abstract in the academic discipline "History of the World"

on the topic: "History of Germany. Germanic tribes".

Plan

1. Introduction.

2. Germany. prehistoric times.

3. Germanic tribes within the Roman Empire.

4. The history of the German lands until the beginning of the X century.

5. Conclusion.

6. List of references.

1. Introduction.

The history of Germany has many blank spots, myths and dubious facts. The fact is that it never had any clearly fixed borders, nor a single economic, political and cultural center. The territory of present-day Germany was a place constantly traversed by various nomadic tribes. The ancient Germans, migrating from the northern part of Europe, gradually colonized these lands. The tribes of the Germans were not united, sometimes at enmity with each other, sometimes making alliances. The difference between them, even despite the established Germanic ethnic group, was fixed for many centuries. Advancing in southbound, they systematically ousted and assimilated the Celts. They were to play a decisive role in the fate of the Roman Empire, as well as participate in the formation of a number of European peoples and states. Therefore, in the future, the Germans will be closely connected with the British, French, Belgians, Swiss, Scandinavians, Czechs, Dutch, etc. This abstract work will be devoted to the early period in the history of Germany.

2. Germany. prehistoric times.

In prehistoric times, glaciers advanced on Central Europe four times. On the territory of present-day Germany, there were sites and migration routes of the most ancient hominids. The found remains of the Heidelberg man belong to the first interglacial warming, approximately 600 - 500 thousand years ago. Later, other finds were discovered by archaeologists: parts of the skeleton from Bilzingsleben, bone remains of a Steinheim man discovered near Stuttgart (second interglacial period), Scheningen and Lehringen wooden spears, Neanderthal remains found near Düsseldorf (third interglacial period). Neanderthal Man is now known to have evolved from Heidelberg Man. These prehistoric people lived in difficult climatic conditions and waged an intense struggle for survival. In particularly dangerous areas, on the border of glaciers, they tried to settle as close to each other as possible. Of course, it is still too early to talk about tribes, and even more so to consider these ancient people as Germans. After all, archaeologists believe that Germany was hardly inhabited until the Middle Paleolithic.

During the Upper Paleolithic period, traces of the migration of the Cro-Magnon man (an early representative modern man). The onset of the Mesolithic is distinguished by tools characteristic of this time, made of bones. The Dufensee culture is considered dominant, but the Tardenois culture is gradually beginning to penetrate. Over time, stone tools began to be used in everyday life. Near Rottenburg, several sites were discovered and explored, in which dwellings and workshops are clearly expressed. The Late Mesolithic (6000-4500 BC) brings climate change, from a continental climate to an Atlantic climate. Large forests appear in which deer, wild boars and other animals live, becoming one of the main sources of food for ancient man. In addition to animal food, there is also plant food: nuts, berries, acorns. Improved stone processing.

In the early Neolithic era, new population groups gradually penetrate into the lands of Germany from modern Austria and Hungary. Their main activity is animal husbandry and crop production. Ceramic products (linear-band ceramics) appear. With the advent of the Middle Neolithic, a culture of pricked pottery developed. The Münchshöfen culture belongs to the Late Neolithic, which includes the Copper Age. It was largely formed under the influence of cultures from neighboring Bohemia and Moravia. It is characterized by large ceramic vessels and goblets with legs. Copper products are not common, but apparently, even then it was mined in the Alps. The Münchshöfen culture was inherited by the Altheim culture, with the advent of which dwellings began to be erected in the swampy area on stilts in Bavaria. Archaeologists attribute the Hamer culture to the Late Copper Age.

In the Bronze Age, Germany is inhabited by peoples who speak Indo-European languages. This period is dominated by the culture of Corded Ware, as well as bell-shaped goblets. The era of hunters, forced to get their own food with the help of primitive weapons, is replaced by the era of shepherds. They have livestock that are moved from one pasture to another, followed by their families. It is known about a major battle that took place near the Tollense River around 1250 BC. e., which was attended by several thousand well-organized and armed warriors. In general, few historical monuments are known to us during this period. For the most part, these are burial mounds, in which there are jewelry in the form of a necklace or bracelets, dishes made of clay or copper. These grave hills suggest that a person was already thinking about the future afterlife, leaving in the graves various items.

In the process of the continuous formation of an ethnic community, which continued throughout the Bronze Age in Germany, the following ethnic groups appeared: the Celts, who inhabited from the XIII century BC. e. before the Roman invasion, most of Europe; the Venets, who settled east of the Germans (they completely disappeared from the map of Europe after the Great Migration of Peoples, which began in the 4th century AD); northwestern block - the peoples who lived in the territory of the modern Netherlands, Belgium, Northern France and Western Germany, speaking languages ​​​​other than the Celtic language or Germanic and assimilated by these ethnic groups in the future.

The additions of the Proto-Germanic ethnic and linguistic community, scientists attribute to the 1st millennium BC. e. and are associated with the Jastorf culture, which bordered on the Celtic La Tène culture. The ancient Germans lived in the north of Germany, their closest neighbors were the Celts who settled in the south. Gradually, starting from the Iron Age, the Germans forced them out or assimilated them. By the 1st century BC. e. The Germans settled in lands approximately coinciding with the territory of present-day Germany.

3. Germanic tribes within the Roman Empire.

The ancient Germans, as a single ethnic group, formed in the northern part of Europe from various tribes who were carriers of the Indo-European language. They led a settled way of life in the lands of Jutland, Scandinavia and in the region of the lower Elbe. Approximately from the II century BC. e. the Germans begin to move south, displacing the Celts. The Germanic tribes were numerous, but there was no unity among them. They can be divided into groups on a geographical basis. Batavs, Bructers, Hamavs, Hutts and Ubii lived between the Rhine, Main and Weser. Hawks, Angles, Varins, Frisians settled on the coast of the North Sea. Marcomanni, Quadi, Lombards and Semnons inhabited the lands from the Elbe to the Oder. Vandals, Burgundians and Goths lived between the Oder and the Vistula. Svions and Gauts entrenched in Scandinavia.

The ancient Germans had a tribal system. The council of warriors at a special meeting chose a leader for themselves, after which he was raised on a shield. The ruler was only the first of equals and did not have absolute power, his decrees and decisions could be criticized and challenged. During the war, the tribe is led by a military leader - the duke. The main type of occupation is cattle breeding and internecine wars. The land was collectively owned. The migration of many tribes is very difficult to trace, they often mixed up and even changed names. So the Suebi suddenly became Alemanni, Franks and Saxons, the Bavarians will begin their origins from the Bohemian Marcomanni, etc. Over time, they will have common gods and beliefs. They are not afraid of death, because they know that after they die in battle they will go to Valhalla, where Wotan awaits them.

The ancient world first learned about the Germans from the writings of the Greek navigator Pytheas from Massalia, who traveled to the shores of the North and Baltic Seas. Later, Caesar and Tacitus wrote about the life of the Germanic tribes. The strength and power of the Roman military machine for a long time frightened and inspired fear in the Germans, who were in constant search for new lands, but their clash was only a matter of time. From 58 BC e. to 455 AD e. the territories west of the Rhine and south of the Danube were under the control of the Roman Empire. Moreover, from 80 to 260 years. n. e. it included part of present-day Hesse and part of present-day Baden-Württemberg. Roman possessions on the site of modern Germany were divided into a number of provinces: Germania Superior, Germania Inferior and Rhetia. During the period of Roman domination, such cities as Trier, Cologne, Bonn, Worms and Augsburg appeared.

Rome first encountered a military confrontation with the Germans during the invasion of the Cimbri and Teutons in the 2nd century BC. e. (113-101 BC). They moved from Jutland in search of new lands. In 113 BC. e. The Cimbri defeated the Romans in the Danubian Alpine province of Norik. Later, uniting with the Teutons, they defeated the Romans at the battle of Arausion. In 102-101 BC. e. Gaius Marius defeated the barbarians, pushing them back over the Alps. The second contact took place already in the 1st century BC. e., after Gaius Julius Caesar subjugated Gaul and went to the Rhine. In 72 BC. e. Sueves under the command of Ariovistus to support the Celtic tribes in the war against the allies of the Romans, the Aedui, invade Gaul. After Ariovistus defeated them, other Germanic tribes headed to Gaul. In 58 B.C. e. Julius Caesar opposed the barbarians and, having defeated them, threw the Germans back behind the Rhine. Three years later, Caesar destroyed the Usipetes and Tencteri tribes and crossed the Rhine for the first time, after which this river became the natural northwestern frontier of the Roman Empire for four centuries.

In the second half of the 1st century BC. e. rebellions often broke out in Gaul, which were supported by the Germanic tribes. The Romans had to invade the German lands in order to conduct punitive expeditions against the Germans. The second Roman commander to cross the Rhine was Mark Agrippa, who founded a fortress on the left bank of the Rhine. In 29 BC e. Guy Carrina fought against the Suebi, helping the Gauls, and in 25 BC. e. Mark Vinicius had already tried to punish the Germans for robbing Roman merchants. In 17 or 16 BC. e., Sugambri, Usipets and Tencters, again entered the borders of Gaul. It became clear that without decisive action the Germans simply could not be pacified. Octavian Augustus begins preparations for a large anti-German campaign, which resulted in a series of operations from 12 BC to 12 AD. e. to 12 n. e., which will be headed by Drusus the Elder and Tiberius. Some tribes were exterminated, their lands devastated. Drusus advanced to the Elbe, but after he died, Tiberius took his place. However, Rome did not want to annex the poor lands, at the cost of such efforts it was decided to create a German kingdom under the protectorate of Rome, which was destined to not last long until Arminius, the Cheruscan leader, rebelled, during which the Romans suffered a crushing defeat in the Teutoburg Forest. The rebels were defeated only in 16 AD. e. after which Arminius was killed by his inner circle. As a result, only Upper and Lower Germany remained under the rule of Rome. In 69, the Batavians, led by Julius Civilis, raised an uprising. They captured a number of fortresses along the Rhine. In 70, the rebels were pacified. The new emperor Domitian finally decided not to conquer the poor and hard-to-reach lands of the Germans. He decided to protect himself from barbarian raids by the defensive line of the Rhine-Danube, which stretched for more than five hundred kilometers. This stopped the migration of unsubdued Germanic tribes for a long time and isolated them. In the second half of the 2nd century A.D. e. the barbarians crossed the Rhine-Danube border and invaded Italy. In 180, Emperor Commodus managed to make peace with them and agree on the restoration of the former borders. In the III century, German raids on the eastern provinces of the empire resumed, which escalated into the Gothic wars. Ready managed to stop and defeat Emperor Aurelian on their own lands. On the western frontier, the Romans were threatened by the Alemanni, who were only held back with the help of loyal Marcomanni. In the 270s, part of Gaul was captured by the Franks, whom the emperor Probus managed to squeeze out.

In the IV century, the appearance of the Huns in the steppes of the northern Black Sea region set in motion the Germanic tribes, pressed by the hordes of these nomads. All this century, the Romans held back pressure from the Goths, Alemanni, Franks, and others in the area of ​​the Rhine and Danube. Somewhere success accompanied the Romans, somewhere they had to cede land to the barbarians, on which they settled, such as in Thrace. But oppressed by the imperial authorities, they often raised uprisings. One of the largest happened in 395, under the leadership of the Visigothic leader Alaric, in 410 he even ravaged Rome.

Relations between the Germans and Rome consisted not only of a series of endless wars, but also of mutually beneficial agreements. Rome saw that the Germans were not united and took advantage of this. The Romans realized that it was better to have tribes loyal to themselves than to constantly keep legions in the provinces. With the help of the allied Germans, other barbarian tribes could be held back. Many Germans entered the service of the Roman troops and served in the border garrisons, for which they received land. Over time, the Germans appeared among the military elite officers. Some, before becoming leaders of their tribe, managed to succeed in the service of the Romans. One of the first who chose friendship with the Romans were the Frisians and Suevi-Nikrets. Communication was not limited only to military alliances, trade was also carried out. Many items of Roman production: wine, jewelry, silverware, were found by archaeologists in the tombs of German leaders. In turn, Roman merchants imported fish, furs, skins, and amber. Diplomacy did not lag behind, for the loyalty and humility of one or another leader, Rome paid in gold and silver. Therefore, before the empire fell under their onslaught, which by the way was never organized and spontaneous, it had close relations with the Germanic tribes.

5th century AD e. was the last in the history of the Roman Empire, which is in the process of decay and decline. And the main role in this was to be played by the Germanic tribes. The Goths were the first to rush into the empire in large numbers back in the 4th century, followed by the Franks, Burgundians, and Sueves. Rome could no longer hold many provinces, as soon as the legions left Gaul, the Vandals, Suebi, Alans, and later the Burgundians and Franks came there. In 409 they broke into Spain. On the fragments of the Roman state, the first prototypes of the German states began to appear. The Kingdom of the Suebi was located in most of the Iberian Peninsula and lasted until 585. The Visigoths in 418 formed their state in Aquitaine. The Burgundians founded their kingdom in Gaul, which fell in 437 at the hands of the Huns. The Vandals settled on the shores of North Africa, founding the kingdom of the Vandals and Alans. In 455 they temporarily captured Rome. In 451, on the Catalaunian fields in Gaul, the Germans managed to defeat Attila, the leader of the Huns. The Roman emperor became very dependent on the Germanic tribes and in the period from 460 to 470. even appointed the Germans to the post of his commanders. In 476, the Germanic Wars, who were in the service of the Roman army under the leadership of Odoacer, overthrew the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus, without putting anyone in his place, this was the end of the Western Roman Empire.

4. The history of the German lands until the beginning of the X century.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Frankish tribes became the strongest and most important among all the Germans. The Kingdom of the Franks was formed by Clovis I of the Merovingian dynasty. He, in the role of the first king of the Franks, began his conquests from Gaul. In the course of further campaigns, the lands of the Alemanni on the Rhine in 496, the possessions of the Visigoths in Aquitaine in 507 and the Franks who lived along the middle reaches of the Rhine were subjugated. The sons of Clovis defeated the leader of the Burgundians Godomaru in 534, and his state was included in the kingdom of the Franks. In 536, the leader of the Ostrogoths, Vitigis, ceded Provence to them. Further, the Franks extended their influence to the Alpine territories of the Alemanni and Thuringians between the Weser and the Elbe, as well as the possessions of the Bavarians on the Danube.

The Merovingian state was a loose political entity that did not have economic and ethnic unity. After the death of Clovis, his heirs divided the empires, occasionally joining forces for joint military campaigns. There were continuous internecine conflicts, during which power fell into the hands of senior dignitaries of the royal court - mayors. In the middle of the VIII century, Major Pepin the Short son of the famous Charles Martel, deposed the last ruler from the Merovingian family and became a monarch himself, thus founding the Carolingian dynasty. In 800, Charlemagne, son of Pepin the Short, assumed the title of Roman Emperor. The German city of Aachen became the capital of the empire. At this time, the peak of the power of the Frankish power comes. Louis the Pious became the last king of the united Frankish state. He waged endless wars that brought the country to a crisis. After his death, the empire broke up into several independent states.

In 843, the grandchildren of Kard the Great signed the Treaty of Verdun, according to which the West Frankish kingdom was assigned to Charles the Bald, the Middle Kingdom went to Lothair, and the German part passed to Louis the German. It is the East Frankish kingdom that is considered by scientists as the first full-fledged German state. It controlled the lands east of the Rhine and north of the Alps. The East Frankish state showed stable development, which led in 870 to the expansion of its borders. The eastern part of Lorraine was included in its composition, including the Netherlands, Alsace and Lorraine proper. The process of development by the Germans of the territory along the Elbe, where the Slavs had previously lived, began. Louis the German chose Regensburg as his capital. The German state consisted of five semi-independent duchies: Saxony, Bavaria, Franconia, Swabia and Thuringia (Later Lorraine was added). The king did not have absolute power and was dependent on large feudal lords. The peasants still had a number of personal and property freedoms, the process of enslavement began somewhat later. By the end of the 9th century, the principle of the inseparability of the state had developed, the throne of which was to be inherited from father to eldest son. In 911, the German line of Carolingians ceased to exist, but this did not lead to a transfer of power to the French Carolingians. The East Frankish aristocracy elected the Franconian Duke Conrad I as their king. This secured the rights of the German princes to appoint a successor, if the deceased ruler had no sons to whom the throne could pass. Conrad turned out to be a weak monarch, who practically lost influence on the duchies. After his death in 918, the Duke of Saxony Henry I the Fowler (918-936) became king. He led several successful military campaigns against the Hungarians and Danes and erected defensive fortifications that protected Saxony from the invasion of the Slavs and Hungarians. Thus, by the 10th century, all the conditions had developed for the creation of a full-fledged German statehood and the formation of its own ruling dynasty independent of the French Carolingian line.

5. Conclusion.

In this paper, we examined the early history of the Germanic lands and tribes. As you can see, the territory of modern Germany from prehistoric times was the site of ancient human settlements, on which traces of various cultures were found. In the first millennium BC. e. German tribes begin to penetrate into central Europe, from Scandinavia, gradually mastering these lands and squeezing out the Celts. At the turn of II-I centuries. BC e. The Germans first encounter the Romans. This confrontation will last for several centuries. The disunity of the Germans will play into the hands of the Romans, who will use this to their advantage. By fighting with some, they will be able to make alliances with others. The invasion of the Huns into Europe in the 4th century, which began, will set in motion the Goths, who will begin to massively move to the lands of the empire, followed by other tribes. As a result, in the 5th century, the Germans form their first kingdoms on the fragments of Ancient Rome, which will finally fall at the hands of all the same Germans who displaced last emperor. In the future, the leading Germanic tribe would be the Franks, who formed the Frankish state, subjugating other tribes and even Gaul. According to scientists, it will become, in fact, the first full-fledged German state.

6. List of references.

1. A Brief History of Germany / Schulze Hagen - Publisher: Ves Mir, 2004. - 256 p.

2. History of Germany. Volume 1. From ancient times to the creation of the German Empire / Bonwetsch Bernd - Publisher: Publisher: KDU, 2008. - 644 p.

3. History of Germany / Andre Morua - Publisher: Azbuka-Atticus, 2017. - 320 p.

4. A Brief History of Germany / James Howes - Publisher: Azbuka-Atticus, 2017. - 370 p.

5. German history. Through the thorns of two millennia / Alexander Patrushev - Publisher: "Publishing House of the International University in Moscow", 2007. - 708 p.

6. German tribes in the wars against the Roman Empire / S. Evseenkov, V. Mityukov, A. Kozlenko - Publisher: Reitar, 2007. - 60 p.

Introduction

In this work, we will touch on a very interesting and at the same time not sufficiently studied topic, like the social system and economic development of the ancient Germans. This group of peoples is of interest to us for many reasons, the main of which will be cultural development and militancy; the first was of interest to ancient authors and still attracts both professional researchers and ordinary people interested in European civilization, while the second is interesting to us from the point of view of that spirit and desire for militancy and freedom that was inherent in the Germans then and lost until now.

In that distant time, the Germans kept the whole of Europe in fear, and therefore many researchers and travelers were interested in these tribes. Some were attracted by the culture, lifestyle, mythology and way of life of these ancient tribes. Others looked in their direction solely from a selfish point of view, either as enemies or as a means of profit. But still, as will be known later from this work, the latter attracted.

The interest of Roman society in the life of the peoples who inhabited the lands bordering the empire, in particular the Germans, was associated with constant wars waged by the emperor: in the 1st century BC. the Romans managed to put under their nominal dependence the Germans who lived east of the Rhine (up to the Weser), but as a result of the uprising of the Cherusci and other Germanic tribes that destroyed three Roman legions in the battle in the Teutoburg Forest, the Rhine and Danube. The expansion of Roman possessions to the Rhine and Danube temporarily stopped the further spread of the Germans to the south and west. Under Domitian in 83 AD the left-bank regions of the Rhine, the Decumates fields were conquered.

Starting work, we should delve into the history of the very appearance of the Germanic tribes in this area. After all, other groups of peoples also lived on the territory that is considered to be originally German: they were Slavs, Finno-Ugric peoples, Balts, Laplanders, Turks; and already passed through this area large quantity peoples.

The settlement of the north of Europe by Indo-European tribes took place approximately 3000-2500 BC, as evidenced by archeological data. Prior to this, the coasts of the North and Baltic Seas were inhabited by tribes, apparently of a different ethnic group. From the mixing of Indo-European aliens with them, the tribes that gave rise to the Germans originated. Their language, separated from other Indo-European languages, was the Germanic language - the basis from which, in the process of subsequent fragmentation, new tribal languages ​​of the Germans arose.

The prehistoric period of the existence of the Germanic tribes can only be judged from the data of archeology and ethnography, as well as from some borrowings in the languages ​​of those tribes that in ancient times roamed in their neighborhood - the Finns, the Laplanders.

The Germans lived in the north of central Europe between the Elbe and the Oder and in the south of Scandinavia, including the Jutland peninsula. Archaeological data suggest that these territories were inhabited by Germanic tribes from the beginning of the Neolithic, that is, from the third millennium BC.

The first information about the ancient Germans is found in the writings of Greek and Roman authors. The earliest mention of them was made by the merchant Pytheas from Massilia (Marseilles), who lived in the second half of the 4th century. BC. Pytheas traveled by sea along the western coast of Europe, then along the southern coast of the North Sea. He mentions the tribes of the Guttons and Teutons, with whom he had to meet during his voyage. The description of Pytheas' journey has not come down to us, but it was used by later historians and geographers, Greek authors Polybius, Posidonius (II century BC), Roman historian Titus Livius (I century BC - early I century AD). They cite extracts from the writings of Pytheas, and also mention the raids of the Germanic tribes on the Hellenistic states of southeastern Europe and on southern Gaul and northern Italy at the end of the 2nd century. BC.

From the first centuries of the new era, information about the Germans becomes somewhat more detailed. The Greek historian Strabo (died in 20 BC) writes that the Germans (Suebi) roam in the forests, build huts and are engaged in cattle breeding. The Greek writer Plutarch (46 - 127 AD) describes the Germans as wild nomads who are alien to all peaceful pursuits, such as agriculture and cattle breeding; their only occupation is war.

By the end of the II century. BC. Germanic tribes of Cimbri appear near the northeastern outskirts of the Apennine Peninsula. According to the descriptions of ancient authors, they were tall, fair-haired, strong people, often dressed in skins or skins of animals, with wooden shields, armed with burnt stakes and stone-tipped arrows. They defeated the Roman troops and then moved west, linking up with the Teutons. For several years they won victories over the Roman armies until they were defeated by the Roman general Marius (102 - 101 BC).

In the future, the Germans do not stop raids on Rome and more and more threaten the Roman Empire.

At a later time, when in the middle of the 1st c. BC. Julius Caesar (100 - 44 BC) encountered Germanic tribes in Gaul, they lived in a large area of ​​central Europe; in the west, the territory occupied by the Germanic tribes reached the Rhine, in the south - to the Danube, in the east - to the Vistula, and in the north - to the North and Baltic Seas, capturing the southern part of the Scandinavian Peninsula. In his Notes on the Gallic War, Caesar describes the Germans in more detail than his predecessors. He writes about the social system, economic structure and life of the ancient Germans, and also outlines the course of military events and clashes with individual Germanic tribes. He also mentions that the Germanic tribes are superior in courage to the Gauls. As governor of Gaul in 58 - 51, Caesar made two expeditions from there against the Germans, who tried to capture the area on the left bank of the Rhine. One expedition was organized by him against the Suebi, who had crossed to the left bank of the Rhine. In the battle with the Suebi, the Romans were victorious; Ariovistus, the leader of the Suebi, fled, crossing to the right bank of the Rhine. As a result of another expedition, Caesar expelled the Germanic tribes of the Usipetes and Tencters from the north of Gaul. Talking about clashes with German troops during these expeditions, Caesar describes in detail their military tactics, methods of attack and defense. The Germans were built for the offensive in phalanxes, by tribes. They used the cover of the forest to surprise the attack. The main way to protect against enemies was to fence off forests. This natural method was known not only by the Germans, but also by other tribes who lived in wooded areas.

A reliable source of information about the ancient Germans are the writings of Pliny the Elder (23-79). Pliny spent many years in the Roman provinces of Germania Inferior and Upper Germania while in military service. In his Natural History and in other works that have come down to us far from completely, Pliny described not only military operations, but also the physical and geographical features of a large territory occupied by Germanic tribes, listed and was the first to give a classification of Germanic tribes, based mainly on , from my own experience.

The most complete information about the ancient Germans is given by Cornelius Tacitus (c. 55 - c. 120). In his work "Germany" he tells about the way of life, way of life, customs and beliefs of the Germans; in the "Histories" and "Annals" he sets out the details of the Roman-German military clashes. Tacitus was one of the greatest Roman historians. He himself had never been to Germany and used the information that he, as a Roman senator, could receive from generals, from secret and official reports, from travelers and participants in military campaigns; he also widely used information about the Germans in the writings of his predecessors and, first of all, in the writings of Pliny the Elder.

The era of Tacitus, as well as subsequent centuries, is filled with military clashes between the Romans and the Germans. Numerous attempts by the Roman generals to subdue the Germans failed. To prevent their advance into the territories conquered by the Romans from the Celts, the emperor Hadrian (who ruled in 117-138) erects powerful defensive structures along the Rhine and the upper reaches of the Danube, on the border between Roman and German possessions. Numerous military camps-settlements become strongholds of the Romans in this territory; subsequently, cities arose in their place, in the modern names of which echoes of their former history are stored.

In the second half of the 2nd century, after a short lull, the Germans again intensify offensive operations. In 167, the Marcomanni, in alliance with other Germanic tribes, break through the fortifications on the Danube and occupy Roman territory in northern Italy. Only in 180 did the Romans manage to push them back to the northern bank of the Danube. Before early III in. relatively peaceful relations are established between the Germans and the Romans, which contributed to significant changes in the economic and social life of the Germans.

1. Social system and material culture of the ancient Germans

In this part of our study, we will deal with the social structure of the ancient Germans. This is perhaps the most difficult problem in our work, since, unlike, for example, military affairs, which can be judged “from the outside”, it is possible to understand the social system only by joining this society, or being a part of it or having close contact with him. But to understand society, relationships in it is impossible without ideas about material culture.

The Germans, like the Gauls, did not know political unity. They broke up into tribes, each of which occupied on average an area with an area equal to approximately 100 square meters. miles. The border parts of the region were not inhabited for fear of an enemy invasion. Therefore, even from the most remote villages it was possible to reach the place of the people's assembly, located in the center of the region, within a one-day march.

Since a very large part of the country was covered with forests and swamps, and therefore its inhabitants were only to a very small extent engaged in agriculture, living mainly on milk, cheese and meat, the average population density could not exceed 250 people per 1 square meter. a mile Thus, the tribe numbered approximately 25,000 people, and larger tribes could reach 35,000 or even 40,000 people. This gives 6000-10000 men, i.e. as much as in the most extreme case, taking into account 1000-2000 absentees, a human voice can capture and as much as can form an integral and capable of discussing issues of the people's assembly. This general popular assembly possessed the highest sovereign power.

The tribes broke up into clans, or hundreds. These associations are called clans, since they were not formed arbitrarily, but united people on the basis of a natural blood connection and unity of origin. There were no cities to which part of the population growth could be transferred, forming new connections there. Each remained in the union within which he was born. Clans were also called hundreds, because each of them had about 100 families or warriors. However, in practice this figure was often more, since the Germans used the word "hundred, hundred" in the sense of a generally large rounded number. The digital, quantitative name was preserved along with the patriarchal one, since the actual relationship between members of the clan was very distant. The genera could not have arisen as a result of the fact that the families originally living in the neighborhood formed large genera over the centuries. Rather, it should be considered that the overgrown clans had to be divided into several parts in order to feed themselves in the place where they lived. Thus, a certain size, a certain value, a certain amount, equal to approximately 100, were the forming element of the association along with the origin. Both gave their name to this union. Genus and hundred are identical.

What can we say about such an important part of social life and material culture as the dwelling and life of the ancient Germans. In his essay on the Germans, Tacitus constantly compares their way of life and customs with those of the Romans. The description of the German settlements was no exception: “It is well known that the peoples of Germany do not live in cities and do not even tolerate their dwellings adjoining close to each other. The Germans settle, each separately and on their own, where someone likes a spring, a clearing or an oak forest. They do not arrange their villages in the same way as we do, and do not get crowded with buildings crowded and clinging to one another, but each leaves a vast area around his house, either to protect himself from fire if a neighbor catches fire, or because of the inability to build “It can be concluded that the Germans did not even create urban-type settlements, not to mention cities in the Roman or modern sense of the word. Apparently, the German settlements of that period were villages of the farm type, for which long distance between buildings and a piece of land next to the house.

The members of the clan, who at the same time were neighbors in the village, formed during the war one common group, one horde. Therefore, even now in the north they call the military corps "thorp", and in Switzerland they say "village" - instead of "detachment", "dorfen" - instead of "convene a meeting", and the current German word "troop", "detachment" (Truppe) comes from the same root. Transferred by the Franks to the Romanesque peoples, and from them returned to Germany, it still retains the memory of the social system of our ancestors, dating back to such ancient times that no written source testifies. The horde that went to war together and that settled together was one and the same horde. Therefore, the names of the settlement, village and soldier, military unit were formed from the same word.

Thus, the ancient Germanic community is: a village - according to the type of settlement, a district - according to the place of settlement, a hundred - in terms of size and genus - in terms of its internal connections. Land and subsoil do not constitute private property, but belong to the totality of this strictly closed community. According to a later expression, it forms a regional partnership.

At the head of each community was an elected official, who was called "alderman" (elder), or "hunno", just as the community was called either "clan" or "hundred".

The Aldermans, or Hunnies, are the chiefs and leaders of the communities in times of peace, and the leaders of the men in times of war. But they live with the people and among the people. Socially, they are just as free members of the community as everyone else. Their authority is not so high as to keep the peace in case of major strife or serious crimes. Their position is not so high, and their horizons are not so broad as to guide politics. In each tribe there were one or more noble families, who stood high above the free members of the community, who, towering above the mass of the population, formed a special estate and traced their origin from the gods. From their midst, the general people's assembly elected several "princes", "first", "principes", who were supposed to travel around the districts ("through villages and villages") to hold court, negotiate with foreign states, jointly discuss public affairs, involving the Hunni in this discussion as well, in order to then make their proposals at public meetings. During the war, one of these princes, as a duke, was invested with the supreme command.

In princely families - thanks to their participation in military booty, tribute, gifts, prisoners of war who were serving their corvee, and profitable marriages with wealthy families - concentrated large, from the point of view of the Germans, wealth6. These riches made it possible for the princes to surround themselves with a retinue consisting of free people, the bravest warriors who swore allegiance to their master for life and death and who lived with him as his companions, providing him "in time of peace, splendor, and in time war defense." And where the prince spoke, his retinue strengthened the authority and significance of his words.

Of course, there was no law that categorically and positively demanded that only the offspring of one of the noble families be elected to the princes. But in fact, these families were so far removed from the mass of the population that it was not so easy for a person from the people to cross this line and enter the circle of noble families. And why on earth would the community choose a prince from the crowd who would not rise in any way above any other? Nevertheless, it often happened that those Huns in whose families this position was preserved for several generations and who, thanks to this, achieved special honor, as well as well-being, entered the circle of princes. This is how the process of formation of princely families went. And the natural advantage that the sons of distinguished fathers had in the election of officials gradually created the habit of choosing in the place of the deceased - subject to appropriate qualifications - his son. And the advantages associated with the position elevated such a family so much above the general level of the mass that it became more and more difficult for the rest of them to compete with it. If we now feel a weaker effect of this socio-psychological process in social life, this is due to the fact that other forces are exerting significant opposition to such a natural formation of estates. But there is no doubt that in ancient Germany a hereditary estate was gradually formed from the initially elected bureaucracy. In conquered Britain, kings appeared from the ancient princes, and erli (earls) from the eldermen. But in the era we are talking about now, this process has not yet ended. Although the princely estate has already separated from the mass of the population, having formed a class, the Hunni still belong to the mass of the population and in general have not yet separated themselves on the continent as a separate estate.

The assembly of the German princes and the Huns was called by the Romans the Senate of the Germanic Tribes. The sons of the most noble families were clothed already in their early youth with princely dignity and were involved in the meetings of the senate. In other cases, the retinue was a school for those young men who tried to escape from the circle of free members of the community, striving for a higher position.

The rule of princes passes into royal power when there is only one prince, or when one of them removes or subjugates the others. The basis and essence of the state system does not change from this, since the highest and decisive authority still, as before, remains general meeting warriors. Princely and royal power still fundamentally differ so little from each other that the Romans sometimes use the title of king even where there are not even one, but two princes. And royal power, just like princely power, is not transferred by mere inheritance from one holder to another, but the people bestow this dignity on the one who has the greatest right to this through elections, or calling his name screams. An heir who is physically or mentally incapable of doing this could and would have been bypassed. But although, therefore, royal and princely power primarily differed from each other only in quantitative terms, nevertheless, of course, the circumstance was of tremendous importance, whether the authorities and leadership were in the hands of one or several. And in this, of course, there was a very big difference. In the presence of royal power, the possibility of contradiction was completely eliminated, the possibility of proposing to the people's assembly various plans and make suggestions. The sovereign power of the popular assembly is more and more reduced to mere exclamations. But this exclamation of approval remains necessary for the king. The German retained even under the king the pride and spirit of independence of a free man. "They were kings," says Tacitus, "as far as the Germans allowed themselves to be ruled."

Communication between the district-community and the state was fairly loose. It could happen that the district, changing the place of its settlement and moving farther and farther, could gradually separate from the state to which it previously belonged. Attendance at general public meetings became more and more difficult and rare. Interests have changed. The district was only in a kind of allied relationship with the state and formed over time, when the clan increased quantitatively, its own separate state. The former Xiongnu family turned into a princely family. Or it happened that in the distribution of judicial districts among the various princes, the princes organized their districts as separate units, which they firmly held in their hands, gradually forming a kingdom, and then separated from the state. There are no direct indications of this in the sources, but this is reflected in the uncertainty of the terminology that has been preserved. The Cherusci and the Hutts, who are tribes in the sense of the state, own such wide territories that we should rather see them as a union of states. With regard to many tribal names, it may be doubted whether they are simple district names. And again, the word "district" (pagus) can often be applied not to a hundred, but to a princely district, which covered several hundred. We find the strongest internal ties in a hundred, in a clan that led a semi-communist way of life within itself and which did not disintegrate so easily under the influence of internal or external causes.

We next turn to the question of German population density. This task is very difficult, since there were no specific studies, let alone statistical data on this. Nevertheless, let's try to understand this issue.

We must do justice to the excellent powers of observation of the famous writers of antiquity, while rejecting, however, their conclusion about the considerable population density and the presence of large masses of the people, about which the Romans are so fond of talking.

We know the geography of ancient Germany well enough to establish quite accurately that in the area between the Rhine, the North Sea, the Elbe and the line drawn from the Main at Hanau to the confluence of the Saal with the Elbe, there lived approximately 23 tribes, namely: two tribes of Frisians , Caninefats, Batavs, Hamavs, Amsivars, Angrivars, Tubants, two tribes of Khavks, Usipets, Tenkhters, two tribes of Brukters, Marses, Khasuarii, Dulgibins, Lombards, Cherusci, Hatti, Hattuarii, Innerions, Intvergi, Calukons. This whole area covers about 2300 km 2, so that on average each tribe accounted for approximately 100 km 2. The supreme power of each of these tribes belonged to the general popular assembly or assembly of warriors. This was the case in Athens and Rome, however, the industrial population of these civilized states attended only a very small part of the people's meetings. As for the Germans, we can really admit that very often almost all the soldiers were at the meeting. That is why the states were comparatively small, since if the remotest villages were more than a day away from the central point, genuine general meetings would no longer be possible. This requirement corresponds to an area equal to approximately 100 square meters. miles. Similarly, a meeting can be conducted more or less in order only with a maximum number of 6000-8000 people. If this figure was the maximum, then the average figure was a figure a little over 5000, which gives 25,000 people per tribe, or 250 per square meter. mile (4-5 per 1 km 2). It should be noted that this is primarily the maximum figure, the upper limit. But this figure cannot be greatly reduced for other reasons - for reasons of a military nature. The military activity of the ancient Germans against the Roman world power and its battle-tested legions was so significant that it suggests a certain population. And the figure of 5,000 warriors for each tribe seems so insignificant in comparison with this activity that, perhaps, no one will be inclined to reduce this figure still.

Thus - in spite of the complete absence of positive data that we could use - we are still in a position to establish positive figures with reasonable certainty. The conditions are so simple, and economic, military, geographical and political factors are so closely intertwined that we can now, using firmly established methods of scientific research, fill in the gaps in the information that has come down to us and better determine the number of Germans than the Romans, who had them. before their eyes and communicated with them daily.

Next, we turn to the question of supreme power among the Germans. The fact that the German officials fell into two different groups follows both from the nature of things, the political organization and the dismemberment of the tribe, and directly from the direct indications of the sources.

Caesar tells that "princes and elders" of the Usipets and Tenchters came to him. Speaking of the assassins, he mentions not only their princes, but also their senate, and tells that the senate of the Nervii, who, although they were not Germans, were very close to them in their social and state system, consisted of 600 members. Although we have a somewhat exaggerated figure here, it is nevertheless clear that the Romans could apply the name "senate" only to a fairly large deliberative assembly. It could not be a meeting of princes alone, it was a larger meeting. Consequently, the Germans had, in addition to the princes, another type of public authority.

Speaking about the land use of the Germans, Caesar not only mentions the princes, but also indicates that "officials and princes" distributed arable land. The addition of the "office of the person" cannot be considered a simple pleonasm: such an understanding would be contrary to the compressed style of Caesar. It would be very strange if Caesar, for the sake of verbosity alone, added additional words precisely to the very simple concept of “princes”.

These two categories of officials are not as clear in Tacitus as they are in Caesar. It was with regard to the concept of “hundreds” that Tacitus made a fatal mistake, which later caused scientists a lot of trouble. But even from Tacitus we can still deduce with certainty the same fact. If the Germans had only one category of officials, then this category would in any case have to be very numerous. But we constantly read that in every tribe the individual families were so superior to the mass of the population that others could not compare with them, and that these individual families are definitely called "royal line". Modern scholars have unanimously established that the ancient Germans did not have a petty nobility. The nobility (nobilitas), which is constantly referred to, was the princely nobility. These families elevated their clan to the gods, and "they took kings from the nobility." The Cherusci beg for their nephew Arminius from Emperor Claudius as the only survivor of the royal family. In the northern states there was no other nobility besides royal families.

Such a sharp differentiation between noble families and the people would be impossible if there were a noble family for every hundred. To explain this fact, however, it is not enough to admit that among these numerous families of chiefs, some have achieved special honor. If the whole matter were reduced to only such a difference in rank, then other families would undoubtedly come forward to take the place of the extinct families. And then the name "royal family" would be assigned not only to a few genera, but, on the contrary, their number would no longer be so small. Of course, the difference was not absolute, and there was no impassable abyss. The old Xiongnu family could sometimes penetrate into the environment of the princes. But still, this difference was not only of rank, but also purely specific: the princely families formed the nobility, in which the significance of the position strongly receded into the background, and the Hunni belonged to the free members of the community, and their rank largely depended on the position, which all could also acquire a certain degree of hereditary character. So, what Tacitus tells about the German princely families indicates that their number was very limited, and the limited number of this number, in turn, indicates that below the princes there was another category of lower officials.

And from a military point of view, it was necessary that a large military unit break up into smaller units, with a number of people not more than 200-300 people, who were to be under the command of special commanders. The German contingent, which consisted of 5,000 soldiers, was supposed to have at least 20, and maybe even 50 lower commanders. It is absolutely impossible that the number of princes (principes) should be so great.

The study of economic life leads to the same conclusion. Each village had to have its own headman. This was due to the needs of agrarian communism and the diverse measures that were necessary for pasturing and protecting the herds. The social life of the village every moment required the presence of a manager and could not wait for the arrival and orders of the prince, who lived at a distance of several miles. Although we must admit that the villages were quite extensive, yet the village chiefs were very insignificant officials. Families whose origin was considered royal were to have more significant authority, and the number of these families is much smaller. Thus, princes and village chiefs are essentially different officials.

In continuation of our work, I would like to mention such a phenomenon in the life of Germany as the change of settlements and arable land. Caesar points out that the Germans annually changed both arable land and settlement sites. However, this fact, transmitted in such a general form, I consider disputable, since the annual change of the place of settlement does not find any grounds for itself. Even if it was possible to easily move the hut with household belongings, supplies and livestock, nevertheless, the restoration of the entire economy in a new place was associated with certain difficulties. And it was especially difficult to dig cellars with the help of those few and imperfect shovels that the Germans could have at that time. Therefore, I have no doubt that the "annual" change of settlement sites, which the Gauls and Germans told Caesar about, is either a strong exaggeration or a misunderstanding.

As for Tacitus, he nowhere directly speaks of a change in the places of settlement, but only points to a change in arable land. This difference was tried to be explained by a higher degree of economic development. But I fundamentally disagree with this. True, it is very possible and probable that already in the time of Tacitus and even Caesar, the Germans lived firmly and settled in many villages, namely where there were fertile and solid land. In such places, it was enough to change the arable land and fallow land around the village every year. But the inhabitants of those villages, which were located in areas covered for the most part by forests and swamps, where the soil was less fertile, could no longer be content with this. They were compelled to make full and consecutive use of all individual fields suitable for cultivation, all relevant parts of a vast territory, and therefore had to change the place of settlement from time to time for this purpose. As Thudichum has already rightly noted, Tacitus's words do not absolutely exclude the fact of such changes in the places of settlement, and if they do not directly indicate this, then nevertheless I am almost convinced that this is precisely what Tacitus thought in this case. His words read: “Whole villages alternately occupy such a number of fields as would correspond to the number of workers, and then these fields are distributed among the inhabitants depending on their social status and wealth. Extensive margin sizes make the section easier. Arable lands are changed every year, and there is a surplus of fields. Of particular interest in these words is an indication of a double shift. First, it is said that the fields (agri) are occupied or seized alternately, and then that the arable land (arvi) changes every year. If it were only that the village alternately assigned a more or less significant part of the territory to arable land, and that within this arable land again arable land and fallow changed annually, then this description would be too detailed and would not correspond to the usual brevity of Tacitus' style. This fact would be, so to speak, too meager for so many words. The situation would be quite different if the Roman writer put into these words at the same time the idea that the community, which alternately occupied entire territories and then divided these lands among its members, along with the change of fields, also changed the places of settlements. . Tacitus does not directly and precisely tell us about this. But just this circumstance is easily explained by the extreme conciseness of his style, and, of course, by no means can we assume that this phenomenon is observed in all villages. The inhabitants of the villages, which had small but fertile lands, did not need to change the places of their settlements.

Therefore, I have no doubt that Tacitus, making a certain distinction between the fact that “villages occupy fields” and that “arable land changes annually”, does not at all mean to depict a new stage in the development of German economic life, but rather does a tacit correction to Caesar's description. If we take into account that a German village with a population of 750 people had a territorial district equal to 3 sq. miles, then this indication of Tacitus immediately acquires a completely clear meaning for us. With the then existing primitive method of cultivating the land, it was absolutely necessary to annually work with a plow (or hoe) a new arable land. And if the supply of arable land in the vicinity of the village was exhausted, then it was easier to move the entire village to another part of the district than to cultivate and protect fields that lie far from old village. After a number of years, and perhaps even after numerous migrations, the inhabitants again returned to their old place and again had the opportunity to use their former cellars.

And what can be said about the size of the villages. Gregory of Tours, according to Sulpicius Alexander, tells in the 9th chapter of Book II that the Roman army in 388, during its campaign in the country of the Franks, discovered "huge villages" among them.

The identity of the village and the clan is not subject to any doubt, and it has been positively proved that the clans were quite large.

In accordance with this, Kikebusch, using prehistory data, established the population of the Germanic settlement in the first two centuries AD. at least 800 people. The Dartsau cemetery, containing about 4,000 burial urns, existed for 200 years. This gives an average of approximately 20 deaths per year and indicates a population of at least 800 people.

The stories about the change of arable land and places of settlements that have come down to us, perhaps with some exaggeration, still contain a grain of truth. This change of all arable land, and even the change of places of settlement, becomes meaningful only in large villages with a large territorial district. Small villages with little land have the opportunity to change only arable land for fallow. Large villages do not have enough arable land in their vicinity for this purpose and are therefore forced to seek land in remote parts of their district, and this in turn entails the transfer of the whole village to other places.

Each village was required to have a headman. Common ownership of arable land, common pasture and protection of herds, frequent threat of enemy invasions and danger from wild animals - all this certainly required the presence of a local authority. You can’t wait for the leader to arrive from another place when you need to immediately organize protection from a pack of wolves or hunt wolves, when you need to repel an enemy attack and hide families and livestock from the enemy, or to protect a flooded river with a dam, or put out a fire, sort out disputes and petty lawsuits. , to announce the beginning of plowing and reaping, which, under communal land tenure, took place simultaneously. If all this happens as it should, and if, therefore, the village had its headman, then this headman - since the village was at the same time a clan - was a clan master, an elder of the clan. And this one, in turn, as we have already seen above, coincided with the Xiongnu. Therefore, the village was a hundred, i.e. numbered 100 or more warriors, and therefore was not so small.

Smaller villages had the advantage of being easier to get food from. However, large villages, although they necessitated a more frequent change of place of settlement, were nevertheless most convenient for the Germans in the constant dangers in which they lived. They made it possible to counter the threat from wild animals or even wilder people with a strong body of warriors, always ready to meet danger face to face. If we find small villages among other barbarian peoples, for example, later among the Slavs, this circumstance cannot weaken the significance of the evidence and arguments we have cited above. The Slavs do not belong to the Germans, and some analogies do not yet indicate the complete identity of the remaining conditions; moreover, the evidence concerning the Slavs belongs to such a later time that they can already describe a different stage of development. However, the German large village later - in connection with the growth of the population and the greater intensity of tillage, when the Germans had already ceased to change the places of their settlements - broke up into groups of small villages.

In his narrative about the Germans, Cornelius Tacitus gave a short description of the German land and the climatic conditions of Germany: “Although the country differs in appearance in some places, nevertheless, on the whole, it terrifies and disgusts with its forests and swamps; it is wettest on the side where it faces Gaul, and most exposed to the winds where it faces Noricum and Pannonia; in general, quite fertile, it is unsuitable for fruit trees. ”From these words, we can conclude that most of the territory of Germany at the beginning of our era was covered with dense forests and abounded in swamps, however, at the same time, land was occupied by sufficient space for agriculture. The remark about the unsuitability of the land for fruit trees is also important. Further, Tacitus directly said that the Germans "do not plant fruit trees." This is reflected, for example, in the division of the year by the Germans into three parts, which is also highlighted in Tacitus's "Germany": "And for this reason they divide the year less fractionally than we do: they distinguish winter, and spring, and summer, and they have their own names, but the name of autumn and its fruits are unknown to them. The name of autumn among the Germans really appeared later, with the development of horticulture and viticulture, since under the autumn fruits Tacitus meant the fruits of fruit trees and grapes.

The saying of Tacitus about the Germans is well-known: "They annually change arable land, they always have a surplus of fields." Most scholars agree that this indicates a custom of redistribution land plots within the community. However, in these words, some scholars saw evidence of the existence of a shifting system of land use among the Germans, in which arable land had to be systematically abandoned so that the soil, depleted by extensive cultivation, could restore its fertility. Perhaps the words "et superest ager" meant something else: the author had in mind the vastness of unoccupied settlement and uncultivated spaces in Germany. Evidence of this can be the easily noticeable attitude of Cornelius Tacitus to the Germans as to people who treated agriculture with a share of indifference: gardens." And sometimes Tacitus directly accused the Germans of contempt for work: “And it is much more difficult to convince them to plow the field and wait for a whole year of harvest than to persuade them to fight the enemy and suffer wounds; moreover, according to their ideas, then to get what can be acquired with blood is laziness and cowardice. In addition, apparently, adults and men capable of bearing arms did not work on the land at all: “the most brave and militant of them, without bearing any duties, entrust the care of housing, household and arable land to women, the elderly and the weakest of the household, while they themselves wallow in inactivity. However, speaking about the way of life of the Aestians, Tacitus noted that "They grow bread and other fruits of the earth more diligently than is customary among the Germans with their inherent negligence."

Slavery developed in the German society of that time, although it did not yet play a big role in the economy, and most of the work lay on the shoulders of the master's family members: “They use slaves, however, not in the same way as we do: they do not keep them with them and do not distribute duties between them: each of them independently manages on his site and in his family. The master taxes him as if he were a column, a fixed measure of grain, or sheep and pigs, or clothes, and only this consists of the duties sent by the slave. The rest of the work in the household of the master is carried out by his wife and children.

Regarding the crops grown by the Germans, Tacitus is unequivocal: "They expect only the harvest of bread from the earth." However, now there is evidence that in addition to barley, wheat, oats and rye, the Germans also sowed lentils, peas, beans, leeks, flax, hemp and dyeing woad, or blueberry.

Cattle breeding occupied a huge place in the German economy. According to Tacitus about Germany, “there are a great many small cattle” and “the Germans rejoice at the abundance of their herds, and they are their only and most beloved asset.” However, he noted that "for the most part, he is small, and the bulls are usually deprived of the proud decoration that usually crowns their heads."

Evidence that cattle really played an important role in the economy of the Germans of that time can be the fact that in case of a slight violation of any norms of customary law, the fine was paid precisely by cattle: “for lighter offenses, the punishment is commensurate with their importance: a certain number of horses are recovered from those convicted and sheep." Cattle also played an important role in the wedding ceremony: the groom had to present the bride with bulls and a horse as a gift.

The Germans used horses not only for household purposes, but also for military purposes - Tacitus spoke with admiration about the power of the tencters’ cavalry: “Endowed with all the qualities appropriate for valiant warriors, the tencters are also skillful and dashing riders, and the tencters’ cavalry is not inferior in glory to the infantry of the Hutts” . However, describing the fens, Tacitus with disgust notes the general low level of their development, in particular, pointing out the absence of horses in them.

As for the presence of appropriating branches of the economy among the Germans, Tacitus also mentioned in his work that "when they do not wage wars, they hunt a lot." However, no further details about this follow. Tacitus does not mention fishing at all, although he often focused on the fact that many Germans lived along the banks of rivers.

Tacitus singled out the Aestii tribe in particular, narrating that “they rummage both the sea and on the coast, and on the shallows they are the only ones of all who collect amber, which they themselves call eye. But the question of its nature and how it arises, they, being barbarians, did not ask and know nothing about it; for for a long time he lay with everything that the sea throws up, until the passion for luxury gave him a name. They themselves do not use it in any way; they collect it in its natural form, deliver it to our merchants in the same raw form and, to their amazement, receive a price for it. However, in this case, Tacitus was wrong: even in the Stone Age, long before establishing relations with the Romans, the Aestii collected amber and made all kinds of jewelry from it.

Thus, the economic activity of the Germans was a combination of agriculture, possibly shifting, with settled cattle breeding. However, agricultural activity did not play such a big role and was not as prestigious as cattle breeding. Agriculture was mainly the lot of women, children and the elderly, while strong men were engaged in livestock, which played a significant role not only in the economic system, but also in the regulation of interpersonal relations in German society. I would especially like to note that the Germans widely used horses in their economy. A small role in economic activity was played by slaves, whose situation can hardly be described as difficult. Sometimes the economy was directly influenced by natural conditions, as, for example, among the Germanic tribe of the Aestii.

2. The economic structure of the ancient Germans

In this chapter, we will study the economic activities of the ancient Germanic tribes. The economy, and the economy in general, are closely connected with the social life of the tribes. As we know from the training course, the economy is the economic activity of society, as well as the totality of relations that develop in the system of production, distribution, exchange and consumption.

Characteristics of the economic system of the ancient Germans in the representation

historians of different schools and directions was extremely contradictory: from the primitive nomadic life to the developed arable farming. Caesar, having caught the Suebi during their migration, quite definitely says: the Suebi were attracted by the fertile arable lands of Gaul; the words of the leader of the Suebi Ariovistus, which he cites, that his people had not had a roof over their heads for fourteen years (De bell. Gall., I, 36), rather testifies to a violation of the habitual way of life of the Germans, which under normal conditions, apparently, was settled. Indeed, having settled in Gaul, the Suebi took away a third of the lands from its inhabitants, then claimed the second third. Caesar’s words that the Germans “are not zealous in cultivating the land” cannot be understood in such a way that agriculture is completely alien to them - simply the culture of agriculture in Germany was inferior to the culture of agriculture in Italy, Gaul and other parts of the Roman state.

The textbook saying of Caesar about the Suebi: “Their land is not divided and is not privately owned, and they cannot stay more than a year

in the same place for cultivating the land, ”a number of researchers were inclined to interpret in such a way that the Roman commander encountered this tribe during the period of his conquest of foreign territory and that the military - resettlement movement huge masses of the population created an exceptional situation, which necessarily led to a significant "distortion" of their traditional agricultural way of life. No less widely known are the words of Tacitus: "They change the arable land every year and there is still a field." These words are seen as evidence of the existence of a shifting system of land use among the Germans, in which arable land had to be systematically abandoned so that the soil, depleted by extensive cultivation, could restore its fertility. The descriptions of the nature of Germany by ancient authors also served as an argument against the theory of the nomadic life of the Germans. If the country represented either an endless virgin forest, or was swamped (Germ., 5), then there was simply no room for nomadic pastoralism. True, a closer reading of Tacitus' narratives about the wars of the Roman generals in Germany shows that the forests were used by its inhabitants not for settlement, but as shelters, where they hid their belongings and their families when the enemy approached, as well as for ambushes, from where they suddenly attacked on the Roman legions, not accustomed to war in such conditions. The Germans settled in glades, on the edge of the forest, near streams and rivers (Germ., 16), and not in the forest thicket.

This deformation was expressed in the fact that the war gave rise to "state socialism" among the Suebi - their rejection of private ownership of land. Consequently, the territory of Germany at the beginning of our era was not completely covered with primeval forest, and Tacitus himself, drawing a very stylized picture of its nature, immediately admits that the country is “fertile for crops”, although “it is not suitable for growing fruit trees” (Germ ., 5).

Archeology of settlements, inventory and cartography of finds of things and burials, paleobotanical data, soil studies showed that settlements on the territory of ancient Germany were distributed extremely unevenly, isolated enclaves separated by more or less extensive "voids". These uninhabited spaces in that era were entirely forested. The landscape of Central Europe in the first centuries of our era was not forest-steppe, but

predominantly forest. The fields near the settlements separated from each other were small - human habitats were surrounded by forest, although it was already partly sparse or completely reduced by industrial activity. In general, it must be emphasized that the old idea of ​​the hostility of the ancient forest to man, whose economic life allegedly could unfold exclusively outside the forests, has not received support in modern science. On the contrary, this economic life found its essential premises and conditions in the forests. The opinion about the negative role of the forest in the life of the Germans was dictated by the trust of historians in the statement of Tacitus that they supposedly had little iron. From this it followed that they were powerless before nature and could not exert an active influence either on the forests surrounding them or on the soil. However, Tacitus was mistaken in this case. Archaeological finds testify to the prevalence of iron mining among the Germans, which provided them with the tools necessary for clearing forests and plowing the soil, as well as weapons.

With the clearing of forests for arable land, old settlements were often abandoned for reasons that are difficult to ascertain. Perhaps the movement of the population to new places was caused by climatic changes (around the beginning of a new era in Central and Northern Europe there was some cooling), but another explanation is not ruled out: the search for better soils. At the same time, it is necessary not to lose sight of the social reasons for the inhabitants to leave their settlements - wars, invasions, internal troubles. So, the end of the settlement in the Hodde area (Western Jutland) was marked by a fire. Almost all the villages discovered by archaeologists on the islands of Öland and Gotland died from a fire during the era of the Great Migration. These fires are possibly the result of political events unknown to us. The study of traces of fields found in Jutland, which were cultivated in antiquity, showed that these fields were located mainly in places cleared from under the forest. In many areas of settlement of the Germanic peoples, a light plow or coxa was used - a tool that did not turn over a layer of soil (apparently, such an arable tool is also depicted on the rock carvings of Scandinavia of the Bronze Age: it is driven by a team of oxen. In the northern parts of the continent in the last centuries before the beginning of our era a heavy plow with a moldboard and a plowshare appears, such a plow was an essential condition for lifting clay soils, and its introduction into agriculture is regarded in the scientific literature as a revolutionary innovation, indicating an important step towards the intensification of arable farming. Climate change (a decrease in the average annual temperature) has led to the need to build more permanent dwellings. In the houses of this period (they are better studied in the northern areas of the settlement of the Germanic peoples, in Friesland, Lower Germany, in Norway, on the island of Gotland and to a lesser extent in Central Europe, along with housing premises, there were stalls for keeping domestic animals in the winter. These so-called long houses (from 10 to 30 m long by 4-7 m wide) belonged to a firmly settled population.While in the pre-Roman Iron Age, the population occupied light soils for cultivation, starting from the last centuries BC, it began to move on heavier soils.This transition was made possible by the spread of iron tools and the associated progress in tillage, forest clearing, and construction.A typical "original" form of German settlements, according to the unanimous opinion of modern specialists, were farms consisting of several houses , or individual estates. They were small "cores" that gradually grew. lok Esinge near Groningen. On the site of the original courtyard, a small village has grown here.

On the territory of Jutland, traces of fields were found, which date back to the period starting from the middle of the 1st millennium BC. and up to the 4th c. AD Such fields have been cultivated for several generations. These lands were eventually abandoned due to leaching of the soil, which led to

diseases and deaths of livestock.

The distribution of settlement finds on the territory occupied by the Germanic peoples is extremely uneven. As a rule, these finds were found in the northern part of the German area, which is explained by favorable conditions for the preservation of material remains in the coastal regions of Lower Germany and the Netherlands, as well as in Jutland and on the islands Baltic Sea- in the southern regions of Germany, such conditions were absent. It arose on a low artificial embankment erected by the inhabitants in order to avoid the threat of flooding - such "residential hills" were poured and restored from generation to generation in the coastal zone of Friesland and Lower Germany, which attracted the population with meadows that favored the breeding of livestock. Under the numerous layers of earth and manure, which were compressed over the centuries, the remains of wooden dwellings and various objects are well preserved. The "long houses" in Esing had both rooms with a hearth intended for housing and stalls for livestock. At the next stage, the settlement increased to about fourteen large courtyards, built radially around a free area. This settlement existed since the IV-III centuries. BC. until the end of the Empire. The layout of the settlement gives grounds to believe that its inhabitants formed a kind of community, whose tasks, apparently, included the construction and strengthening of the "residential hill". In many ways, a similar picture was given by the excavations of the village of Feddersen Virde, located on the territory between the mouths of the Weser and the Elbe, north of the present Bremerhaven (Lower Saxony). This settlement existed from the 1st century. BC. until the 5th century AD And here the same “long houses” are open, which are typical for the German settlements of the Iron Age. As in Oesing, in Feddersen Wierde the houses were arranged radially. The settlement grew from a small farm to about 25 estates of various sizes and, apparently, unequal material well-being. It is assumed that during the period of greatest expansion, the village was inhabited by 200 to 250 inhabitants. Along with agriculture and cattle breeding, handicrafts played a prominent role among the occupations of a part of the village population. Other settlements studied by archaeologists were not built according to any plan - cases of radial planning, like Esinge and Feddersen Wierde, are explained, perhaps, by specific natural conditions and were the so-called cumulus villages. However, few large villages have been found. Common forms of settlements were, as already mentioned, a small farm or a separate yard. Unlike villages, isolated farms had a different “life span” and continuity in time: one or two centuries after their foundation, such a single settlement could disappear, but some time later a new farm arose in the same place.

Noteworthy are the words of Tacitus that the Germans arrange villages “not in our way” (that is, not in the way that was customary among the Romans) and “cannot stand their dwellings touching each other; they settle at a distance from each other and randomly, where they liked a stream, or a clearing, or a forest. The Romans, who were accustomed to living in close quarters and saw it as a kind of norm, must have been struck by the tendency of the barbarians to live in individual, scattered homesteads, a trend confirmed by archaeological research. These data are consistent with the indications of historical linguistics. In Germanic dialects, the word "dorf" ("dorp, baurp, thorp") meant both a group settlement and a separate estate; what was essential was not this opposition, but the opposition "fenced" - "unfenced". Experts believe that the concept of "group settlement" developed from the concept of "estate". However, the radially built agrarian settlement of Eketorp on the island of Öland was apparently surrounded by a wall for defense reasons. The existence of "circular" settlements on the territory of Norway, some researchers explain the needs of the cult.

Archeology confirms the assumption that the characteristic direction of the development of settlements was the expansion of the original separate estate or farm into a village. Together with the settlements, they acquired constancy and economic forms. This is evidenced by the study of traces of early Iron Age fields found in Jutland, Holland, inner Germany, the British Isles, the islands of Gotland and Öland, Sweden and Norway. They are usually called "ancient fields" - oldtidsagre, fornakrar (or digevoldingsagre - "fields fenced with ramparts") or "fields of the Celtic type. They are associated with settlements whose inhabitants cultivated them from generation to generation. The remains of pre-Roman and Roman Iron Age fields on the territory of Jutland have been studied in particular detail. These fields were plots in the form of irregular rectangles. The margins were either wide and short or long and narrow; judging by the preserved traces of soil cultivation, the former were plowed up and down, as it is supposed, with a primitive plow, which had not yet turned over the earth layer, but cut and crumbled it, while the latter were plowed in one direction, and here a plow with a mouldboard was used. It is possible that both varieties of the plow were used at the same time. Each section of the field was separated from the neighboring ones by an unplowed boundary - stones collected from the field were piled on these boundaries, and the natural movement of the soil along the slopes and the dust deposits that settled on weeds at the boundaries from year to year created low, wide boundaries separating one plot. from another. The boundaries were large enough so that the farmer could drive along with a plow and a team of draft animals to his plot without damaging the neighboring allotments. There is no doubt that these allotments were in long-term use. The area of ​​the studied "ancient fields" varies from 2 to 100 hectares, but there are fields reaching an area of ​​up to 500 hectares; the area of ​​individual plots in the fields - from 200 to 7000 square meters. m. The inequality of their sizes and the lack of a single standard for the site indicate, according to the famous Danish archaeologist G. Hatt, who is the main merit in the study of "ancient fields", the absence of redistribution of land. In a number of cases, it can be established that new boundaries arose inside the enclosed space, so that the plot turned out to be divided into two or more (up to seven) more or less equal shares.

Individual fenced fields adjoined homesteads in the "cumulus village" on Gotland (excavations at Vallhagar); on the island of Öland (near the coast

Southern Sweden) fields belonging to individual farms were fenced off from the plots of neighboring estates with stone embankments and border paths. These settlements with fields date back to the era of the Great Migration. Similar fields have also been studied in mountainous Norway. The location of the plots and the isolated nature of their cultivation give researchers reason to believe that in the Iron Age agricultural settlements studied so far, there was no striping or any other communal routines that would find their expression in the system of fields. The discovery of traces of such "ancient fields" leaves no doubt that agriculture among the peoples of Central and Northern Europe dates back to the pre-Roman period.

However, in cases where there was a shortage of arable land (as on the North Frisian island of Sylt), small farms that separated from the "big families" had to reunite. Consequently, residence was sedentary and more intense than previously thought. It remained so in the first half of the 1st millennium AD.

From crops barley, oats, wheat, rye were bred. It was in the light of these discoveries, made possible as a result of the improvement of archaeological technology, that the groundlessness of the statements of ancient authors regarding the characteristics of agriculture of the northern barbarians became finally clear. From now on, the researcher of the agrarian system of the ancient Germans stands on the firm ground of established and repeatedly attested facts, and does not depend on the unclear and scattered statements of narrative monuments, the tendentiousness and bias of which cannot be eliminated. In addition, if the messages of Caesar and Tacitus in general could only concern the Rhine regions of Germany, where the Romans penetrated, then, as already mentioned, traces of the "ancient fields" were found throughout the territory of the settlement of Germanic tribes - from Scandinavia to continental Germany; their dating is pre-Roman and Roman Iron Age.

Similar fields were cultivated in Celtic Britain. Hutt draws other, more far-reaching conclusions from the data he has collected. He proceeds from the fact of long-term cultivation of the same land areas and the absence of indications of communal routines and redistribution of arable land in the settlements that he studied. Since land use was clearly individual in nature, and the new boundaries within the plots testify, in his opinion, to divisions of ownership between heirs, then there was private ownership of land. Meanwhile, in the same territory in the following era - in medieval Danish rural communities - forced crop rotation was used, collective agricultural work was carried out and the inhabitants resorted to remeasurements and redistribution of plots. It is impossible, in the light of new discoveries, to regard these communal agrarian practices as "original" and to trace back to deep antiquity - they are the product of medieval development itself. We can agree with the last conclusion. In Denmark, development supposedly went from the individual to the collective, and not vice versa. The thesis about private ownership of land among the Germanic peoples at the turn of the BC. established itself in the latest Western historiography. Therefore, it is necessary to dwell on this issue. Historians who studied the problem of the agrarian system of the Germans in the period preceding these discoveries, even attaching great importance to arable farming, nevertheless tended to think about its extensive character and assumed a shifting (or fallow) system associated with a frequent change of arable land. Back in 1931, at the initial stage of research, for Jutland alone, “ancient fields” were recorded. However, traces of the "ancient fields" have not been found anywhere for the time after the Great Migration of Peoples. The conclusions of other researchers regarding ancient agricultural settlements, field systems and farming methods are extremely important. However, the question of whether the duration of the cultivation of the land and the presence of boundaries between the plots testifies to the existence of individual ownership of the land is unlawful to decide with the help of only those means that the archaeologist has at his disposal. Social relations, especially property relations, are projected onto the archaeological material in a very one-sided and incomplete way, and the plans of the ancient Germanic fields do not yet reveal the secrets of the social structure of their owners. The absence of redistribution and a system of leveling plots in itself hardly gives us an answer to the question: what were the real rights to the fields of their farmers? After all, it is quite possible to admit - and a similar assumption was expressed. That such a system of land use, as is drawn in the study of the "ancient fields" of the Germans, was associated with the property of large families. The "long houses" of the early Iron Age are considered by a number of archaeologists precisely as the dwellings of large families, house communities. But the ownership of land by members of a large family is extremely far from individual in nature. The study of Scandinavian material relating to the early Middle Ages showed that even the division of the economy between small families united in a house community did not lead to the separation of plots into their private property. To resolve the issue of real rights to land from their farmers, it is necessary to involve completely different sources than archeological data. Unfortunately, there are no such sources for the early Iron Age, and retrospective conclusions drawn from later legal records would be too risky. However, a more general question arises: what was the attitude of the man of the era we are studying to cultivated land? For there is no doubt that, in the final analysis, the right of ownership reflected both the practical attitude of the tiller of the land to the subject of the application of his labor, and certain comprehensive attitudes, the “model of the world” that existed in his mind. Archaeological material testifies that the inhabitants of Central and Northern Europe were by no means inclined to frequently change their places of residence and lands under cultivation (the impression of the ease with which they abandoned arable land is created only when reading Caesar and Tacitus), - for many generations they inhabited all the same farms and villages, cultivating their fields enclosed by ramparts. They had to leave their habitual places only as a result of natural or social disasters: due to the depletion of arable land or pastures, the inability to feed the increased population, or under the pressure of warlike neighbors. The norm was a close, strong connection with the land - a source of livelihood. The German, like any other person of archaic society, was directly included in natural rhythms, constituted a single whole with nature, and saw in the land on which he lived and worked his organic continuation, just as he was organically connected with his family. - tribal team. It must be assumed that the relation to reality of a member of barbarian society was comparatively weakly divided, and it would be premature to speak of the right to property here. Law was only one of the aspects of a single undifferentiated worldview and behavior - an aspect that highlights modern analytical thought, but which in the real life of ancient people was closely and directly connected with their cosmology, beliefs, myth. That the inhabitants of an ancient settlement near Grantoft Fede (western Jutland) changed their location over time is the exception rather than the rule; in addition, the duration of habitation in the houses of this settlement is about a century. Linguistics is able to help us to some extent restore the idea of ​​the Germanic peoples about the world and about the place of man in it. In the Germanic languages, the world inhabited by people was designated as the "middle court": midjungar Is ( Gothic), middangeard (OE), mi ðgary r (Old Norse), mittingart, mittilgart (Other - Upper German). Gar ðr, gart, geard - "a place surrounded by a fence." The world of people was perceived as well-organized, i.e. a fenced, protected "place in the middle", and the fact that this term is found in all Germanic languages ​​\u200b\u200bis evidence of the antiquity of such a concept. Another component of the cosmology and mythology of the Germans associated with it was utgar ðr - "what is outside the fence", and this outer space was perceived as the seat of evil and hostile forces to people, as the realm of monsters and giants. Opposition mi ðgarðr -utg aryr gave the defining coordinates of the whole picture of the world, culture resisted chaos. The term heimr (Old Norse; cf.: Goth haims, OE ham, OE Frisian ham, hem, OE Saxon, hem, OE High German heim), occurring again However, mainly in a mythological context, it meant both “peace”, “homeland”, and “house”, “dwelling”, “fenced estate”. Thus, the world, cultivated and humanized, was modeled after the house and the estate.

Another term that cannot fail to attract the attention of a historian who analyzes the relationship of the Germans to the land is oð al. Again, there are correspondences to this Old Norse term in Gothic (haim - obli), Old English (about ð e;, ea ð ele), Old High German (uodal, uodil), Old Frisian (ethel), Old Saxon (o il). Odal, as it turns out from a study of medieval Norwegian and Icelandic monuments, is a hereditary family property, land, in fact, inalienable outside the collective of relatives. But "odal" was called not only arable land, which was in the permanent and stable possession of the family group - this was also the name of the "homeland". Odal is a “patrimony”, “fatherland” both in the narrow and in the broad sense. A man saw his fatherland where his father and ancestors lived and where he himself lived and worked; patrimonium was perceived as patria, and the microcosm of his homestead was identified with the inhabited world as a whole. But then it turns out that the concept of “odal” was related not only to the land on which the family lives, but also to its owners themselves: the term “odal” was akin to a group of concepts that expressed innate qualities in the Germanic languages: nobility, generosity, nobility of the face (a ðal, aeðel, ethel, adal, eðel, adel, aeðelingr, oðlingr). Moreover, nobleness and nobility here should be understood not in the spirit of medieval aristocracy, inherent or attributed only to representatives of the social elite, but as descent from free ancestors, among whom there are no slaves or freedmen, therefore, as full rights, full freedom, personal independence. Referring to a long and glorious pedigree, the German proved at the same time both his nobility and his rights to the land, since in fact one was inextricably linked with the other. Odal was nothing more than the generosity of a person, transferred to land ownership and rooted in it. A Alborinn ("well-born", "noble") was a synonym for o Alborinn (“a person born with the right to inherit and own ancestral land”). Descent from free and noble ancestors "ennobled" the land owned by their descendant, and, conversely, the possession of such land could increase the social status of the owner. According to Scandinavian mythology, the world of the aesir gods was also a fenced estate - asgarar. Land for a German is not just an object of possession; he was connected with her by many close ties, including not least psychological, emotional. This is evidenced by the cult of fertility, to which the Germans attached great importance, and the worship of their "mother earth", and the magical rituals that they resorted to when occupying land spaces. The fact that we learn about many aspects of their relationship to the land from later sources can hardly cast doubt on the fact that this was also the case at the beginning of the 1st millennium AD. and even earlier. The main thing is, apparently, that the ancient man who cultivated the land did not see and could not see in it a soulless object that can be manipulated instrumentally; between the human group and the piece of soil cultivated by it, there was no abstract relationship "subject - object". Man was included in nature and was in constant interaction with it; this was also the case in the Middle Ages, and this statement is all the more true in relation to ancient German times. But the connection of the farmer with his plot did not contradict the high mobility of the population of Central Europe throughout this era. In the end, the movements of human groups and entire tribes and tribal unions were dictated to a large extent by the need to take possession of arable land, i.e. the same relation of man to the earth, as to its natural continuation. Therefore, the recognition of the fact of the permanent possession of a plot of arable land, fenced with a boundary and a rampart and cultivated from generation to generation by members of the same family - a fact that emerges thanks to new archaeological discoveries - does not yet give any grounds for asserting that the Germans were at the turn of a new era were "private landowners". The use of the concept of “private property” in this case can only indicate a terminological confusion or an abuse of this concept. The man of the archaic era, regardless of whether he was a member of the community and obeyed its agrarian regulations or ran a household completely independently, was not a "private" owner. There was a very close organic connection between him and his plot of land: he owned the land, but the land also “owned” him; the possession of an allotment must be understood here as the incomplete isolation of a person and his team from the “people - nature” system. When discussing the problem of the attitude of the ancient Germans to the land they inhabited and cultivated, it is apparently impossible to confine oneself to the traditional historiography dilemma "private property - communal property". The Mark community among the Germanic barbarians was found by those scholars who relied on the words of Roman authors and considered it possible to trace back to hoary antiquity the communal routines discovered during the classical and late Middle Ages. In this regard, let us turn again to the all-German policy mentioned above.

The human sacrifices reported by Tacitus (Germ., 40) and which are attested by many archaeological finds are apparently also connected with the fertility cult. The goddess Nerthus, who, according to Tacitus, was worshiped by a number of tribes and which he interprets as Terra mater, apparently corresponded to Njord, the god of fertility, known from Scandinavian mythology.

During the settlement of Iceland, a person, occupying a certain territory, had to go around it with a torch and light fires on its borders.

The inhabitants of the villages discovered by archaeologists, no doubt, carried out some kind of collective work: at least the construction and strengthening of "residential hills" in the flooded areas of the North Sea coast. On the possibility of community between individual farms in the Jutland village of Hodde. As we have seen, a dwelling surrounded by a fence forms, according to these ideas, mi ðgarðr, " middle courtyard”, a kind of center of the universe; around him stretches Utgard, the hostile world of chaos; it is simultaneously located somewhere far away, in uninhabited mountains and wastelands, and begins right there behind the fence of the estate. Opposition mi ðgarðr - utgarðr fully corresponds to the opposition of the concepts innan garðs - utangaris in medieval Scandinavian legal monuments; these are two types of possessions: “land located within the fence”, and “land outside the fence” - land allocated from

community fund. Thus, the cosmological model of the world was at the same time a real social model: the center of both was the household yard, house, estate - with the only essential difference that in the actual life of the earth utangar Is, not being fenced, nevertheless they did not surrender to the forces of Chaos - they were used, they were essential for the peasant economy; however, the householder's rights to them are limited, and in case of violation of the latter, he received a lower compensation than for violation of his rights to lands located innangar Is. Meanwhile in the world-simulating consciousness of the earth utangar Is belong to Utgard. How to explain it? The picture of the world that emerges when studying the data of German linguistics and mythology, undoubtedly, developed in a very distant era, and the community was not reflected in it; "reference points" in the mythological picture of the world were a separate courtyard and house. This does not mean that the community at that stage did not exist at all, but, apparently, the importance of the community among the Germanic peoples increased after their mythological consciousness developed a certain cosmological structure.

It is quite possible that the ancient Germans had large family groups, patronymics, close and branched relations of kinship and properties - integral structural units of the tribal system. At that stage of development, when the first news about the Germans appeared, it was natural for a person to seek help and support from his relatives, and he was hardly able to live outside such organically formed groups. However, the brand community is a formation of a different nature than the clan or extended family, and it is by no means necessarily associated with them. If there was some reality behind the gentes and cognationes of the Germans mentioned by Caesar, then most likely these are consanguineous associations. Any reading of Tacitus's words: "agri pro numero cultorum ab universis vicinis (or: in vices, or: invices, invicem) occupantur, quos mox inter se secundum dignationem partiuntur" has always been and is doomed to continue to remain guesswork. To build on such a shaky foundation a picture of the ancient Germanic rural community is extremely risky.

Statements about the presence of a rural community among the Germans are based, in addition to the interpretation of the words of Caesar and Tacitus, on retrospective conclusions from material that belongs to the subsequent era. However, the transfer of medieval data on agriculture and settlements to antiquity is an operation hardly justified. First of all, one should not lose sight of the break in the history of German settlements noted above, associated with the movement of peoples in the 4th-6th centuries. After this era, there were both a change in the location of settlements and changes in the land use system. For the most part, the data on communal routines in the medieval mark go back to the period no earlier than the 12th-13th centuries; in relation to the initial period of the Middle Ages, such data are extremely scarce and controversial. It is impossible to put an equal sign between the Ancient community among the Germans and the medieval "classical" brand. This is clear from the few indications of communal ties between the inhabitants of the ancient German villages, which nevertheless exist. The radial structure of settlements such as Feddersen Virde is evidence that the population placed their houses and built roads based on a general plan. The struggle with the sea and the erection of "residential hills" on which villages were built also required the combined efforts of householders. It is likely that the grazing of cattle in the meadows was regulated by communal rules and that neighborhood relations led to some organization of the villagers. However, we have no information about the system of forced field orders (Flurzwang) in these settlements. The device of the "ancient fields", the traces of which have been studied in the vast territory of the settlement of the ancient Germans, did not imply such a routine. There are no grounds for the hypothesis of the existence of "supreme ownership" of the community in arable land. When discussing the problem of the ancient Germanic community, one more circumstance must be taken into account. The question of the mutual rights of neighbors to land and the delimitation of these rights, their settlement arose when the population increased and the villagers became crowded, and there were not enough new lands. Meanwhile, starting from the II-III centuries. AD and until the end of the Great Migration, there was a decline in the population of Europe, caused, in particular, by epidemics. Since a considerable part of the settlements in Germany were separate estates or farms, there was hardly any need for collective regulation of land use. The human unions in which members of the barbarian society united were, on the one hand, narrower than villages (large and small families, kindred groups), and on the other, wider (“hundreds”, “districts”, tribes, unions of tribes). Just as the German himself was far from becoming a peasant, the social groups in which he was located were not yet built on an agricultural, economic basis in general - they united relatives, family members, warriors, participants in gatherings, and not direct producers, while while in medieval society the peasants will be united precisely by the rural communities that regulate the production agrarian order. On the whole, it must be admitted that the structure of the community among the ancient Germans is little known to us. Hence, those extremes that are often found in historiography: one, expressed in the complete denial of the community in the era under study (meanwhile, the inhabitants of the settlements studied by archaeologists, undoubtedly, were united by certain forms of community); the other extreme is the modeling of the ancient German community on the model of the medieval rural community-mark, generated by the conditions of later social and agrarian development. Perhaps a more correct approach to the problem of the German community would have been given the essential fact that in the economy of the inhabitants of non-Romanized Europe, with a strong sedentary population, cattle breeding still retained the leading role. Not the use of arable land, but the grazing of cattle in meadows, pastures and forests, apparently, should primarily affect the interests of neighbors and give rise to communal routines.

As Tacitus reports, Germany “cattle is plentiful, but for the most part small in stature; even working cattle are not imposing, nor can they boast of horns. The Germans like to have a lot of cattle: this is the only and most pleasant kind of wealth for them. This observation of the Romans who visited Germany is consistent with what is found in the remains of ancient settlements of the early Iron Age: an abundance of bones of domestic animals, indicating that the cattle were indeed undersized. As already noted, in the "long houses", in which the Germans mostly lived, along with the living quarters, there were stalls for livestock. Based on the size of these premises, it is believed that a large number of animals could be kept in the stalls, sometimes up to three or more tens of cattle.

Cattle served the barbarians as a means of payment. Even in a later period, vira and other compensations could be paid by large and small livestock, and the very word fehu among the Germans meant not only “cattle”, but also “property”, “possession”, “money”. Hunting, judging by archaeological finds, was not an essential occupation of the Germans, and the percentage of bones of wild animals is very insignificant in the total mass of remains of animal bones in the studied settlements. Obviously, the population satisfied their needs through agricultural activities. However, a study of the contents of the stomachs of corpses found in swamps (these people were apparently drowned as punishment for crimes or sacrificed) indicates that sometimes the population had to eat, in addition to cultivated plants, also weeds and wild plants. As already mentioned, the ancient authors, not sufficiently aware of the life of the population in Germania libera, argued that the country was poor in iron, which gave a primitive character to the picture of the economy of the Germans as a whole. Undoubtedly, the Germans lagged behind the Celts and Romans in the scale and technique of iron production. Nevertheless, archaeological studies have radically altered the picture drawn by Tacitus Iron was mined everywhere in Central and Northern Europe in both the pre-Roman and Roman periods.

Iron ore was easily accessible due to its surface occurrence, in which it was quite possible to extract it in an open way. But underground iron mining already existed, and ancient adits and mines were found, as well as iron-smelting furnaces. German iron tools and other metal products, according to modern experts, were of good quality. Judging by the surviving "burials of blacksmiths", their social position in society was high.

If in the early Roman period the extraction and processing of iron remained, perhaps, still a rural occupation, then metallurgy is more and more clearly distinguished into an independent trade. Its centers are found in Schleswig-Holstein and Poland. Blacksmithing has become an important integral component of the German economy. Iron in the form of bars served as a trade item. But the processing of iron was also carried out in the villages. A study of the settlement of Fedderzen Virde showed that workshops were concentrated near the largest estate, where metal products were processed; it is possible that they were not only used to meet local needs, but were also sold to the outside. The words of Tacitus, that the Germans had few weapons made of iron and they rarely used swords and long spears, were also not confirmed in the light of archaeological finds. Swords were found in the rich burials of the nobility. Although spears and shields in the burials predominate over swords, still from 1/4 to 1/2 of all burials with weapons contain swords or their remains. In some areas up to

% of men were buried with iron weapons.

Also questioned is Tacitus' statement that armor and metal helmets are almost never found among the Germans. In addition to iron products necessary for the economy and war, German craftsmen were able to make jewelry from precious metals, vessels, household utensils, build boats and ships, wagons; textile industry took on various forms. The lively trade of Rome with the Germans served for the latter as a source of many products that they themselves did not possess: jewelry, vessels, jewelry, clothes, wine (they obtained Roman weapons in battle). Rome received from the Germans amber collected on the coast of the Baltic Sea, bull skins, cattle, mill wheels made of basalt, slaves (Tacitus and Ammianus Marcellinus mention the slave trade among the Germans). However, in addition to income from trade in Rome

German taxes and indemnities were received. The busiest exchange took place on the border between the empire and Germania libera, where Roman camps and urban settlements were located. However, Roman merchants also penetrated deep into Germany. Tacitus notes that food exchange flourished in the interior of the country, while Germans living near the border with the empire used (Roman) money (Germ., 5). This message is confirmed by archaeological finds: while Roman items have been found throughout the territory of the settlement of the Germanic tribes, right up to Scandinavia, Roman coins are found mainly in a relatively narrow strip along the border of the empire. In more remote areas (Scandinavia, Northern Germany), along with individual coins, there are pieces of silver items cut, possibly for use in exchange. The level of economic development was not uniform in different parts of Central and Northern Europe in the first centuries AD. Differences are especially noticeable between the interior regions of Germany and the areas adjacent to the "limes". Rhenish Germany, with its Roman cities and fortifications, paved roads and other elements of ancient civilization, had a significant impact on the tribes living nearby. In the settlements created by the Romans, the Germans also lived, adopting a new way of life for them. Here, their upper stratum learned Latin as the language of official use, and adopted new customs and religious cults. Here they got acquainted with viticulture and horticulture, with more advanced types of crafts and with monetary trade. Here they were included in social relations that had very little in common with the order within "free Germany".

Conclusion

culture tradition ancient german

Describing the culture of the ancient Germans, let us once again emphasize its historical value: it was on this “barbarian”, semi-primitive, archaic culture that many peoples grew up. Western Europe. The peoples of modern Germany, Great Britain, and Scandinavia owe their culture to the amazing fusion that the interaction of ancient Latin culture and ancient German culture brought.

Despite the fact that the ancient Germans were at a rather low level of development compared to their powerful neighbor, the Roman Empire (which, by the way, was defeated by these “barbarians”), and was just moving from the tribal system to the class system, the spiritual culture of the ancient Germanic tribes is of interest due to the richness of forms.

First of all, the religion of the ancient Germans, despite a number of archaic forms (first of all, totemism, human sacrifice) provides rich material for studying the common Indo-Aryan roots in the religious beliefs of Europe and Asia, for drawing mythological parallels. Of course, in this field, future researchers will have hard work, since there are a lot of "blank spots" in this issue. In addition, there are many questions about the representativeness of sources. Therefore, this problem needs further development.

Much can also be emphasized from material culture and economics. Trade with the Germans gave their neighbors food, furs, weapons and, paradoxically, slaves. Indeed, since some of the Germans were valiant warriors, often making predatory raids, from which they brought with them both selected material values, and took a large number of people into slavery. This is what their neighbors did.

Finally, the artistic culture of the ancient Germans also awaits further research, primarily archaeological. According to the currently available data, we can judge the high level of artistic craft, how skillfully and original the ancient Germans borrowed elements of the Roman and Black Sea style, etc. However, it is also undoubted that any question is fraught with limitless possibilities for its further study; that is why the author of this term paper considers this work far from the last step in the study of the rich and ancient spiritual culture of the ancient Germans.

Bibliography

.Strabo. GEOGRAPHY in 17 books // M.: Ladomir, 1994. // Translation, article and comments by G.A. Stratanovsky under the general editorship of prof. S.L. Utchenko // Translation editor prof. O.O. Kruger./M.: "Ladomir", 1994.p. 772;

.Notes of Julius Caesar and his successors on the Gallic War, on the Civil War, on the Alexandrian War, on the African War // Translation and comments by Acad. MM. Pokrovsky // Research Center "Ladomir" - "Science", M.1993.560 p.;

Cornelius Tacitus. Works in two volumes. Volume one. Annals. Small works // Iz-vo "Nauka", L.1970/634 p.;

G. Delbrück "History of military art within the framework political history» vol. II "Science" "Juventa" St. Petersburg, 1994 Translation from German and notes by prof. IN AND. Avdieva. Published according to the publication: Delbrück G. "History of military art within the framework of political history." in 7 vols. M., Mrs. military Publishing house, 1936-1939, 564 pp.

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Mysterious people in the darkness of the past: the Germanic tribes. The Romans called them savages, far from culture. Did they know about anything but battles and wars? What did they believe? What were they afraid of? How did you coexist with? What did they leave behind and what do we know about them? Who were the Germans?

Battle of Ariovistus with Caesar

October 1935. Archaeologists explore a burial mound on a Danish island. The hill dates back to the 1st century BC, the time of the Germanic tribes.

Archaeologists make a sensational discovery: it is tomb of a German priestess. This is evidenced by the found plant seeds, fossilized sea urchins and willow twigs - all this presumably had magical meaning.

Who the deceased was is unknown, because the biographies of German women of that era have not reached us. But Roman historians already then mentioned the great influence that the priestesses had on the Germans.

Today, ancient sources and modern science allow us to tell about the life of a German priestess. Let's call her Bazin, and here's her story.

“The threat of war with the Romans hung over our tribe. I asked: should we fight? What will the signs say? The twigs of the sacred willow will tell me the future. The fate of my tribe is in the hands of the gods. What will they tell us? And here's a word of caution: no fighting while Luna dies. Let the weapon rest until the new moon."

But in 58 B.C. Roman general Caesar invaded the lands of the Suebi. Mindful of the warning of the gods, Ariovistus was ready to negotiate with the Romans, but Caesar demanded that he leave his lands.

Drusus set up Roman milestones where no one knew of the existence of Rome at all. And here is what the Roman writes: "Drusus conquered most of the Germans and shed a lot of their blood."

Like Drusus, Tiberius is also adopted son of the Emperor, and he had to fulfill the will of his father Augustus: finally conquer all the Germans.

Tiberius chose a different strategy than his brother: he decided not to achieve the goal by war. Tiberius followed the path of diplomacy: The Germans had to voluntarily recognize the dominance of Rome. The resistance of the barbarians had to be broken by the cultural superiority of the Romans.

On the Rhine, on the site of today, the beginning of this was laid. According to the Roman model, a city arose - a Germanic tribe that had been an ally of Rome for decades. Oppidum Ubiorum became one of the most luxurious imperial metropolises: theaters, temples and baths were supposed to convince the Germans of advantages of Roman civilization.

Not much has survived from the founding of Cologne. The earliest archaeological evidence is the famous monument to the killers, the foundation of a stone tower built in 4 AD.

Having erected a tower, the Romans surrounded it with hewn stone - this was the Roman way of building. The city has become emperor's gift his German subjects. Apparently, the stone tower was part of the city wall of the Oppidum Ubiorum.

Rome had big plans for the city of the Ubii: the first main temple of the new province of Germany arose here. Once a year, all the conquered tribes of the Germans were to gather here to renew their alliance with Rome.

A spacious temple built by the Romans towered over the city. German priest led ceremonies on the altar Macaw Germany. It is symbolic that the altar was turned to the east, to Germany - to where Rome wanted to gain dominance.

Not only killers, but also tribes from the right bank of the Rhine gradually submitted to the Roman emperor. Presumably in 8 BC. gave up and Like the rest of the tribes that lived between the Rhine and Elbe, they could either hide in the forest or choose between a hopeless fight and subjugation. The leaders of the Cherusci decided on peaceful coexistence with Rome. Here is what the Roman author Paterculus writes: “Tiberius, as a victor, passed through all corners of Germany, without losing a single person from his devoted troops. He completely conquered the Germans making them a tribute-paying province."

Rome was interested in making peace. Tiberius had to protect the newly acquired areas and seek a reliable alliance with the vanquished. This policy of appeasement proved successful and long-term.

But cherusci paid a high price for peace and security: they had to give up their freedom, follow the orders of Rome, pay tribute and send their sons to serve in the Roman army.

"And in the end the Romans demanded the leader's son as a special guarantee of our devotion. The Romans named it . As a hostage, he had to go with the legionnaires to Rome. The leader gave in, he had no choice. The fate of our tribe was at stake. He was responsible for our freedom."

Children as hostages were commonplace in antiquity. They had to prove the loyalty of their tribes far from their homeland. In Rome, as a rule, hostages were treated well. Arminius was brought up in the capital of the empire as a Roman.

“Faithful comrades-in-arms accompanied the son of the leader to a foreign land. Will they ever see the land of the Cherusci again?"

After 20 years Arminius returned to his homeland, and a dramatic turn took place in the history of the Germans ...

THE WORLD OF ANCIENT GERMANS

Scheme of the settlement of the Germanic tribes

The Germans, a motley mixture of different tribes, got their name, the meaning of which remains unclear, thanks to the Romans, who, in turn, probably took it from the language of the Celts. The Germans came to Europe from Central Asia and in the second millennium BC. e. settled between the Vistula and the Elbe, in Scandinavia, Jutland and Lower Saxony. They almost did not engage in agriculture, but mainly carried out military campaigns and predatory raids, during which they gradually settled in more and more vast territories. At the end of the II century. BC e. Cimbri and Teutons appeared on the borders of the Roman Empire. The Romans at first mistook them for the Gauls, that is, the Celts, but quickly noticed that they were dealing with a new and hitherto unknown people. Half a century later, Caesar in his Notes definitely distinguished between the Celts and the Germans.

But if the majority of the Celts were basically assimilated by the Greco-Roman civilization, then the situation was different with the Germans. When the ancient Roman historian Tacitus, after many unsuccessful campaigns of the Roman legions across the Rhine, wrote his famous book about the Germans, he depicted an alien barbarian world, from which, however, the charm of simplicity of manners and high morality, in contrast to the licentiousness of the Romans, emanated. However, Tacitus, who condemned the vices of the Romans, most likely exaggerated the virtues of the Germans, arguing that they were “a special people that retained their original purity and only looked like themselves.”

According to Tacitus, the Germans lived in small settlements scattered among dense forests, swamps and sandy wastelands overgrown with heather. Their society was built on a hierarchical principle and consisted of the nobility, free commoners, semi-free litas and non-free schalks. Only the last two groups were engaged in agriculture, which included previously captured captives and their offspring. Elected kings began to appear among some of the larger tribes, claiming that their ancestors were descended from the gods. Other tribes were led by military leaders or dukes, whose power did not claim to be of divine origin.

The Germans revered the gods, ideas about which underwent changes. Often, as a result of tribal clashes, the winners appropriated the gods of the defeated tribe, as if capturing them. Germanic gods surprisingly resembled mere mortals. They were not alien to such feelings as anger, rage, they were distinguished by a warlike spirit, experienced passions and even died. Chief among them is the warrior god Wotan, who reigns in the afterlife Valhalla, where the soldiers who fell in battle end up. Among other gods, the lord of thunder and lightning Thor (Donar) with his terrible hammer, the cunning and treacherous god of fire Loki, the beautiful god of spring and fertility Baldr stood out. They all live in a world of blood and fire, rage and revenge, fury and horror, in a world where an inevitable fate rules everyone. The gods of the Germans weaved conspiracies and committed crimes, suffered defeats and won victories. The gloomy poetry of the first song of the ancient German epic Edda depicts an invasion of dark forces, in the struggle against which gods and people perish. Everything disappears in an all-devouring great fire. But then the renewed world will be reborn, the bright Balder will return from the kingdom of the dead, a time of calm and abundance will come.

The picture created by the Germans themselves reflects the difficulties they faced on the way of their Christianization. It took a powerful external and internal upheaval before the concept of a loving and compassionate God, the idea of ​​mercy and forgiveness replaced the former world of fierce struggle, in which only honor or shame was known.

German mythology tells us about the people who lived in a harsh and poor environment. It was a world ruled by spirits and hidden forces, where evil and good dwarfs and giants lived, but there were no muses and sylphs. However, the role of women both in society and in religion among the Germans was much more significant than in the ancient world. For the Germans, something prophetic and sacred lurked in a woman. It is impossible to imagine the militant and domineering German Brunhilde locked up in a gynaecea. Only supernatural powers and Siegfried's magic belt could pacify her.

The Germans entered the stage of history when they left their northern settlements and began to move south. They not only displaced or assimilated the local Celtic-Illyrian population, but also adopted its higher culture. By the time of Caesar's reign, the Germans in the west had reached the banks of the Rhine, in the south they had broken through the Thuringian mountains and descended into Bohemia, in the east they had stopped in front of the impenetrable swamps between the Vistula and the Pripyat.

What reasons prompted the Germans to migrate? This question can only be answered hypothetically. First of all, it is necessary to take into account climate changes associated with a sharp cooling in southern Scandinavia. A decrease in temperature by an average of one or two degrees over the course of one century leads to such a change in flora and fauna that the life of people, already difficult, becomes unbearable. Subjective motives also played their role - the thirst for conquest, the extraction of wealth and warlike inclinations, to which religious ideas were also mixed.

The advance of the Germans to the south was not straightforward and steady. Between the time when the Cimbri and Teutons appeared on the Roman border, and the era during which the ancestors of the German people - the tribes of the Franks, Saxons, Thuringians, Swabians, Bavarians - settled their territories, seven centuries of wars and conflicts lay. Most of the tribes disappeared into the darkness of the past. Usually these were temporary associations for military campaigns, which arose as quickly as they disintegrated. Since there were not enough means of subsistence, the nomadic tribes and groups remained small. The largest ethnic groups of the era of resettlement usually numbered several tens of thousands of soldiers, and together with women, children, the elderly and slaves, their number ranged from 100-120 thousand people.

The Cherusci tribe, who settled in Westphalia, was widely known. One of their leaders was the famous Herman (the Latinized form of the name is Arminius), who led the fight against Rome. In his youth, he was brought up in this city, participated in the campaigns of the Roman legions, and even received Roman citizenship under the name Gaius Julius Arminius. In 9 A.D. e. he utterly defeated the three legions of the proconsul Publius Varus in the Teutoburg Forest. This, as is commonly believed, put an end to the plans of Emperor Augustus to push the Roman frontier to the Elbe. Strictly speaking, the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest was just one of countless frontier skirmishes. And in the future, the Romans repeatedly tried to reach the banks of the Elbe, but all their campaigns were unsuccessful. In the end, Rome stopped the unsuccessful and costly war and set about fortifying the border along the Danube and the Rhine. The southwestern part of Germany from Koblenz to Regensburg, still inhabited by wild Celts, and mainly by bears, wild boars and deer, remained in his power. Along the entire border, the Romans built a limes - a fortified rampart with moats and watchtowers, which was built over a hundred years.

It was not the Romans who managed to conquer the Germanic tribes, but the creator of a new empire that stretched from Spanish Barcelona to Magdeburg, from the mouth of the Rhine to Central Italy, the Frankish king, and then the emperor Charlemagne (747–814). In Carolingian Germany, a class-status system gradually developed, in which the position of a person was determined by his origin and occupation. Most of the peasants slowly but steadily turned into semi-dependent, and then personally not free people. In those troubled times, the institution of "guardianship" became widespread, when the peasants voluntarily went under the authority of the master, who promised them protection and patronage.

Division of Charlemagne's empire by the Treaty of Verdun 843

The empire of Charlemagne collapsed after the death of his successor Louis the Pious in 840. The grandchildren of Charles, according to the Treaty of Verdun in 843, divided the empire into three parts.

In the historical literature for a long time there was no clear distinction between the concepts of "German", "Frankish" and "German". Even today in popular writings there is an assertion that Charlemagne was the "first German emperor". However, the Carolingian Empire was, as it were, the common progenitor of modern France and Germany. But even today, it has not been possible to determine a universally recognized date from which one can trace the beginning of "German history." Some scientists, as before, take the Treaty of Verdun as a starting point, in latest works the formation of the German state dates back to the 11th and even the 12th centuries. It is probably impossible to determine the exact date at all, since the transition from the Carolingian East Frankish state to the medieval German Empire was not a one-time event, but a long process.

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Subtitles

Etymology of the ethnonym Germani

“The word Germany is new and has recently come into use, for those who were the first to cross the Rhine and drive out the Gauls, now known as the Tungros, were then called Germans. Thus, the name of the tribe gradually prevailed and spread to the whole people; at first, out of fear, everyone designated him by the name of the winners, and then, after this name took root, he himself began to call himself Germans.

In the late Iron Age, a tribe of Germans lived in the northeast of Iberia, however, most historians consider them to be Celts. Linguist Yu. Kuzmenko believes that their name is associated with the region from where they migrated to Spain, and which later passed to the Germans.

For the first time the term "Germans" was used, according to known data, by Posidonius in the 1st half of the 1st century. BC e. for the name of the people who had the custom of drinking fried meat with a mixture of milk and undiluted wine. Modern historians suggest that the use of this word in more early times was the result of later insertions. Greek authors, who were little interested in the ethnic and linguistic differences of the "barbarians", did not separate the Germans from the Celts. So, Diodorus of Sicily, who wrote his work in the middle of the 1st century. BC e. , refers to the Celts tribes, which already in his time the Romans (Julius Caesar, Sallust) called Germanic.

Truly ethnonym " Germans» came into circulation in the 2nd half of the 1st century. BC e. after the Gallic wars of Julius Caesar to refer to the peoples who lived east of the Rhine and north of the upper and lower Danube, that is, for the Romans it was not only an ethnic, but also a geographical concept.

However, in the German language itself there is also a consonant name (not to be confused with Roman) (German Hermann is a modified Harimann / Herimann, a two-base name of ancient Germanic origin, formed by adding the components heri / hari - “army” and mann - “man”).

Origin of the Germans

Indo-Europeans. IV-II millennium BC e.

According to modern ideas, 5-6 thousand years ago, in the strip from Central Europe and the Northern Balkans to the northern Black Sea region, there was a single ethno-linguistic formation - tribes of Indo-Europeans who spoke a single or at least close dialects of the language, called the Indo-European language - the basis from which then all the modern languages ​​of the Indo-European family developed. According to another hypothesis, which today has a limited number of supporters, the Indo-European proto-language originated in the Middle East and was spread across Europe by migrations of kindred tribes.

Archaeologists identify several early cultures at the turn of the Stone and Bronze Ages associated with the spread of the Indo-Europeans and with which different anthropological types of Caucasoids are associated:

By the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC. e. from the ethno-linguistic community of the Indo-Europeans, the Anatolian tribes (the peoples of Asia Minor), the Aryans of India, the Iranians, the Armenians, the Greeks, the Thracians, and the most eastern branch, the Tochars, stood out and developed independently. To the north of the Alps in Central Europe, an ethno-linguistic community of ancient Europeans continued to exist, which corresponds to the archaeological culture of barrow burials (XV-XIII centuries BC), which passed into the culture of burial urn fields (XIII-VII centuries BC) .

The south of Scandinavia represents a region where, unlike other parts of Europe, there is a unity of toponyms belonging only to the Germanic language. However, it is here that a gap in archaeological development is found between the relatively prosperous culture of the Bronze Age and the more primitive culture of the Iron Age that replaced it, which does not allow us to make an unambiguous conclusion about the origin of the Germanic ethnos in this region.

Jastorf culture. 1st millennium BC e.

In the 2nd half of the 1st millennium BC. e. throughout the coastal zone between the mouths of the Rhine and the Elbe, and especially in Friesland and Lower Saxony (traditionally referred to as the original German lands), a single culture was spread, which differed both from the one-time La Tène (Celts) and from the Jastorf (Germans). The ethnicity of its Indo-European population, which became Germanic in our era, cannot be classified:

"Language local population, judging by toponymy, was neither Celtic nor German. Archaeological finds and toponymy testify that the Rhine before the arrival of the Romans was not any tribal border, and related tribes lived on both sides.

Linguists made an assumption about the separation of the Proto-Germanic language from the Proto-Indo-European at the very beginning of the Iron Age, that is, at the beginning of the 1st millennium BC. e., there are also versions about its formation much later, up to the beginning of our era:

“It was in the last decades, in the light of comprehending the new data that comes to the disposal of the researcher - the material of ancient German toponymy and onomastics, as well as runology, ancient German dialectology, ethnology and history - in a number of works it was clearly emphasized that the isolation of the Germanic linguistic community from the Western area of ​​the Indo-European languages ​​took place at a relatively late time and that the formation of separate areas of the Germanic linguistic community refers only to recent centuries before and the first centuries after our era.

Thus, according to the versions of linguists and archaeologists, the formation of the Germanic ethnos on the basis of the Indo-European tribes dates back approximately to the period of the 6th-1st centuries. BC e. and occurred in areas adjacent to the lower Elbe, Jutland and southern Scandinavia. The formation of a specifically Germanic anthropological type began much earlier, in the early Bronze Age, and continued into the first centuries of our era as a result of the migrations of the Great Migration of peoples and the assimilation of non-Germanic tribes related to the Germans within the framework of the ancient European community of the Bronze Age.

In the peat bogs of Denmark, well-preserved mummies of people are found, the appearance of which does not always coincide with classic description ancient authors of the tall race of Germans. See articles about a man from Tollund and a woman from Elling, who lived in Jutland in the 4th-3rd centuries. BC e.

Germanic genotype

Although in the Germanic lands it is possible to classify weapons, brooches and other things as Germanic in style, according to archaeologists, they date back to the Celtic samples of the La Tène period.

Nevertheless, the differences between the areas of settlement of the Germanic and Celtic tribes can be traced archaeologically, primarily in more high level material culture of the Celts, the spread of oppidums (fortified Celtic settlements), burial methods. The fact that the Celts and Germans were similar, but not related, peoples is confirmed by their different anthropological structure and genotype. In terms of anthropology, the Celts were characterized by a diverse build, from which it is difficult to choose a typical Celtic, while the ancient Germans were predominantly dolichocephalic in terms of the structure of the skull. The genotype of the population in the area of ​​origin of the Germanic ethnos (Jutland and southern Scandinavia) is represented mainly by haplogroups R1b-U106, I1a and R1a-Z284.

Classification of Germanic tribes

Separately, Pliny also mentions the Gillevions living in Scandinavia, and other Germanic tribes (Batavs, Kanninefats, Frisians, Frisiavons, Ubies, Sturii, Marsaks), without classifying them.

According to Tacitus the titles " ingevons, hermiones, istevons” came from the names of the sons of the god Mann, the progenitor of the Germanic tribes. Later in the 1st century, these names are not used, many names of Germanic tribes disappear, but new ones appear.

History of the Germans

Ancient Germans until the 4th century.

The ancient world for a long time did not know anything about the Germans, separated from them by the Celtic and Scythian-Sarmatian tribes. For the first time, the Germanic tribes were mentioned by the Greek navigator Pytheas from Massalia (modern Marseilles), who during the time of Alexander the Great (2nd half of the 4th century BC) traveled to the shores of the North Sea, and even presumably the Baltic.

The Romans clashed with the Germans during the formidable invasion of the Cimbri and Teutons (113-101 BC), who devastated Alpine Italy and Gaul during the migration from Jutland. Contemporaries perceived these Germanic tribes as hordes of northern barbarians from unknown distant lands. In the description of their manners, made by later authors, it is difficult to separate fiction from reality.

The earliest ethnographic information about the Germans was reported by Julius Caesar, who conquered by the middle of the 1st century. BC e. Gaul, as a result of which he went to the Rhine and faced the Germans in battles. Roman legions towards the end of the 1st century. BC e. advanced to the Elbe, and in the 1st century, works appeared that described in detail the settlement of the Germanic tribes, their social structure and customs.

The wars of the Roman Empire with the Germanic tribes began from their earliest contact and continued with varying intensity throughout the first centuries AD. e. The most famous battle was the battle in the Teutoburg Forest in the year 9, when the rebel tribes exterminated 3 Roman legions in central Germany. Rome managed to subdue only a small part of the territories inhabited by the Germans beyond the Rhine, in the 2nd half of the 1st century the empire went on the defensive along the line of the rivers Rhine and Danube and the Upper Germanic-Retian Limes, repelling the raids of the Germans and making punitive campaigns in their lands. Raids were made along the entire border, but the Danube became the most threatening direction, where the Germans settled on its left bank during their expansion to the south and east.

In the 250s-270s, the Roman-Germanic wars called into question the very existence of the empire. In 251, Emperor Decius died in a battle with the Goths, who settled in the northern Black Sea region, followed by their devastating land and sea raids into Greece, Thrace, and Asia Minor. In the 270s, the empire was forced to abandon Dacia (the only Roman province on the left bank of the Danube) due to the increased pressure of the Germanic and Sarmatian tribes. Due to the pressure of the Alemanni, the Upper Germanic-Rhaetian limes was abandoned, the new border of the empire between the Rhine and the Danube became more convenient for the defense of the Danube-Iller-Rhine Limes. The empire survived, consistently repelling the attacks of the barbarians, but in the 370s the Great Migration of Peoples began, during which the Germanic tribes penetrated and entrenched themselves in the lands of the Roman Empire.

Great Migration of Nations. 4th-6th centuries

The Germanic kingdoms in Gaul showed strength in the war against the Huns. Thanks to them, Attila was stopped on the Catalaunian fields in Gaul, and soon the Hunnic empire, which included a number of eastern Germanic tribes, disintegrated. Emperors in Rome itself in 460-470. commanders from the Germans were appointed, first sev Ricimer, then Burgundian Gundobad. In fact, they ruled on behalf of their henchmen, overthrowing those if the emperors tried to act independently. In 476, the German mercenaries who made up the army of the Western Empire, led by Odoacer, deposed the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus. This event is formally considered the end of the Roman Empire.

The social structure of the ancient Germans

social order

According to ancient historians, ancient German society consisted of the following social groups: military leaders, elders, priests, combatants, free members of the tribe, freedmen, slaves. The supreme power belonged to the people's assembly, which was attended by all the men of the tribe in military weapons. In the first centuries A.D. e. the Germans had a tribal system at its late stage of development.

“When a tribe wages an offensive or defensive war, then officials are elected who have the duties of military leaders and who have the right to dispose of the life and death of [members of the tribe] ... When one of the first persons in the tribe declares in the popular assembly his intention to lead [in ] and calls on those who want to follow him to express their readiness for this - then rise those who approve of both the enterprise and the leader, and, greeted by those assembled, promise him their help.

The leaders were supported by voluntary donations from members of the tribe. In the 1st century, the Germans have kings who differ from leaders only in the possibility of inheriting power, which is very limited in peacetime. As Tacitus observed: They choose kings from the most distinguished, leaders from the most valiant. But their kings do not have unlimited and undivided power.»

Economic relations

Language and writing

It is believed that these magical signs became the letters of the runic script. The name of the rune signs is derived from the word secret(Gothic runa: mystery), and the English verb read(read) derived from the word guess. Futhark alphabet, the so-called "elder runes", consisted of 24 characters, which were a combination of vertical and oblique lines, convenient for cutting. Each rune not only conveyed a separate sound, but was also a symbolic sign that carried a semantic meaning.

There is no single point of view on the origin of the Germanic runes. The most popular version is runologist Marstrander (1928), who suggested that the runes developed on the basis of an unidentified Northern Italic alphabet, which became known to the Germans through the Celts.

In total, about 150 items are known (details of weapons, amulets, tombstones) with early runic inscriptions of the 3rd-8th centuries. One of the earliest inscriptions raunijaz: "testing") on a spearhead from Norway dates back to c. 200 year. , an even earlier runic inscription is considered to be an inscription on a bone crest, preserved in a swamp on the Danish island of Funen. The inscription is translated as harja(name or epithet) and dates back to the 2nd half of the 2nd century.

Most inscriptions consist of a single word, usually a name, which, in addition to the magical use of runes, makes about a third of the inscriptions indecipherable. The language of the oldest runic inscriptions is closest to the Proto-Germanic language and more archaic than Gothic, the earliest Germanic language recorded in written monuments.

Due to its predominantly cult purpose, runic writing fell out of use in continental Europe by the 9th century, displaced first by Latin, and then by writing based on the Latin alphabet. However, in Denmark and Scandinavia, runes were used until the 16th century.

Religion and beliefs

Tacitus, writing about 150 years after Caesar at the end of the 1st century, records a marked progress in Germanic paganism. He reports on the great power of the priests within the Germanic communities, as well as on the gods to whom the Germans make sacrifices, including human ones. In their view, the earth gave birth to the god Tuiston, and his son, the god Mann, gave birth to the Germans. They also honor the gods whom Tacitus called the Roman names of Mercury.