THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 102

The First Documentary Evidence of the Germanic Tribes

7-04. The First Documentary Evidence of the Germanic Tribes

It was only later, in the time of the migrations of the Cimbri, and doubtless in connexion therewith, that the frontier formed by the Main was crossed. It was — to the best of our information — a portion of the Suebi, previously settled on the northern bank of this river, who were the first to push across it, and after driving out the Helveti, established themselves firmly to the south of the river, and were here known under the name of Marcomanni (Men of the Marches) — the name first meets us in Caesar, in the enumeration of the peoples led by Ariovistus. Their country, the Marca, extended south to the Danube. That the Tulingi (mentioned by Caesar as finetini of the Helveti) were of Germanic origin is put beyond doubt by their name, which is good German and forms a pendant to that of the Thuringi. But it will doubtless be near the truth to see in them not the whole nation of the Marcomanni, but only a tribe or local division of it, and doubtless its advance guard towards the south. In any case it is evident from Caesar's account that numbering as they did a round 36,000, of whom about 8,000 were warriors, they formed a united whole with a definite territory and were not merely a migratory body of Marcomanni gathered together ad hoc.

A remnant of the old Marcomanni of South Germany, who in the year B.C. 9 migrated to Bohemia, is doubtless to be found in the Suebi Nicretes whom we meet with in the time of the Empire on the lower Neckar. Further to the north, on the southern bank of the Main, near Mittenberg, we find the name of the Toutoni in an inscription which came to light in the year 1878. Hereupon certain scholars have arrived at the conviction that this locality was the original home of the Teutones whom we hear of in association with the Cimbri, and so that they were not of Germanic but of Keltic origin, being of Helvetic race and identified with the Helvetic local clan of the Toutoni of Strabo. This hypothesis must be absolutely rejected. There must have been, some connexion between those Toutoni and the Teutoni of history. But to conclude without more ado that the Teutoni were Helveti, South German Kelts, is to do direct violence to the whole body of ancient tradition, which consistently represents the Teutoni as a people whose original home was in the North. The simplest solution of the difficulty is that the Mittenberg Toutoni were a fragment which split off from the Teutonic peoples during their migration southward, and settled in this district, just as in northeastern Gaul a portion of the Cimbri and Teutones maintained itself as the tribe of the Aduatuci.

The whole process of the expulsion of the Kelts from South Germany must have been accomplished between B.C. 100 and 70, for Caesar knows of no Gauls on the right bank of the upper Rhine, and the Helveti had been living for a considerable time to the south of the head-waters of the river which, as Caesar tells us, divides Helvetic from German territory.

The first collision between the Teutons and the Graeco-Roman world took place far to the east of Gaul. It resulted from a great migration of the eastern Teutonic tribes in the neighbourhood of the Vistula, which had carried some of them as far as the shore of the Black Sea. The chief of these tribes was that of the Bastarnae. Settled, it would seem, before their exodus near the head-waters of the Vistula they appear, as early as the beginning of the second century B.C., near the estuary of the Danube. The whole region north of the Pruth, from the Black Sea to the northern slope of the Carpathians, was in their possession and remained so during all the time that they are known to history. Another Germanic tribe, doubtless dependent upon them, meets us in the same district, namely the Sciri from the lower Vistula. The well-known and much discussed "psephisma" of the town of Olbia in honour of Protogenes mentions them as allied with the Galatai, and there has been much debate as to what nation is to be understood by them, and they have sometimes been conjectured to be Illyrian Kelts (Scordisci), sometimes Thracian, sometimes the — also Keltic — Britolages, or the Teutonic Bastarnae, or even the Goths.

The majority of scholars has however decided that these "Galatians" are the Bastarnae, whose presence in the neighbourhood of Olbia in the year B.C. 182 is attested by Polybius. There is, indeed, much in favour of this hypothesis and nothing against it. The inscription then, which is proved by the character of the writing to be one of the oldest found in this locality, would have been written about the time of the arrival of the Bastarnae at the estuary of the Danube, that is to say, about B.C. 200 -180, and would therefore be the earliest documentary evidence for the entrance of the Germanic tribes on the field of general history.

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