), was dealing with his own scary German problem. According to Caesar’s own account, the Celtic tribes in what’s now western Europe (mostly in the Rhine River region) were being attacked by these ferocious people Caesar referred to as “Germans.” Caesar portrayed them as just as scary and unstoppable as they were a generation earlier (that is, if they were related at all to the Cimbri and Teutons) and said the Celtic tribes begged him to help them fend off this attack or invasion from over the Rhine.
When the Roman legions arrived in the area to help their Gallic/Celtic* allies, they began to hear accounts of the terrible, unfamiliar foe that they would be up against, and Caesar said they became intimidated. “Our men started asking questions,” Caesar wrote, “and the Gauls and traders replied by describing how tall and strong the Germans were, how unbelievably brave and skillful with weapons. Often, they claimed, when they had met the Germans in battle, they had been unable to stand even the way they looked, the sternness of their gaze.”* According to Caesar’s self-serving and biased (though seemingly firsthand) account, the terrifying descriptions of these “Germans” caused a panic among the Roman military tribunes and prefects.
Some of them started offering various excuses for urgent departure and asked his permission to go. Others stayed behind out of shame, wanting to avoid the taint of cowardice. These men could not conceal their fearful expressions, nor, at times, could they restrain their tears. They hid themselves away in their tents and bemoaned their fate, or among their friends lamented the common danger. Throughout the camp, all the men were signing and sealing their wills.
It should be noted that by Caesar’s time the Roman military had been conquering everybody and was seen as pretty unstoppable. The troops whom Caesar describes as intimidated by this unnerving foe were themselves an army of intimidators.
Later ancient writers such as Tacitus and Plutarch would say much the same thing Caesar had: This group of people who Caesar claimed belonged on the eastern side of the Rhine River were physically large and very warlike.* The women and children of the tribe are often said to have come to the battlefield in wagons, tending the wounded and screaming encouragement for their warriors from behind the fighting lines, putting themselves in harm’s way so that if the men lost the battle, everybody died or was enslaved.
Tacitus wrote that the Germanic warriors hated peace, and if their own tribe wasn’t at war, they might seek out one that was and join their cause: “Many noble youths, if the land of their birth is stagnating in a long period of peace and inactivity, deliberately seek out other tribes which have some war in hand. For the Germans have no taste for peace; renown is more easily won among perils, and a la
rge body of retainers cannot be kept together except by means of violence and war.” He then added: “A German is not so easily prevailed upon to plough the land and wait patiently for harvest as to challenge a foe and earn wounds for his reward. He thinks it tame and spiritless to accumulate slowly by the sweat of his brow what could be got quickly by the loss of a little blood.”*
Finally, Caesar talked about how these great tribes created zones where they had forcibly depopulated the land around their home area to form a defensive perimeter. The greater the tribe, the wider the dead zone. “The highest praise among the German states goes to those who ravage their borders and so maintain the widest unpopulated area around themselves.” (Caesar claimed to have heard of one zone that was six hundred miles wide.)*
An interesting relationship developed between the Romans and the Germans over the next several centuries, which would take two divergent paths. The first, and most obvious, in the history books at least, was a relationship through war.
From the time of the great invasion/migration of the Cimbri and Teutons, to the very end of the Western Roman Empire, Germanic tribes and Roman armies would regularly square off. Despite the Germanic armies’ celebrated physical attributes, fighting qualities, and the furor teutonicus, the Romans beat them much more often than they lost to them, and when they did suffer defeats there were usually extenuating circumstances.
A perfect example of that happened in 9 CE, in what to us now resembles a Roman version of Custer’s Last Stand. But where US lieutenant colonel George Armstrong Custer lost fewer than three hundred men in his disastrous encounter with a larger force of Native Americans, his Roman equivalent lost something like twenty thousand of his soldiers to tribal warriors. The Roman general Publius Quinctilius Varus led an army of three legions, plus thousands of auxiliaries, deep into forbidding north-central Germany . . . and never came out. Varus was led into a trap by a Roman-trained German tribesman he thought was friendly but who was instead secretly working with several allied German tribes hostile to Rome.* Varus and his troops were ambushed in the dark forests and were virtually exterminated—the story was, to a civilized Roman’s mind, a complete nightmare.
Several years later, a Roman force exacting revenge on the tribes would find the nightmarish aftermath of the battle, including the overrun Roman camp defenses, the locations of the last stands by the final resisters, and the places where the Roman captives were tortured to death.
The ancient writer Tacitus portrayed it in stark terms:
Varus’ first camp with its wide circumference and the measurements of its central space clearly indicated the handiwork of three legions. Further on, the partially fallen rampart and the shallow fosse suggested the inference that it was a shattered remnant of the army which had there taken up a position. In the center of the field were the whitening bones of men, as they had fled, or stood their ground, strewn everywhere or piled in heaps. Near lay fragments of weapons and limbs of horses, and also human heads, prominently nailed to trunks of trees. In the adjacent groves were the barbarous altars, on which they had immolated tribunes and first-rank centurions.*
Emperor Augustus Caesar was supposed to have pounded his head against a door from time to time while declaiming, “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!”*
The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (Teutoburger Wald) didn’t end Roman involvement in the region, yet it was deemed by many historians to have been a turning point of sorts, one in which the Germans smashed any hope the Romans would turn Germany into another imperial province as they had Gaul. The region was too big and the terrain and climate too challenging. To “Romanize” it would have been difficult for Rome’s taxpayers and military at this stage of the empire, and, frankly, it was not a rich enough area to warrant the effort that would have been needed to subdue and hold it. The emperors Trajan (r. 98–117 CE) and Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–180 CE) would both fight terrible wars against the Germans, but ultimately it was decided that the frontier of Rome would pretty much stop at the Rhine, not far from the borders of modern Germany. Along the Danube in the south, the Romans would build massive fortifications to guard the empire from Germanic incursions.
The martial aspect of the Romano-Germanic relationship attracts more historical attention, but it may have been the peaceful interaction between the two peoples that eventually changed the actual balance of power. It’s easy to see how sustained contact, even just a shared border, can change societies, as goods, money, ideas, and people move back and forth across it. This is especially true if there’s a cultural or technological imbalance between the two sides. The native peoples of the Americas in the sixteenth century weren’t the same five hundred years later, after sustained contact with the more centralized and technologically advanced Europeans. The Germanic tribal peoples in central Europe weren’t the same after five centuries of contact with the Roman world, either. Germans who fought with Rome as allies, auxiliaries, or mercenaries were an obvious conduit for the transmission of Roman ideas and culture to the tribes. This was especially true for any of the tribes in the interior of Germanic territory who lacked direct physical contact with Roman lands. Even before the Roman Republic morphed into the empire, the value of using German warriors had been recognized. Often, these German fighters in the empire’s service would get to travel to Rome and experience one of the greatest cities the world had ever seen, then go out to fight on the frontiers of the empire, rubbing elbows with other cosmopolitan peoples in far-flung places. They would then return to their tribes in Germany, bringing with them a massive transfer of experience gained by operating in an advanced society. Multiply that by hundreds of thousands of individual warriors over many lifetimes and it’s not hard to see how transformative it would have been.
By the time the Roman Empire in the West was beginning to totter (say, the 400s CE), many of these Germanic “barbarian” tribes and their leaders looked quite a lot like Romans themselves. The historian Roger Collins writes, “It would be easy to imagine [‘the barbarians’] as little more than savages—naked, hairy and doubtless garishly painted. In practice, however, by the fourth and fifth centuries, the various Germanic-speaking peoples were, in terms of material culture, little different from the Roman provincials.” Although they often had blonder or redder hair and the ubiquitous ancient German mustache, Collins points out that the Germans were even wearing many of the same clothes as the Romans. In fact, both sides were wearing each other’s clothing and shared adornment styles, too. German skintight pants and long hair became fashionable among the cool crowd in Rome—much to the distaste of the traditionalists in the Eternal City.
It’s been long argued that what was going on in the Roman army was a type of fusion that might have been far from harmless, a kind of Germanization of the army. It started with the practice of employing Germanic troops—sometimes whole tribes—often fighting and equipped as tribal warriors.* The practice of creating allies (or foederati) out of tribes and peoples, and then using their soldiers in Rome’s armies, went way back in Roman history. The Romans handled the Germans as they had so many others, creating client states on their Germanic tribal borders, ruled by tribal leaders who were beholden to Rome, and who then formed buffer states between Rome and the interior German tribes. These client states also often provided warriors en masse to fight when needed with the Romans. Some historians have even referred to these arrangements as essentially “contracts.”*
There was never a problem having some Germans fighting in the Roman army, but the question of whether there was such a thing as too many Germans in a Roman army has been debated extensively. At what point did it become more German than Roman? Did this even matter anyway? For the Romans this may have been an existential question as much as a theoretical one, especially since this army would be called on to defend Rome in its darkest days against the armies that would eventually topple the western empire—armies often made up of, you guessed it, Germanic tribesmen.*
Over just a couple of centuri
es, the Roman armies became so Germanized that Germanic warriors began to rise into the ranks of the command structure. There were times in the Roman Empire when the major field army in the West and the major field army in the East were both commanded by generals of Germanic descent. And these Roman armies over time began to look and eventually to fight differently than Roman armies of earlier eras. Instead of being integrated into the legions and becoming virtually indistinguishable from other Roman troops (as had happened with the Gauls after they were tamed), more and more German troops were fighting with the Romans using their traditional “barbaric” weapons, armor, group leaders, and fighting style.
It’s hard to quantify how much this contributed to what would eventually happen to Rome.* Archaeology has recently shed light on previously unknown developments occurring “behind the barbarian iron curtain.” It seems that much was changing in the dark interior of central and northern Europe, from increasing wealth and economic activity, to evolving political systems, to new agricultural techniques, all of which contributed to huge population increases. How much was due to contact with people like the Romans and how much of it was internally germinated isn’t clear,* but this change was part of the reason the Germanic tribes of the very late imperial era were more dangerous than those of previous centuries.
As the historian Peter Heather has written: “The massive population increase, economic development and political restructuring of the first three centuries AD could not fail to make fourth-century Germania much more of a potential threat to Roman strategic dominance in Europe than its first-century counterpart.” He also points out that this greater threat was less stable than it had been: “It is important to remember, too, that Germanic society had not yet found its equilibrium. The belt of Germanic client kingdoms extended only about a hundred kilometers beyond the Rhine and Danube frontier lines: this left a lot of Germania excluded from the regular campaigning that kept frontier regions reasonably in line. The balance of power on the frontier was, therefore, vulnerable to something much more dangerous than the periodic over-ambition of client kings. One powerful exogenous shock had been delivered by Sasanian Persia in the previous century—did the Germanic world beyond the belt of closely controlled client kingdoms pose a similar threat?”