Settlement of independent Germanic tribes, ca. 1 AD.
Many historians hold that German history began in the year A.D. 9. That was when Arminius, a Germanic prince, vanquished three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest. Although Rome continued their efforts to conquer the tribes across the Rhine for decades, the frontier eventually stabilized along the Rhine and Danube rivers. At that time, Germanic culture extended from Scandinavia as far south as the Carpathians. Although it was heavily fortified, the frontier was never a barrier to trade or culture.
The Eastern Roman Empire survived the crisis and lasted for another thousand years, but the Germanic peoples carved out their own independent kingdoms in the West.
Of the various Germanics tribes that settled the lands of the Roman Empire, the Franks proved to be the most successful. The Merovingian kings and their Carolingian successors eventually brought much of what would later constitute Germany under Frankish control, but the ceaseless blows from Danes, Saracens (Muslims), and Magyars in the later 9th and 10th centuries weakened the kingdom’s cohesion. Because the Carolingians themselves were unable to provide effective defense for the empire, there arose in nearly all the German lands powerful lines of margraves, counts, and hereditary rulers; their intrigues and wars against each other were interrupted only briefly by the rise of strong emperors such as Frederick Barbarossa (1155-1190). The subsequent history of Germany is, despite the role of the central rule of the Holy Roman Empire, one of the rise and fall of feuding principalities. It would be a thousand years before Germany was again unified under a single ruler.
Arminius
Arminius (16 BC through 21 AD), was a war chief of the Germanic tribes trained as a Roman military commander. He attained Roman citizenship before returning to Germany to drive the Romans out.
In about 4 AD, Arminius assumed command of a Germanic detachment of Roman auxiliary forces. He returned to northern Germany in about 7 AD, where the Roman Empire had established control of the territories west of the Rhine and now sought to extend its hegemony eastward towards the Elbe river, under the military governor Publius Quinctilius Varus. Arminius soon began planning to unite German tribes and defy Roman efforts to incorporate their territories into the empire.
In the fall of 9 AD, in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, twenty-five year old Arminius and his alliance of German tribes ambushed and annihilated Varus’ Roman army of 25-30,000 men. When defeat was certain, Varus committed suicide by falling upon his sword, and the Romans never again attempted permanent conquest of any territory on the right bank of the Rhine, which formed a limes of the Empire for centuries.
After his great victory, Arminius tried for several years to bring about a more permanent union of the north German tribes, but did not succeed in the face of tribal jealousies. He also met the Romans in other battles, as they sought revenge for Teutoburg Forest.
In AD 13, Germanicus invaded the same area with 80,000 troops, found and buried the dead of Varus’ legions, and raided much of the surrounding area. Arminius successfully resisted in a series of skirmishes and battles and came close once more to annihilating an entire Roman army under Caecina; only the indiscipline of his uncle Inguiomer, who attacked the Roman camp too early, saved Caecina from suffering Varus’ fate. Caecina abandoned his camp and supplies and fled with his remaining troops, while Inguiomer’s warriors plundered the camp.
In 15 AD, Germanicus again raided German settlements and captured Arminius’ wife Thusnelda who was delivered to the Romans by her own father Segestes as an act of revenge on Arminius. Promised by Segestes to someone else, Thusnelda had eloped with Arminius and married him after the victory of Teutoburg Forest. Segestes and his clan were Roman clients and opposed the policy of Arminius. Thusnelda was taken to Rome and displayed in Germanicus’ victory parade in Rome in 18; she never saw her homeland again. The son she bore Arminius while in captivity, Thumelicus, was trained by the Romans as a gladiator in Ravenna and died in the arena before reaching the age of thirty.
The last major battle between Germanicus and Arminius, the Battle of the Weser River, took place in 16 AD at Idistaviso near the Weser river, where the Romans avoided another defeat only because, again, Inguiomer failed to heed the agreed battle plan. Both sides suffered heavy losses, and this marked the end of Roman attempts to subdue the Germanic tribes.
