Curated category
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…
- SuebiThe Suebi were a large grouping of Germanic peoples whose name Julius Caesar first set down in writing in the 1st century BC.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- JutesThe Jutes were one of the Germanic tribes who crossed the North Sea and settled in Great Britain after Roman rule collapsed.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- CimbriAncient authors described the Cimbri as a Celtic-Gaulish, Germanic, or even Cimmerian people. Several sources indicate they lived in Jutland, which classical…
- 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…
- 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…