The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down by Jesse Browner

Author:Jesse Browner
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-01-02T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VI

GERMANS!

A great many things keep happening some of them good, some of them bad. The inhabitants of different countries keep quarrelling fiercely with each other and kings go on losing their tempers in the most furious way.

Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks

When Jesus Christ was still a little boy preaching to the rabbis, the Consul Varus Quintilius left Rome on a quixotic mission. He crossed the empire's northern border and entered the heart of Germany "as though he were going among a people enjoying the blessings of peace," despite all evidence to the contrary. Somehow, the consul had convinced himself that the Germans, "who could not be subdued by the sword, could be soothed by the law." The German prince Arminius destroyed his army and sent his head back to Rome on a platter. It was a pattern with which the Romans were to become increasingly familiar.

Rome had known nothing about the Germans in the second century B.C. and only gained its first real sense of them in Julius Caesar's northern campaigns late in the first. One hundred years later, the empire was surrounded. Scandinavia was Germanic; the lands of modern Germany swarmed with Franks, Suebi, Chatti, Saxons, and myriad smaller tribes and confederacies; a vast eastward migration swept Germanic Goths, Vandals, Burgun-dians, and Langobards onto the plains of eastern Europe and Scythia, whence they gradually began their westward drive against the far eastern frontiers of the empire.

The Rhine was the border between Germany and Gaul, as it is today. To the hapless Gauls, softened by generations of wine-drinking, toga-wearing, villa-living, and other Roman necessities, the river offered scant protection from the fieri - the wild animals on the other side. "Little by little they have grown accustomed to defeat," Julius Caesar says of the Gauls, "and after being conquered in many battles they do not even compare themselves in point of valour with the Germans." The Gauls were so terrified by the Germans that they were "unable even to endure their look and the keenness of their eyes." Gaul was like a pampered teenage girl, Rome's beloved eldest, blushing and squirming under the hardened gaze of a merciless Lothario. He would have her, she knew, the moment papa's back was turned.

These Germans really were different in every way. They were illiterate and proud of it. They worshipped only what they could see: the sun, the moon, water, fire. They hated cities, knew nothing of stonemasonry, and lived in villages of widely scattered huts. Even in the coldest weather, they wore nothing but cloaks or skins fastened with a thorn, training themselves to hardship; only the most distinguished wore underwear. The German prince Ariovistus boasted of his "invincible Germans highly trained in arms, who in a period of fourteen years had never been beneath a roof." They ate boiled meat and curdled milk and drank only beer, fearing that wine would make them "soft and womanish." They slept late and spent their lives hunting, fighting, and getting drunk. "To make day and night run into one in drinking is a reproach to no man," claimed Tacitus.

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