The tribal name Suebi or Suevi has been used variously in reference to GERMANICS. It has been applied to a tribe with political unity living along the Elbe River in the present-day Czech Republic and Germany in the centuries before 100 B. C.E. It has also been applied to a number of tribes spread out over a wider area, especially to the west as far as the Rhine, who manifested cultural unity in the first century b. c.e. and first century C. E. and afterward. These include the Alamanni, Hermunduri, Marcomanni, Naristi, Nemetes, Quadi, Semnones, Triboci, and Vangiones. During and after the Huns’ tenure in Europe in the fourth and fifth centuries the term was applied to Elbe River tribes, and those Germanics, in particular the Quadi, who joined the Vandals and Alans in their migration to the iberian Peninsula, where they established a
Suebi time line
SUEBI
Location:
Germany; Spain; Portugal
Time period:
C. 71 B. C.E. to 585 C. E.
Ancestry:
Germanic
Language:
Swabian (Germanic)
B. C. E.
C. 71 Suebi under Ariovistus defeat Aedui.
58 Suebi defeated by Romans.
C. E.
166-180 Marcomanni Wars against Romans
Early third century Alamannic confederacy has formed.
409 Suebi invade Iberian Peninsula with Vandals and Alans. 456 Suebi defeated by Visigoths.
585 Remaining Suebi kingdom annexed to Visigoth lands. 10th century Swabia becomes duchy of Germany.
Kingdom. Those Suebi who remained behind settled in southern Germany and gave their name to the medieval duchy known as Swabia. They also gave their name to their typical hairstyle, the “Suevi-knot,” which became common among the Elbe River Germanic tribes.
It is thought that the ancestors of the Suebi lived near the Baltic Sea in present-day Germany, which was known to the Romans as the Mare Suebicum, and from there spread southward, especially along the Elbe River. The Roman historian Tacitus of the first and second centuries C. E. described the Suebi as inhabiting all of central Germany, and the name Suebi can thus be considered synonymous with Germans during the early centuries C. E.
The Suebi spoke a Germanic language. The modern dialect known as Swabian is assumed to have evolved at least in part from it.
The Suebi became a threat to the ROMANS in the first century B. C.E., as recorded in the writings of Julius Caesar, when they invaded Gaul (roughly modern France and Belgium) to aid the SEQUANI, considered predominantly a Celtic people although perhaps part Germanic. The leader of the Suebi at the time was Ariovistus, who is referred to by the term Suebian rather than by the name of a particular tribe in historical texts. The main Suebian towns at the time were reportedly Argentorac on the Upper Rhine and Manching on the Upper Danube. It is known that the Nemetes, Triboci, and Vangiones were part of his campaign. The allied Germanic force first crossed the Rhine into Gaul in 71 b. c.e. and aided the Sequani against the Celtic Aedui, allies of Rome. After his campaign against the HELVETII Caesar defeated Ariovistus’s army somewhere in present-day northeastern France in 58 b. c.e. Then he turned to the conquest of Gaul.
Although Rome had at first tried diplomatic means of containing the Suebi by making Ariovistus an ally in 60 b. c.e., Caesar in 55 b. c.e. convinced the Senate that the Suebi were a continuing threat and had to be reduced by force, and further that the only means of containing them and other Germanic tribes was to seize control of the whole of Gaul. He raised the specter of Italy and Rome’s being overrun by
Germanics as they had earlier been by the Celts. It seems clear that at least part of Caesar’s insistence on conquering Gaul derived from personal ambition. In any case the Suebi furnished Caesar with his excuse to extend vastly the reach of Roman hegemony.
It was not only the Suebi under Ariovistus who were pushing out of Germania; Suebian tribes were trying to move from all along the Elbe due west toward Gaul and southeast toward the middle Danube region. To counter this in the decades after the mid-first century B. C.E. the Romans expanded through the Alps to take control of the Upper to Middle Danube.
After the empire’s boundaries were secure Romans began trading extensively with many Germanic tribes, including the Suebi. By the second century c. E. the Marcomanni and Quadi were foremost among the Suebi and battled the Romans in what are known as the Marcomannic Wars of 166-180. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius led the Roman legions in their eventual defeat.
By 300 Suebian territory was under the control of the Alamanni, a large confederacy of tribes that had formed after the Marcomannic Wars. Roman victories in those wars caused the Suebian tribes and other groups to unite for greater strength, and in their Alamannic organization tribes had become more aggressive than ever before. During the fourth century they moved westward into Alsace, then part of Gaul, in northeastern France and later into the Black Forest and northern Alps.
Dispersion by the Huns
The invasion of Europe by the Huns that started in 370 led to dispersion and relocation of many of the Germanic tribes. By this time the names of some of the groups classified as Suebi had already disappeared from the historical record. Others followed. After the Marcomanni fell under Hunnic control they are no longer recorded as a distinct political entity. Some Suebi, mostly Quadi, migrated into Gaul as allies of the Vandals and Alans, part of the great invasion over the frozen Rhine in 406, and three years later migrated onto the Iberian Peninsula. Some Suebi settled in northern Austria. Others, identified as Danubian Suebi, invaded Gaul with the Huns under Attila in 451. Suebi may have been among those people who became known as the Bavarii in present-day southern Germany by the sixth century. In the late fifth and early sixth century the Franks extended their domain eastward, conquering the Alamanni and other Suebian peoples.
The Suebi who migrated to the Iberian Peninsula in 409, led by Hermeric, settled mainly in present-day northwestern Spain, and eventually established an independent kingdom known as Gallaeci (from the tribal name GALLAECI, a presumably Celtic people living there in the early centuries b. c.e.) By 447 under Rechila they had extended their rule southward into the Roman provinces of Lusitania (roughly modern Portugal and the Spanish provinces of Salamanca and Caceres) and Baetica (roughly western Andalusia). The Suebi in Spain converted to Christianity under Rechiarm, who assumed power in 448. Eight years later they were attacked by Burgundii as federates of Rome and finally defeated by the Visigoths under Theodoric ii. Although weakened the Suebi maintained their kingdom in Spain until the late sixth century. The last Suebian king, Andeca, surrendered to the Visigoths under Leovigild in 585.
The region called Swabia (Schwaben in German), derived from the old tribal name, was a duchy in the Middle Ages—from sometime in the 10th century to its division in 1268. Its territory included roughly present-day Baden-Wurttemberg, Hesse, and southwestern Bavaria. Some parts of it were known for a time as Alamannia. The mountainous region known as the Black Forest is located there. In the early 19th century people of the region began to discuss the Alamanni and Suebi as separate groups, the inhabitants of the regions of Baden claimed Alamanni ancestry, and those of Wurttemberg claimed Suebian ancestry. The two regions became merged into one state, Baden-Wurt-temberg, in 1952 (see Germans: nationality).
CULTURE (see also Germanics) Economy: Trade with the Romans
The Suebi according to a contemporary account were willing to admit traders to their country to exchange their booty from raids more than to receive foreign goods. This may refer to their reputed dislike of wine, which they thought made men effeminate. or it may have been a proud disdain for the products of Roman civilization. In this the Suebi were different from many of their Germanic counterparts, who eagerly sought Roman luxury goods, including wine. Even their fellow Suebians the
Marcomanni and Quadi were not averse to such goods, and trade with Rome soon had a profound effect on their society. It gave their elites a taste for luxury and awakened in them a spirit of acquisitiveness and competition that gave rise to tensions as warriors resorted to raiding for booty
The history of the Suebi—and that of their tribal name—illustrates both aspects of ethnogene-sis (tribal formation) among the Germanic peoples and Roman tendencies in classifying or pinning down the teeming mass of Germanic tribes east of the Rhine. The Suebi were first known to history as a group with a single war leader, Ariovistus; thus their organization then may have been what is called a comitatus—war band—rather than a tribe that comprised a whole people, including women and children. By Tacitus’s time over a century later the name Suebi was given to people living in a wide region of central Germany, either because the original war band of the Suebi had expanded to become a full-fledged tribe or because the Romans habitually lumped together different peoples under a single name, more for the sake of clarifying classification than of reflecting reality (as in their classification of all peoples west of the Rhine as Celts and all peoples east of the Rhine as Germanics, a vast oversimplification).
Gradually it became clear that a number of tribes, including the Marcomanni and Quadi, were in some sense part of the “Suebi,” although it is unclear whether this was the result of Roman classification or whether the name Suebi was being used for one of the militant confederations of tribes that were developing in the second century C. E. The great aggressiveness of the Marcomanni and Quadi argues the latter. Whether the Alamannic confederation was made of tribes that invaded Suebian territory from elsewhere or whether it was simply a reorganization of former Suebian tribes under different leadership is not known.
After the great disruption of the Germanic world by the Huns some tribes formerly named Suebi—such as the Quadi—continued to be known and named in contemporary accounts, for example, of the Quadi’s invading Spain. Whether the name Suebi still had any meaning for the Quadi is unknown; Quadi in Spain were called Suebi.
The derivation of the name of Swabia from the tribal name Suebi may mean no more than that
SUGAMBRI
Location:
Between Sieg and Lippe Rivers in western Germany
Time period:
First century b. c.e. to first century c. e.
Ancestry:
Germanic and possibly Celtic
Language:
Germanic
SVEAR
Location:
Sweden
Time period:
First to seventh century c. e.
Ancestry:
Germanic
Language:
Germanic
Scholars of the Middle Ages used a name from Roman sources for a certain territory. The many and varied incarnations of the name Suebi through history illustrate both the great fluidity of ethnic identity among Germanic tribes and the staying power that names recorded in historical literature by Romans and others can have, sometimes taking on a life of their own that may follow paths quite different from those of the people who first bore them.
World History
