Suebi

• 1. Introduction

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  The 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, constantly engaged in war, animal husbandry, and hunting. They had little agriculture, no private ownership of land, and a rule against living in one place for more than one year. Each of their hundred districts could supply a thousand men for military campaigns sent out every year. They were powerful enough to force the peoples near them to keep a large, unoccupied swathe of land as a buffer around their territory.

  Yet the Suebi were not, in any simple sense, a single people. They were an umbrella , a name applied across centuries to dozens of tribes, from the forests east of the Elbe to the Atlantic coasts of Spain and Portugal, from the plains of Bohemia to the foothills of the Italian Alps. The Marcomanni, the Langobards who would one day rule Italy as the Lombards, the ancestors of the modern Germans, Austrians and Swiss , all of these trace some part of their origin to this sprawling, shape-shifting identity.

  How does a name come to mean so many different things? And how did people who began along the Elbe River end up founding kingdoms as far away as Galicia, in the northwest corner of the Iberian Peninsula? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. What the Name Meant

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  The spelling "Suebi" dominated classical writing, though variants such as Suevi, Suaevi and Suavi also appear throughout history. Around 300-600 AD, a sound shift in West Germanic changed the way the word was pronounced, producing spellings closer to the medieval "Swab" that survives in the name Swabia today.

  Linguists have spent considerable effort on what the name originally meant. Numerous 19th-century proposals are no longer accepted by scholars. The most widely accepted view today links the word to a reconstructed Germanic adjective meaning "one's own," the same root found in the name of the Suiones, the ancient Swedes. Taken together, the Suebi may have been "those who are of their own kind" , a term expressing shared kinship or communal belonging rather than a single tribal identity.

  The name of the Semnones, whom classical authors described as the most prestigious and original of the Suebian peoples, may share the same etymology. Linguists generally reconstruct it as derived from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "of one's own kind," with a suffix expressing belonging , making the Semnones, roughly, "those who belong to those of their own kind."

  One dissenting proposal, by the scholar Rübekeil, traces the Suebi name to a different Proto-Indo-European suffix built on the verb "to be," giving the meaning something like "self-being" or "belonging by nature of existence." A separate, minority view holds that the name was not Germanic in origin at all, but borrowed from a Celtic word for "vagabond."

  By the late Roman period, the historian Herwig Wolfram argued that classical ethnography had applied the name Suebi to so many Germanic tribes that it nearly replaced the term Germani that Caesar himself had made popular.

• 3. One Tribe or Many

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  In Caesar's first report, from events in 58 BC, the Suebi appear as a single tribe living in a specific place, between the Ubii and the Cherusci, somewhere between the Rhine and the Elbe. A generation later, they were described again as a single people who suffered a crushing defeat by Drusus the Elder in 9 BC.

  But by the early 1st century AD, authors such as Strabo, Pliny the Elder and Tacitus had begun to perceive the Suebi as a category of tribes rather than one tribe. Strabo, writing around 23 AD, called the Suebi not only the largest people of the region between Rhine and Elbe, but also an umbrella including the Semnones, the Hermunduri, the Langobardi and others. Pliny did not explicitly frame them as an umbrella, but grouped the Suebi, Hermunduri, Chatti and Cherusci together within an ancient Germanic racial category called the Irminones.

  Tacitus, writing around 100 AD, was direct: the Suebi "are not one single people," he wrote, and "they occupy a larger part of Germania" while remaining "divided into distinct nations and names." He noted that the Semnones, who lived on the Elbe in a hundred settlement districts called pagi, were regarded as the head and origin of the Suebian people. Their sacred grove was a gathering place where "all the people of the same name and blood come together" , meaning all Suebi, not just the Semnones.

  The 3rd-century writer Dio Cassius went further, claiming that many peoples had simply decided to call themselves Suebi over time. Modern scholars are skeptical of this. They suggest instead that Romans were initially unaware that tribes like the Marcomanni saw themselves as Suebian, and that the label was partly a Roman administrative convenience for naming northern tribes whose real names were unfamiliar. Roman sources used the term heavily when they knew little, then used it less as their knowledge improved, and returned to it again in the late 4th century when older tribal names like Quadi and Marcomanni began to fade from the record.

• 4. Archaeology and Language

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  Before Rome reached the Elbe, the forerunners of the Suebi are associated by archaeologists with the Jastorf culture, which existed in the pre-Roman Iron Age in what is now Eastern Germany and Schleswig-Holstein. During the Roman imperial period, scholars speak of the "Elbe Germanic peoples" , a term common in German-language scholarship , referring to populations who carried Jastorf-related material culture southward and westward toward the Roman frontiers on the Rhine and Danube.

  The 1st-century movement of Suebi into new regions is associated more specifically with a horizon influenced not only by the Jastorf culture but also by the Przeworsk culture from what is now Poland. This horizon first appeared in central parts of present-day western Germany, near the Main River, and then spread into what is now the Czech Republic and western Slovakia. Scholars link this spread directly to the settlements made by the Marcomanni king Maroboduus in the mountains and forests north of the Roman border.

  The Alemanni, who would later take the name Swabians, first appear in historical records in the 3rd century. Archaeological evidence shows a steady stream of materials arriving from Suebian areas, from both the Elbe and Danube regions. But their incoming population did not arrive as a cohesive tribe. The evidence instead points to wide-reaching communication and ongoing contacts stretching as far as Mecklenburg and Bohemia.

  On language, the Suebi are broadly agreed to have spoken Germanic languages within the West Germanic group. Modern languages that evolved at least partly from Suebian languages include standard German, Alemannic German (including Swabian, Alsatian and Swiss German), and Bavarian and Austrian German. The southern dialects associated with Suebian histories later experienced the High German consonant shift that defines modern High German languages. According to the linguist Volker Harm, the relative unity of West Germanic before that shift was itself a result of the population movements of the 4th and 5th centuries, which mixed large groups of peoples together.

• 5. Caesar, Drusus and Maroboduus

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  Julius Caesar, who lived from 100 BC to the 15th of March 44 BC, confronted the Suebi directly in 58 BC, when he faced a large army led by the king Ariovistus, whose first wife was Suebian. Ariovistus had already been settled for some years in Gaul, having arrived at the invitation of the Sequani tribe, who lived between the Saone and the Jura Mountains. Caesar defeated him and forced him back across the Rhine.

  When news of this defeat spread, a fresh Suebian force being led toward the Rhine by two brothers, Nasuas and Cimberius, turned back in panic. The Ubii, who lived near what is now Cologne, took the opportunity to attack them. In 55 BC Caesar bridged the Rhine and pressed into Suebian territory. The Suebi abandoned their nearest towns, retreated to the Silva Bacenis forest and assembled an army. After eighteen days Caesar crossed back and destroyed the bridge, declaring his objective achieved.

  After Caesar's conquest, the Suebi crossed the Rhine again shortly before 29 BC and were defeated by the Roman governor Gaius Carrinas. Captured Suebians subsequently fought as gladiators against captured Dacians in Rome. In 9 BC, Drusus the Elder defeated the Suebi again, this time so thoroughly that, as the writer Florus put it, "there was such peace in Germany that the inhabitants seemed changed." Suetonius recorded that the future emperor Tiberius settled forty thousand prisoners of war in Germania.

  After these major defeats, the Marcomanni and many Suebi came under the leadership of Maroboduus, a member of the Marcomanni royal family who had grown up in Rome. He led his people and others into the Hercynian forest in Bohemia, drilling his soldiers to almost Roman standards. Velleius Paterculus noted that Maroboduus was personally committed to avoiding conflict with Rome, yet the Romans grew concerned he could invade Italy. Races and individuals who had rebelled against Rome found in him a refuge. In 19 AD he was deposed by a prince named Catualda who had been living in exile among the Gutones in what is now northern Poland. Maroboduus was taken in by Rome and lived another eighteen years in Ravenna.

• 6. The Marcomannic Wars

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  The long series of conflicts known as the Marcomannic Wars, fought mainly under the emperor Marcus Aurelius (161-180 AD), permanently changed the relationship between Rome and the Suebian alliance north of the Danube.

  The trouble began with a raid across the Danube in the 150s or 160s AD by Suebian Langobardi together with an uncertain people called the Obii. A group of nations north of the Danube selected Ballomarius, king of the Marcomanni, and ten other national representatives to go on a peace mission to the Roman governor of Pannonia. The Romans were diplomatic during this period because they were occupied with a campaign against the Parthians in the Middle East and severely affected by the Antonine plague. But the peace could not hold. The Marcomanni and Quadi led a crossing of the Danube and attacked into Italy itself, destroying the town of Opitergium (present-day Oderzo) and putting Aquileia under siege.

  Marcus Aurelius established his Danubian headquarters at Carnuntum, between present-day Vienna and Bratislava, where he received embassies from peoples north of the Danube. Some were offered land within the empire; others were recruited as soldiers. By 171 AD the Quadi agreed to leave their coalition, returned deserters and thirteen thousand prisoners of war, and promised not to allow Marcomanni or Iazyges to pass through their territory. By 173 they had rebelled again.

  A decisive battle against these enemies was fought at Laugaricio, present-day Trencin in Slovakia, in 179 AD under the legate and procurator Marcus Valerius Maximianus. By 180 AD, both the Quadi and Marcomanni were under occupation, with Roman garrisons of twenty thousand men each permanently stationed in their territories. The Romans even blocked mountain passes to prevent the Quadi from migrating north to join the Semnones on the Elbe, cutting a link between Suebian peoples that had apparently remained important for centuries. Marcus Aurelius was considering creating a new Roman province called Marcomannia when he died in 180. His son Commodus made peace instead, and the plan was abandoned.

• 7. Collapse, Migration, and the Kingdom of Hispania

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  After the Battle of Adrianople in 378, the entire Middle Danube region was upended by the large-scale arrival of Huns, Goths and Alans from further east. The historian Ammianus described the region of the Marcomanni and Quadi as among the first areas affected by "a savage horde of unknown peoples, driven from their abodes by sudden violence." Saint Jerome, writing after the death of the emperor Theodosius I in 395, listed the Quadi and Marcomanni alongside Goths, Sarmatians, Huns and Vandals among the peoples causing devastation across Roman provinces stretching from Constantinople to the Julian Alps.

  Around 406, large numbers of people from the Middle Danube moved far to the west, crossing the Rhine into Gaul. The last contemporary mention of the Quadi as an identifiable people comes from a letter by Jerome written in 409, which places them in Gaul, listed first among the peoples occupying Roman territory there.

  A large force of Suebi, probably including many Quadi, entered Roman Hispania by 409 AD, at the same time as groups of Vandals and Alans. Hispania was then under the control of the rebel Roman general Gerontius, and the newcomers became his military allies. The three groups divided Hispania into four kingdoms by agreement. After Gerontius was defeated, Roman authorities rejected the arrangement and the Visigoths worked against all four kingdoms. One by one the Vandal and Alan kingdoms fell. The Suebi alone held on, ruling from Gallaecia in the northwest corner of the Iberian Peninsula. Their kingdom lasted from 409 until 585, when it was absorbed by the Visigothic kingdom, though its legacy survives in local place-names of the region.

  Meanwhile, on the Middle Danube, a short-lived Suebian kingdom emerged after the death of Attila the Hun in 453, ruled by two kings named Hunimund and Alaric. After being defeated by the Ostrogoths, Hunimund and some of these Suebi appear to have moved west and joined the Alemanni, possibly explaining why the Alemanni later came to be called Swabians in the Middle Ages. The Langobards, who had long been counted among the Suebian peoples, filled the power vacuum left by the Ostrogoths on the Middle Danube from around 500, and in 568 they entered Italy and established the Kingdom of the Lombards there.