Gaul

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Gaul was a place that Rome first described clearly, a vast territory stretching across what is now France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, and northern Italy. It covered 494,000 square kilometers, a land of river valleys, hill forts, and sacred groves. And in 387 BC, warriors from this territory marched into Rome itself and sacked the city. That was the only time in 800 years that Rome fell to a foreign enemy. What kind of people pulled that off, and how did Rome eventually turn the tables? What happened to the Gauls, their language, their gods, their druids, when the legions finally won? And what does it mean that modern French, and the very name of France, still carry traces of the world the Gauls built?

• 2. Before Rome Arrived

  ›

  Before 500 BC, the territory of Gaul already had deep cultural roots. Eastern and southern France participated in the Late Bronze Age Urnfield culture, which ran roughly from the 12th to the 8th centuries BC, and from that soil grew the early iron-working Hallstatt culture of the 7th and 6th centuries BC. Out of the Hallstatt background arose the La Tene culture, named by archaeologists for the material goods its people left behind. Scholars believe it probably represented an early form of Continental Celtic culture, shaped in part by contact with Greek, Phoenician, and Etruscan civilizations from the Mediterranean. By the late 5th century BC, La Tene influence had spread rapidly across the entire territory of Gaul. A major archaeogenetics study traced a migration into southern Britain during the 500-year period from 1300 to 800 BC, with the newcomers genetically most closely related to ancient individuals from Gaul. The authors described this link as a plausible vector for the spread of early Celtic languages into Britain. By the 4th and early 3rd century BC, Gallic tribal confederations had expanded well beyond what would later become Roman Gaul, pushing into Pannonia, Illyria, northern Italy, Transylvania, and even Asia Minor. The primary written source for the early Celts of Gaul is Poseidonios of Apamea, whose accounts were later quoted by writers including Julius Caesar, the Sicilian Greek Diodorus Siculus, and the Greek geographer Strabo.

• 3. Names and Words

  ›

  The word Gaul itself contains a hidden history. The Greek and Latin names Galatia and Gallia both trace back to a Celtic ethnic term, Gal(a)-to-, and modern researchers connect it to the Welsh gallu, meaning capacity or power, suggesting the name originally meant something close to "powerful people." The English word Gaul, however, took a completely different path. It comes from the French Gaule, which derives from the Old Frankish term for "Land of the Foreigners," with the root Walho meaning foreigner or Romanized person. That same root also produced the names Wales, Cornwall, Wallonia, and Wallachia. The Latin name Gallia and the English word Gaul are not related, despite looking similar on the page. Caesar noted in The Gallic Wars that the Galli of Gallia Celtica referred to themselves as Celtae in their own language. The word Gael is similarly unrelated, though the Irish gall did originally mean an inhabitant of Gaul before its meaning widened to cover Vikings and later Normans. The 12th-century book Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib uses the pair gael and gall together for contrast. Gallia remains the name of France in modern Greek and modern Latin to this day, a linguistic thread running directly from Caesar's campaigns to the present.

• 4. The Gallic Wars

  ›

  By the 2nd century BC, Mediterranean Gaul had an extensive urban fabric and real prosperity. Archaeologists know cities in northern Gaul including the Biturigian capital of Avaricum, present-day Bourges; Cenabum, now Orleans; Autricum, now Chartres; and the excavated site of Bibracte near Autun in Saone-et-Loire. Rome had already intervened in Gaul in 154 BC and again in 125 BC, and by 121 BC controlled an area called Provincia, later named Gallia Narbonensis. Julius Caesar entered Gaul in 58 BC, ostensibly to help Rome's Gaulish allies against the migrating Helvetii. He found a land that was militarily strong but politically fractured; tribal divisions meant that no unified front could hold against him for long. Caesar was checked at the siege of Gergovia, a fortified town in the center of Gaul, when Vercingetorix led a resistance that temporarily broke Caesar's alliances, including that of the Aedui, until then Caesar's most faithful supporters. Yet the ever-loyal Remi and Lingones sent troops to Caesar's side, and the Germanic Ubii contributed cavalry that Caesar outfitted with Remi horses. The end came in September 52 BC at the Battle of Alesia, where Caesar captured Vercingetorix. The human cost of the Gallic Wars is staggering by any measure: as many as one million people died, probably one in twelve of the entire Gaulish population. Another million were enslaved, 300 clans subjugated, and 800 cities destroyed. The entire population of Avaricum, some 40,000 people, was slaughtered. Among the Helvetii alone, a population of 263,000 was reduced to 100,000, most of whom Caesar took as slaves.

• 5. Three Parts, One People

  ›

  Caesar opened The Gallic Wars with one of the most famous sentences in Latin literature: "All Gaul is divided into three parts." The Belgae lived in the north, between the Rhine and the Seine; the Celtae, who called themselves Celtae in their own language, occupied the center and Armorica; and the Aquitani held the southwest. Caesar described the Belgae as the bravest of all the Gauls, because they were furthest from the civilization of the Roman Province and least affected by merchants who, in Caesar's estimation, softened the mind. The fundamental political unit in this world was the tribe, or civitas, which was itself made up of smaller groups Caesar called pagi. The French word pays, meaning region or country, descends directly from that Latin term. Each tribe had a council of elders; initially a king ruled, but later the executive became an annually-elected magistrate. Among the Aedui, this official held the title of Vergobret, a position comparable to a king but constrained by the council's rules. The Romans took over these existing administrative groupings and in time they became the basis for France's division into ecclesiastical bishoprics and dioceses, a system that remained largely intact until the French Revolution.

• 6. The Druids

  ›

  Perhaps no aspect of Gaulish society has attracted more speculation than the druids. They presided over sacrifices, human and animal, performed in wooded groves or rough temples, and they maintained the annual agricultural calendar and organized the seasonal festivals tied to the lunar-solar cycle. Caesar recorded in The Gallic Wars that Celts who wanted to make a deep study of druidism traveled to Britain for the purpose. A little over a century later, Gnaeus Julius Agricola described Roman armies attacking a large druid sanctuary in Anglesey in Wales. The druids claimed the power to determine questions of war and peace, giving them what the sources describe as an international status that crossed tribal boundaries. They also educated the aristocracy and exercised a form of excommunication: to be expelled from the assembly of worshippers in ancient Gaul was to be separated from secular society as well. One of the most striking facts about druidic practice is that they refused to commit Celtic oral literature or traditional wisdom to writing. Scholars point to this deliberate secrecy as a major reason the Celtic language almost completely disappeared from the territorial lands of ancient Gaul, surviving only in Brittany.

• 7. After Rome: Language and Legacy

  ›

  Rome absorbed Gaul as a set of provinces called Gallia, and its inhabitants gradually took on aspects of Roman culture, producing the distinctive Gallo-Roman civilization. In 212 AD the Constitutio Antoniniana extended citizenship to all inhabitants. Celtic deities were not erased but reshaped under interpretatio romana; Cobannus and Epona were among those subjected to this process of Roman reinterpretation. The Gaulish language is thought to have survived into the 6th century in France. The last plausibly credible record of spoken Gaulish describes Christians destroying a pagan shrine in Auvergne that was called Vasso Galatae in the Gallic tongue. Coexisting with Latin for centuries, Gaulish shaped the Vulgar Latin dialects that eventually became French. Evidence survives in graffiti, where sound changes matched earlier shifts in indigenous languages, especially Gaulish. The Vulgar Latin of northern Gaul evolved into the langues d'oil and Franco-Provencal; in the south it produced Occitan and Catalan. From 260 to 273, Gaul, Britain, and Hispania briefly broke away from Rome as the Gallic Empire. Then Frankish victories in the Franco-Roman War of 486 and the Franco-Gothic War of 507 brought Gaul under the rule of the Merovingians, the first kings of France. Gallo-Roman culture lingered longest in Gallia Narbonensis and Gallia Cisalpina, while the north developed into Merovingian culture. The Gallo-Roman world survived in urban meeting points like Tours, where two cultures found ways to share the same streets.