From the Iron Age peoples of the Jastorf culture and the terror of the Cimbri through Caesar at the Rhine, the disaster of Varus in the Teutoburg, Tacitus's Germania, the great migrations of Goths, Vandals, and Franks, the conversion of Clovis, and the missions of Boniface, to the imperial coronation of Charlemagne in Rome. Slide across the centuries to read the major events that turned a frontier of free tribes into the Christian empire of the West.
Across the lowlands between the lower Elbe and the Jutland peninsula, a distinctive Iron Age culture emerges that archaeologists call Jastorf — usually identified as the cradle of the Germanic-speaking peoples.
From the Iron Age peoples of the Jastorf culture and the terror of the Cimbri through Caesar at the Rhine, the disaster of Varus in the Teutoburg, Tacitus's Germania, the great migrations of Goths, Vandals, and Franks, the conversion of Clovis, and the missions of Boniface, to the imperial coronation of Charlemagne in Rome. Slide across the centuries to read the major events that turned a frontier of free tribes into the Christian empire of the West.
Across the lowlands between the lower Elbe and the Jutland peninsula, a distinctive Iron Age culture emerges that archaeologists call Jastorf — usually identified as the cradle of the Germanic-speaking peoples.
Driven from their Jutland homelands by climate change and rising seas, the Cimbri, Teutones, and Ambrones cross the Alps and crush the Roman consul Cn. Papirius Carbo at Noreia — the first great clash between Rome and the Germanic peoples.
In the Vosges, Julius Caesar crushes the Suebian war-king Ariovistus, who had crossed the Rhine and seized lands in Alsace. The Rhine begins its long career as the frontier between Roman Gaul and free Germania.
Drusus the Elder, stepson of Augustus, launches the first systematic Roman conquest east of the Rhine, campaigning to the Weser and the Elbe. For a generation it appears that a province of Germania between Rhine and Elbe will join the empire.
In the forests of the Teutoburg, the Cheruscan prince Arminius — a Roman-trained auxiliary officer — ambushes the army of Publius Quinctilius Varus and annihilates three legions, XVII, XVIII, and XIX, with their eagles. Augustus, hearing the news, beats his head against a door, crying out 'Quinctili Vare, legiones redde!'
After three years of punitive campaigns east of the Rhine — recovering lost eagles, defeating Arminius at Idistaviso, and surviving devastating North Sea storms — Germanicus is recalled by his uncle Tiberius. Rome formally abandons the project of conquering Germania.
The senator Cornelius Tacitus publishes the De origine et situ Germanorum — a short ethnographic monograph on the tribes beyond the Rhine. It will become the single most influential ancient text on the Germanic peoples and the foundation of every later European theory about them.
A coalition of Marcomanni, Quadi, Iazyges, and other peoples crosses the middle Danube into Pannonia and Noricum, briefly besieging Aquileia. Marcus Aurelius spends most of the rest of his reign on the frontier fighting them, writing his Meditations between campaigns.
As Roman power totters under simultaneous civil wars, Persian invasion, and plague, new Germanic confederations — the Alemanni in the upper Rhine and the Franks on the lower — break through the limes. The Agri Decumates between the Rhine and Danube are permanently lost.
Outside Argentoratum (modern Strasbourg), the Caesar Julian — soon to be the last pagan emperor — destroys an army of seven Alemannic kings under Chnodomar. The Rhine frontier is briefly restored.
Pushed west by the Huns, perhaps two hundred thousand Tervingi Goths under Fritigern beg the emperor Valens for asylum and are admitted across the Danube into Thrace — the first time an entire foreign nation is settled inside Roman territory under arms.
On 9 August, in the Thracian heat, the emperor Valens attacks Fritigern's Gothic army without waiting for his nephew Gratian's reinforcements. The Gothic cavalry, returning from foraging, surrounds the Roman line. Two-thirds of the eastern field army is destroyed; the emperor himself disappears in the rout.
On the night of 31 December, an enormous host of Vandals, Suebi, and Iranian-speaking Alans cross the frozen Rhine near Mainz, sweeping into Gaul. The Roman frontier between Germania and the empire collapses for good.
On 24 August, after years of negotiation and two earlier blockades, Alaric's Visigoths enter Rome. For three days they plunder the eternal city — the first foreign army to do so in eight hundred years. Jerome, in Bethlehem, lays down his pen.
On the Catalaunian Plains in Champagne, the Roman general Aetius — at the head of a coalition of Visigoths, Franks, Burgundians, Alans, and the last Roman regulars — fights Attila the Hun to a bloody stalemate that ends the Hunnic invasion of Gaul.
A federate officer of mixed Scirian–Germanic descent named Odoacer overthrows the boy-emperor Romulus Augustulus, sends the western imperial regalia to Constantinople, and rules Italy as king under nominal eastern suzerainty.
At fifteen, Clovis succeeds his father Childeric as king of the Salian Franks around Tournai. Within thirty years he will conquer most of Gaul, eliminate his rival Frankish kings, and found the Merovingian dynasty that will rule the western Germanic heartland for two and a half centuries.
At Reims, after a desperate vow on the battlefield against the Alemanni, Clovis accepts baptism from bishop Remigius along with three thousand of his warriors. Alone among the Germanic kings, the Franks embrace Catholic rather than Arian Christianity.
Under their king Alboin, the Lombards — a Germanic people lately settled in Pannonia — pour across the Julian Alps into Italy, exhausted by Justinian's Gothic war. Within five years they take Pavia and reduce Byzantine rule to a coastal patchwork.
Pippin of Herstal, Mayor of the Palace of Austrasia, defeats the Neustrian forces at Tertry and brings all the Frankish lands under his effective control. The Merovingian kings dwindle into 'do-nothing kings' (rois fainéants); the future belongs to Pippin's family — the Carolingians.
Between Tours and Poitiers, Charles Martel — Pippin's son and Mayor of the Palace — defeats the Umayyad raiding army of Abd al-Rahman and kills its commander. The northward expansion of Islam in western Europe is checked.
In Frisia, the Anglo-Saxon missionary Boniface, who had felled Donar's Oak and re-organised the Church across Germania, is murdered by pagans at Dokkum. In the same year Pope Stephen II travels to St-Denis and anoints Pippin the Short as king, recognising the new Carolingian dynasty.
Charlemagne crosses the Eresburg and fells the Irminsul — the great wooden idol of the pagan Saxons — beginning thirty-three years of intermittent war to conquer and forcibly convert the last independent Germanic people east of the Rhine.
On Christmas Day, in St Peter's Basilica, Pope Leo III sets a crown upon the head of the kneeling Charles and the Roman people acclaim him Augustus. For the first time since 476 there is an emperor in the West — a Germanic king crowned by the bishop of Rome.