Gallia

Gallia was the Roman name for the territory between the Rhine, the Alps, the Pyrenees and the Atlantic, occupied from around 600 BC by Celtic-speaking peoples organised as perhaps sixty tribal states rather than a single polity. That structure is the whole story of its conquest. Each people - Aedui, Arverni, Sequani, Helvetii, Belgae - had its own territory, aristocracy, coinage and clientage networks, and their politics consisted largely of shifting alliances against each other, with the druids providing the only pan-Gallic institution. They were not primitive: they built oppida, hill towns of thousands of people with planned streets and industrial quarters, worked iron better than the Mediterranean did, invented the barrel and mail armour, and traded wine, slaves and metals with the Greek colony at Massalia and with Rome. Rome had already annexed the southern coast as Gallia Narbonensis by 121 BC. The rest fell between 58 and 51 BC to Julius Caesar, who intervened at the invitation of one faction and stayed, exploiting the divisions systematically; his own account puts the dead and enslaved in the hundreds of thousands each. The last coordinated resistance, under Vercingetorix of the Arverni, ended at Alesia in 52 BC. What followed was not extermination but absorption: the aristocracy took Roman citizenship and Latin, the oppida became Roman towns, and within two centuries Gaul was among the wealthiest parts of the empire and the Gaulish language was dying. Caesar's Commentaries are both the principal source for pre-Roman Gaul and the account of the man who destroyed it. The Gaulish calendar recovered at Coligny shows an astronomical sophistication the Roman sources do not mention. Gaul's grain and manpower underwrote the western empire until the fifth century.

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