Chamaver

Roman Gaul and Germania on the right bank of the Rhine around AD 70.

The Chamavers (also Chamaven , Latin: Chamavi , Greek: οι Καμαυοί) were a West Germanic tribe that eventually became part of the Franks .

Originally they seem to have settled north of the Lippe on the right bank of the Rhine, but their ancestral seat was relocated in the 1st century BC. Apparently. According to Tacitus , their new settlement area on the Lower Rhine, which had once belonged to the Brukterians , bordered the Germanic Angrivarians and Dulgubnians in the 1st century AD . The chamavers reappear in late ancient sources. The Roman emperors Constantius I and Constantine defeated the Chamavians, who advanced westward into Roman territory in the middle of the 4th century. They were beaten by Julian and made peace. But at the end of the 4th century fighting flared up again after Frankish tribes attacked the Romans. The historian Sulpicius Alexander reports on this in a historical work that is now lost, but whose descriptions were processed by Gregory of Tours in the 6th century. In 392 there was accordingly a Roman punitive expedition under the command of Arbogast , who was himself a Franconian, but acted as a Roman magister militum . The Romans devastated the Chamaver area.

In the late antique sources, the Chamavers were referred to as Franks in addition to their own name. But they seem to have retained a certain identity before they were generally included in the Franks in later sources, such as Gregor von Tours. In the early Middle Ages , her name lived on in the area around Deventer under the name Hamaland .

A legal record relating to the law of a Frankish tribe from the Carolingian period has been known as Lex Francorum Chamavorum since the mid-19th century . The name Chamaver itself is not mentioned in the text, which is also known as Ewa (or Euua) ad Amorem . It was initiated by Charlemagne .

literature

• Günter Neumann , Harald von Petrikovits :  Chamaver. In: Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde (RGA). 2nd Edition. Volume 4, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1981, ISBN 3-11-006513-4 , pp. 368-370.
• Ruth Schmidt-Wiegand :  Lex Francorum Chamavorum. In: Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde (RGA). 2nd Edition. Volume 18, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2001, ISBN 3-11-016950-9 , pp. 317-318.
• Ulrich Nonn : The Franks . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2010, p. 19f.
• Erich Zöllner : History of the Franks up to the middle of the sixth century . CH Beck, Munich 1970, p. 271 (index, see Chamaven ).

Web links

• Lex Francorum Chamavorum in the LegIT project ( digital recording and indexing of the vernacular vocabulary of the continental West Germanic Leges barbarorum in a database )

Remarks

1. ^ Tacitus, Germania , cap. 33f.
2. ^ Ulrich Nonn: The Franks . Stuttgart 2010, p. 20.
3. ^ Edition in the context of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica , translated in Karl August Eckhardt : Laws of the Carolingian Empire 714-911 Germanic Rights 2, VII Law of the Chamavian Franks . Weimar 1934.