You barbarians were, in the optics greek, all peoples who did not speak the Greek language and did not share the same culture and organization of Greek society. The term was assimilated by the romans and it became a synonym for referring to foreign peoples in a stereotypical way.
You Germans were labeled as barbarians in the Roman world. They were peoples who inhabited northern Europe, in a region known as Germania. The Germans were formed by different peoples that, from the third century d. C., began to migrate and invade the lands of Roman Empire of the West.
Accessalso: Main events that marked the Low Middle Ages
Origin of the term barbarian
THE barbarian word it appeared in the Greek language to refer to all peoples who did not speak the Greek language and did not share the same culture and form of social and political organization as the Greeks. The term was therefore used by them to
express your contempt for other cultures, indicating that they were not “advanced” enough.The first mention of the word barbarians (in Greek, barbarians or Βάρβαρος) known to have been registered in the Iliad, written by Homer. In this work, the term was used to refer to the speech of the Carians (different from the language of the Greeks), people who inhabited the region of Asia Minor.
It is believed that it was from the V century BC. Ç. that the term barbarian began to be used in fact to refer to the differences between Greeks and non-Greeks in general, not just the language. This is because, in culture, in addition to language, it was used to establish criteria for differentiating between Greeks and non-Greeks.
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The term won a stereotyped sense and even hostile from the Medical Wars. Because of the war, the foreigner, in this sense the non-Greek, was in fact not well received by the Greeks. With this, the barbarians became, in Greek culture, synonymous with everything that was unwanted and were seen as "uneducated" and "uncivilized" (understanding by civilization the way of life developed by the Greeks themselves).
Therefore, the first people called barbarians in this Greek perspective that saw the other as “wild” and “primitive” were the Persians. The designation, however, could be used for other non-Greek peoples, such as the Egyptians, you Celts, you Phoenicians, the Thracians and many others.
The term barbarian is explained because, in the ears of the Greeks, the languages of foreign peoples were understood with a sound similar to “bar bar bar”. Thus, the word barbarian is classified as a onomatopathic reduplication, according to researcher Ioannis Petropoulos|1|.
Over time, the word was assimilated by the Romans, heavily influenced by Greek culture. Thus, for them, the word came to be used in the same sense as the Greeks. Thus, all peoples who did not have Greek or Roman culture were considered barbarians and stereotyped as “uncivilized”, “uneducated”, “primitive” etc.
Accessalso: Passage from Greek Hellenism to Roman Hellenism
Germanic peoples
Within Roman history, the term barbarian was directly associated with the Germanic peoples, who inhabited northern Europe and that, from the 2nd century BC onwards. Ç., kept in frequent contact with the Romans. The Germans were understood as barbarians because they spoke different languages and had a political, social and economic organization quite different from that practiced by the Romans.
To the Romans, anyone who lived beyond the borders of their empire was a barbarian. In the case of the Germans, this frontier was established on the Rhine and Danube rivers. All who inhabited the regions beyond these rivers were Germanic and, in Roman eyes, barbarians. The region beyond these rivers was known to the Romans as germany.
it is believed that the first Roman to identify these peoples as Germanic was Julio Cesar, during the wars against the Gauls. He, in his accounts, began to refer to the peoples who dwelt beyond the Rhine as german. Caesar used this nomenclature to differentiate the cimbris and the Swabians from the peoples Celts.
The classification used by Julius Caesar ended up being replicated by other Roman intellectuals, such as Tacit, Roman historian and politician known for writing a book relating the way of life of the Germanic peoples.
As we can identify here, the Germanic peoples, therefore, were not just one people, but different peoples brought together by the Romans within the same ethnic group. In fact, there was consanguinity among the Germans, but each group organized a large military confederation that formed a Germanic people different from the other.
Among the Germanic peoples, the following can be cited:
- francs
- alamans
- Visigoths
- Ostrogoths
- Vandals
- Jutos
- Anglos
- Saxons
- Heruli
- Swabians
The Germans had a lot of relationship with the Romans because they maintained peaceful and hostile contacts with them, especially from the 1st century AD. Ç. Thereafter, especially in the border regions, there was a great assimilation of the Germanic peoples, as the Romans ceded land to them in exchange for military services and the maintenance of peace.
The Germans, in general, were seminomads and lived from herding and agriculture, also practicing commerce selling enslaved people, amber and other types of merchandise and acquiring objects such as glass and metals, for example. The Germans had a tribal and patriarchal organization that determined that the leader would be the bossmilitary, the most powerful warrior.
Contrary to what common sense established, the Germans were not peoples who had war as their only skill. Historian Jacques Le Goff stated that these peoples assimilated many skills and techniques during their displacements.|2|. From the Romans, for example, they acquired the habit of minting coins.
Furthermore, it is known that, in some Germanic peoples, there were laws that established criteria for punishing people who behaved inappropriately. These laws established fines for people who committed a crime and criteria for conflict resolution and the peacekeeping internal. It is believed that they began to be elaborated from the 3rd century AD. Ç.
Still, there were conflicts among the Germanic peoples, and the Roman historian Tacitus recorded how the disagreements between them facilitated the work of assimilation and conquest carried out by the Romans|3|.
As mentioned, the relationship between Romans and Germans was not always peaceful, and one of the great examples of this was the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, that happened in 9 d. Ç. In this battle, the Romans, led by Publius Quintilius Varus, suffered one of the greatest defeats in Roman history and three legions were destroyed by Arminius, leader of the cherusques.
Accessalso: Black Death - a disease that severely affected medieval Europe
Germanic invasions
Until the third century d. C., the Germanic peoples were in limes, border region of the Roman Empire. From that century onwards, the different Germanic peoples began to move and migrate into the Roman lands. This ended up precipitating the end of the Western Roman Empire, since in these lands different foreign peoples settled.
Historians speculate that three factors may have been crucial to the Germanic migrations. there was the search for more fertile land and the search for places with milder climates so they could settle down. Finally, the arrival of the huns, a people from Central Asia, would have been the third factor. The Huns were feared, and their arrival would have spread panic and caused different peoples to begin to migrate to flee from them.
With this, different peoples settled in different places of the Western Roman Empire. Anglos and Saxons went to Brittany; Franks settled in Gaul; Visigoths and Swabians in the Iberian Peninsula; vandals in North Africa; Ostrogoths, in the north of the Italian Peninsula. The establishment of the Germanic kingdoms helped to accelerate the process of cultural assimilation of Romans and Germans that marked Europe in Middle Ages. If you would like to go deeper into the study of this great migratory movement, read: barbarian invasions.
Grades
|1| PETROPOULOS, Ioannis. Deconstructing the barbarian concept with the help of Kavafis. To access, click on here.
|2| LE GOFF, Jacques. The civilization of the medieval West. Petropolis: Voices, 2016. P. 23-24.
|3| GONÇALVES, Ana Teresa Marques. The construction of the image of the other: Romans, Germans on the borders of the Empire; an analysis of the Germania of Tacitus. To access, click on here.
By Daniel Neves
History teacher
