The Germanic Tribes in Antiquity: The History and Legacy of the Ancient Peoples Who Spread across Europe

Despite all the accomplishments and widespread victories and conquests that the ancient Romans accrued over the centuries, one of their most critical failures was the inability to subjugate Germany. Indeed, historians have singled out this one failure as central to the ultimate downfall of Rome, as the constant wars against the Germanic tribes and the need to defend the frontier on the Rhine helped bring the Roman Empire to its knees.


There are elements of truth in such a conclusion, but the reality was far more fluid than is often realized. From the 1st century BCE until the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century CE, the relationships between the Romans and those living in what is now modern Germany were extremely complicated, involving much more than simple warfare. As a Roman territory, Germania at one point included significant areas of land east of the Rhine, all the way up to the Elbe. The Romans would maintain a significant force on this eastern side until the 3rd century CE, but eventually a Frankish invasion ended that presence, and the term Germania came to refer specifically to the territory west of the Rhine, which included the two provinces of Germania Superior and Germania Inferior, or Upper and Lower Germany. Those provinces were key to the defense of the empire, so much so that Triers provided the location of one of the four seats of government near the end of Rome’s reign.

The people that came to be known as Germans originally came from Scandinavia and were mainly shepherds and hunters, but they comprised a number of distinct groups. Within each group, there were separate tribes, and as their populations grew, the land they occupied in Scandinavia was unable to support them, so they began migrating south, settling outside the borders of the Roman Empire. The Germans were fierce warriors who employed rather crude but effective tactics in battle.