To The Stars by Peter Rhodan

Author:Peter Rhodan [Rhodan, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-07-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

The Langobardii cometh

Two days later, Gundomad and six of his senior Tegns rode into Mogontiacum and presented Coren with a stilted but readable Latin scroll that formally requested admission of the Mattiaci people and their lands as a new province of the Empire. The lands they occupied were almost directly north of Mogontiacum and included a good deal of the area formally encompassed within the Roman lines that had been constructed centuries earlier. The new border in the area, negotiated with the Alemanni after their defeat, followed the Rhenus and then turned east, following the Moenus, which had two large northward loops before turning south finally. The border then jumped across to the Alomora, which eventually joined the Danuvius to the west of Castra Regina.

The lands of the Mattiaci extended Westward to the Lagona River, which joined the Rhenus a bit south of the port of Confluentes. The roughly rectangular block of land included some choice farming areas to the west of the Moenus and a large area of rugged mountains. The old bridge across the Rhenus to the small Roman enclave on the north bank had been replaced by a large structure a few years earlier that carried both road and rail traffic to the growing town of Augustanus in the center of the farming plains opposite Mogontiacum. The whole area south of the border was developing rapidly from the rather uncivilized area it had been before the arrival of Arturo Sandus.

The main town of the Mattiaci was Aquae Mattiacorum, a town that had been established by the Romans and which the Mattiaci still refused to acknowledge as their capital. King Gundomad ruled from the town of Holzhausen, the wood house, the name reflecting the large wooden hall that served as Gundomad's palace. While not as big as many Roman buildings, among the Germani in the southwestern part of the territory the tribes occupied, the hall was recognized as a building of some significance. This was as much for its size and the fact that it wasn't built using Roman materials or Roman engineering, nor was it built in a Roman style.

The northern area of the land occupied by the Mattiaci had several mines of various types producing copper, lead, zinc, and silver. Zinc was an increasingly important trading item with the Romans, while the copper and the silver the mines produced were used primarily in the local coinage that King Gundomad had instituted. Rather than deliberately set up his own standards, he had chosen to copy the Roman coins both in size and style to a large extent, and in the area of the Empire bordering the lands of the Mattiaci, their coins are used interchangeably with Roman ones.

The railway he was building was in the rugged terrain in the north of his lands to service the mines in the area. The town of Lagoniacum was now developing around an old stone watchtower originally built for the Roman limes. The railway ran up the river valley and

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