Germanic peoples

The Germanic peoples were a group of ancient northern European tribes with a common ethnic and linguistic origin. The Germanic tribes are believed to have originated in the region of modern-day Denmark, Sweden, and northern Germany. They were first described in a historical context by Roman general Julius Caesar, who encountered them in the first century BCE. Germanic tribes clashed with the Romans for centuries and handed the empire some of its most devastating defeats, including the capture of Rome itself in 410 CE. After Roman power crumbled, many Germanic peoples migrated south and west, settling in regions from northern Africa to Britain. Their culture greatly influenced several nations including England, France, Germany, and Norway. Germanic languages also gave birth to modern-day Dutch, German, and English.

Origins

Historians are unsure as to the exact origins of the Germanic peoples. They are believed to be descended from the intermingling of several migratory cultures in northern Europe in the second millennium BCE. The earliest culture that has been linguistically connected to the Germanic people was the Jastorf culture, a group that lived in southern Denmark and northern Germany around 500 BCE. Traditions passed down by the Germanic tribe the Goths held that their people originated in a homeland in southern Sweden and Norway. By the third century BCE, the Germanic peoples are believed to have inhabited a core region in southern Sweden, Denmark, and northern Germany.

The early Germanic peoples were nomadic and began to move south into central Europe around 250 BCE. They encountered the Celts, another group of tribes that inhabited the region. The Germanic tribes captured much of the Celts' territory, either absorbing the Celtic population or forcing them to move west. Many Germanic peoples shifted to more agricultural-based societies and established settlements in a region that stretched from western Germany and Switzerland to Belarus and Ukraine.

The first contact between Germanic tribes and Romans likely occurred in the late third century BCE. Documents from the era mention a people called the Germani, although that term may have referred to all the foreign tribes living northeast of Rome. While Germani is Latin, its exact origin is unknown. It may have come from the Latin word germen, which corresponds to "related" or "authentic." This may have been a reference to a Roman belief the Germanic people were allies of the Celts. Later Roman historians suggested the term meant that the Germanic people were the "authentic" Celts—a compliment to the Germanic capability in warfare as opposed to the once-formidable Celts, whom the Romans had defeated. The name also may have originated in the Celtic language from the word for "neighbor" or "men of the forest."

Background

The first recorded conflict between Germanic peoples and Rome occurred near the end of the second century BCE. Migrating Germanic tribes known as the Cimbri and Teutoni invaded Roman territory in Italy, Spain, and Gaul, a region in western Europe corresponding to modern-day France, Belgium, and parts of the Netherlands, Germany and Italy. The Germanic forces won several decisive victories against the Romans before the invasion was finally subdued in 102 BCE.

In 55 BCE, Julius Caesar, then a Roman general, massacred a group of Germanic people near the Meuse River in the Netherlands. Caesar referred to the people as Germani cisrhenani, or "left bank Germani," a reference to the tribes living west of the Rhine River. The river runs through modern-day western Germany and was considered the symbolic border of Germanic territory in Caesar's time. His writings were the first recorded mention of the Germanic people as a specific group. He also referred to the Germanic homeland east of the Rhine as Germania.

Caesar, and later writings from the Roman historian Tacitus, divided the Germanic tribes into several groupings. Those near the Oder and Vistula Rivers near modern Poland were called the East Germanic tribes; the tribes near the southern part of the Rhine River were the Istvaeones; those near the Elbe River in northeastern Germany were the Irminones; and the tribes of the Danish peninsula and the Danish islands were the Ingvaeones. The tribes that remained in the regions of Norway and Sweden were known as North Germanic. These designations were strictly used by the Romans; the Germanic people were not united in a single nation and had no collective name for themselves.

By the beginning of the first century CE, Rome had transitioned from a republic to an empire and its forces controlled much of the territory around the Mediterranean Sea. The effort to subjugate Germania begun by Julius Caesar was ongoing and had met with only limited success. Roman legions had advanced into Germanic territory and formed uneasy alliances with some of the tribes but failed to gain complete control of the region.

In ninth century CE, three seasoned Roman legions were dispatched into Germania to investigate reports of a local uprising. As they reached the Teutoburg Forest in northern Germany, they were ambushed by forces led by a Germanic tribal leader named Arminius. As a child, Arminius was raised in Rome and had studied Roman battle tactics. His army slaughtered the Romans, killing almost the entire force of 15,000 to 20,000 soldiers. The defeat stunned both the leaders and people of Rome and halted Roman expansion in Germania.

Overview

Skirmishes between the Romans and the Germanic tribes continued for years, but after the defeat in the Teutoburg Forest, Rome was never able to establish any control over Germania. By the third century CE, political chaos in Rome had begun to weaken the empire. A Germanic tribe called the Goths took advantage of the turmoil and invaded the Roman city of Histia in modern-day Hungary. During the next decades, their constant incursions and border attacks became an annoyance to the Romans.

The empire could not afford to send a large military force to deal with the problem, so it attempted to form alliances with the Goths. Those who had captured Roman territory near the Danube River in modern-day Romania were open to the idea of an alliance. Many adopted the Roman ways of life and were recruited into the Roman army. These Goths were later called the Visigoths, a term meaning "western Goths." The Goths who remained in their lands in modern Russia and Ukraine were called the Ostrogoths, or "eastern Goths."

In 285, the empire was split into two halves, the western empire controlled by Rome and the eastern empire controlled by Constantinople. In the late fourth century, the Huns, a warlike group of invaders from Asia, pushed the Visigoths from their lands and into Roman territory. The Eastern emperor Valens allowed them to settle on Roman lands, but poor treatment by local imperial officials prompted the Visigoths to revolt. In 378, the Visigoths defeated the Romans at the battle of Adrianople and killed Valens.

Further mistreatment at the hands of the Romans led Visigoth king Alaric to march an army into Italy and invade the city of Rome in 410. Alaric's forces looted the city and burned several buildings but did not destroy Rome. The Visigoths left after three days, but the event shocked the ancient world and is widely considered a milestone in the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The official end of the western empire is considered to have occurred in 476, when a Germanic solider named Odoacer deposed its last emperor and declared himself king of Italy. Both the Visigoths and Ostrogoths established kingdoms in Italy and France, but these were overthrown in the sixth century. The Gothic Germanic people were eventually dispersed and absorbed into other cultures over the course of centuries.

The decline and fall of the Roman Empire opened up new lands to other Germanic tribes that were being pushed from their homelands by warfare and foreign invaders. The Vandals, a Germanic people from the region of modern-day Poland, migrated into Spain and eventually settled in northern Africa. In 455, a Vandal army also attacked and sacked Rome. Authors of the period reported the Vandal incursion was more violent than the Visigoths of forty years earlier, making the name vandal synonymous with acts of destruction. The Vandal kingdoms fell to various attackers in the sixth century, and the people scattered across northern Africa and Europe.

In the late fifth century, the kingdom of Gaul was controlled by the Visigoths and two other Germanic groups called the Alemanni and Burgundians. A collection of Germanic tribes from northern Germany known as the Franks had their sights set on westward expansion and conquered Gaul in 486. They were led by their king, Clovis I, who converted to Christianity in an attempt to unify the region's Germanic and Roman populations. The merger of Roman and Germanic influences eventually gave birth to the nation and culture of France. Clovis is remembered as France's historical founder and first king.

In the ninth century, the Germanic peoples from modern-day Germany came under the control of the Holy Roman Empire, a collection of territories ruled by the Frankish king Charlemagne. The empire was eventually divided with the medieval Kingdom of Germany emerging as the strongest force in the region. By the eleventh century, several of the Germanic peoples of the area adopted the collective name diutisc, meaning deutsch, or "of the people" in modern German. The last remnants of the Holy Roman Empire dissolved in the nineteenth century; by 1871, the region's states consolidated into what would become modern Germany.

The Germanic tribes that remained in the regions of Norway and Sweden were mostly isolated from the upheaval of post-Roman Europe. This allowed them to achieve a period of relative stability and develop prosperous trading cultures. It was the descendants of these northern Germanic tribes that evolved into the feared Norse raiders known as the Vikings of the eighth to eleventh centuries. The Norse territories eventually became the modern nations of Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

In the fifth century, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, Germanic tribes from the region of northern Germany and Denmark, invaded Britain and captured much of the southern part of the island. By the sixth century, they had established several kingdoms and became known as the Anglo-Saxons. By the eighth century, many of the Anglo-Saxon territories had unified and their new kingdom was called England, a name meaning "land of the Angles" in Old English. In the ninth and tenth centuries, Norse Vikings invaded and eventually settled in parts of England, adding another Germanic influence to the island.

Modern Influences

The various dialects spoken by the Germanic tribes evolved into their own diverse family of languages. The Eastern Germanic dialects spoken by tribes such as the Goths and Vandals went extinct. Northern Germanic dialects became Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Icelandic. English, German, and Dutch grew from Western Germanic languages. English began as an Anglo-Saxon dialect but was later influenced by Latin, French, and Old Norse.

The laws in many European nations borrowed elements from Germanic legal customs the Romans called leges barbarorum, or "the law of the barbarians." Germanic law was not uniform and varied according to the customs of local tribes. Some common features included a system of oaths and restitution that varied by the type of crime committed. These customs were refined by later cultures into an early court system that contributed to the formation of governments. The English word law developed from the Norse word lag, meaning "something laid down" or "that which is fixed."

Most of the Germanic tribes converted to Christianity by the sixth century; the Norse people followed suit by the eleventh century. However, pagan Germanic influences remained common in several cultures. The Norse god Odin developed from a Germanic deity named Wodan or Wotan. The English word Wednesday is named in honor of the Germanic god as "Wodan's Day." The Germanic fertility goddess known as Friia, Frea, or Frigg was considered the wife of Wodan and the inspiration for the word Friday, "Frigg's Day."

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