Do you want naked Germans humping your statues? Because this is how you get naked Germans humping your statues. Sack of Rome in 410 painting by Joseph-Noel Sylvestre (1890)

(10) GERMANIC & GOTHIC WARS

“Give me back my legions!”

The Roman-Germanic Wars – the longest wars fought by the Roman Republic, Roman Empire and eastern Roman Empire, both in space and time, the wars of the crisis and fall of the classical empire.

In space, they were fought along Rome’s northern frontier from the Rhine through the Alps to the Danube. I’ll see Turner’s Frontier thesis about the frontier defining American history and raise it with the Roman-German frontier defining world history.

In time, they exceeded even the seven centuries of Roman-Persian Wars, extending both before and after the latter if you count them extending through the Gothic Wars and Lombard Wars fought by the eastern empire.

And yes – I’ve effectively featured Roman-Germanic and Roman-Gothic wars in my special mentions for the Crisis of the Third Century as well as the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with the Goths playing the leading role in the latter. It’s not overstating it to attribute the fall of the Roman Empire to the Goths, even if as Youtuber Tominus Maximus quips, they’d didn’t mean to do it.

However, the Roman-Germanic wars date back before the empire to the republic, prior to the Republic’s wars with Persia, with the Cimbrian War in 113-101 BC – a war often overlooked for the more glamorous Punic Wars, despite a Roman defeat in the Battle of Arausio exceeding that at Cannae and the first threat to Italy or Rome itself since the Second Punic War.

The Republic saw more Roman-Germanic Wars with Caesar’s Gallic Wars – which despite being primarily directed at the conquest of Gaul also had campaigns against Germanic tribes such as the Suebi or across the Rhine, even if the latter weren’t much more than skirmishes compared to the subsequent wars.

When it comes to the classical empire, the Roman-Germanic Wars might be classified as falling into three phases.

The first phase was essentially when the Roman Empire held the initiative against the Germans – to the extent that there was the serious possibility of the empire incorporating Germania as a province or provinces, potentially pushing the imperial border from the Rhine to the Elbe or Weser. Famously that possibility was lost with Varus and his three legions in the Roman defeat at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest at the hands of Arminius, German turned renegade from his Roman citizenship.

Despite this defeat, the Roman Empire still (mostly) held the initiative against the Germans, although they used it more for pre-emptive or punitive expeditions, not least to avenge the defeat at Teutoburg Forest, rather than imperial expansion.

The second phase might be considered as one in which the initiative oscillated between the Romans and the Germans in clashes at and over the frontier. The Romans were mostly robust enough to retain both the initiative and frontier, but from the Marcomannic Wars in 161-180 AD onwards Germans and Goths were able to make substantial incursions within the empire – as in the Crisis of the Third Century or the invasions of the western empire fought by Julian or Valentinian.

The third phase is that of the decline and fall of the classical empire, when the Germans – particularly the Goths – increasingly held both the initiative and territory within the empire itself, from the Gothic War of 376-382 and the Roman defeat at the Battle of Adrianople in 378 onwards. Ultimately, the western empire and Rome itself fell to the Germans and Goths.

The fall of the classical or western empire wasn’t the end of Roman-Germanic and Roman-Gothic Wars, as the eastern empire continued fighting them – against the Vandals in north Africa, against the Visigoths in Spain, and above all against the Ostrogoths in the Gothic Wars of 535-554 in Italy.

The Byzantine-Gothic Wars were initially very successful against the odds under the leadership of Belisarius, but bogged down with an impressive revival by the Ostrogoths and ultimately ended with a Pyrrhic victory for the Romans – (re)conquering Italy from the Ostrogoths but then left desperately clinging on to increasingly small parts of it against a new Germanic invader, the Lombards.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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