Curated playlist
Early Germanic peoples
- FranksThe Franks began as a name, not a people. In the third century AD, a cluster of Germanic tribes living near the lower Rhine acquired a new collective label, Franci, and with it a shared identity that would reshape the map of western…
- SuebiThe Suebi were a large grouping of Germanic peoples whose name Julius Caesar first set down in writing in the 1st century BC. Caesar called them the largest and most warlike nation of all the Germanic peoples. They were, he wrote,…
- VisigothsThe Visigoths crossed the Danube into the Roman Empire in 376, refugees fleeing the Huns, and within two years they had killed a Roman emperor at the Battle of Adrianople. Within three decades they had sacked the city of Rome itself. And…
- GothsThe Goths were a Germanic people, and in 410 their forces walked into the city of Rome and sacked it. The riches were plundered, yet the civilian inhabitants were treated humanely and only a few buildings burned. Their leader, Alaric I,…
- Angles (tribe)The Angles gave their name to England itself. That single fact opens a chain of questions stretching back almost two thousand years: who were these people, where did they come from, and how did a tribal group from a narrow Baltic peninsula…
- VandalsThe Vandals gave the world a word. When the French bishop Henri Gregoire coined the term "vandalisme" in 1794 to describe the destruction of art during the French Revolution, he was reaching back to a people who had sacked Rome more than…
- JutesThe Jutes were one of the Germanic tribes who crossed the North Sea and settled in Great Britain after Roman rule collapsed. According to the scholar Bede, writing centuries after the events, they ranked among the three most powerful…
- SaxonsThe Saxons gave their name to England, to Scotland's lowlanders, to the Finnish word for scissors, and to the whole country of Germany as far as Finnish and Estonian speakers are concerned. Yet the people behind that name were never, for…
- LombardsThe Lombards got their name, by one account, from a woman's clever trick at dawn. In a war against the Vandals, the Winnili were outnumbered, so the goddess Frea advised that all their women tie their hair in front of their faces like…
- North Germanic peoplesNorth Germanic peoples left their names across the map of Europe in ways that still endure today. Normandy in France takes its name from "Northman." Dublin's old Oxmanstown district preserves the memory of their eastern settlements. Russia…
- CimbriThe Cimbri gave Rome a phrase that outlasted them: terror cimbricus, the Cimbrian terror. Ancient Romans coined it to describe what this tribe from far northern Europe had made them feel. They fought the Roman Republic for little more than…
- HeruliThe Heruli sacked Athens. A seafaring war band from somewhere near the Sea of Azov arrived by fleet in 267 AD, slipped through the Bosphorus, and swept south through Greece, plundering Sparta, Corinth, Argos, and the sanctuary of Zeus at…
- GeatsThe Geats were a large North Germanic tribe who inhabited Götaland, meaning the land of the Geats, in what is now southern Sweden, from antiquity until the Late Middle Ages. Their name survives today in the Swedish provinces of…