Germania

Germania was the Roman name for the land east of the Rhine and north of the Danube, occupied from around 600 BC by peoples the Romans classed together and who did not class themselves together at all - Cherusci, Chatti, Marcomanni, Suebi, Goths and dozens more, without a common state, capital or ruler. That absence is why it was never conquered. Caesar crossed the Rhine twice and came back; Augustus committed legions to annexing the territory to the Elbe and had a provincial administration operating there for two decades. It ended in AD 9 in the Teutoburg Forest, where Arminius - a Cheruscan noble who had served in the Roman army and held citizenship - destroyed three legions under Varus in a running ambush through wooded defiles. Rome never seriously tried again. The frontier settled on the Rhine and Danube with a fortified limes between them, and the relationship became one of trade, subsidy, recruitment and raid, punctuated by wars like the Marcomannic invasions of the 160s. What changed the arrangement was pressure from further east: the Huns' arrival in the 370s pushed Goths and then everyone else across the river, first as refugees, then as federates, then as kingdoms established inside the empire. The western empire's end in 476 is conventionally the end of Germania as a Roman category, because by then the peoples it described were governing Italy, Gaul, Spain and Africa. Tacitus wrote the Germania in AD 98 as much to criticise Rome as to describe its neighbours, and the book's later use by German nationalists is entirely a modern imposition. The Varus disaster was located archaeologically at Kalkriese only in the 1980s. Roman coins and glass travelled far beyond the frontier, into Scandinavia.

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