Caesar records in " Gaul War " that during the Battle of East Gallic, he led his army to defeat the Germanic people. This is the clearest documentary record about the Germanic people.
Before this, Romans always called the residents of eastern Europe the Sesians, and the people in the west called the Celtics . After the publication of "The Battle of Gaul", the people of Rome realized that among the Celtics, there was a separate ethnic group, namely the Germans.
Germans have lived in the southern Sweden , as well as the Danish Peninsula and northern Germany between the Em River, the Oder River and the Khazi Mountains. However, at the end of the 4th century AD, the Germans ushered in a great migration that lasted more than 200 years.
Germans rushed to most of Europe and even the North African region centered on the west Roman Empire , directly causing the collapse of Western Roman Empire .
The migration of the Germans, like the Jews leaving Canaan, has very complicated reasons.
First of all, the westward migration of the Huns forced the Germans to leave their long-lived homeland. Xiongnu , who lived in Mongolian Plateau for a long time and continued to invade the Central Plains dynasty. After the Huns were divided, the Northern Huns went to Western Regions , but often raided the border.
Eastern Han General Pei Cen led his troops to fight, as recorded in "Pei Cen Memorial Monument": "On August of the year of Yonghe Dou of Han Dynasty, the Dunhuang prefect Pei Cen commanded 3,000 troops from the county, killed King Huyan and others, killed the troops of the king, defeated the entire army, eliminated the disasters in the Western Regions, destroyed the harm of the four counties, and the border Aian, and the power came here."
The Huns had to move west again to find a new home. At this time, Western literature has records of them. Ptolemy, a scholar from Rome, mentioned in Geography that a group of nomadic nomadic peoples from the East live on the north bank of the Caspian Sea.
公元350年，蓄势待发的匈人开始成为一支活跃在欧洲舞台上的强大军事力量。
Germanic race has a branch called Alan . They encountered the Huns in the Don River basin. In order to protect their homeland, the Alan people fought bloody battles, but despite this, they were defeated by the Huns' iron horse and golden hook.
After Alan was defeated, King Alan was killed and his people were forced to join the Huns. The Huns continued to head westward and arrived at the north shore of the Black Sea , where there was a country composed of Germans named the Ostrogothic Kingdom.
Kosminsky Skaskin wrote in "Medieval History": "(Germans) I heard that a race that I had never heard of before came like a storm and snow, and everyone was filled with fear and anxiety."
The King of Otgoths had launched several resistance battles, but could not stop the Huns from destroying the country, and finally ended with the destruction of the country.
Oxgoth people "try to escape to places where these savages don't know and settle down again, but they can't do it, they can only join the enemy's camp."
After the destruction of the Oxgoths, everyone in the Visigoths were in danger. They set up a formation in Transnistria and prepared to fight the Huns to the death. However, the Huns attacked during the day and went down from upstream at night, destroying the defensive offensive constructed by the Visigoths.
After the fall of the Transnistrian River, the Visigoth fled in scattered areas and crossed the Danube River overnight to take refuge in the Western Roman Empire.
The defeat of the three Germanic kingdoms caused panic among all Germanic people. They rushed into the Western Roman Empire.
Originally, the Germans thought that the Western Roman Empire was a towering tree that could be relied on, but they did not know that the Huns were professional "lumberjacks".
The Huns followed the footsteps of the fleeing Germans, defeated the Western Roman Empire in Yadeya Fort, and took advantage of the situation to take Messia into his pocket.
The Huns and the Western Roman Empire confronted the Danube River.
Immediately afterwards, the Huns marched north, took down Panonia plain , and drove away the Germans living there.
From then on, a huge empire that starts from the Aral Sea in the east, reaches the Rhine River in the west, reaches the Baltic Sea in the north, and is officially established against the Danube River in the south. The Hun leader Attila became the " God's Whip " that everyone was terrified of.
The ghostly Huns descended, taking away the land where the Germans lived for generations. The Germans who were unwilling to become slaves could only embark on the road to escape.
Of course, the Huns were short-lived after all. After Attila's death, the Huns' empire quickly collapsed.
It is worth mentioning that Attila's death has a great relationship with the Germans. The reason is that he just married the Germanic princess the day before, but died on the bed the next day due to a ruptured artery.
Therefore, Attila is most likely dead from the revenge of the Germanic princess.
The Western Roman Empire accommodated the fleeing Germans not because it kindly accepted refugees, but because it was powerless to stop the tide of Germans from entering the country.
As a slave society, the Western Roman Empire had already revealed its decline as early as the 1st century AD.
As Kolumela said in " on Agriculture ": "Slaves will cause the greatest damage to these fields. They do not care whether the seeds sown in the fields can achieve a good harvest."
Slaves gradually became ideological and became increasingly reluctant to work for the landlords, so that the fields, mines and handicrafts could not be maintained.
The rule of the Western Roman Empire became increasingly abandoned, and the economy declined very seriously. But it had to maintain a huge military and bureaucracy, so it issued a large amount of currency, which triggered severe inflation .
The Western Roman Empire was in a state of disagreement, social contradictions intensified, central government was paralyzed, and barbarians often invaded them. In order to obtain a stable living environment, the people even went to the barbarians they once despised for protection.
At this time, the feudal system had already sprouted in the Western Roman Empire.
In order to motivate the slaves to work as much as possible, the slave owners distributed the land piece by piece to the slaves in their hands. These slaves who rented the land were called "slaves without shackles" and "member farmers" in "On Agriculture".
The peasants only need to pay a certain rent to the slave owner, and the remaining harvest belongs to them. The feudal system has begun to emerge on the land of Western Rome. The emergence of
serfs directly demonstrated the emergence and growth of feudal production relations within the Roman slave society. It also shows that slavery no longer meets the needs of social production development, but the empire itself cannot.
resolves this contradiction, which requires revolutionary means to destroy the old mode of production. The Western Roman Empire was not willing to carry out self-revolution and evolved slavery society into feudal society.
Moreover, in the Western Roman Empire, fewer and fewer nationals were willing to serve the imperial power.
Western Roman Empire recruited a large number of Germanic mercenaries, and even the members of the emperor's guards were Germanic. The phenomenon of
directly shows that the Germans had already existed in the Western Roman Empire in large quantities before the official migration began.
As for their social status, Thompson's "Medieval Economic and Social History" once wrote: "In the long years of being neighbors with the Western Roman Empire, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of Germanic people entered the country. Some lived as 'allies' on the border of the Western Roman Empire; some settled in a sparsely populated barren land as Linong . Some moved into Western Rome because of war capture."
These Germanic pioneers set up a front station for the subsequent great migration of ethnic groups.
It is worth mentioning that the last emperor of Siro was killed by a leader of a tribe of the Germans.
Although the Germans were defeated several times in the battle with the Huns, this does not mean that the Germanic nation is a weak and bullied group.
Germanic people evolved from clan society . There is a statement in "The War of the Gallic": "The Germanic people do not have private and separate lands, and they only live in each place for one year. They live a nomadic life, not on grains, but on milk and cattle and sheep."
The long-term nomadic life has created the Germanic people's strong body and superb riding skills. Even after transitioning to settled life, men farming are still considered to be spineless.
In comparison, the Western Roman Empire was an farming civilization , and in the era of cold weapons, nomadic civilization had innate advantages in combat. What's more, when the Germans migrated, the Western Roman Empire was still a stale farming civilization.
"Nomadic World and Farming World in World History" summed up this: "The few with strong mobility can often defeat the majority of the farming world who have been relocated to Antu. When horses and chariots appear on the stage of history, nomadic peoples who already have strong mobility can always defeat the farming civilization unexpectedly. Even if the size of the farming civilization is ten times or even a hundred times that of the nomadic people."
Faced with the migration of the Germans' families, the Western Roman Empire could not resist the Germans' entry at all, and could only let it go.
Just imagine, if the Western Roman Empire was very strong, how could it not send troops to garrison the Rhine River to resist the Germans who were ferrying. How could the rulers of the Western Roman Empire not know the consequences of the influx of foreign races.
Of course, in terms of size, the Germans were not comparable to the Western Roman Empire, but their handicrafts and manufacturing industries were highly developed.
Engels once said in his book "On the Ancient History of the Germans": "Before the Germans migrated, their metal industry had reached a considerable level."
In summary, the direct reason for the large number of Germans entering the Western Roman Empire was the attack of the Huns. The Huns fought bravely and often caught German off guard by surprise.
just so Germanic has not just lost the mobility carried by the nomadic peoples, and the vast Western Roman Empire is already old, which prompted them to start to move towards a new country.
The Germanic people established many countries on the ruins of the Western Roman Empire and carried forward civilization. Today's Germans , Norwegians , Swedes, Icelanders , Swiss, Austrians, and even English are all descendants of Germanic.
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