Cherusci

The Cherusci lived between the Weser and the Elbe and destroyed the Roman conquest of Germany in three days. They had been inside the Roman system for two decades: their nobility sent sons to serve in the auxiliary forces, and one of them, Arminius, held Roman citizenship and equestrian rank and served as an officer of Cheruscan cavalry. In AD 9 he led Publius Quinctilius Varus and three legions - the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth, with auxiliaries and camp followers, perhaps twenty thousand people - off the line of march on a false report of a rising, into wooded and boggy country near modern Kalkriese, where a fortified earth wall had been prepared. The column was strung out over miles and could not form; it was destroyed over three or four days of running ambush in rain. Varus killed himself. Augustus, according to Suetonius, beat his head against a door and called for Varus to give him back his legions, and the three numbers were never used again. Germanicus campaigned east of the Rhine for three years afterwards, recovered two of the lost eagles and buried the bones, and was recalled: the frontier stayed on the river permanently. Arminius then fell out with his own aristocracy over the suspicion that he wanted kingship, and was murdered by his relatives around AD 21, at thirty-seven. The Cherusci declined into obscurity within a century, weakened by the civil wars that followed and absorbed by stronger neighbours, chiefly the Chatti and later the Saxons. Two of the three lost eagles were recovered; the third was not. Kalkriese was identified by a British officer collecting coins in the 1980s. The site yielded a cavalry face mask that has become the emblem of the battle.

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