The Early Peoples of Austria-Hungary
Little that is definite is known about the inhabitants of the territories which comprise the present Austrian Empire prior to the Christian era.
From: Unknown To: 400 C.E.
Location: Austria; Hungary
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Austria by Sydney Whitman and J. R. McIlraith, 1899.
Little that is definite is known about the inhabitants of the territories which comprise the present Austrian Empire prior to the Christian era. There are traces of Keltic antiquity in the names of many districts, rivers, mountains, towns, &c., of these territories which seem to prove that the latter were in pre-historical times in the possession of tribes of that great and numerous people, the Kelts, who afterwards spread westward over Gaul and the British Isles. There is even reason for believing that the mining industry in Austria dates back to their time; certain it is that under the Romans iron, steel, and salt were all worked there.
The Romans called the natives, with whom they first came in contact there, Gauls; and, through Roman sources as well as by discoveries made in more recent times in France and Switzerland, we know a good deal about their personal characteristics. They were rude in their ways but brave in the extreme, and must have possessed some amount of civilisation. Their religion was in the hands of Druids, and seems to have been largely of a sacrificial nature. Unlike the Teutons, however, they are said to have shown little chivalry to women, a characteristic that to some extent exists among the Slavs of the present day.
There were several branches of these Kelts or Gauls of Central Europe. One powerful branch was that of the Boii. The Romans speak of a people of this name inhabiting in Gallia Lugduensis what is now the Bourbonnais, Departement de l’Allier, but the same, or at all events a similarly named, people seem also to have dwelt in the district now comprised by Bavaria, Bohemia, Moravia, and Northwest Hungary. Bohemia indeed is Bojohaemum, the country of the Boii. Part of this people also migrated to Upper Italy, occupying the district now known as Parma and Modena. Their ramifications, therefore, were very extensive.
We are also told of a people called the Taurisci or dwellers of the heights (Keltic taur, a mountain), who seem to be identical with the later Norici, and who inhabited the valleys of the Salza, Traun, Enns, Mur and Drau in Carinthia. The immanes Rhaeti, as Horace calls them, and the Vindelici, who inhabited the Tyrol and part of present-day Bavaria respectively, were according to some authorities also of Keltic origin, though this cannot be regarded as established. More certainly Keltic were the Ambidravii or Scordisci, who dwelt between the Danube and the Save in what then was Pannonia, and corresponds fairly well with modern Hungary south of the Danube; the Brenni, whose name survives in the Brenner Pass and the town of Brunecken; the Genauni, whose name is thought to be traced in the Val di Non, half way between Trent and Botzen, and the Ombroni in the Carpathian part of Silesia.
Passing beyond Pannonia, however, we find in what now is Galicia a people called Sarmatians, who came from the country between the Weichsel and the Don, and from whom the Black Sea received the name of Mare Sarmaticum and in modern Bukowina and Transylvania a fierce race called Dacians, who in Julius Caesar's time were exceedingly powerful under their ruler Byrebistes or Boerebistes. Lastly, descending towards the Adriatic, we find the great Illyrian people in modern Croatia, Dalmatia, and Albania, those in Croatia being termed Liburnians.
As for the Coast Land, that too was probably Illyrian, but it early became an integral part of the Roman Empire under the name of Istria, and numerous are the Roman remains there; Spalato (then Salona) being made a great Roman naval station after the struggle of a century and a half with the fierce Illyrian sea pirates.
But besides these peoples who were more or less connected with the soil, we find mention made of others who came from a greater distance. Particularly important in this connection are the Cimbri and Teutones who disappear from Roman history as suddenly as they made their appearance. These, as the name of the second indicates, were of German extraction, and their place of origin is generally placed as far north as Jutland.
About 102 B.C., however, they made an incursion southwards, overcoming all obstacles until they reached the Eastern Alps. Here the Romans under Marius met them, and a bloody battle was fought 101 B.C. at the Campi Raudii, which ended in the complete defeat of these northern invaders. To their bravery the Roman writers bear sufficient witness, for we are told that after the defeat their women rushed with axes and even bare hands upon the victors, and allowed themselves to be slaughtered rather than to fall into the hands of their opponents. This incursion seems specially important as showing that even in these early times there must have been a considerable intermingling of races going on.
As the Romans extended their conquests, we find other tribes mentioned as coming into prominence, only again to fall like those just mentioned into oblivion the most profound. It is undoubtedly a remarkable historical feature, this sudden apparent bloom and decline of these peoples. The explanation of it is to be found partly no doubt in the Romanising of their territories and in the more enlarged knowledge of them possessed by their conquerors, but chiefly in all probability in the constant incursions of other outside tribes who weakened and absorbed the former ones. Be this as it may, by the beginning of the Christian era we find the Romans in possession of all the territory south of the Danube, and the countries of the Taurisci, Scordisci, and other peoples before mentioned replaced by the rich and important provinces of Noricum and Pannonia.
The most important campaigns undertaken by the Romans in those parts, subsequently to that of Marius against the Cimbri and Teutones, were those of Julius Caesar against Ariovistus, of Octavianus in Pannonia and Dalmatia, and of Drusus and Tiberius in the Eastern Alps. Julius Caesar's campaign is important, because among the Germanic tribes led by Ariovistus and driven back with him across the Rhine was that of the Marcomanni, marchmen or borderers (marca = march, border) who subsequently broke the power of the Boii in Bohemia, and established a powerful kingdom there. These Marcomanni were closely related to or according to some a tribe of the Suevi, also mentioned by Caesar, who seem to have been a mixed German and Slavonic people settled in what now is Baden. To the Suevi we shall have to revert again. It may be mentioned here, however, that according to Pliny they and the Hermanduri, Chatti, and Cherusci were all tribes of a great Germanic people, the Hermiones, who occupied the central parts of Europe.
The result of the campaigns of Drusus and Tiberius (12-9 B.C.) was the complete subjection to the Romans of the Tyrol and whole district of the Eastern Alps. Drusus operated from the south, Tiberius from Gaul and the Lake of Constance, and both penetrated the valleys of the Rhine and Inn in every direction so completely that, as Merivale puts it, "at the conclusion of a brilliant and rapid campaign the two brothers had effected the complete subjugation of the country of the Grisons and the Tyrol." This author also adds: "The free tribes of the Eastern Alps appear then for the first time in history only to disappear again for a thousand years."
The "Apotheosis of Augustus" in the Museum of Antiquities at Vienna represents the triumph celebrated in honour of Tiberius' success. The same leader subsequently added Pannonia to the Roman Empire. Among the prisoners captured by Drusus and taken to Rome was Hermann, or Arminius, afterwards chief of the Cherusci. In Rome he learned the arts of his conquerors as well as their weak points, and having after a time returned to his native people, he was able to train them so well that when next he came into conflict with the Romans under Varus in the Teutoburger forest in A.D. 9 he completely defeated them. When Augustus heard of this terrible disaster, he is said to have exclaimed: "O Varus, Varus, give me back my legions!"
Five years afterwards the Romans under Germanicus had again to suffer defeat at the hands of the Cherusci, but treachery did what the might of the south failed to accomplish, and Arminius fell by the hands of relatives at the early age of thirty-seven. Then this people who had overcome both the Marcomanni and the Romans themselves suffered defeat at the hands of the Chatti or Hessians. Lastly, in the early years of the Christian era Dalmatia, Liburnia, and the western part of what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina were subdued, and the district converted into a Roman province. The subjection of the Dacians of Transylvania was not accomplished till about a hundred years later by Trajan, whose pillar in Rome still stands in commemoration of the event.
We thus see that at the end of the first century of our era, practically the whole of the present Austrian-Hungarian Empire was an integral portion of the Roman dominions. Soon the whole district became completely Romanised. Even in those times the country was famous for its forests and mines, and its grain production was very large. With the Romans, too, came a higher state of culture and a more settled life, towns such as Noricum Juvavum (Salzburg), Augusta Vindelicorum (Augsburg), Lentia (Linz), Celeia (Cilli), Vindobona (Vienna), &c., were founded, and commerce generally flourished.
The natives gave up their ancient nomadic habits, the only remaining traces of which seem to be discoverable in the scarcity of hedges and definite boundaries among the South Germans as compared with those in the north, and even the language of Rome became to a great extent that of the country. The establishment of new municipia and colonia gave the subject race the benefit of fine roads, amphitheatres, fora, baths, &c., and the liberal system of law (Jus gentium) administered by the praetors put the weak on an equal footing with the strong. Some of the Roman Emperors—for example, Claudius II., Probus and Valentinian I.—were actually Pannonian by birth.
For a time all seems to have gone well. About the end of the second century, however, the Marcomanni again became very troublesome; in fact, they appear to have devasted almost the whole of the province of Pannonia. From this time forward the Roman power in these regions gradually waned. Allied with the Marcomanni in these incursions were the Quadi (Celtic, col, cold or coad, a wood) and Suevi (Swabians), the former of whom came from Bohemia and Northern Hungary between Mons Gabretta (Böhmer Wald) and the Danube, while the latter seem to have been located in Moravia and Silesia.
For two centuries we read of constant incursions by these tribes, as well as by the Alemanni and Burgundians, but by the end of the fourth century they have completely disappeared. At the time we speak of they must have been very powerful, for the Romans had repeatedly to purchase peace and make concessions. Thus Aurelianus and Probus withdrew the Roman legions from Dacia and Pannonia Inferior, leaving them a prey to the Goths, and Commodus had to purchase peace of the Germanic confederation led by the Marcomanni. The Allemanni, too, actually succeeded in penetrating into Italy as far as Milan, but were defeated there by Gallienus—a kind of Cadmean victory, apparently, for it was followed by the Emperor marrying Pipa, daughter of the chief of the Suevi, and giving Pannonia to his father-in-law as the price of peace.
Whitman, Sydney, and J. R. McIlraith. Austria. G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1899.
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