The Germans

The third century was a time of crisis for the Roman Empire. Not only was Persia revived by the Sasanians but, in the West, the Germans posed a far greater threat than ever before. Find out why in this episode! 

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Hello and welcome back to the fall of the Roman Empire. My name is Nick Holmes, and this is episode 9 called Germans. In the last episode, we heard about the rise of Persia and how the Sasanians defeated and captured the Emperor Valerian Atadesa in 260. This put Rome's control of its whole Eastern Empire in jeopardy. But before we continue that story, we need to turn west, for it wasn't only in the East that Rome's enemies were triumphant. The West was on fire as well. And in this episode we'll look at the growing power of the German tribes along the Rhine frontier. You'll remember from previous episodes the famous defeat of the Roman general Varus in 9 AD at the Battle of the Tutobur Forest, where three Roman legions were annihilated by the German leader Arminius, who'd managed to unite the normally divided German tribes. And this was such a calamity that apparently, according to the Roman historian Suetonius, it caused the Emperor Augustus to break down, banging his head against the wall of his palace and crying out, Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions. And maybe Augustus was doing this for a good reason, for the really striking thing about the Varian disaster, or Clades Variana in Latin as the Romans called it, was that it was a complete one-off. For throughout the rest of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, the Romans unquestionably had the upper hand over the Germanic tribes, who were troublesome but very well contained by the Roman legions along the Rhine frontier. So, what happened in the 3rd century and why did this change so radically? Let's find out in this episode. Hope you enjoy it. So internal changes had taken place among the German tribes during the last two centuries, which caused them to combine to form far more effective tribal concentrations than had ever existed before. This meant that the new kids on the block were tribes like the Alemanni, the Franks, the Vandals, and others who were quite different from the multitude of earlier, smaller, and weaker German tribes such as the Cheruski, Chatti, and others mentioned by Tacitus, the Roman historian, in the first century AD. So what had happened? Let's take a step back and look at Rome's long history with the German tribes. Like the Persians, the Germans, or Germani, as the Romans called them, had always been a major feature of the Roman world. Back in 105 BC, the German tribes called the Cimbrian Teutones had invaded southern France, which was called Provincia Romana or Roman Provence, and defeated the Romans so severely at Arazio near Modern Orange that it had catapulted Gaius Marius to being elected for an exceptional second consulship, since only one was normally allowed, in order to reorganize the Roman army and defeat the invading Germans. Fortunately for Rome, Marius succeeded in doing both. Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul from 54 to 50 BC had brought him into contact with the German tribes, but he stopped his victorious army at the River Rhine, finding the German tribes particularly savage and seeing little reward from their conquest. Augustus was a bit more inclined to subjugate the Germans until Varus's three legions were slaughtered in the famous battle that we've just mentioned at the Juterberger Wald, but the Romans swiftly took revenge. Two of the three lost legionary eagles were recovered. Arminius's political leadership of the Germans proved short-lived. He was killed by rival German leaders, and thereafter the Romans decided that Germania simply wasn't worth conquering. With the Roman frontiers established along the Rhine and Danube, the Romans and Germans established a broadly peaceful coexistence until the next major German intervention in the Roman world happened in 167 AD in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, when the German tribes, the Marcomini and Quadi, crossed the Danube in force. This was a serious invasion, rather similar to that of the Cimbrian Teutones, nearly 300 years earlier, albeit it was across the Danube rather than the Rhine and into the Balkans instead of into Gaul. The Germans even reached Aquileia at the head of the Adriatic. Marcus Aurelius was hard pressed for some time, partly because of manpower shortages due to the Antonine plague which struck the Roman Empire at the same time and which we will cover in a later episode. Nevertheless, he managed to prevail and push the Germans back across the Danube. But it was in the third century that things started to go seriously wrong for the Romans. German invasions began to pose a threat to Gaul and even to Italy itself. This really began in 213 AD when the Emperor Caracalla was forced to campaign against a powerful new German tribe called the Alemanni, who had invaded Roman Rita, which is modern Switzerland and the Tyrol. Then in the 230s matters became more urgent when the Alemanni started to raid across the central Rhine frontier as well. The last of the severan emperors, Severus Alexander, was murdered by his own troops at Mainz in Germany as he tried to buy peace from the Alemanni. In the decades afterwards it was not just the Alemanni who were raiding frequently into Rietier and across the Rhine, but further north another new German tribe, the Franks, were starting to put pressure on Roman defences along the Rhine to the English Channel. Meanwhile, another German tribe, the Saxons, started launching seaborne raids against the northern Gallic coast and Britain. Then in the 250s, all hell let loose. Between 254 and 258, the Rhine frontier was shattered, and Gaul was invaded by the Franks, Alemanni, and Marcomini. These were proper invasions, not just raids. At about the same time, Roman Pannonia, which is a territory stretching along the North Danube and including parts of modern Hungary, Austria, Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia, was overrun by the Marcomani Quadi and the Sarmatian Yazigis. The Marcomini even reached Italy, advancing as far as Ravenna in 254. Meanwhile, the Alemanni descended into the Rhone Valley in Gaul, which they occupied for three years and used as a base to raid the rest of Gaul. Another group of Alemanni crossed the Alps and advanced into northern Italy, where the Roman Emperor Gallienus just managed to defeat them near Milan in 260. So, what had changed? How did the relatively fierce but largely ineffective German tribes suddenly become so much more dangerous? To answer this, let's start by looking at what Germania was in the first century AD. For at that time it covered a vast area much bigger than modern Germany, stretching from the Rhine in the west to the Vistula in modern Poland in the east and from the Baltic down to the Danube. There were some non-Germanic peoples included in this area, such as the Sarmatians and Dacians north of the Danube, but modern historians believe that most of what we would call today Central and much of Eastern Europe was ruled by Germanic speaking tribes. Within this area, there could have been peoples of an even older origin whose remains have altogether disappeared, but if such did exist, then they were certainly dominated by the Germans. Now, if the Germans were so dominant in so large a part of Europe, one obvious question is why didn't the Romans choose to conquer them when they had conquered both the Gauls and the Britons? And the answer seems to be that the Romans quite simply didn't think it was worth it. This was really because most of Germania was exceptionally primitive and poor. The Germans were the poor relations to their cousins the Celts. For example, when Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, he found that it was a relatively sophisticated part of the non-Roman Europe, which modern archaeologists refer to as belonging to the Latin culture, Latin spelt La and then T E N E, which encompassed a broad swathe of Europe running from Gaul to modern Hungary and from southern Britain to modern Switzerland. Now the Latin communities were good metal workers in bronze, iron and gold and produced distinctive and often very beautiful stylized curvilinear designs for shields, sword handles, horse strappings and jewellery. They were influenced by the Etruscans, the Greeks, the Romans, and when Julius Caesar invaded Gaul, he found quite large Gallic settlements and towns, and he was very impressed by their relatively sophisticated religious and political institutions. But while the Gauls certainly impressed Caesar, the Germans didn't accept in one thing, their ferocious and primitive warfare. What was really different about Germany was that although the archaeological remains of some southern German tribes have been categorized as falling into the Latin culture, the majority, and especially those in northern Germany and Poland, belonged to a much more primitive culture which archaeologists have called Jastorf. Artifacts discovered in burial grounds are far fewer and very basic compared with those of the neighbouring Latin culture. Northern Europe was also still very heavily forested at this time, in contrast to Gaul, which had already been extensively deforested even at this time. The thick German forests made Roman invasions of Germania much more challenging, as the Roman general Varus, of course, discovered to his cost at the Battle of the Teuterburg Wald in 9 AD. So what changed? Why were the Germans suddenly in the 3rd century so much more powerful? The answer in brief is that the Germans had caught up with their Celtic neighbours during the first to third centuries AD. Archaeological evidence points to considerable population expansion and wealth creation in Germania in this period. This began with improvement in agricultural methods which allowed the Germans to produce more food and stay in more settled environments rather than leading the semi-nomadic lives that they had done before. New agricultural techniques were copied from the Celts and Romans, such as applying animal manure as fertilizer and rotating land more quickly between fallow and cultivated, thereby producing more food and allowing settlements to stay in the same place. As villages grew and populations expanded, so primitive industries for iron, pottery and even glass production developed. Why did this economic expansion happen at this precise time? Well one reason is that it was simply the inevitable influence of their more sophisticated neighbours, which probably would have been felt at some point anyway. But ironically for the Romans, they probably speeded this up. And this was because of the Germans' growing trade with the Roman world. The Germans didn't produce coins of their own, but Roman coins were certainly in plentiful circulation in Germania to stimulate trade. In addition, Roman goods and artifacts from weapons to jewellery became highly prized possessions amongst the Germans as status symbols, similar to buying the latest iPhone would be today. This meant that Germans invested more time and effort in wealth creation. And this led to social change. Increasing material prosperity led to more pronounced social hierarchies. In particular, archaeological evidence points to the emergence of German warrior elites. The discovery of large timber halls suggests that German leaders started to entertain their retainers with feasts and drinking, and Roman wine amphorae, for example, have also been found at these sites. Indeed, this was a very, very early example of the origins perhaps of medieval feudalism, when hundreds of years later lords would feast their followers in grand castles. But perhaps the biggest change of all, and one which threatened the Roman frontiers the most, was the increasing stratification and militarization of German society. Burial grounds show an increasing focus on weapons, warrior elites were growing who could either work for the Romans as auxiliaries or invade the Roman Empire. And by far the most worrying development for the Romans was that the German tribes were consolidating and becoming better organized. In the first and second centuries AD, there was a huge number of totally independent tribes, perhaps more than 300 of them scattered across Germania, that had no intention of forming a united front against the Romans. Back in the first century, the example of cooperation between several German tribes under Arminius, which had resulted in his victory at the Battle of the Juterberger Wald, was conspicuous for being the exception rather than the rule. But in the third century this changed completely, and the smaller German tribal groupings were much more willing to consolidate, however loosely, to form larger tribal federations, from which the Alemanni and the Franks along the Rhine and the Saxons on the North Sea coast all sprang into being. And while these federations were still divided between many different kings and princes, they were much more willing to cooperate than before. Another reason that enticed the Germans across the Rhine was self-inflicted by the Romans, for in the first and second centuries AD, the Germans often looked to Rome for employment as auxiliary troops, and indeed the Romans welcomed this. Arminius, for example, the architect, as I've just mentioned, of German victory at the Battle of the Juterberger Forest, had been one such example. As a German auxiliary, he had acquired a good understanding of how the legions fought, which he then used against them. And by the third century there were many more Arminiuses in Rome's pay working as auxiliaries, and they were only too ready, just as Arminius had been to double cross the Romans. But there was one Germanic tribe that we haven't mentioned so far, and it was to become far more important in Rome's history than any of the Alemanni Franks or Vandals, important of course as those tribes were. Indeed, this people was to play perhaps the leading role in the history of the decline of the Roman Empire, and it was a role that would become strangely intertwined and pivotal for both themselves and the Romans over the next two hundred years. And this people was called the Goths. Oh yes, and I nearly forgot, if you're using Spotify, there's a new rating system where you can give a rating with just one click. And in the next episode, we'll hear about the Goths, who would become perhaps the Romans' greatest enemy. Thanks for listening, and see you next time.