Marcomanni

The Marcomanni were a Germanic people who lived close to the border of the Roman Empire, north of the River Danube, and are mentioned in Roman records from approximately 60 BC until about 400 AD. They became one of the most important members of a powerful cluster of allied Suebian peoples, which also included the Hermunduri, Varisti, and Quadi north of the Danube, and the Semnones and Langobardi to their north. They were first reported by Julius Caesar among the Germanic peoples who were attempting to settle in west of the Rhine in Gaul in 58 BC under the leadership of Ariovistus, but he did not explain where their homeland was. Archaeological evidence suggests that they originally lived in what is now Germany, probably near the central Elbe river and Saale, or possibly to the southwest of this region in Franconia. After a major defeat to the Romans in about 9 BC, the Marcomanni received a new king named Maroboduus, who had grown up in Rome. He subsequently led his people and several others into a region surrounded by forests and mountains somewhere in what is now the Czech Republic, in a part they called "Boiohaemum" — the origin of the name Bohemia — because it was land that had been abandoned by the Boii people.

From his new base, Maroboduus built up a Rome-aligned Suebian empire, but the Langobardi and Semnones left when Maroboduus failed to support the rebellion of Arminius against Rome. The subsequent war among the Germanic peoples was damaging to both sides. This damaged Maroboduus's reputation, and he was eventually toppled from power, and died in exile in Ravenna. This suited the empire because despite their neutrality towards Rome, Roman rulers saw the Marcomanni as a potential threat to them, within striking distance of Italy. Over the centuries the Romans sought to control their leaders, and disrupt their relationships with neighbouring peoples. Despite long periods of peace and prosperity there were also several periods of intense warfare between them, often triggered by the actions of peoples living further from the Roman frontier.

In the second half of second century AD, during the reign of Marcus Aurelius and his co-emperors, the Romans pursued a long series of bloody wars against the Marcomanni and their allies which are called the Marcomannic Wars. At one point the Marcomanni and their allies invaded Italy itself. Eventually defeated and weakened, many Marcomanni were moved into the Roman empire, but the tensions behind this war were never resolved, and their neighbours such as the Quadi continued to come into conflict with Rome. This ended only when large numbers of Goths, Alans and Huns moved from the east and took effective control of the Middle Danubian region in the late 4th century. The Marcomanni and their neighbours needed to decide between the Rome-centred civilization, and the mobile and militarized life of the newcomers. One of the last clear mentions of the Marcomanni is in 395 when they, along with the neighbouring Quadi, joined Huns, Goths, Alans and others in a massive raid across the Danube into the fertile areas of the Roman Balkans, where Roman authors claimed that they left behind a desert. Many Suebi, probably including many Marcomanni, soon left the region entirely and travelled far to the west into Roman Gaul and then even further, founding the Kingdom of the Suebi in what is now northern Portugal and north-eastern Spain. Others joined in with what historian Herwig Wolfram called the "Hunnic Alternative" to Rome, because the newcomers now coalesced into the empire of Attila, whose warlords settled around the Middle Danubian, including Roman Pannonia.

Among the small new kingdoms which precipitated out of Attila's empire after his death in 453 was a single Suebian group. However, in the region where the Marcomanni had dominated were now Rugians and Heruli, and many Marcomanni had by now crossed the Danube and lived within what was left of the Roman Pannonia, and at least some of these had converted to Christianity. One group of Suebi, which probably included Marcomanni, apparently found a new home between the Sava and Drava rivers in what is now Slovenia and northern Croatia. In the 6th century, although the details are now unclear, many Suebian communities from the region of the Elbe and Danube are believed to have joined the Langobardi (Lombards) who moved from the north, replacing the short-lived kingdoms which arose after Attila's death, and subsequently moved into Italy under pressure from the arrival of the Avars from the east. Other people descended from the Marcomanni are likely to have joined the Alemanni and Bavarians to their west, or to have become integrated with the newcomers.