Germanic–Roman contacts

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Germanic-Roman contacts stretch back to a moment in the late 2nd century BC when Germanic tribes swept into Gaul, Italy, and Hispania, forcing Rome into military confrontation with peoples it barely understood. The armies of the Roman Republic, commanded by the consul Gaius Marius, pushed those invaders back. Yet the encounter planted a question that would haunt centuries of Roman policy: what was the true nature of the people living beyond the Rhine and the Danube?

  Archaeologist Are Kolberg has argued that the relationship between Rome and the Germanic world can be understood through four distinct lenses: the military, the trade, the gift, and the plunder. Each lens offers a different answer to a persistent puzzle. Roman objects have been recovered as far north as Norway. Silver cups have turned up in Danish graves. Roman coins and scrap metal lie buried at trading sites in Denmark. How did all of this material travel so far, and what did it mean to the people who received it?

  The story that unfolds is not simply one of enemies facing each other across a frontier. It is a story of cultures that borrowed from, armed, and enriched each other across three centuries, even as they occasionally tried to destroy each other.

• 2. Defining the Frontier

  ›

  Julius Caesar invoked the fear of Germanic incursion as a justification for annexing Gaul to Rome, but it was the Cimbri and Teutoni whose earlier thrust into Roman Italy, beaten back in 101 BC, gave that fear its first sharp shape. Caesar and others wrote up those invasions as a warning of a persistent northern danger, one that Rome needed to manage rather than simply defeat.

  As Rome pushed its borders outward to the Rhine and Danube, it absorbed many societies into the Empire. The lands to the north and east came to be called Germania in Roman records. The period of Augustus saw the Roman military reach as far as the Elbe River, and Roman writers began sketching a working definition of "Germania magna": a territory bounded by the Rhine and Danube in the west and south, and stretching to the Vistula and the Baltic Sea in the east and north.

  The Roman goal along the Rhine was to protect Transalpine Gaul by controlling the corridor between the Rhine and the Elbe. That goal ended decisively in 9 AD, when a Germanic leader named Arminius, who had been treated as a Roman ally, led a revolt and destroyed three Roman legions in the surprise attack known as the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. The Roman commander Publius Quinctilius Varus died in that defeat, and the Roman frontier pulled back to the Rhine for good. By the end of the 1st century, Rome had formalized two provinces west of the Rhine: Germania Inferior and Germania Superior. The cities those provinces nurtured - Aachen, Cologne, Trier, Mainz, Worms, and Speyer - would later become important medieval centers.

• 3. Soldiers and Spoils

  ›

  Germanic warriors filled the ranks of Roman legions. It is probable, as the archaeological record suggests, that Germanic chieftains who served with Rome tried to absorb Roman culture and to align themselves with the Roman nobility. In return for military service, they received Roman objects, though Roman law explicitly prohibited the export of weapons to Germanic tribes.

  The excavation at Illerup Ådal in Denmark offers some of the most striking evidence of what happened on the ground. Enormous quantities of Roman and Roman-inspired arms and equipment were recovered there. Many pieces showed Scandinavian factory marks modeled on Roman stamps, meaning the Germanic peoples were not just receiving Roman goods but producing their own imitations of Roman military equipment. That capacity for standardized production implies a social organization capable of supporting large armies.

  Archaeologists Lars Jørgensen, Birger Storgaard, and Ulla Lund Hansen have proposed that Rome actively supplied and supported a Germanic power in what is now Denmark. Jørgensen has suggested this was either a strategy to destabilize Scandinavia or to cultivate a friendly power that could help keep the border zones stable. Storgaard has pointed to a text connected to an expedition led by Tiberius in 5 AD, which describes what some interpreters read as Jutland, though that reading is acknowledged to rest partly on myth. Jørgensen has also highlighted the Gudme-Lundeborg complex in Denmark, where Roman coins and scrap metal have been found at a site identified as a trading place.

• 4. Trade Routes and Amber

  ›

  Lynn F. Pitts wrote that Rome at all periods needed some kind of relationship with its neighbors, whether friendly or otherwise. Trade was central to that need. The Roman Empire depended heavily on the import of grain, particularly in its early phases, and the complex of exchanges that developed with Germanic societies served that dependence.

  Many of the Roman objects found in Scandinavia most likely arrived through trade networks that may have predated the Roman Empire itself. The chain appears to have run from the Mediterranean through Germanic chieftains and onward into Scandinavia. The sophistication implied by these networks points to an advanced social structure among the Germanic tribes, not the formless mass that Roman writers sometimes portrayed.

  The reach of those pre-Roman networks is confirmed by a single striking find: Scandinavian amber has been recovered at Mycenae in Greece, a discovery that places northern European material in the heart of the ancient Mediterranean world long before Roman legions marched north.

• 5. Diplomacy Through Objects

  ›

  Roman artefacts also moved through a gift economy. Diplomatic gifts served to build and reinforce alliances with Germanic peoples, and Pitts has written specifically about Roman relations with the Marcomanni and the Quadi, noting that diplomacy rather than military strength was often what kept the peace along Rome's frontier.

  The Marcomanni were not a minor force to be pacified cheaply. Pitts records that they maintained a standing army of seven thousand infantry and four thousand cavalry. Rome's interest in cultivating them as a counterweight to other Germanic neighbors was driven by genuine strategic necessity.

  As the Roman Empire stretched further and its military capacity thinned, it became increasingly common for Rome to pay tribute to Germanic armies that threatened invasion. What had begun as a gift exchange between unequal partners shifted into something closer to ransom, with Rome buying time and peace from the very peoples it had once tried to conquer.

• 6. Collapse and Continuity

  ›

  Two silver cups found in a grave at Hoby in Denmark are believed to be war spoils from the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD, placing a concrete object between the great military catastrophe of the Rhine frontier and the burial practices of Danish aristocrats generations later. As the Western Roman Empire collapsed, Germanic tribes reclaimed territories Rome had once held, and enormous quantities of Roman material dispersed through existing trade networks all the way to Scandinavia.

  Hilaire Belloc argued against the idea of a sudden barbarian conquest, writing that there was no single invasion but rather a continuation of processes that had been running for centuries: people from outside the Empire moving inward because the Empire offered the advantages of civilization. Norman Cantor developed that point by observing that the Germanic peoples did not seek to defeat and subjugate Rome. They sought to become part of it, fighting for land and money as settlers and allies rather than conquerors. Cantor noted that they permeated the Roman world across three centuries and transformed the fundamental character of Roman civilization.

  The Roman objects recovered in Norwegian soil, Danish graves, and Danish trading sites are the material trace of that long, layered process - not trophies of conquest, but evidence of a relationship that was stranger and more entangled than the simple story of empire falling to the barbarians.