For my grandfather, Heinrich Leng, who survived seven years of battle and captivity in one of historys most terrible wars.
And to the memory of all the men, women and children, who suffered through the wars that sadly mark the history of humanity.
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
Pen & Sword Military
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
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Copyright Ludwig Heinrich Dyck 2015
ISBN: 978 1 47382 388 4
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Contents
Acknowledgements
I would like to give thanks to my girlfriend, friends and family, who have encouraged me to write articles and to write this book. Special thanks to retired college dean Lawrence Fast, who checked the edits for spelling and for grammatical errors. Thanks as well to my editor Barnaby Blacker and the helpful and friendly staff at Pen & Sword.
Preface
T he initial concept of The Roman Barbarian Wars grew out of my fondness for J.F.C. Fullers classic Decisive Battles of the Western World and out of my fascination with the Roman barbarian age. Fullers book retold western history from the viewpoint of its greatest battles. His expressive writing wove together the prominent events and personalities of history, whose influences and fates, respectively, cumulated in decisive, history changing, battles. Inspired by Fullers book and by his style of writing, I set upon the task of writing a book that treated Roman barbarian history in a similar fashion.
My fondness for the Roman barbarian age (and of reading and writing) heralds back to my teens. In those days, I spent many an entrancing hour delving into the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, Michael Moorcock and especially Robert E. Howard. I resolved to find out more about the real history and cultures on which the fantasy worlds of the aforementioned authors were based. As the years passed by I became more interested in the reading of history and less in fantasy and fiction.
Turning the concept into an actual book was immensely facilitated by my part time career as a magazine writer. Before I conceived of the idea of the Roman Barbarian Wars, I wrote a short article about pirates for the now defunct Command Magazine. Encouraged by its publication, I wrote a feature piece about the Gallic sack of Rome in 390 BC. It was published in Military Heritage magazine and became the basis for the second chapter of this book. I continued to write many more articles both for Sovereign Media, which published Military Heritage, and for the Primedia (now Weider) History Magazine group. To my good fortune, every article I wrote eventually saw publication. I wrote not just on the Roman barbarian age, but also about the Second World War, the Habsburg-Ottoman Wars, and on diverse subjects like the First Chinese Emperor or Brian Boru, the Irish Warrior King.
Many of my magazine articles, however, continued to concern the battles of the Roman barbarian age. These articles formed the chapters of my slowly evolving book which first saw publication by Trafford Publishing in 2011 before being released, as a revised edition, by Pen & Sword Books. Since most of the chapters in The Roman Barbarian Wars are thus based on magazine articles, for the most part, each can be read independently of the others. On the other hand, reading the chapters in proper sequence will allow for greater appreciation of the background of the different cultures and personalities involved. The histories of those cultures, of the tribal peoples of Europe the Celts, the Iberians and the Germans and of the Roman Empire, turned out to be every bit as fascinating as any of the fictional literature which first inspired me to read and write.
L.H. Dyck
Introduction
I t has been my privilege to re-tell the battles and wars of the Roman barbarian age so that the prominent individuals, the people they led and the cultures they hailed from, will not be forgotten. The time frame of the Roman barbarian wars spans over 800 years. This book provides a background of the founding of Rome and chronicles the first four centuries of the Roman barbarian wars. Those wars began in 390 BC, when the Gauls laid waste to Rome. Thereafter followed an era of nearly unrelenting Roman conquest. Only deep within the forests of Germania, four centuries later, was Roman expansion against the barbarians brought to a decisive halt.
The growth of her civilization put Rome at odds with other simultaneously expanding or migrating cultures. Around the Mediterranean, Rome clashed with the civilizations of Greece, Parthia and Carthage. In the Alps and the Balkans, amidst the plains, swamps and forests of Gaul, Britannia and Germania, and in the hills of Spain, the Romans faced a different sort of enemy. Here dwelt the Celts and Germans, Ligurians and Iberians, tribal peoples who are commonly referred to as barbarians.
The term barbarian requires some clarification. The word was coined by the Attican Greeks, who derided anyone elses tongue as unintelligible chatter, i.e. bar, bar, bar or barbarian. Both Greek and Roman writers came to use it in reference to any culture outside the Greco-Roman world that they considered uncultured, backward and brutish. Thus the Romans denounced their Carthaginian arch-enemies as barbarians even though the Carthaginians were no less civilized than the Romans. More frequently, the term barbarian was used in reference to the Celts and Germans. Although the Celts reached a state of semi-civilization within their fortified towns, neither they nor the Germans were a literate people. They certainly had nothing to compare to the sprawling cities and the volumes of literature of the civilized Mediterranean world. What they did have, were unique cultures whose histories were as dramatic and enthralling as those of the classical world.
