FREDERICK  ENGELS
A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY
OF  THE  GERMANS
CAESAR  AND  TACITUS
The Germans are by no means the first inhabitants of
the territory in which they now live.*  They were preceded
by at least three races.
The oldest human remains in Europe have been found
in a few strata of Southern England. It has not yet been
possible to ascertain their exact age, but they probably
fall between the two glacial periods of what is known as
the Ice Age.
After the second glacial period, when gradually the
climate grew warmer, man appears in the whole of Europe, North Africa and Southwest Asia including India together with the now extinct large pachyderms (mammoth,
straight-toothed elephant, woolly rhinoceros) and beasts
of prey (cave-lion, cave-bear) and also with still existing
animals (reindeer, horse, hyena, lion, bison, aurochs). A
very low cultural level is
to this period: extremely
indicated bythe tools belonging
crude stone knives, pear-shaped
stone hoes or axes, which were used without a handle.
scrapers to clean animal skins, awls, all made of flint,
indicating roughly the stage of development of present-
day Australian aborigines. The fragments of bones found
up to now do not enable us to draw conclusions about
the bodily structure of these men, whose wide distribution and cultural similarity everywhere suggest that this
era lasted for a very long time.
* In this section I am mainly following Boyd Dawkins, Early
Man in Britain, London, 1880. [Note by Engels.]

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  299
We do not know what became of these early palaeolithic men. In none of the countries where they existed,
including India, have any human races survived that can
be regarded as their present-day representatives.
The tools of these extinct men are usually found only
in the lowest strata of deposits in the caves of Britain,
France, Switzerland, Belgium and southern Germany.
Above this, the lowest, culture stratum-and often separated from it by a thinner or thicker layer of limestone-we
find another layer containing tools. These tools, which belong to a later period, are far more skilfully made and
their material too is more varied. Although the stone instruments are still not polished, their design and execution
are already more efficient. We find moreover arrow-heads
and spearheads of stone, reindeer antler or bone; daggers
and needles of bone orliorn, necklaces of pierced animal
teeth, etc. Some pieces are covered with very vivid drawings of animals, reindeer, mammoths, aurochs, seals,
whales, also hunting scenes with nude humans, and we
even find the beginnings of sculpture in horn.
While early palaeolithic men are accompanied by animals of predominantly southern origin, late palaeolithic
men appear on the scene together with animals of northern
origin-two still extant species of northern bear, the arctic
fox, the glutton and the snowy owl. These men probably
immigrated from the north-east together with the animals,
and the Eskimos seem to be the last remainder of those
men in the modern world. The tools of the two groups
correspond entirely with one another not only in detail
but also as regards their range, this applies to their drawings as well, and the food of the two groups is provided
by almost exactly the same animals. Their way of life, as
far as we have been able to establish it for the extinct
race, tallies exactly.
These Eskimos, whose existence has so far only been
proved north of the Pyrenees and Alps, have vanished
from Europe. Just as in the last century, the American

300  FREDERICK  ENGELS
Red Indians by waging a merciless internecine war forced
the Eskimos back to the extreme North, so the newly
emerging race seems to have gradually driven them back
and finally exterminated them in Europe too, without intermingling with them.
This new race came from the south, at least to Western
Europe, probably advancing from Africa into Europe at
a time when the two continents were still linked by landbridges both at Gibraltar and Sicily. These people had
reached a considerably higher cultural level than their
predecessors. They cultivated plants and had domestic
animals (dogs, horses, sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle). They
were familiar with hand pottery, spinning and weaving.
Their tools, though still of stone, were manufactured with
great care and for the most part well polished (they are called neolithic to distinguish them from the previous periods).
Their axes have handles and can thus for the first time be
used for woodcutting, and hence it becomes possible to hollow out tree trunks thus making boats that could be used
to cross over to the British Isles, which were now separated
from the mainland owing to the gradual sinking of the land.
In contrast to their predecessors, these people carefully
buried their dead. Thus a sufficient number of skeletons
and skulls has been preserved to enable us to determine
their bodily structure. Their long skulls, small stature (the
women average about 1.46 metres, the men 1.65 metres),
low forehead, aquiline nose, heavy brows, delicate cheekbones and moderate jaw-bones indicate a race whose last
modern representatives seem to be the Basques. The neolithic inhabitants not only of Spain, but also of France,
Britain and the whole region at least up to the Rhine very
probably belonged to the Iberian race. Before the arrival
of the Aryans90 Italy too was inhabited by a similar small,
black-haired race, it is difficult today to say how close its
kinship to the Basques was.
Virchow has traced the long skulls of the Basques far
into Northern Germany and Denmark, and the earliest

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  301
neolithic pile-dwellings on the northern slopes of the Alps
belong to them as well.
On the other hand Schaaffhausen declares that a number of skulls found near the Rhine definitely belong to
the Finnish, and in particular the Lappic type. And earliest history knows only the Finns as the northern neighbours of the Germans in Scandinavia and of the Lithuanians and Slavs in Russia. These two small, dark-haired
races, one coming from the other side of the Mediterranean, the other direct from Asia north of the Caspian Sea,
therefore seem to have met in Germany. The circumstances under which they met remain completely obscure.
After these different immigrations, finally-still in prehistoric times-followed the last large principal group of
peoples, the Aryans, whose languages are grouped around
Sanskrit, the most ancient of them. The earliest immigrants were the Greeks and Latins, who took possession
of the two south-eastern European peninsulas, and presumably also the Scythians, who have now vanished, and
who inhabited the steppes north of the Black Sea and
were probably mainly related to the Medo-Persian tribes.
Then followed the Celts. All we know about their migration is the fact that their route lay north of the Black Sea
and through Germany. Their foremost groups penetrated
into France, conquered the country up to the Garonne and
even subjugated parts of Western and Central Spain. The
ocean in one case, the resistance of the Iberians in the
other, brought them to a halt, while behind them other
Celtic tribes were still pressing forward from both sides
of the Danube. There, at the very brink of the ocean and
at the sources of the Danube, they are mentioned by Herodotus. But they must have arrived much earlier. Tombs
and other findings in France and Belgium prove that when
the Celts entered the country they had as yet no metal
tools, but in Britain they used bronze tools from their
very arrival. Hence between their conquest of Gaul and
their migration to Britain a certain amount of time must

302  FREDERICK  ENGELS
have passed during which the Celts, as a result of their
trade with Italy and Marseilles, became familiar with
bronze and began to use it.
Meanwhile, the Celtic tribes further back, who were
themselves pushed by the Germans, were pressing forward
with increasing force. Since the way forward was blocked
a back flow in a south-easterly direction ensued, similar
to the movement recurring later during the migrations of
the Germanic and Slav tribes. Celtic tribes crossed the
Alps, invaded Italy, Thrace and Greece, some of them
perished and some settled down in the Po valley and in
Asia Minor. At that time (-400 to -300*)  we find the bulk
of the Celts in Gaul up to the Garonne, in Britain and
Ireland and north of the Alps, on both sides of the Danube
up to the Main and the Riesengebirge, and perhaps even
further. For although Celtic names for mountains and rivers are less frequent and more open to doubt in Northern
Germany than in the south, it can hardly be assumed that
the Celts should have chosen only the more difficult route
through the mountainous south of Germany without at
the same time using the more convenient way through the
open plain of Northern Germany.
* For the sake of brevity, I am using the negative sign in the
manner of the mathematicians, to indicate dates before the present
chronology. [Note by Engels.]
The previous inhabitants were only partially ousted by
the Celtic immigration, and especially in the south and
west of Gaul they still constituted the majority of the population, though they were an oppressed race, and the
present-day population has inherited their bodily structure. The custom of yellowing their hair with soap, which
prevailed both among the Celtic and the Germanic tribes
in the territories they recently inhabited, shows that they
ruled the dark-haired population they had found there. Fair
hair was the sign of the ruling race and where as a result
of intermarriage it had been lost they had recourse to soap.

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  303
The Germans followed the Celts, and in this case we
can, at least approximately, establish the time of their immigration with some degree of credibility. It could hardly
have begun long before the year -400 and was not quite
completed in Caesar's time.
The first reliable information about the Germans is
given in Pytheas' account of his journey about the year
-325. He sailed from Marseilles to the Amber Coast and
mentions that Guttons and Teutons, undoubtedly German
tribes, were living there. But where was that Amber Coast?
One usually thinks only of East Prussia, and that the Guttons are said to have lived in the neighbourhood of that
coast does certainly fit. But the dimensions given by
Pytheas do not correspond to those of this area, whereas
they match fairly well those of the large North Sea bay
between the North German coast and the Cimbric Peninsula. The Teutons who are also said to have lived in the
neighbourhood would likewise fit in there. There is also
an Amber Coast on the west side of Schleswig and Jutland
and a considerable trade in locally found amber is being
carried on in Ringkjbbing even now. It seems moreover
highly improbable that at so early a date Pytheas should
have advanced so far into quite unknown waters, and
furthermore that the very complicated voyage from the
Kattegat to East Prussia should not only have been omitted from his very careful narrative, but that it would not
have fitted in at all. Accordingly one would definitely have
to support the opinion, first advanced by Lelewel, that
Pytheas' Amber Coast must be situated on the North Sea,
if it were not for his mentioning the Guttons, who can only
be found on the Baltic Sea. Mullenhoff has taken an important step towards the removal of this last difficulty;
he considers that the word Guttons is a distortion of Teutons.
Approximately in 180 B.C.,  the Bastarnae, undoubtedly
Germans, appear on the lower Danube, and a few years
later we meet them as mercenaries-the first lansquenets-

304  FREDERICK  ENGELS
in the army of Perseus, King of Macedon, fighting against
the Romans. They were wild warriors.
rd"men not suited to farming or to navigation, nor do they gain
their livelihood by cattle-breeding, on the contrary, they go in for
one kind of work and one art only-always to fight and to overcome whatever stands in their way”.
It is Plutarch who gives us this, the first report on the
way of life of a German tribe.91 We still find these Bastar-
nae north of the Danube, although in a more westerly region, several centuries later. The Cimbri and Teutons invaded the Celtic area of the Danube fifty years later; after
being repulsed by the Boii, a Celtic tribe who lived in
Bohemia, they marched in several groups towards Gaul,
entered Spain, defeating one Roman army after the other,
until finally Marius put an end to their migrations, which
had lasted for almost twenty years, by annihilating their
probably already decimated hosts-the Teutons in a battle
at Aix-en-Provence (-102) and the Cimbri near Vercelli
in Northern Italy (-101).
Caesar encountered two new Germanic armies in Gaul
half a century later. First that of Ariovistus on the Upper
Rhine, whose warriors comprised men from seven different
tribes including Marcomanni and Suevi, and soon afterwards on the Lower Rhine the host of the Usipetes and
Tencteri, who had left their former territory because they
were harassed by the Suevi and after three years of wanderings had reached the Rhine. Both arnji^s+were defeated by
the disciplined warfare of the Romans, but in the case of
the Usipetes and Tencteri this was also due to the Romans
committing a breach of contract. Dio Cassius speaks of an
invasion of Thrace by the Bastamae in the first years of
Augustus' rule; they were defeated by Marcus Crassus on
the Hebrus (now known as Maritsa). The same historian
also mentions a migration of the Hermunduri, who for
unknown reasons left their homeland at the beginning
of our era and are said to have been allowed by the Roman

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  305
general Domitius Ahenobarbus to settle "in a part of the
territory of the Marcomanni".92 These are the last migrations of that period. The consolidation of Roman power
on the Rhine and the Danube checked them for a considerable time, but very many signs indicate that the peoples in the north-east, beyond the Elbe and the Riesen-
gebirge, acquired permanent homesteads only much later.
These movements of Germanic tribes form the first act
of the Volkerwanderung which, arrested by Roman resistance for three hundred years, surged irrepressibly across
the two border rivers at the end of the third century, inundated Southern Europe and Northern Africa and ended
only with the conquest of Italy by the Langobardi in 568-
that is it ended only as far as the Germanic tribes were
concerned, but the Slavs who came behind them kept moving for a considerable time. It was literally a migration of
peoples. Whole tribes, or at any rate large sections of
them, set out including women and children and their
goods and chattels. Waggons covered with animal skins
served as homes and provided transport for the women
and children and their scanty household goods; the cattle
were driven along. The men were armed and prepared to
overcome all resistance and repulse surprise attacks; a
warlike march during the day, and a war camp behind the
barricade of waggons at night. These migrations must
have involved enormous losses of life caused by constant
fighting, hardship, hunger and disease. It was a life-and-
death venture. If il was successful the survivors settled on
alien land; if it failed the tribe which had set out disappeared from the face of the earth. Those who were not
killed in the carnage on the battlefield perished in slavery.
The Helvetii and their allies whose march was checked by
Caesar counted at the start J368,000 people, including
92,000 capable of bearing arms; after their defeat by the
Romans only 110,000 remained, and they were by way of
exception sent back to their country by Caesar for political reasons. The Usipetes and Tencteri comprising 180,000

306  FREDERICK  ENGELS
people crossed the Rhine, almost all of them were killed
either during the fight or when fleeing. It is not surprising
that entire tribes disappeared often without leaving a
trace, during this long period of migration.
The conditions Caesar found on the Rhine correspond
entirely to this unsettled way of life of the Germanic peoples. The Rhine was by no means a clear-cut boundary
between Gauls and Germans. The Belgian-Gallic Menapii
had villages and fields on the right bank of the Rhine in
the region of Wesel, the Germanic Batavi on the other
hand occupied the Meuse delta to the left of the Rhine,
and the Germanic Vangiones, Tribocci and Nemetes lived
in an area reaching roughly from Worms to Strasbourg-
whether only since Ariovistus' time or even earlier is uncertain. The Belgians waged perpetual wars against the
Germans, contested territory still existed everywhere. No
Germans lived as yet south of the Main and the Erz
Gebirge; only a short time had passed since the Suevi had
driven the Helvetii from the territory between the Main,
Rhine, Danube and the Bohemian Forest, and the Boii from
Bohemia (Boihemum), which is still named after them.
But the Suevi however had not occupied the land but
turned its 600 Roman (150 German) miles*  into a wilderness, which was to protect their southern flank. Further to
the east Caesar mentions Celts (Volcae Tectosages) north
of the Danube, where later Tacitus places the Germanic
Quadi. It was only in Augustus' time that Maroboduus
led his Suevian Marcomanni into Bohemia, while the Romans sealed off the area between the Rhine and the
Danube by fortifications and settled Gallic peoples there.
The territory beyond this boundary wall seems then to
have been occupied by Hermunduri. This undoubtedly
shows that the Germanic tribes entered Germany through
the plain north of the Carpathians and of the Bohemian
* The Roman mile equals 1.5 km. and the German one, 7.42 km.
-Ed.

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  307
mountain chain. Only after they had occupied the lowlands
in the north did they drive the Celts who lived further
south in the mountainous area, across the Danube.
The way of life of the Germanic people, as described
by Caesar, also proves that they had not yet become sedentary in their country. They lived primarily on the products of stock-breeding, cheese, milk and meat, and to a
smaller degree grain. The chief occupation of the men
was hunting and military exercises. They did also a little
tilling but only as a sideline and in an extremely primitive manner. Caesar reports that they cultivated their
field one year only and in the next year invariably
ploughed up new land.93 It seems to have been burnbeating, which is still practised in Northern Scandinavia
and Finland. The forest-and apart from forest there were
only swamps and peat bogs which at that time could not
be used for cultivation-was burnt down, the roots were to
some extent removed and also burnt together with the
scarified top soil, and the seed was sown in the soil which
had been fertilised by the ashes. But even if this was the
case Caesar's statement that new fields were used each
year is not to be taken literally and should be modified
by adding that in general it was their custom to resort to
new land after at least two or three harvests. The entire
passage, the un-German division of the land by princes
and officials and especially the motives he imputes to the
Germanic people for the rapid changing of land are permeated by Roman concepts. This changing of land was
quite inexplicable to the Romans. To the Germans in the
Rhineland, who were already in a state of transition to
permanent settlement, it may have seemed to be a custom
which they had inherited and which was gradually losing
its purpose and meaning. But on the other hand, for the
Germans from the interior, for the Suevi who were just
arriving at the Rhine, to whom it primarily applied, it
was still an essential element of their way of life which
enabled the whole tribe to move slowly ahead in the di20 ’

3  08 FREDERICK  ENGELS
rection and at the rate permitted by the resistance they
encountered. Their constitution too was geared to this life.
The Suevi were divided into a hundred districts, each of
which annually provided one thousand men for the army,
while the rest of the menfolk remained at home, looked
after the livestock and the fields and in the next year took
the place of those in the armed forces. The bulk of the
people including the women and children followed the
army only when it had conquered new territory. This is
already a step towards a sedentary life compared with the
campaigns at the time of the Cimbri.
A German custom, which Caesar mentions repeatedly,
was to protect themselves from their enemies, i.e. any
alien people, by wide stretches of impassable forests. This
custom still prevailed even in the late mediaeval period.
The Saxons on the northern Elbe were protected from the
Danes by a forest (old Danish Jamwidhr) running along
the border between Eider and Schlei, and from the Slavs
by the Sachsenwald which stretched from the Kiel Fjord
to the Elbe; and the Slavonic name Brandenburg, Brani-
bor, simply denotes such a protective forest (in Czech
braniti means to defend, and bor both pine and pine
forest).
Accordingly there can be no doubt about the stage of
civilisation reached by the Germans whom Caesar met.
They were certainly not nomads like the modem Asiatic
tribes of horsemen. This requires steppes and the Germans lived in primaeval forests. But they were just as
certainly not sedentary peasant people. Even sixty years
later Strabo writes about them:
"What all these" (Germanic) "tribes have in common is the
easiness with which they migrate because of their simple way of
life, for they do not till the land and do not accumulate wealth,
but live in huts which they can build in one day and they live
mainly on the products of their livestock as the nomads do, and
like the nomads they take their belongings with them in waggons
and together with their herds they move wherever they like."94

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  309
They had brought the knowledge of the cultivation of
the soil with them from Asia, as comparative philology
proves, and that they had not yet forgotten it is evident
from Caesar. But the semi-nomadic warrior tribes who
slowly rolled across the central European wooded plain
used cultivation as a makeshift and a subordinate source
of food.
It follows from this that in Caesar's time the immigration of the Germans into their new land situated between
the Danube, the Rhine and the North Sea was not yet
completed, or at any rate just about to be completed. This
is by no means contradicted by the circumstance that at
the time of Pytheas Teutons and perhaps also Cimbri may
have reached Jutland, and the front rank of the Germans
may have advanced to the Rhine-as one can infer from
the absence of any information about their arrival. Their
way of life which is compatible only with constant migration, their repeated westward and southward treks, and
finally the fact that Caesar found the Suevi, the largest
group known to him, still in full movement-, permit only
one conclusion: these were evidently the last moments of
the great German migration into their principal European
territory presented to us in a fragmentary form. It was the
Roman resistance on the Rhine and later on the Danube
that checked this migration, confining the Germans to the
territory they occupied at the time and thus forcing them
to settle permanently.
As for the rest our ancestors, as Caesar saw them, were
real barbarians. They permitted merchants to come into
their country only because they needed someone to buy
their booty from them, but they themselves bought hardly
anything from the merchants. And what foreign goods did
they need? They even preferred their bad ponies to the
beautiful and excellent Gallic horses. No wine at all was
permitted to enter the country of the Suevi, because it
was supposed to have an enfeebling effect. Their kinsmen, the Bastarnae were after all more civilised; during

Ill310  FREDERICK  ENGELS
their invasion of Thrace"' they sent envoys to Crassus,
who made them drunk, elicited the required information
about the positions and plans of the Bastarnae and then
lured the latter into an ambush and destroyed them. As
late as the eve of the battle of Idisiavisus (A.D. 16) Ger-
manicus told his soldiers that the Germans fought without
armour and helmet, equipped only with shields consisting
of wickerwork or weak boards and only the first rank had
real spears, those further back simply used sticks which
were pointed and hardened in fire. Metal working therefore was hardly known to the people living along the
Weser, and the Romans will have taken good care that
merchants did not bring weapons into Germany.
Over a century and a half after Caesar, Tacitus gives
us his famous description of the Germans. Many things
had changed by then. The restless tribes had settled down
permanently up to the Elbe and even beyond it. There
could of course be no mention of towns for a long time
to come. Some of them lived in villages, which sometimes
consisted of separate farmsteads, and sometimes of adjoining farmsteads, but even in the latter case each house was
built separately and surrounded by unoccupied land. The
houses, as yet without any rubble-work or tiles, were crudely constructed from undressed trunks (materia informi
must have this meaning here, in contrast to caementa and
tegulae); they were log huts, of the type still found in
Northern Scandinavia, but no longer huts that could be
built in one day, as in Strabo's time. We shall return later
to their agricultural system. The Germans already had
subterranean store-rooms, a sort of cellar, in which they
lived during the winter because it was warm there, and
where according to Pliny the women were engaged in
weaving. Tilling the land had thus become more important, but their principal wealth still consisted of livestock,
which were numerous but of inferior breed, the horses
See this book, p. 304.-Ed.

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  311
were ungainly and no racers, the sheep and cattle were
small and the latter had no horns. Meat, milk and crabapples are mentioned as food, but not bread. They no longer did much hunting, the game population must therefore have been considerably reduced since Caesar's time.
Their clothing too was still very primitive, the bulk of
the people wearing a coarse blanket, apart from that they
were naked (almost like the Zulu Kaffirs). But the wealthiest already wore closely fitting garments; animal skins
were also used; the women were dressed like the men
but linen garments without sleeves were already found
more frequently among them. All the children were running around naked. Reading and writing was unknown,
but a passage indicates that the priests were already using
runes, derived from Latin characters and carved in wooden rods. Gold and silver was of no particular interest to
the Germans in the interior, silver vessels presented by
Romans to German princes and envoys were used in the
same way as earthenware. The small amount of trade they
did was simple exchange.
The men still followed the custom-common to all primitive peoples-of considering work in house and field as
unfit for men and leaving it to women, old men, and children. They had on the other hand acquired two civilised
habits, drinking and gambling, and they carried on both
with all the immoderation peculiar to raw barbarians,
even going as far as gambling away their own freedom.
In the interior they drank beer made of barley or wheat;
if spirits had already been invented, the history of the
world would perhaps have taken a different course.
Still more advances were made near the frontiers of
the Roman territory, there they drank imported wine and
had to some extent already got used to money, preferring
of course silver, which was more convenient for their
limited exchange, and-as is usual among barbarians-
coins with long-familiar designs. How well-founded this
precaution was, will be seen later. Commerce with the

312  FREDERICK  ENGELS
Germans was carried on solely along the banks of the
Rhine, and only the Hermunduri who lived beyond the
palisaded ditch visited Gaul and Rhaetia for trading purposes.
Hence it is the period between Caesar and Tacitus that
contains the first great phase of German history: the final
transition from migratory life to permanent settlement, at
least as regards the major part of the people, from the
Rhine to far beyond the Elbe. The names of individual
tribes begin to be, to some extent, associated with certain
regions. But since the information given by the ancients
is contradictory and since the names vary and change it
is often impossible to assign a definite area to each tribe.
This would moreover take us too far from our subject.
The general statement which we find in Pliny will suffice
here:
"There are five principal groups of German peoples: the Vindili to whom the Burgundians, Varini, Carini and Guttons belong;
the lngaevon.es form the second group, which includes the Cimbri,
Teutons and Chauci. The Istaevones including the Sugambri live
close to the Rhine. The Hermiones comprising the Suevi, Hermunduri, Chatti and Cherusci, live in the centre of the country. The
fifth group consists of the Peucini and Bastarnae, whose neighbours
are the Dacians."95
In addition there is a sixth branch, the Hilleviones, who
live in Scandinavia.
Of all the information that has come down from the
ancients this agrees best with later data and with the
surviving linguistic remains.
The Vindili comprise the Gothic-speaking people, who
lived between the Elbe and Vistula from the Baltic coast
till far into the interior of the country, beyond the Vistula,
the Guttons (Goths) had settled near the Frische Haff. The
few remaining linguistic vestiges make it perfectly clear
that the Vandals (who must certainly have belonged to
Pliny's Vindili, for he gives their name to the entire
group) and Burgundians spoke Gothic dialects. Uncer
A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  313
tainty can only arise regarding the Wami, or Varini, who
are usually ranked among the Thuringians, on the basis
of reports from the fifth and sixth centuries; we know
nothing about their language.
The second group, the Ingaevones, first of all comprises
the Frisian-speaking people, the inhabitants of the North
Sea coast and the Cimbric Peninsula, and very probably
also the Saxon-speaking people living between the Elbe
and Weser, in which case the Cherusci should be included
as well.
The Istaevones, since the Sugambri are classed with
them, immediately stand out as the future Franks, the
inhabitants of the right bank of the Rhine from the Tau-
nus up to the sources of the Lahn, Sieg, Ruhr, Lippe and
Ems, bounded in the north by Frisians and Chauci.
The Hermiones, or Herminones as they are more aptly
called by Tacitus, are the future High Germans-the Her-
munduri (Thuringians), Suevi (Swabians and Marcomanni,
Bavarians), Chatti (Hessians), etc. It is quite indubitable
that the Cherusci were placed here by mistake. This is
the only definitely ascertained mistake which Pliny made
in the entire account.
The fifth group, the Peucini and Bastarnae, has disappeared. Jacob Grimm is undoubtedly correct when he
classes them among the Goths.
Finally the sixth group, the Hilleviones, comprises the
inhabitants of the Danish islands and the large Scandinavian peninsula.
Pliny's classification thus corresponds with surprising
accuracy to the disposition of the German tongues
actually existing later. We know of no dialect that does not
belong to the Gothic, Frisian-Low Saxon, Franconian, High
German or Scandinavian languages, and even today we
can accept this classification of Pliny as exemplary. The
arguments that can perhaps be advanced against it, I
shall examine in the note on the German tribes.*
* See this book, pp. 346-51.-Ed.

314  FREDERICK  ENGELS
We therefore have to assume that the original immigration of the Germans into their new country proceeded
approximately thus: first of all the Istaevones advanced in
the centre of the North German plain, between the mountains in the south and the Baltic and North Sea, close
behind them, but keeping closer to the coast, came the
Ingaevones. These seem to have been followed by the Hil-
leviones, who however turned towards the islands. The
Goths (the Vindili of Pliny) followed them, leaving behind
the Peucini and Bastarnae in the south-east; the Gothic
names in Sweden prove that some of their groups joined
the migrating Hilleviones. Finally to the south of the
Goths came the Herminones, and it was only during the
time of Caesar or even Augustus that the bulk of them at
any rate entered the territory where they remained up to
the Volketwanderung.
THE  FIRST  BATTLES  WITH  ROME
Romans and Germans confronted one another on the
Rhine since Caesar's time, and on the Danube since Augustus conquered Rhaetia, Noricum and Pannonia. Roman rule
had meanwhile been consolidated in Gaul. Agrippa had
covered the whole country with a network of military
roads, fortresses had been built, a new generation, bom
under the Roman yoke, had grown up. Gaul, which was
directly connected with Italy by the Alpine roads across
the Little and the Great St. Bernard built under Augustus,
could serve as a basis for the conquest of Germania from
the Rhine. Augustus entrusted this conquest, which was
to be accomplished with the eight legions that were stationed on the Rhine, to his stepson (or real son?) Drusus.
Constant friction among the borderers, German incursions into Gaul, and an alleged or real conspiracy of
dissatisfied Belgians with the Sugambri, who were to
cross the Rhine and bring about a general uprising,
served as a pretext. Drusus secured the assistance of the

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  315
Belgian chiefs, (-12), went across the Rhine above the
delta, close to the Batavian Island, devastated the territory
of the Usipetes and in part that of the Sugambri, sailed
down the Rhine, compelled the Frisians to provide him
with infantry reinforcements, and sailed with his fleet
along the coast and into the Ems estuary in order to
make war on the Chauci. But his Roman seamen, who
were not used to tides, let the fleet run aground when the
tide was out, and it was only with the help of his Frisian
allies, who were more familiar with these matters, that
he got it afloat again and sailed home.
This first campaign was merely a reconnaissance in force.
Next year (-11) he really began the conquest. He crossed
the Rhine, again below the influx of the Lippe, subdued
the Usipetes who lived there, bridged the Lippe and invaded the territory of the Sugambri, who were just
fighting against the Chatti because the latter refused to
join an alliance against the Romans led by the Sugambri.
He then built a fortified encampment Aliso at the confluence of the Lippe and the Eliso, and when winter approached he again withdrew across the Rhine. During
this withdrawal his army was attacked by the Germans in
a narrow ravine and could only with difficulty escape
annihilation. In the same year he set up another fortified
camp "in the land of the Chatti, close to the Rhine".96
This second campaign of Drusus already contains the
entire plan of conquest which was afterwards consistently
carried out. The territory to be conquered first of all was
fairly clearly demarcated, it was the part of the interior
inhabited by the Istaevones up to the border with the
Cherusci and Chatti, and the corresponding coastal strip
up to the Ems, and perhaps up to the Weser. The conquest
of the coastal region was for the main part left to the
fleet. Mainz, which was founded by Agrippa and extended
by Drusus, was to serve as the basis of operations in the
south; and it is in the neighbourhood of Mainz that we
have to look for the fortress which was built "in the land

316  FREDERICK  ENGELS
of the Chatti" (people now believe that it is Saalburg
near Homburg). From there the course of the lower Main
leads to the open terrain of the Wetterau and the upper
Lahn region, the occupation of which would separate the
Istaevones from the Chatti. The flat country through which
the Lippe flows and especially the low mountain ridge between the Lippe and the Ruhr in the centre of their offensive operations provided a most convenient line of advance
for the main forces of the Romans, and by taking possession of this area they divided the country they intended
to subjugate into two approximately equal parts and at
the same time separated the Bructeri from the Sugambri.
From this position they could on the left co-operate with
the fleet, and on the right together with the column coming
from the Wetterau, isolate the Istaevonian Slate Mountains, and keep the Cherusci in check in the centre. The
fortress Aliso was the outermost fortified position on this
front. It was situated near the sources of the Lippe, either
at Eisen near Paderborn, where the Alme flows into the
Lippe, or at Lippstadt, where a large Roman fortress has
recently been discovered.
In the next year (-10) the Chatti, realising the danger
that threatened them all, at last joined the Sugambri. But
Drusus overran their country and forced them at least
partially into submission. But this cannot have outlasted
the winter, for in the next spring (-9) he again descended upon them advancing as far as the land of the Suevi
(that is probably the Thuringians, or according to Floras
and Orosius the Marcomanni, who at that time still lived
north of the Erz Gebirge); then he attacked the Cherusci,
crossed the Weser and turned back only at the Elbe. He
devastated the entire territory through which he passed,
but encountered fierce resistance everywhere. He died-at
the age of thirty-on the way back, before reaching the
Rhine.
We add to the above account, which is taken from Dio
Cassius, that according to Suetonius, Drusus had a canal

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  317
dug from the Rhine to the Ijssel, through which he led
his fleet across Friesland and the Flevo (the Vlie streamnow the channel between Vlieland and Terschelling which
is an outlet of the Zuider Zee) to the North Sea; and that
according to Florus Drusus built over fifty fortresses
along the Rhine and a bridge near Bonn and that he also
fortified the line along the Maas, thus securing the position of the legions on the Rhine both against Gallic revolts
and against German invasions. Florus' tales about fortresses and fortifications along the Weser and Elbe are
mere boasting. Drusus may have thrown up some entrenchments during his marches there, but he was too good a
soldier to leave even one man behind to garrison them.
On the other hand it seems certain that he equipped his
line of operation along the Lippe with fortified posts. He
also fortified the passes across the Taunus.
Drusus' successor on the Rhine, Tiberius, crossed the
river in the following year (-8). The Germans, with the
exception of the Sugambri, sent peace negotiators; Augustus, who was in Gaul, refused to negotiate so long as
the Sugambri were not represented. When at last they
sent envoys, "numerous and respected men", says Dio, Augustus had them seized and interned in various cities in
the interior of the empire, "grief of this caused them to
take their own life".97 In the next year (-7) Tiberius
again went with his army into Germania, where apart
from a few small disturbances, there was very little for
him to combat. Describing this period, Velleius says,
"Tiberius has subjugated the country" (Germania) "so thoroughly that it hardly differs from a tax-paying province."98
This success was probably due not only to Roman
arms and the often extolled diplomatic "skill" of Tiberius, but especially to the transplantation of Germans to the
Roman bank of the Rhine. Already Agrippa had re-settled
the Ubii, who were always faithful to the Romans,
with their consent to the left bank of the Rhine near Co
318  FREDERICK  ENGELS
logne. Tiberius forced 40,000 Sugambri to emigrate and
thus broke the resistance of this powerful tribe for a considerable time.
Tiberius then withdrew from all public affairs for some
time, and for several years we hear nothing about events
in Germany. A fragment of Dio's mentions an expedition
of Domitius Ahenobarbus from the Danube to the Elbe
and beyond. But soon afterwards, around the first year of
our era, the Germans rose up in arms. According to
Velleius, Marcus Vinicius, the Roman supreme commander, fought on the whole successfully against them and
in recognition of his services he received several rewards.
However in order to restore the weakened Roman rule,
Tiberius had once more to cross the Rhine immediately
after his adoption by Augustus in the year 4. He subjugated the Canninefates and Chatti who lived near the river,
and then the Bructeri and "won over" the Cherusci. Velleius, who took part in this and the following campaign,
gives no further details. Because of the mild winter the
legions were able to operate till December, then they
moved into winter quarters in Germany itself-probably
near the sources of the Lippe.
The campaign in the next year (5) was designed to
complete the subjugation of Western Germany. While
Tiberius advanced from Aliso defeating the Langobardi
on the Lower Elbe, the fleet sailed along the coast and
"won over" the Chauci. On the Lower Elbe the land forces
met the fleet, which was sailing up the river. It seemed,
according to Velleius, that with the successes of this campaign the work of the Romans in the North had been
completed. In the following year Tiberius went to the
Danube, where the border was threatened by the Marcomanni, who led by Maroboduus had settled in Bohemia
a short time ago. Maroboduus, who had been brought up
in Rome and was familiar with Roman tactics, had organised an army of 70,000 foot-soldiers and 4,000 cavalrymen
according to the Roman model. He was faced in the front

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  319
by Tiberius along the Danube, while Sentius Saturninus
was to lead the legions from the Rhine through the country of the Chatti to the enemy's rear and flank. But at that
moment the Pannonians in Tiberius' own rear revolted,
and the army had to turn back to reconquer its basis of
operation. The struggles continued for three years, but
when the Pannonians were vanquished things in Northern
Germany had changed to such an extent that the Romans
could no longer think of conquering the land of the
Marcomanni.
Drusus' plan of conquest had been retained in its entirety, and the land and sea campaigns up to the Elbe
were simply required for its safe implementation. The
idea of moving the boundaries to the Little Carpathians,
the Riesengebirge and along the Elbe up to its estuary is
discernible in the plan of operation against Maroboduus,
but at the time it was still a distant prospect and soon it
became quite impracticable. We do not know how far
Roman fortified positions extended into the Wetterau at
that time, it seems that this line of operation was neglected compared with the more important one along the
Lippe, where evidently the Romans had firmly established
themselves on a fairly large area. The plain on the right
bank of the Rhine from Bonn downstream belonged to
them. The Westphalian lowlands from the Ruhr
northwards to the country beyond the Ems, up to the
border of the Frisians and Chauci remained occupied by
the army. The Batavi and Frisians in the rear were at that
time still reliable friends. The Chauci, Cherusci and Chatti further to the west could be regarded as sufficiently
subdued after their repeated defeats, and after the blow
which they as well as the Langobardi suffered. And in
any case there existed a fairly strong party among these
three tribes which sought salvation only in association
with Rome. For the time being the power of the Sugam-
bri in the south was broken. A part of their territory, i.e.,
between the Lippe and the Ruhr and also in the Rhine

320  FREDERICK  ENGELS
valley, was occupied, the rest was on three sides surrounded by Roman positions on the Rhine, on the Ruhr,
and in the Wetterau, and Roman columns must certainly
have often marched through it. Roman roads leading to
the sources of the Lippe, from Neuwied to the Sieg, from
Deutz and Neuss to the Wupper running along dominant
mountain ridges at least as far as the borders of Berg
and Mark have recently been discovered. Further away
the Hermunduri, who with the assent of Domitius Aheno-
barbus had occupied a part of the territory abandoned by
the Marcomanni, maintained peaceful relations with the
Romans. And finally in view of the well-known discord
among the German tribes, the Romans were justified in
expecting that they would only have to wage such separate wars as they themselves considered desirable in order
to turn their allies step by step into subjects of Rome.
The hub of the Roman position was the country on
both sides of the Lippe up to the Osning. It was here that
the constant presence of the legions in fortified encampments accustomed the barbarians to Roman rule and
Roman habits, thus, according to Dio, "apparently transforming" the barbarians.99 Around the permanent military
camps developed the towns and markets which the same
historian mentions, and the peaceful relations obtaining
within them contributed greatly to the consolidation of
the foreign rule. Everything seemed fine, but things were
to work out differently.
Quintilius Varus was appointed commander-in-chief of
the troops in Germany. He was a Roman typical of the
beginning decline, phlegmatic and easy-going, inclined
to rest on the laurels of his predecessors, and even more
to exploit these laurels for his own ends.
"Syria, which he had administered, proved that he certainly
did not despise money, he was poor when he arrived in this rich
country and was rich when he left it, a poor country" (Velleius).100
Otherwise he had "a gentle nature", but this gentle

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  321
nature must have been greatly enraged by being transferred to a country where extortion was made so difiicult,
because there was hardly anything there worth taking.
Varus nevertheless made the attempt, using a method
customarily applied by Roman proconsuls and propraetors. The essential thing was as quickly as possible to
organise the occupied part of Germany as a Roman province, to substitute Roman control for the local public
authority which up to then continued to exist under military rule, and thus to turn the country into a source of
income-for the public treasury as well as for the proconsul. Accordingly Varus tried "to transform the Germans
with great speed and vigour", he "ordered them about as
if they were slaves and demanded payments from them
as if they were his subjects" (Dio).101 The well-tried means
of subjugation and extortion which he used there was the
supreme judicial power of the Roman provincial governor
which he arrogated to himself and by virtue of which he
intended to impose Roman law on the Germans.
Varus and his civilising mission were unfortunately
almost one and a half millennium ahead of history, for it
took approximately that time to prepare Germany for
the "acceptance of Roman law". Roman law with its classical dissection of private property relations must indeed
have seemed quite preposterous to the Germans, who
possessed the scanty private property their society produced only by virtue of their common property in land. The
Germans, who were used to administer justice and pronounce sentence themselves according to established tradition in an open people's court in the course of a few
hours, were bound to regard the solemn forms and challenges, and the constant adjournments of Roman litigation merely as means for denying justice, and the multitude of legal advisers and pettifoggers surrounding the
Proconsul as downright cut-throats, which they indeed
Were. And the Germans were now supposed to give up
their free Thing, where a compatriot was judged by his
21 — 773

322  FREDERICK  ENGELS
compatriots, and to submit to the decision of a single
man, who conducted the proceedings in a foreign language, who at best based his judgment on laws that were
quite unfamiliar to them and moreover completely inapplicable, and who was himself an interested party. The
free German, whom according to Tacitus only the priest
had the right to strike on rare occasions, who could forfeit life and limb only by committing treason against his
people, but apart from that was able to expiate every
offence, even murder, by a fine (wergeld), and who in
addition was used to taking blood revenge for himself and
his relatives-he was now to submit to the rods and the
ax of the lictors. And all this merely to enable the Romans
to suck the country dry, by means of taxes for the benefit
of the public treasury, and by means of extortion and
bribery for the benefit of the proconsul and his henchmen.
But Varus had miscalculated. The Germans were no
Syrians. The Roman civilisation he had imposed on them
impressed them only in one way. It simply showed the
neighbouring tribes who had been compelled to join the
alliance how unbearable a yoke awaited them as well,
and thus forced the unity on them which they had previously failed to achieve.
Varus had three legions in Germany, Asprenas another
two on the Lower Rhine, only five or six days' march
from Aliso, the hub of the position. Only a sudden decisive stroke, which had however to be slowly and carefully
prepared, was likely to succeed against such a force. Conspiracy therefore was the prescribed method. Arminius
undertook to organise it.
Arminius, who belonged to the Cheruscan tribal nobility, was the son of Segimerus, apparently a tribal lord.
He spent his early youth in the Roman military service,
knew the language and customs of the Romans, and
was a frequent and welcome guest in the headquarters of
the Romans, whose loyalty was beyond all doubt. Varus'

• A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  323
trust in him was unshakeable even on the eve of the
attack. Velleius describes him as
"a young man of noble descent, valiant and quick-witted, more
so than most barbarians are, a young man whose face and eyes
were radiant with spiritual ardour, who had been our constant
companion during the previous campaigns" (that is against Germans) "and who in addition to Roman citizenship held the rank
of a Roman knight".
But Arminius was more than all this, he was a great
statesman and an outstanding general. Having decided to
put an end to Roman rule on the right bank of the Rhine,
he unhesitatingly employed all the requisite means. It
was necessary to win at least the majority of the Cheruscan military nobility, who were already largely under the
sway of Roman influence, and to involve the Chatti and
Chauci in the conspiracy, and especially the Bructeri and
Sugambri, who were directly subjected to the Roman
yoke. All this required time, however much Varus' extortions had prepared the ground, and Varus had to be lulled
into security during this time. They did this by playing
on his favourite pursuit, the holding of courts of law, and
fooled him completely. Velleius tells us.
"anyone who has not seen it himself will hardly believe that the
Germans, although extremely savage, are utterly cunning people
and born liars". The Germans "deluded him with a whole series
of fictitious legal actions, sometimes they accused one another
without cause, and sometimes they thanked him for deciding everything with Roman impartiality, and asserted that their savage
nature was already beginning to abate as a result of the new and
unaccustomed discipline and that matters which used to be settled
by recourse to arms were now resolved in accordance with law
and justice. Thus they lured him into extreme carelessness, to
such an extent that he imagined he was a city praetor dispensing
justice in the forum, and forgot he was commanding an army in
the interior of Germany."102
Thus the summer of the year 9 passed. To make success even more certain, they induced Varus to disperse
21»

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324  FREDERICK  ENGELS
his troops by detailing off detachments for various purposes, this should not have been difficult in view of the
character of the man and the circumstances.
As Dio says, "Varus did not keep his army properly together
as one ought to do in a hostile country, he lent groups of soldiers
to people who needed help and asked for it, either to guard a
fortified place, to hunt for robbers, or to accompany grain transports".103
In the meantime the main conspirators, and in particular Arminius and Segimerus, were constantly near him
and often dined with him. According to Dio, Varus was
already at that time warned, but his trust was quite unlimited. Finally in the autumn, when everything was ready
for the attack and Varus with the bulk of his troops had
been enticed into the land of the Cherusci as far as the
Weser, the signal, a sham uprising some distance away,
was given. Even when Varus received this news and gave
orders for the departure, he was warned by another Che-
ruscan chief, Segestes, who seemed to have had a sort of
clan feud with Arminius’ family. But Varus did not believe
him. Segestes thereupon suggested that Varus should
put Segestes himself, Arminius and the other Cheruscan
chiefs in irons before marching off, the result would
show who was right. But Varus’ confidence was unshakeable, even though when he departed the conspirators
stayed behind under the pretext of intending to rally allies
and to join him then.
They did this indeed, but not as Varus expected. The
Cheruscan warriors were already assembled. The first
thing they did was to kill the Roman detachments stationed
in their area, these detachments had been sent at their
own request. They then attacked the marching columns
of Varus in the flank. Varus moved along bad forest paths,
for there were as yet no paved Roman military roads in
the land of the Cherusci. When he was attacked he at last
realised his position, pulled himself together and from
then on acted like a Roman military leader, but it was too

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  325
late. He ordered his troops to close the ranks, to put the
long train of women, children, vehicles, pack animals,
etc., in order and to defend it as well as the narrow paths
and the dense forests permitted, and moved towards his
base of operation, which we have to assume was Aliso.
Heavy rain made the ground sodden, impeded the march
and again and again upset the orderly arrangement of the
excessively large train. Varus, who suffered heavy losses,
managed to reach a densely forested mountain, which nevertheless offered sufficient free space for a makeshift
camp, and this was set up and fortified in fairly good
order and according to the rules. Germanicus' army visiting the spot six years later could clearly recognise there
"the fortifications of three legions".104 With a determination proper to the situation, Varus had all vehicles and
pieces of luggage not absolutely necessary burnt. On the
next day he passed through open terrain, but again suffered considerable losses so that his troops were even
more strung out and the camp in the evening could no
longer be duly fortified. Germanicus found only a wall,
which had partly collapsed, and a shallow trench. The
course of the march on the third day lay again through
wooded hills and there Varus and most of the leaders lost
heart. Varus took his own life, the legions were almost
totally annihilated. Only the cavalry, commanded by
Vala Numonius, escaped. A few fleeing infantrymen seem
to have also reached Aliso. Aliso itself held out for some
time at least, for the Germans were not familiar with the
proper battering technique. Either the entire garrison or
some of the troops later fought their way through. The
intimidated Asprenas seems to have confined his efforts
to a short advance to meet them. The Bructeri, Sugambri
and all the smaller tribes revolted and the Roman forces
were once more thrown back across the Rhine.
There has been a great deal of discussion about the
location of this campaign. It seems most likely that before the battle Varus was in the Rinteln basin, somewhere

326  FREDERICK  ENGELS
between Hausberge and Hameln, and that the withdrawal,
decided upon after the sham rising and the first attack,
was made towards the Doren gorge near Detmold, which
formed an even and wide pass through the Osning. This
is in general also the traditional view, and concurs with
the available sources and the military necessity of the
strategic situation. Whether Varus reached the Doren
gorge is uncertain, the fact that the cavalry broke through
and perhaps also the vanguard of the infantry seems to
indicate this.
The news of the destruction of the three legions and
the uprising throughout the west of Germany struck
Rome like a thunderbolt. People already saw Arminius
crossing the Rhine and causing Gaul to revolt, and on
the other side Maroboduus moving across the Danube
and rousing the hardly pacified Pannonians to join him
in an expedition across the Alps. And Italy was already
so exhausted that it was scarcely able to provide any more
soldiers. Dio tells us that only very few young men capable of bearing arms remained among the citizens, and the
older ones refused to join, so that as a punishment Augustus confiscated their property and had even some of them
put to death, in the end the Emperor managed to assemble a few makeshift units, consisting of freedmen and
veterans, for the defence of Rome, then he disarmed his
German bodyguard and expelled all Germans from the
city.
But Arminius did not cross the Rhine and Maroboduus
did not think of attacking, and Rome could thus indulge
undisturbed in fits of rage against the "treacherous Germans". We have already seen that Velleius describes
them as "utterly cunning people and born liars". Strabo
does likewise. He does not speak of "German loyalty"
and "French treachery", on the contrary, while he describes the Celts as "naive and guileless" and so simple-
minded that they "rush into battle in full view of everybody and without any circumspection so that they make

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTO RY  OF  THE  GERMANS  327
it easy for their enemies to carry the day",105 he says of
the Germans:
"When dealing with them it was always advisable not to trust
them, for those we trusted have caused great harm, e.g. the Cherusci in whose country, in violation of agreements, three legions
together with their commander Varus perished in an ambush."108
Not to mention the angry and vindictive poems of
Ovid. One almost believes to be reading French writers
of the most chauvinistic period who pour out vials of
wrath up on Yorck's perfidy and the treachery of the Saxons at Leipzig.107 The Germans got to know the honesty
of the Romans and their loyal observance of agreements,
when Caesar attacked the Usipetes and Tencteri while negotiations were carried on and an armistice was in existence; they came to know them when the envoys of the
Sugambri were imprisoned by Augustus who had refused
to negotiate with the German tribes unless these envoys
were sent. Outwitting their enemies in every possible way
is a characteristic common to all conquering peoples, and
they think that this is perfectly all right, if however their
enemies presume to do the same they call it disloyalty
and treachery. But the means used to impose the yoke
must also be granted to those who want to throw off the
yoke. As long as there are exploiting and ruling nations
and classes on the one hand and exploited and ruled ones
on the other, the use of cunning as well as force will be
necessary on both sides, and all sermonising against this
will remain ineffective.
However childish the fantastic Arminius statue set up
near Detmold may be-its only positive effect was to
induce Louis Napoleon to set up an equally ridiculous and
fantastic colossus of Vercingetorix on a mountain near
Aliso (Sainte-Reine]-it remains correct that Varus' battle
was one of the most important historical turning-points.
It decided Germany's independence from Rome once and
for all. Whether this independence was a great advantage

328 FREDERICK  ENGELS
for the Germans themselves can be debated at great length
and to no purpose, it is however certain that without it
history as a whole would have taken a different course.
And though the entire subsequent history of the Germans
consisted in fact almost exclusively of a long series of
national misfortunes-for the most part self-inflicted-so
that even the most brilliant successes almost invariably
turned out to be detrimental to the people, one must nevertheless say that then, at the beginning of their history,
the Germans were undoubtedly fortunate.
Caesar had used the last vital forces of the dying republic to subjugate Gaul. The legions, which since Marius
consisted of mercenaries, but still exclusively of Italic
people, were since Caesar literally dying out, in the same
measure as the Italic people themselves were dying out
as a result of the rapidly spreading system of latifundia
based on slave labour. The 150,000 men who constituted
the compact infantry of the 25 legions could only be held
together by the use of extreme means. The twenty-year
period of service was not observed,veteranswho had
served their time were forced to remain on active service
for an indefinite period. This was the main reason for the
mutiny of the Rhenish legions after Augustus' death. The
strange mixture of rebelliousness and discipline of this
mutiny, which Tacitus so graphically describes, reminds
one strongly of the mutinies of the Spanish soldiers of
Philip II in the Netherlands, in both cases they demonstrated the firm structure of the army which realised that
the ruler had broken his word. We saw that after Varus'
battle Augustus tried, but without success, to reintroduce
the old conscription laws, which had fallen into disuse
long since, and that he had to fall back on soldiers who
had already completed their service and even on freed-
men-he had done this once before during the Pannonian
revolt.108 The possibility of recruiting free Italic peasant
sons as replacements had vanished together with the free
Italic peasants. Every new contingent sent to the army

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  329
lowered its quality. And since nevertheless these legions
which, difficult though they were to maintain, formed the
core of the whole military force, had to be conserved as
much as possible the auxiliary troops were more and
more placed in the forefront and had to fight the battles
while the legions merely remained in reserve, so that as
early as Claudius' time the Batavi could say, the provinces were conquered with the blood of the provinces.
With such troops, to whom old Roman discipline and
staunchness became more and more alien, and therefore
also the old Roman mode of combat, and who consisted
to an increasing extent of men from the provinces, and in
the end even mainly of barbarians not belonging to the
empire-with such troops it was already then hardly possible to wage large-scale wars of aggression, and soon
not even large-scale offensive battles could any longer
be fought. The degeneration of the army restricted the
state to defensive operations, which at first were still actively conducted but soon became more and more passive, until finally the focus of attack had altogether shifted to the German side, and an irresistible offensive across
the Rhine and the Danube was launched along the entire
line from the North Sea to the Black Sea.
Meanwhile it was imperative that the superiority of
Roman arms was once more demonstrated to the Germans
on their own territory, this was required even for the security of the Rhine border. With this end in view Tiberius
hurried to the Rhine, by his personal example and stiff
penalties he restored slackened discipline, reduced the
train of the mobile army to the absolutely indispensable
and marched in two expeditions through Western Germany
(in the years 10 and 11). The Germans did not accept any
decisive battles and the Romans did not dare to move into
winter quarters on the right bank of the Rhine. Whether
Aliso and the fort at the mouth of the Ems in the land
of the Chauci had permanent garrisons even in winter is
not mentioned, but seems likely.

330  FREDERICK  ENGELS
Augustus died on August 14. The legions on the Rhine,
which had neither been permitted to leave the colours
after completing their period of service nor received the
payment due to them, refused to recognise Tiberius and
proclaimed Germanicus, son of Drusus, emperor. German-
icus quelled the rebellion, restored discipline among the
troops and led them in three campaigns, described by
Tacitus, into Germany. There he was confronted by Armi-
nius, who proved that as a general he was completely
equal to his adversary. He tried to avoid all decisive battles in open terrain, to impede the march of the Romans
as much as possible and to attack them only in swamps
and defiles, where they were unable to deploy their
forces. But the Germans did not always follow his instructions. Their eagerness to fight often induced them to accept combats under unfavourable conditions, and lust for
booty more than once saved the Romans who were caught
in a trap. Germanicus thus won two futile victories, on
the Idisiavisus and at the Angrivarian frontier wall, during his withdrawal he escaped with difficulty along narrow paths leading through swamps, lost a number of ships
and men on the Frisian coast as a result of storms and
flood-tides, and finally after the campaign of the year 16
he was recalled by Tiberius. This brought to an end the
expeditions of the Romans into the interior of Germany.
But the Romans knew very well that one controls a
river line only if one also controls the crossing to the
other bank. Far from retreating passively behind the
Rhine, the Romans moved their defences to the right
bank. The Roman entrenchments, large groups of which
cover the territory of the lower Lippe, the Ruhr and the
Wupper, and which at least in some cases correspond to
districts which existed later, and the military roads that
lead from the Rhine to the County of Mark seem to indicate that a system of fortifications had been constructed
there, whose route from the Ijssel to the Sieg corresponded to the present boundary between Franks and Saxons.

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  331
and apart from a few deviations to the boundary between
the Rhine Province and Westphalia. It is presumably this
system which, having evidently still retained some of its
defensive capacity in the seventh century, prevented the
advancing Saxons from reaching the Rhine and thus determined their present boundary with the Franks. The most
interesting discoveries in this area have only been made
during the last few years (by J. Schneider) ■ further discoveries can therefore be still expected.
Gradually the great Roman frontier wall was further
extended up the Rhine, especially under Domitian and
Hadrian. It runs from below Neuwied over the Montabaur
hills to the Ems, crosses the Lahn there, turns westward
at Adolfseck, follows the northern slope of the Taunus
encompassing Griiningen in the Wetterau, which forms
its most northerly point, and proceeds from there in a
south-easterly direction reaching the Main south of
Hanau. From there the wall follows the left bank of the
Main up to Miltenberg, then it runs in a straight line,
broken only once, to the Rems near the Hohenstaufen
castle in Wurttemberg. The wall-the construction of
which was later continued, probably under Hadrian-tums
here to the east and passing through Dinkelsbuhl, Gunzenhausen, Ellingen and Kipfenberg reaches the Danube
at Irnsing above Kelheim. Smaller entrenchments were
situated behind the wall and further away were larger
fortified sites serving as supporting points. Since the expulsion of the Helvetii by the Suevi, the area to the right
of the Rhine thus enclosed-or at least the part south
of the Main-which had been desolate, was according to
Tacitus inhabited by Gallic vagabonds and camp-followers.
More peaceful and stable conditions were thus gradually brought about on the Rhine, the fortified wall and the
Danube. Combats and raids continued but the territorial
boundaries remained unchanged for several hundred
years.

332  FREDERICK  ENGELS
PROGRESS  UP  TO  THE  Völker WANDER  UNO
Written sources of information about conditions and
events in the interior of Germany disappear after Tacitus
and Ptolemy. But we obtain various other and much more
vivid sources instead-discoveries of ancient remains in
so far as they can be attributed to the period in question.
We have seen that trade between the Romans and the
interior of Germany was almost non-existent in Pliny's
and Tacitus' time. But we find nevertheless in Pliny an
allusion to an old trade route, which was still occasionally used in his time, it led from Carnuntum (opposite the
influx of the March into the Danube) along the March
and Oder to the Amber coast. This route as well as
another one through Bohemia and along the Elbe were
probably used at a very early age by the Etruscans, whose
presence in the valleys of the northern Alps has been attested by numerous finds, in particular those at Hall-
statt.109 The invasion of Northern Italy by the Gauls is
said to have put an end to this trade (about -400) (Boyd
Dawkins). If this supposition is confirmed, one would
have to assume that the Etruscan trade-mainly import of
bronze articles-was carried on with the people who lived
in the country on the Vistula and the Elbe before the
Germans, that is probably with the Celts, and in that case
the immigration of the Germans is likely to have contributed as much to the interruption of this trade as the
return of the Celts to Italy. It seems that only after this
disruption did the more eastern trade route, from the
Greek cities on the Black Sea along the Dniester and the
Dnieper to the vicinity of the Vistula estuary, come into
use. Ancient Greek coins found near Bromberg, on the
island of Osel and elsewhere support this view; some of
the coins were minted in Greece, Italy, Sicily, Cyrene, etc.
in the fourth and perhaps the fifth century before our era.
The interrupted trade routes along the Oder and the
Elbe were bound to be restored spontaneously as soon as

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  333
the migrating peoples settled down. It seems that in Ptolemy's time not only these but also several other routes
across Germany were re-established, and when Ptolemy's
evidence ends, the finds continue to speak.
Through careful classification of the finds in this region,
C.  F. Wiberg*  has clarified many points and proved that
the trade routes through Silesia down the Oder and
through Bohemia down the Elbe were again in use in the
second century of our era. As regards Bohemia Tacitus
already mentions that
* Bidrag till Kannedomen otn Gtekers och Romares forbindelse
med Norden. Deutsch von J. Mestorf: Der Einfluf} der klass[ischen]
Volker, etc. Hamburg, 1867. [Note by Engels.]
"avarice and lack of patriotism has led traders in booty and
merchants" (lixae ac negotiators) "from our provinces into enemy
territory and to Maroboduus' army camp".110
The Hermunduri, who maintained friendly relations
with the Romans for a long time and, according to Tacitus, travelled unimpeded in the Tithe-Lands and Rhaetia
as far as Augsburg, will certainly also have helped to
distribute Roman goods and coins from the upper reaches
of the Main to the Saale and Werra. Traces of a trade
route into the interior have also been discovered further
along the Roman wall, on the Lahn.
The most important route seems to have remained the
one through Moravia and Silesia. The watershed between
the March, or Becva, and Oder, the only one that has to be
crossed, runs through open hilly country and always remains below 325 m above sea level, even now the railway
passes that way. From Lower Silesia, the North German
plain unfolds and allows roads to branch off in all directions towards the Vistula and Elbe. Roman merchants
must have lived in Silesia and Brandenburg in the second
and third centuries. We find not only glass vessels, lachrymal vases and funeral urns with Latin inscriptions

334  FREDERICK  ENGELS
there (at Massel near Trebnitz in Silesia and elsewhere)
but even entire Roman burial vaults with niches for cinerary urns (columbaria) (Nacheln near Glogau). Tombs
which are indubitably Roman were also found near Warin
in Mecklenburg. Find of coins, Roman metal-ware,
earthenware lamps, etc., also show that trade went along
this route. In fact the whole of Eastern Germany, although
Roman armies never set foot there, is strewn with Roman
coins and manufactures, the origin of the latter is frequently attested by the same trademarks as those occurring on articles found in the provinces of the Roman empire. Earthenware lamps found in Silesia bear the same
trademark as lamps found in Dalmatia, Vienna, etc. For
example two bronze vases, one found in Mecklenburg,
another in Bohemia, are marked: Ti. Robilius Sitalcis, this
indicates that one trade route went along the Elbe.
Moreover, Roman merchant ships sailed to the North
Sea in the first centuries after Augustus. This is proved
by the discovery at Neuhaus on the Oste (Elbe estuary)
of 344 Roman silver coins from the reign of Nero to
Marcus Aurelius and parts of a ship, which probably
sank there. Ships also sailed along the south coast of the
Baltic as far as the Danish Isles, Sweden and Gotland,
we shall afterwards take a closer look at this traffic. The
distances of various coastal points from each other which
Ptolemy and Marcianus (about 400) mention can only be
based on reports by merchants who sailed along those
coasts. They extend from the coast of Mecklenburg to
Danzig and from there to Scandia. This is proved finally
by numerous other discoveries of Roman origin in Holstein, Schleswig, Mecklenburg, Western Pomerania, the Danish Isles and Southern Sweden: they were found in places
that were situated close together and not far from the coast.
It is hardly possible to determine in how far this
Roman trade also comprised import of arms into Germany. The numerous Roman weapons found in Germany can
just as well have been taken as booty, and the Roman

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  335
authorities along the frontier will of course have done
everything in their power to stop the supply of arms to
the Germans. However some supplies may have arrived
by sea, reaching especially the peoples living further
away, g.g. those on the Cimbric Peninsula.
Other Roman goods which were brought to Germany
along various routes were household utensils, jewellery,
toilet articles, etc. Among the household utensils were
bowls, gauges, beakers, vessels, pots and pans, sieves,
spoons, scissors, and ladles made of bronze, there were
some gold or silver vessels and earthenware lamps, which
were widespread. There was jewellery of bronze, silver
or gold consisting of necklaces, diadems, bracelets and
rings, and clasps similar to our brooches. We find among
the toilet requisites combs, tweezers, ear-picks, etc., not
to mention articles whose use is uncertain. Most of these
goods were, as Worsaae admits, produced under the influence of the taste prevailing in Rome in the first century.
There is a great difference between the Germans as
described by Caesar, and also by Tacitus, and the people
who used these articles, even if one acknowledges that
only the more distinguished and richer families used them.
The "simple food" which, according to Tacitus, the Germans consumed "without much preparation (sine appara-
tu) and seasoning to satisfy their hunger"111 has been
superseded by a cuisine which already employed a fairly
complex equipment, and together with this equipment the
requisite spices were probably also obtained from the
Romans. The contempt for gold and silver has been replaced by the desire to adorn themselves with jewellery,
and the indifference towards Roman money by its distribution throughout German territory. And especially the toilet
requisites, the mere presence of these articles reveals a
beginning transformation in the habits of a people that,
so far as we know, invented soap, but were not able to
find any other use for it than the yellowing of their hair.
In order to determine what the Roman traders received

336 FREDERICK  ENGELS
from the Germans in exchange for all these coins and
goods we must rely in the first place on information given
by the ancients, and as we said, they have let us down
almost completely. Pliny mentions that the empire imported vegetables, goosefeathers, woollen fabrics and
soap from Germany. But that incipient trade along the
border cannot provide a yardstick for later times.
An important item, as we know, was amber, but this is
insufficient to explain the spread of commerce throughout
the country. Cattle, which formed the Germans' principal
wealth, will probably have also been the most important
export item, and the legions posted on the border ensured
that there was a strong demand for meat. Animal skins
and furs, which in Jornandes' times were sent from
Scandinavia to the estuary of the Vistula and from there
into the Roman territories, certainly found their way there
from the east German forests in earlier times as well.
Wiberg thinks that Roman seafarers brought back wild
animals for the circus from the North. But apart from
bears, wolves and possibly aurochs they could find nothing there, and it was easier and simpler to get lions and
leopards and even bears from Africa and Asia.
Finally and almost shamefacedly, Wiberg asks: perhaps
slaves? and with that he has probably hit on the right
thing. Apart from cattle, slaves were in fact the only
item Germany could export in sufficient quantities to
pay for her commercial transactions with Rome. The cities
and latifundia of Italy alone consumed a huge multitude
of slaves, who were able to propagate themselves only to
a very insignificant extent. The entire economy of the
large Roman estates presupposed an enormous supply of
saleable prisoners of war, such as Italy obtained during
the incessant wars of conquest waged by the declining republic and by Augustus as well. That had now come to
an end. The empire was now on the defensive within fixed
borders. Conquered enemies, who provided the bulk of
the slaves, became more and more scarce in the Roman

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  337
armies. It was necessary to purchase them from the barbarians. Is it likely that under the circumstances the
Germans should not have appeared on the market as
sellers? The Germans, who, according to Tacitus, already
then sold slaves (Germania, 24), who constantly waged
war against each other, who, e.g. the Frisians, when they
were short of money, paid their taxes by handing over
their wives and children to the Romans to be turned
into slaves, who as early as the third century, if not before,
sailed across the Baltic and whose maritime expeditions
into the North Sea-from the voyages of the Saxons in the
third century to those of the Normans in the tenth-had
mostly slave hunting as their direct aim, in addition to
other types of piracy. Their hunt for slaves, moreover,
was carried on almost exclusively for trading purposes.
The same Germans were the foremost slave robbers and
slave traders a few centuries later both during the Vdl-
kerwanderung and during their wars against the Slavs.
We must either assume that the Germans in the second
and third centuries were quite different from all the
other neighbours of the Romans and quite different from
their own descendants in the third, fourth and fifth centuries, or we must admit that they too participated extensively in the slave trade with Italy, a trade which at that
time was regarded as quite decent and even creditable.
Thus disappears the mysterious veil, which otherwise would
have shrouded the German export trade of that period.
We must return here to the traffic along the Baltic Sea
during those times. Although hardly any Roman finds
have been made on the Kattegat coast, there are very
many finds on the southern coast of the Baltic up to Livonia, in Schleswig-Holstein, on the southern rim and in
the interior of the Danish Isles, and on the south and
south-east coast of Sweden, Oland and Gotland. The great
bulk of these finds belong to what is known as the denarius period,112 which extends as far as the first years of
Septimius Severus rule, that is approximately 200-we
22 — 773

338  FREDERICK  ENGELS
shall examine this period later. Tacitus says already of
the Suiones that they were strong because of their fleets
of rowing vessels and adds that they held wealth in high
regard, they must therefore have been engaged in maritime commerce even then. Navigation which was first
developed in the Baltic, the Oresund and Olandsund and
in coastal shipping had to brave the high seas to include
Bornholm and Gotland in its orbit. They must already
have had considerable experience in handling vessels to
establish the brisk traffic whose centre appears to have
been Gotland, the island situated farthest from the Continent. In fact over 3,200 Roman silver denarii were found
there up to 1873"' compared with about 100 on Oland,
hardly 50 on the Swedish mainland, 200 on Bornholm,
600 in Denmark and Schleswig (428 of these in a single
find at Slagelse on Zealand). The examination of these
finds shows that only very few Roman denarii came to
Gotland before the year 161, when Marcus Aurelius became
Emperor, but from then up to the end of the century
large quantities arrived there. Baltic navigation must
therefore have reached a considerable extent in the second
half of the century. The fact that it already existed earlier
is proved by Ptolemy's account, in which he states that
the distance from the estuary of the Vistula to Scandia
was 1,200 to 1,600 stadia (30 to 40 geographical miles).
Both distances are approximately correct from the eastern
tip of Blekinge and the southern tip of Oland or Gotland,
depending on whether the measurement is taken from
Rixhbft, Neufahrwasser or Pillau. These data can only be
based on information obtained from sailors, and this applies likewise to the other distances he mentions along
the German coast up to the Vistula estuary.
The fact that firstly the notions of the Romans about
Scandinavia are all very hazy and secondly that no Roman
* Hans Hildebrand, Das heidnische Zeitalter in Schweden.
Deutsch von Mestorf, Hamburg, 1873. [Note by Engels.]

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  330
coins have been found on the Kattegat and in Norway indicates that navigation on the Baltic was not carried on by
the Romans. The Cimbrian promontory (Skagen), which
the Romans reached under Augustus and from where they
saw the boundless sea stretch in front of them, seems to
have remained the limit reached by their maritime navigation. Accordingly the Germans themselves must have
sailed the Baltic and carried on trade there thus bringing
Roman money and Roman goods to Scandinavia. And
it could really not have been otherwise. The maritime
expeditions of the Saxons to the coast of Gaul and
Britain began quite suddenly in the second half of the
third century, and they displayed such daring and confidence which they could not have acquired overnight, but
which on the contrary presupposed a long and intimate
knowledge of navigation on the high seas. And the Sax-
ons-as we use this term here it includes all the tribes of
the Cimbric Peninsula, that is also Frisians, Angles and
Jutes-could have gained this knowledge only on the Baltic Sea. This large inland sea, without tides, where the
southwesters from the Atlantic only arrive after largely
spending themselves over the North Sea, this long basin
with its many islands, bays and straits, where when crossing from shore to shore one is out of sight of land only
for a short time at most, seems almost to have been
especially designed as a training ground for navigation in
its early stages. Even the Swedish rock paintings ascribed to the Bronze Age with their numerous representations of rowing boats indicate that shipping here dates
back to times immemorial. The find in the Nydam bog in
Schleswig has presented us with a boat which is 70 feet
long, eight to nine feet wide, made of oak planks at the
beginning of the third century and quite suitable for sailing the high seas. It was there that the shipbuilding technique was quietly developed and the nautical experience
accumulated which later enabled the Saxons and Normans
to undertake their expeditions across the high seas in
22 »

340  FREDERICK  ENGELS
search of conquests, and as a result of which the Germanic
people are at the head of all seafaring peoples in the world
up to the present time.
The Roman coins which were brought to Germany up
to the end of the second century were predominantly
silver denarii (1 denarius=1.06 mark). And moreover, as
Tacitus informs us, the Germans preferred the old, well-
known coins with serrated edge and the imprinted design
of a two-horse chariot. Among the older coins many of
these serrati bigatique have in fact been found. These old
coins contained only 5 to 10 per cent copper. Trajan already ordered that 20 per cent copper be added to the
silver, the Germans seem not to have noticed this. But
when Septimius Severus increased the copper admixture
to 50-60 per cent from 198 onwards, the Germans thought
that this went too far, the later inferior denarii are hardly
ever encountered in the finds, the import of Roman money
ceased. It was resumed only after Constantine had established the gold solidus (72 solidi to the Roman pound of
327 gr. of fine gold, i.e. 1 solidus=4.55 gr. fine=12.70
marks) as the monetary unit in 312, and it is predominantly gold coins, solidi, that from then on reach Germany, but even more Oland and especially Gotland. The
solidus period, the second period in which Roman money
was imported, continues as far as Western Roman coins
are concerned to the end of the Western Empire, and as
regards Byzantine coins up to Anastasius (died 518). The
finds occur mostly in Sweden, the Danish Isles and a few
on the Baltic coast of Germany, they are very rare in the
interior of Germany.
But the counterfeiting of coins by Septimius Severus
and his successors is insufficient to explain the sudden
interruption of trade between the Germans and Romans.
There must have been other reasons as well. One was evidently the political situation. The German aggressive war
against the Romans began early in the third century, and
about 250 it flared up along the entire line from the estu
A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  341
ary of the Danube to the Rhine delta. No normal trade
could of course exist under these circumstances between
the belligerents. But these sudden and persistent wars of
aggression which broke out everywhere must themselves
be explained. They were not due to internal conditions in
Rome, on the contrary the resistance the empire still put
up was everywhere successful, and between periods of
wild anarchy it still produced powerful emperors, especially at this time. The attacks therefore must have been
caused by changes which took place within Germany.
And in this case too the finds provide an explanation.
Finds of exceptional importance were made in two peat
bogs in Schleswig in the early sixties of this century. They
were carefully excavated by Engelhardt of Copenhagen
and after some wanderings they have now been deposited
in the Kiel museum. What distinguishes them from other
similar finds is the presence of coins, which allow us to
determine their date fairly reliably. One find, from the
Taschberg (or Thorsbjerg, as the Danes call it) bog near
Suderbrarup, contains 37 coins from Nero to Septimius
Severus, the other, from the Nydam bog, an inlet of the
sea which silted up and became peaty, contains 34 coins
from Tiberius to Macrinus (218). There can therefore be
hardly any doubt that the finds belong to the period between 220 and 250. They contain however not only articles of Roman origin, but also numerous others which
were manufactured in Germany, and since they have been
almost completely preserved by the ferruginous water of
the bog, they give a surprisingly clear indication of the
state of the metal industry, weaving, shipbuilding and,
owing to runic inscriptions, also of the use of writing in
Northern Germany during the first half of the third century.
And the industrial level attained is even more surprising. The fine fabrics, the elegant sandals and the well
made harness show a far higher cultural stage than that
of the Germans in Tacitus' times. But the most astonishing
are the locally made metal goods.

342  FREDERICK  ENGELS
Comparative philology has demonstrated that the Germans brought a knowledge of the use of metal with them
from their homeland in Asia. It is possible that they also
possessed a knowledge of the extraction and processing
of metal, but it is hardly probable that they still had it
when they encountered the Romans. At any rate there is
no suggestion in the writers of the first century that iron
or bronze was extracted or worked up between the Rhine
and the Elbe, they seem rather to imply the contrary. Tacitus does indeed say that the Gotones (in Upper Silesia?)
were mining iron, and Ptolemy asserts that their neighbours, the Quadi, had iron works,- both tribes may again
have acquired a knowledge of the smelting process from
the peoples of the Danube. Moreover the finds which are
attested by coins to date from the first century never contain locally made iron goods but only Roman ones, and
why should large quantities of Roman metal articles have
been brought to Germany, if a local metal-working industry had existed there? It is true that old foundry moulds
and incomplete and scrapped bronze castings have been
found in Germany but never accompanied by coins that
could confirm their age. In all probability they are remnants of a pre-German period, vestiges of the activity of
itinerant Etruscan bronze casters. Incidentally there is no
point in asking whether the Germans who immigrated had
entirely lost the art of metal-working, all the facts indicate that actually they did not, or practically did not,
manufacture metal goods in the first century.
Then suddenly the finds of the Taschberg bog come to
light disclosing an unexpectedly high level of the local
metal industry. There are buckles, metal plates used as
mountings decorated with animal and human heads, a
silver helmet providing a complete frame for the face leaving free only eyes, nose and mouth, coats of mail consisting of wire mesh, which required extremely assiduous
work, for the wire had first to be hammered out (wiredrawing was not invented till 1306), a golden headring,

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  343
not to mention other objects whose local origin may appear doubtful. The pieces found here are matched by
others discovered in the Nydam bog and also by finds in
bogs in Fyn and finally by a Bohemian find (Horovice)
excavated likewise in the early sixties, it contains magnificent bronze discs with human heads, buckles, etc., very
similar to those of Taschberg, and therefore presumably
belonging also to the same period.
From the third century the metal industry must have
increasingly improved its performance and spread through
the entire German territory: by the time of the Vdlker-
wanderung, say the end of the fifth century, it had
reached a relatively very high level. Not only iron and
bronze but gold and silver too were constantly worked up,
the gold bracteates were imitations of Roman coins, base
metals were gold-plated, there is also inlaid work, enamel and filigree. Whereas the shape of the whole article
is often clumsy, one finds very ingenious and tasteful
decorations, which only partially follow Roman examples
-this applies especially to buckles and clasps as well as
fibulae, among which certain characteristic forms are widespread. The British Museum displays clasps from Kerch
on the Sea of Azov side by side with similar ones found
in Britain, they could have been made in the same factory.
The style is basically the same, though often with strong
peculiarities, from Sweden to the Lower Danube and from
the Black Sea to France and Britain. This, the first period
of the German metal industry disappears on the Continent
with the end of the Volkerwanderung and the general
conversion to Christianity; in Britain and Scandinavia it
continues a little longer.
The tribal laws show how widespread these industries
were among the Germans in the sixth and seventh centuries and to how large an extent they had already become
separate trades. Blacksmiths, sword makers, goldsmiths
and silversmiths are frequently mentioned, the Aleman-
nic law even speaks of smiths who were publicly tested

344  FREDERICK  ENGELS
(publice probati). The Bavarian law imposes higher penalties for theft committed in a church, the ducal court, a
smithy or a mill "because these four buildings are public
houses and are always open". The Wergeld of a goldsmith
is under Frisian law 25 per cent higher than that of other
people of the same social estate. According to Salic law
an ordinary serf is worth 12 solidi, but one who is a
smith (faber) 35 solidi.
We have already spoken of shipbuilding. The vessels
found at Nydam are rowing boats, the larger one, built of
oak, is intended for fourteen pairs of oarsmen, the smaller one is made of pine wood. Oars, rudders and scoops
were still inside. It seems that only after the Germans
began to navigate the North Sea as well, did they take
over the use of sails from the Romans and Celts.
The Germans were familiar with pottery as far back as
Tacitus' time, but probably only hand pottery. The Romans had large potteries near the frontier, and especially
in Swabia and Bavaria within the frontier wall, and Germans were also employed there as the workers' names
burnt into their manufactures prove. These men will have
brought the knowledge of glass flux and of the potter's
wheel as well as a more advanced technique into Germany. The Germans who crossed the Danube also learned to
manufacture glass; glass vessels, coloured glass beads
and glass insertions in metal articles of German origin are
frequently found in Bavaria and Swabia.
Finally we see that the runic script was then widely
known and used. The Taschberg find contains the scabbard of a sword and a shield inscribed with runes. We
find the same type of runes on a gold ring found in Wallachia, on clasps from Bavaria and Burgundy and finally on
the oldest rune stones of Scandinavia. This is the larger
runic alphabet, from which the Anglo-Saxon runes later
evolved, it contains seven more letters than the nordic
runes, which later predominated in Scandinavia, and indicates an older linguistic form than the oldest Norse pre
A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  345
served. Incidentally it was an extremely clumsy script,
derived from Roman and Greek characters and modified
in such a way that they could be easily inscribed (written) on stone or metal and especially wooden rods. The
rounded forms had to give way to angular shapes, only
vertical or oblique strokes were possible, no horizontal
ones, because of the grain of the wood, and it was just
this which made the script exceedingly unwieldy when
writing on parchment or paper. In fact as far as we can
judge, it was used almost exclusively for ritual and
magical purposes and for inscriptions and probably also
for other short communications. As soon as the need for
a script suitable for books arose, for instance among
the Goths and later the Anglo-Saxons, it was discarded
and a new adaptation of the Greek and Roman alphabets was made and only a few runic characters were
retained.
Finally, the Germans must also have made considerable advances in farming and stock-breeding during the
period under discussion. This was imperative because they
had adopted a settled way of life, and the enormous increase in population, which spilt over during the Volker-
wanderung, would have been impossible without these
advances. Many sections of primaeval forest must have
been cleared, and most of what are known as "high
fields"-stretches of forest showing traces of ancient cultivation-in so far as they are situated in regions that
were then German, probably date from that period. There
is of course no special proof. But the fact that as early as
the close of the third century Probus preferred German
horses for his cavalry, and that the large white cattle-
which ousted the small black cattle of the Celts from the
Saxon regions of Britain-was introduced there by the
Anglo-Saxons, as is asserted now, indicates a complete
revolution in stock-breeding, and hence also in farming
among the Germans.

346  FREDERICK  ENGELS
The result of our analysis is that the Germans had
made substantial advances in civilisation in the period
from Caesar to Tacitus, but that they advanced much faster from Tacitus to the beginning of the Volkerwande-
tung, approximately 400. Commerce reached them and
brought them Roman industrial products and thus at least
to some extent Roman needs; it called forth an industry
of their own, which though following Roman patterns
nevertheless developed quite independently. The finds in
the Schleswig bogs represent the first chronologically determinable stage of this industry, the finds from the time
of the Vdlkerwanderung the second stage, which shows a
higher level of development. A peculiar feature moreover
is that the western tribes are definitely more backward
than those living in the interior and especially on the
Baltic coast. The Franks and Alamanni and later still the
Saxons produce metal goods of lower quality than do the
Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians and the peoples that migrated from the interior-the Goths on the Black Sea and the
lower Danube, and the Burgundians in France. The influence of the old trade routes from the middle course of
the Danube along the Elbe and Oder is quite unmistakable in this respect. At the same time the inhabitants of the
coast became adept shipbuilders and daring sailors. The
population increased rapidly everywhere and the territory, hemmed in by the Romans, was no longer sufficient.
New migrations of tribes looking for land first began in
the far east, until finally the surging mass flooded into
new territories from all directions, by land and by sea.
NOTE — THE  GERMAN  TRIBES
It was only along a few routes and during a short time
that Roman armies reached the interior of Greater Germany, and even then they went only as far as the Elbe.
Merchants and other travellers came only rarely and did
not penetrate far into the interior up to Tacitus' times.

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  347
No wonder that information of this country and its inhabitants is so scanty and contradictory, it is more surprising that even such an amount of reliable information has
reached us.
As regards the sources themselves, the two Greek geographers can be used without reservation only when there
is independent confirmation. Both relied on book learning,
they collected-and in their way and according to their
means also critically examined-material which for the
most part has not reached us. They had no personal knowledge of the country. Strabo makes the Lippe-well known
to the Romans-flow parallel with the Ems and Weser into
the North Sea instead of into the Rhine and he is sufficiently honest to admit that the country beyond the Elbe
is completely unknown. Whereas he tries to get rid of
the contradictions in his sources and his own doubts by
means of a naive rationalism, which often reminds one of
the beginning of this century, Ptolemy, the scientific geographer, attempts to assign mathematically determined
areas within the inflexible grid of his map to the various
German tribes mentioned in his sources. Magnificent as
Ptolemy's work as a whole is for his time, his geography
of Germania is misleading. In the first place the information available to him is mostly vague and contradictory
and frequently even wrong. Secondly however his map is
distorted, rivers and mountain ranges are to a large extent
entered quite incorrectly. It is just as if a Berlin geographer who had not travelled at all felt obliged to fill in the
blank space on a map of Africa, say in 1820, by reconciling the information given in all sources since Leo Africanus and determining the course of every river and
every mountain range and allocating a particular territory
to every tribe. Such attempts to achieve the impossible
are bound to increase the errors of the sources used.
Thus Ptolemy puts down many tribes twice, the Lacco-
bardi on the lower Elbe and the Langobardi from the
middle course of the Rhine to that of the Elbe, he speaks

348  FREDERICK  ENGELS
of two Bohemias, one inhabited by Marcomanni, the
other by Bainochaimi, etc. While Tacitus says explicitly
that no cities existed in Germania, Ptolemy, hardly 50
years later, is already able to mention 96 place names.
Some of these names may really have been place names.
Ptolemy seems to have collected much information from
merchants, fairly large numbers of whom already visited
Eastern Germany at that time, and they came to know the
names which gradually became established of the places
they visited. How others arose shows the example of a
town allegedly called Siatutanda, that is how our geographer construed Tacitus' words: ad sua tutanda*  which
he probably saw in a badly written manuscript. We find
at the same time information of surprising accuracy and
the greatest historical value. For instance, Ptolemy is the
only one of the ancients who places the Langobardi,
though under the distorted name Laccobardi, just in the
spot where even today Bardengau and Bardenwic testify
to their presence, and also the Ingrions in Engersgau
where even today there is Engers on the Rhine near Neu-
wied. And he is again the only one who lists the Lithuanian
Galindi and Suditi, whose names continue to exist even
now in the East Prussian districts of Geliinden and
Sudauen. Cases like this, however, only prove his great
knowledge, not that his other data are correct. To make
matters worse the text, especially with regard to the main
point, the names, is terribly corrupted.
The Romans remain the most direct sources, particularly those who themselves visited the country. Velleius
served as a soldier in Germany and he writes like a soldier, roughly in the same way as an officer of the grande
armee would write about the campaigns of 1812 and 1813.
His account does not even enable us to establish the localities of the military events, this is not surprising in a
country without towns. Pliny too had served as a cavalry
For its protection.-Ed.

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  349
officer in Germany and among other places he had visited
the Chaucian coast, he also described all the wars waged
against the Germans in twenty volumes, and these were
used as a source by Tacitus. Pliny moreover was the first
Roman who took a theoretical interest in the things he
saw in the country of the barbarians, and not merely a
political and military interest. His account of the German
tribes must therefore be considered as specially important, since it is based on the personal investigations of
Rome's scholarly encyclopaedist. It is customary to assert
that Tacitus was in Germany, but I have found no proof.
In any case in his time he would have been able to collect first-hand information only near the Rhine and the
Danube.
Two classic works, Kaspar Zeuss' Die Deutschen und
die Nachbarstdmme and Jacob Grimm's Geschichte der
deutschen Sprache have unsuccessfully attempted to bring
the tribal charts of [Tacitus'] Germania and of Ptolemy
into harmony with each other and with the jumble of
other data provided by the ancients. What these two scholars of genius, and others since then, failed to achieve can
probably be regarded as impossible with the means at
present available to us. The inadequacy of these means is
demonstrated by the very fact that these two scholars are
obliged to construct wrong auxiliary theories; Zeuss asserting that Ptolemy ought to have the last word in all
controversial questions, although no one has described
Ptolemy's basic errors better than Zeuss himself; Grimm
that the forces that overthrew the Roman empire must
have arisen on a broader basis than the territory between
the Rhine, Danube and Vistula, and hence that together
with the Goths and Dacians the greater part of the land
to the north and north-east of the lower Danube has to
be considered German. The assumptions of both Zeuss
and Grimm are now regarded as obsolete.
Let us try to bring at least some clarity into the matter by restricting the task. If we succeed in making a gen
UH 350  FREDERICK  ENGELS
eral arrangement of the tribes under a few principal
groups, we shall have provided a secure basis for future
detailed research. In this context a passage of Pliny gives
us a clue, the consistency of which has been increasingly
confirmed in the course of this investigation, and which
at any rate leads to fewer difficulties and entangles us in
fewer contradictions than any other.
It is true that if we take Pliny as the starting point
we have to abandon the theory that Tacitus' triad and
the old myth of Ing, Isk and Ermin, the three sons of
Mannus, are absolutely applicable. But in the first place,
Tacitus himself does not know what to do with his In-
gaevones, Istaevones and Herminones. He does not make
the slightest attempt at arranging the individual tribes,
enumerated by him, in those three principal groups. And
secondly nobody succeeded later in doing this. Zeuss
tries hard to force the Gothic tribes, whom he regards
as Istaevones, into the triad, and thus merely brings
about an even greater confusion. He does not even attempt to include the Scandinavians and establishes them
as the fourth principal group. But the triad is thereby
just as much violated as by Pliny's five principal groups.
Let us make a detailed examination of these five
groups.
I. Vindili, quotum pars Burgundiones, Varini, Carini,
Guttones x*
* The Vindili to whom the Burgundians, Varini, Carini and Guttons belong.-Ed.
Thus we have three tribes, Vandals, Burgundians and
Goths, of whom we know firstly, that they spoke Gothic
dialects, and secondly that they lived in Eastern Germania
at that time, the Goths near, and beyond the estuary of
the Vistula, the Burgundians according to Ptolemy in the
Warta region up to the Vistula, and the Vandals, according
to Dio Cassius (who calls the Riesengebirge after them)
in Silesia. All the tribes whose dialects are traced by

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  351
Grimm back to the Gothic can be definitely ascribed to
this group, which we shall call Gothic after their language,
this applies first of all to the areas-and also the Van-
dals-that are directly associated by Procopius with the
Gothic language. We know nothing of their previous
homeland, nor of that of the Heruli, who together with the
Skiri and Rugii are also regarded by Grimm as Goths. The
Skiri are placed by Pliny on the Vistula, the Rugii by Tacitus on the coast close to the Goths. The Gothic-speaking
people accordingly occupied a fairly compact territory
between the Vandal mountains (Riesengebirge), the Oder
and the Baltic Sea up to the Vistula and beyond.
We do not know who the Carini were. Some difficulty
is caused by the Varini. Tacitus mentions them together
with the Angles among the seven tribes who offered sacrifices to Nerthus, already Zeuss mentions quite correctly
that their appearance was peculiarly Ingaevonian. The
Angles, however, were regarded by Ptolemy as Suevi,
which is obviously wrong. Zeuss thinks that one or two
distorted names used by the same geographer denote the
Varini and accordingly he places them in Havelland and
together with the Suevi. The heading of an old tribal code
of laws simply identifies the Varini with the Thuringians,
but the law itself is common to the Varini and the Angles.
For all these reasons it remains doubtful whether the Varini have to be regarded as Goths or as Ingaevones, and
since they have completely vanished, the question is of
little importance.
II. Altera pars Ingaevones, quorum pars Cimbri, Teuton! ac Chaucorum gentes*
* The Ingaevones form the second group, which includes the
Cimbri, Teutons and Chauci.-Ed.
Pliny thus assigns in the first place the Cimbric Peninsula and the coastal land between the Elbe and the Ems
to the Ingaevones. Of the three tribes named the Chau-
ci were undoubtedly closely related to the Frisians.

352  FREDERICK  ENGELS
Even today Frisian is the prevalent language on the North
Sea, in Dutch West-Friesland, in Saterland (in Oldenburg),
and in North Friesland (in Schleswig). At the time of the
Carolingians, Frisian was spoken almost exclusively in
the whole coastal region from Sinkfal (the bay which
even today marks the border between Belgian Flanders
and Dutch Zeeland) to Sylt and Widau in Schleswig and
probably considerably further north; the Saxon tongue
reached the sea only on both sides of the estuary of the
Elbe.
Cimbri and Teutons are for Pliny evidently the people
who lived in the Cimbric Peninsula at that time, and who
therefore belonged to the Chaucian-Frisian language
group. Accordingly we can agree with the view of Zeuss
and Grimm that the North Frisians are direct descendants
of the oldest German inhabitants of the peninsula.
It is true that Dahlmann (Geschichte von Danemark) asserts that the North Frisians migrated from the southwest to the peninsula only in the fifth century. But he
produces no evidence whatever, and his statement was
with good reason entirely disregarded in all later investigations.
According to this, Ingaevonic is identical with Frisian,
in the sense that we call the entire group after the language of which alone we have old relics and dialects
which continue to be used. But does this demarcate the
full extent of the Ingaevonian group? Or is Grimm justified when he includes in it the whole of what he, not
quite accurately, describes as Low German, that is in addition to the Frisians also the Saxons?
Let us admit from the beginning that Pliny has given
the Saxons an entirely wrong position by regarding the
Cherusci as belonging to the Herminones. We shall see
later that the only thing to do is in fact to class the Saxons too with the Ingaevones, and therefore to define this
principal ethnic group as the Frisian-Saxon group.
This is the right place to speak of the Angles, who are

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  353
regarded perhaps by Tacitus and certainly by Ptolemy as
Suevi. The latter places them on the right bank of the Elbe,
opposite the Langobardi; if the statement is to be correct
at all, it can only refer to the real Langobardi on the lower reaches of the Elbe. Accordingly the territory of the
Angles stretched from Lauenburg to approximately the
Prignitz. We find them later in the peninsula itself, where
their name is still preserved and from where they together
with the Saxons migrated to Britain. Their language became then an element of Anglo-Saxon and in fact the
distinctly Frisian element of this newly arisen language.
This fact alone-whatever may have happened to the Angles who remained in, or moved to, the interior of Germany
-forces us to rank the Angles with the Ingaevones, and
indeed with their Frisian branch. The entire vocalism of
Anglo-Saxon-a vocalism which is far more Frisian than Sax-
on-is due to the Angles, and also the fact that the further
development of this language is in many cases strikingly
similar to that of the Frisian dialects. Of all continental
dialects the Frisian ones are today closest to the English
language. Thus the transformation of guttural sounds into
sibilants in English is caused not by French but by Frisian
influence. The English ch-c instead of k, and the English
dz for g before soft vowels can very well have developed
from Frisian tz, tj for k, and dz for g, but not from the
French ch and g.
We must also include the Jutes together with the
Angles in the Frisian-Ingaevonian group, irrespective of
whether they already lived in the peninsula at the time
of Pliny or Tacitus, or migrated there later. Grimm thinks
that their name is identical with that of the Eudoses, one
of the tribes worshipping Nerthus who are mentioned by
Tacitus. If the Angles are Ingaevones, it is difficult to assign the other tribes of this group to a different branch.
In that case the territory of the Ingaevones extended as
far as the Oder estuary, and the gap between them and
the Gothic tribes has been closed.
23 — 773

354  FREDERICK  ENGELS
III. Proximi autern Rheno Iscaevones (alias Istaevones),
quorum pars Sicambri*
* The Iscaevones (or Istaevones) including the Sugambri live
close to the Rhine.-Ed.
Already Grimm and others following him, e.g. Waitz,
more or less identify Istaevones with Franks. But what
disconcerted Grimm was their language. All German documents of the Frankish empire since the middle of the
ninth century are written in a dialect which cannot be
distinguished from Old High German. Grimm therefore
assumes that Old Frankish disappeared abroad and was
replaced by High German at home, and thus in the end
he classes the Franks with the High Germans.
Grimm himself states that his analysis of the linguistic
remnants still existing has shown that Old Frankish was
an independent dialect lying halfway between Saxon and
High German. This is sufficient for the time being, a closer investigation of the Frankish language, regarding
which there is still a great deal of uncertainty, must be
reserved for a separate note.
It is true that the territory allotted to the Istaevones
is relatively small for one of the principal German groups,
and especially for one that played such an important role
in history. It follows the Rhine from the Rheingau, extending into the interior of the country up to the sources of
the Dill, Sieg, Ruhr, Lippe and Ems, in the north it is cut
off from the sea by Frisians and Chauci, and in addition
the area near the estuary of the Rhine is interspersed
with remnants of other tribes, belonging mostly to the
Chatti: Batavi, Chattuari, etc. The Germans dwelling on
the left of the lower Rhine belong also to the Franks;
whether Tribocci, Vangiones and Nemetes as well is questionable. The small size of this territory was due to the
fact that the expansion of the Istaevones was resisted on
the Rhine by the Celts and since Caesar by the Romans,
while the Cherusci had already settled in their rear, and

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  355
their flank was to an increasing extent hemmed in by
Suevi and in particular Chatti, as Caesar attests. The constant penetration across the Rhine, first by conquering
bands and later by groups settling voluntarily in Roman
territory, e.g. the Ubii, proves that for the conditions
prevailing in Germany, a relatively large population was
crowded together in a small space. For the same reason
it was here, and only here, that at an early stage the Romans could without difficulty transfer substantial sections
of Istaevonic tribes to Roman territory.
The note on the Frankish dialect will demonstrate that
the Franks constitute a separate German group, which
is subdivided into several tribes, and speak a distinct
dialect, which consists of various idioms, in short that
they have all the characteristics of a principal Germanic
group, and can accordingly be said to be identical with
the Istaevones. Everything that needs to be said about
the individual tribes belonging to this principal group has
already been said by Jacob Grimm. In addition to the
Sugambri, he includes in this group the Ubii, Chamavi,
Bructeri, Tencteri, and Usipetes, that is the tribes living
in the territory on the right bank of the Rhine which we
have earlier called Istaevonic.
IV. Mediterranei Hermiones, quorum Suevi, Hermun-
duri, Chatti, Cherusci*
The Hermiones comprising the Suevi, Hermunduri, Chatti and
Cherusci, live in the centre of the country.-Ed.
Jacob Grimm already identifies the Herminones, to use
Tacitus' more accurate spelling, with the High Germans.
The term Suevi, which according to Caesar comprised all
High Germans as far as he knew them, begins to acquire
a distinct content. Thuringians (Hermunduri) and Hessians
(Chatti) appear as separate tribes. The other Suevi remain
still undivided. If for the time being we leave aside the numerous mysterious names which vanished already during
the following centuries and cannot be explored, the Suevi
23*

356  FREDERICK  ENGELS  -1
must still have comprised three big High German groups
which later played a role in history: the Alamanni-
Swabians, the Bavarians and the Langobardi. The Lango-
bardi, we know this well, lived on the left bank of the
lower Elbe, in the region of the Bardengau, separate from
the rest of their tribesmen, in an advanced position surrounded by Ingaevonic peoples. Their isolated position,
which they had to maintain in protracted fights, is admirably described by Tacitus without however understanding its cause. The Bavarians, as we also know since Zeuss
and Grimm, lived under the name of Marcomanni in Bohemia. The Hessians and Thuringians lived in their present
territories and the neighbouring southern areas. Since
Roman territory began to the south of the Franks, Hessians
and Thuringians, the only place left for the Swabians-
Alamanni is that between the Elbe and Oder, in the present
Mark Brandenburg and the kingdom of Saxony, and we
find a Suevian people there, the Semnones. The Swabians-
Alamanni were presumably identical with them and
adjoined the Ingaevones in the north-west and Gothic
tribes in the northeast and east.
So far everything has been going fairly smoothly. But
Pliny regards the Cherusci too as Herminones, and this
is definitely a mistake. Even Caesar clearly separated them
from the Suevi, among whom he also places the Chatti. In
Tacitus too there is nothing about the Cherusci belonging
to any High German tribe. Nor in Ptolemy, who even
includes the Angles among the Suevi. The mere fact that
the Cherusci occupied the land between the Chatti and
Hermunduri in the south and the Langobardi in the northeast is certainly not a sufficient reason for concluding that
there was close tribal kinship, although it may have been
precisely this which misled Pliny.
So far as I know, no scholar whose opinion is of any
importance has regarded the Cherusci as High Germans.
Thus there remains only the question whether they are
Ingaevones or Istaevones. The few names which have
'1
il

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  357
come down to us have Frankish characteristics, ch instead
of the h used later in Cherusci, Chariomerus and e instead
of i in Segestes, Segimerus, Segimundus. But almost all
German names which reached the Romans from the Rhine
area seem to have been transmitted to them by the Franks
in a Frankish form. Moreover, we do not know whether
the guttural aspirate of the first consonant shift, which the
Franks pronounced ch as late as the seventh century, was
in the first century perhaps pronounced ch by all west
Germans and only later weakened to h which is now common to all of them. In other ways too we cannot find any
tribal affinity between the Cherusci and Istaevones, such
as for instance the fact that the remnants of the Usipetes
and Tencteri who escaped from Caesar were taken in by
the Sugambri. The territory on the right bank of the Rhine
which was garrisoned by the Romans in Varus' time and
treated as a province likewise coincides with that inhabited by the Istaevones-Franks. Aliso and the other Roman
strongholds were situated there, whereas of the Cheruscan
country only the strip between Osning and Weser seems
to have been actually garrisoned; beyond that lived the
Chatti, Cherusci, Chauci, and Frisians, more or less unreliable allies, kept in check by fear, but who were autonomous in the management of their internal affairs and
exempt from permanent Roman garrisons. When the Romans encountered fairly strong resistance in this area,
they always temporarily halted their advance at the tribal
boundary. Caesar had done likewise in Gaul. He stopped
on the Belgian border and crossed it only when he thought
that he could be sure of what is known as the truly Celtic
part of Gaul.
Hence there is nothing for it but, in agreement with
Jacob Grimm and the commonly held view, to regard the
Cherusci and the smaller neighbouring tribes closely related to them as belonging to the Saxon group and therefore to the Ingaevones. This is also supported by the fact
that it is precisely the old Cheruscan territory where the

358 FREDERICK  ENGELS
old Saxon a has been best preserved as against the Westphalian o of the plural genitive and the weak masculine
declension. All difficulties are thereby removed. The In-
gaevones, like all other groups, receive a fairly self-contained territory, into which only the Herminonic Lango-
bardi protrude a little. Of the two large sections of this
group, the Frisian-Anglian-Jutish one occupied the coast
and at least the northern and western part of the peninsula,
the Saxon one lived in the interior of the country and perhaps even then in a part of Nordalbingien, where Ptolemy
soon afterwards mentions the Saxons for the first
time.
V. Quinta pars Peucini, Basternae contermini Dacis*
* The fifth group consists of the Peucini and Bastarnae, whose
neighbours are the Dacians.-Ed.
The little we know of these two tribes and also their
name Bastarnae mark them as kinsmen of the Goths. That
Pliny lists them as a separate group is probably due to the
fact that he received his information about them through
Greeks from the Lower Danube, whereas his knowledge
of the Gothic tribes on the Oder and Vistula was gained
on the Rhine and the North Sea, and the connection between Goths and Bastarnae therefore eluded him. Both the
Bastarnae and Peucini were German tribes who stayed
behind near the Carpathians and the estuary of the Danube; they continued to wander around for a considerable
time and helped to prepare the ground for the great empire of the Goths, which later arose and in which they
disappeared.
VI. The Hilleviones, a collective name under which
Pliny lists the Germanic Scandinavians, are mentioned by
me merely for form's sake and in order to state once more
that all ancient writers only allotted the islands (among
which they counted Sweden and Norway as well) to this
principal group, and that they excluded it from the Cimbric
Peninsula.

A  CONTRIBUTION  TO  THE  EARLY  HISTORY  OF  THE  GERMANS  359
Thus we have five principal Germanic groups and five
principal dialects.
Gothic, in the East and North-east, has e in the plural
genitive of the masculine and neuter declension and
d and e in the feminine; the weak masculine has a.
Taking into account the sound shift, the inflected verb
forms of the present (indicative) are still very close to
those of the cognate languages, especially Greek and
Latin.
The Ingaevonic in the north-west has a in the plural
genitive and also a in the weak masculine; all three persons in the plural of the present indicative have d or dh
and have shed all nasal sounds. The group is divided into
two main branches, the Saxon and the Frisian, which
merge again in the Anglo-Saxon.
The Scandinavian group, which adjoins the Frisian
branch, has a in the plural genitive and i-which is a modification of a as the whole declension shows-in the weak
masculine. The original s of the second person singular
has been changed to r in the present indicative, the first
person plural retains m, the second person dh, the other
persons are more or less deformed.
In contrast to these three groups we have two southern
ones: the Istaevonic and the Herminonic, or as they were
later called the Frankish and High German groups. Both
have o in the weak masculine, and very likely also d in
the plural genitive, although this has not been proved in
the Frankish dialect, and the plural accusative ends in as
in the oldest western (Salic) documents. The present conjugations of the two dialects, in so far as we can verify
this for the Frankish, are very similar and, like the Gothic,
close to the cognate languages. But their entire linguistic
development, beginning with the very substantial and archaic peculiarities of the oldest Frankish and ending with
the great differences which exist between the two dialects
today, prevents us from lumping the two dialects together;
just as the entire historical development of the two peo-

360  FREDERICK  ENGELS
pies themselves precludes us from placing them into the
same principal group.
The reason for considering only inflected forms and not
the interrelation of sounds in this investigation is that substantial changes occurred in the latter-at any rate in many
dialects-between the first century and the time our oldest
linguistic records were drawn up. I need only point to
the second sound shift in Germany; the alliteration in the
oldest songs of Scandinavia shows how greatly the language changed in the interval that elapsed between their
composition and their recording. The work that has still
to be done in this respect will no doubt be done by professional German philologists, here it would merely have
unnecessarily complicated this essay.