Ampsivarians

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Spread of Germanic tribes around 50 AD.

The tribe of the Ampsivarians ( Amsivarians , Germanic " Ems -Männer", Latin: Ansibarii , Greek: Ἀνσιβαριοί) was a Germanic tribe on the Ems in what is now Emsland . In the middle of the 1st century AD they were driven from their homes by the Chauken . From the late 4th century the tribe was absorbed by the Franks .

Sources

The Ampsivarians left only a few traces in the ancient sources. The tribe is possibly mentioned by Strabo († after 23 AD) as Kampsian (Καμψιανοί) or as Ampsan (Αμψάνών) .

The most detailed reports are Tacitus († around 120 AD). In the annals he describes the unsuccessful attempts of the Ampsivarians to obtain settlement land from the Romans in AD 58. The trunk is not mentioned in Tacitus' Germania .

The existence of the tribe in the 4th century is documented by the Veronese register ( Laterculus Veronensis ) , the map of Julius Honorius and perhaps by the Tabula Peutingeriana (possibly registered there as vapii or varii ); according to the Notitia dignitatum , the Ampsivarians provided auxiliary troops. The late antique historian Sulpicius Alexander mentions the Ampsivarians in the context of fighting between the Romans and Franks at the end of the 4th century.

history

At the turn of an era

The residences of the Ampsivarians at the turn of the times were on the lower Ems between the Frisians in the northwest and the Chauken in the northeast. Although the Ems was of strategic importance for the Roman attempts at conquest in 12 BC. up to 16 AD ( Augustan German Wars ), the tribe does not appear in the tradition at that time, apart from the unsecured mentions in Strabo. This suggests that the tribe, like its neighbors, has been moving since 12 or 11 BC at the latest. Was under Roman sovereignty.

The participation of the Ampsivarians in the Varus Battle in 9 AD and in the battles of the Arminius coalition against Germanicus in 15-16 AD ( Germanicus campaigns ) is uncertain. Tacitus reports that the Ampsivarian prince or chief Boiocalus was arrested at the instigation of Arminius. This speaks for internal conflicts between pro- and anti-Roman factions. An involvement of the tribe or parts of the tribe in the Arminius coalition cannot, however, be derived unequivocally from this. Later, Boiocalus served under Tiberius and Germanicus as a mercenary in the fight against Arminius.

Expulsion and search for land

Around the middle of the 1st century AD, the Chauken drove the Ampsivarians out of their homes. The tribe, which had become homeless, asked the Romans for permission in 58 AD to settle on the right bank of the Rhine in what is now the Netherlands, probably between Vechte and IJssel . The Romans claimed this area as a depopulated buffer zone in front of the Rhine border and were not prepared to tolerate a Germanic settlement. The legions had already rejected parts of the Frisians who had penetrated into the area by force of arms. Tacitus describes the futile negotiations that the elderly Boiocalus conducted with the Roman legate Avitus. The prince reported

(...) he was arrested during the Cheruscan uprising at the behest of Arminius, then served for pay under the command of Tiberius and Germanicus and now complements his 50 years of obedience by submitting his people to our rule. What a large part of the fields there would be (unused), into which the soldiers' sheep and cattle are only occasionally driven over! (…) As heaven is given to the gods, the earth is given to the human race, and what is ownerless is common property. Then he looked up at the sun and called on the other stars, as if they were there in person, and asked them if they wanted to look down on a deserted land: they should rather pour the sea over them against the land robbers.

The last sentence is interpreted as a "'holy' 'curse" against Roman arbitrariness. The curse corresponds to a Germanic oath that was sworn by the stars. The worried Avitus rejected the Ampsivarians' request, but offered the Boiocalus land as a private person, which the latter angrily rejected as an invitation to betray his tribe. They parted in a bitter mood, as Tacitus reports. The Ampsivarians, Tacitus continued, called Brukterer , Tenkerer and “the more distant, allied peoples” (Chasuarians? Chamaven ?) To war. Avitus, for his part, had Curtilius Mancia, the legate of the Upper Rhine Army, cross the Rhine and threaten the back of the Ampsivarian coalition. Avitus himself marched with his troops against the Tenkeri, threatened to destroy them and in this way was able to break them out of the Ampsivarian coalition. The same was then achieved with the Brukterians, whereupon the other tribes also fell away.

There followed unsuccessful attempts by the ampsivarians to use armed force to acquire territories of the Usipeters and Tubanten , then the Chatti and finally the Cherusci . Tacitus assumes that the Ampsivarians were wiped out on their wandering; possibly that is why he did not report anything about them in his Germania (Germania was written before the annals, but describes a later point in time than the relevant chapters of the historical work). However, evidence from late antiquity still confirms the existence of the ampsivarians in the 4th century. It is not certain whether they had found homes on the upper Wupper in the meantime.

From the end of the 4th century, the ampsivarians were counted among the Franks and no longer appear as an independent name.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Strabon, Geographica 7, 1, 3 and 4; Reinhard Wenskus: Amsivarians . In: Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde (RGA). 2nd edition, Volume 1. Berlin 1973, p. 257 and Klaus-Peter Johne: The Romans on the Elbe. The Elbe river basin in the geographical view of the world and in the political consciousness of Greco-Roman antiquity. Berlin 2006, p. 194.
  2. ^ Tacitus, Annales 13, 55f.
  3. ↑ Notitia dignitatum 188.
  4. ↑ Passed on by Gregor von Tours: Ten books of Frankish history 2, 9
  5. ^ Strabo, Geographica 7, 1, 3f.
  6. ^ A b Reinhard Wenskus: Amsivarians. In: Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde (RGA). 2nd edition, Volume 1. Berlin 1973, p. 257.
  7. ↑ Tacitus, Annales 13, 55, 1.
  8. ^ Tacitus, Annales 13, 55 in the translation by Hans-Werner Goetz, Karl-Wilhelm Welwei: Altes Germanien. Excerpts from the ancient sources about the Germanic peoples and their relations to the Roman Empire , part 1 (= selected sources on the German history of the Middle Ages , vol. 1a). Darmstadt 1995, p. 167.
  9. ↑ Günther Behm-Blancke: Cult and Ideology. In: Bruno Krüger (Ed.): Die Germanen. History and culture of the Germanic tribes in Central Europe. A manual in two volumes. Volume 1: From the beginning to the 2nd century of our era. Berlin 1976, pp. 351-373, here p. 354.
  10. ↑ Tacitus, Annales 13, 56, 1.
  11. ↑ Klaus Tausend: Inside Germania. Relations between the Germanic tribes from the 1st century BC BC to the 2nd century AD (= Geographica Historica , vol. 25). Stuttgart 2009, p. 34.
  12. ↑ Tacitus, Annales 13, 56, 2f.
  13. ↑ Critical to this, Reinhard Wenskus: Amsivarians. In: Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde (RGA). 2nd edition, Volume 1. Berlin 1973, p. 257.