Civitas Tungrorum

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Limburg are also shown. The red boundary that separates them is the modern language border
between Dutch and French. The orange lines are modern national borders.

The Civitas Tungrorum was a large Roman administrative district dominating what is now eastern Belgium and the southern Netherlands. In the early days of the

Rhine River border districts, within the province of Germania Inferior. Its capital was Aduatuca Tungrorum, now Tongeren
.

Like many other Roman administrative districts, it was named after the tribal grouping that lived there, the Tungri, although that name is not known from the area before it became part of the Roman Empire. Also like other such districts, it became the basis for a medieval bishopric, but the bishops of Tongeren moved first to nearby Maastricht and then to Liège.

Location

The geographical boundaries of the civitas probably corresponded at least roughly to the area of the large medieval

Limburg, and North Brabant. It also contained the medieval imperial city of Aachen
, now in Germany.

Many early medieval dioceses were based upon older Roman provinces.

pagan Frankish, and outside of Roman or Catholic influence. Edith Wightman, considering the question of the locations of the tribes Caesar originally met here, goes as far as saying that this region "had the least stable political situation of any within later Belgica, and since the pattern was repeated in the Middle Ages, bishopric boundaries are of no help".[4]

In modern terms, the region covered all or most of eastern Belgium. The southern part is generally treated as if it had the same boundaries as the later diocese.

There is less certainty about the borders of the civitas to the north and east, where pagan Franks settled in between the times of

Saint Servatius and Lambert of Maastricht
, leading to a possible disruption of administrative districts.

Geography

The territory of the Tungri is divided into three distinct geographical areas.[9]

  • The north is a large sandy area known today as the Campine (Dutch Kempen). It was not highly fertile, or heavily populated. It contains marshy areas, and the water flows partly to the Scheldt in the west and partly towards the Meuse. In Latin this area came to be known as
    Toxandria
    , but in late Roman time it became almost empty of Romanized inhabitants, and was settled by incoming Franks.
  • A band in the centre of the civitas is hilly, loess ground. This contains the modern regions known as the Hesbaye (Dutch Haspengouw), Hageland, and Condroz. It has historically always been more fertile and more heavily populated. It was here that Roman civilization held out against the invasions of the late empire, and it is therefore here that the frontier was set between Germanic languages and Romance languages, the same as it is today. (Some claim that this pattern was fixed already before Caesar, originally having been a border between Germanic and Celtic languages.[10])
  • The south of the civitas is more heavily wooded and hilly and merges into the natural boundary of the Ardennes.

Origins: the Tungri

See also: Tungri and Germani cisrhenani

Concerning the Tungri, the name appears for the first time only when this area is part of the Roman empire. Some authors believe it represents a name used by new immigrants coming from the eastern side of the Rhine. On the other hand, Tacitus equated them to the same group of tribes who had been known as the Germani and had lived in the area in the time of the Gallic Wars of Julius Caesar, and been described by him in his famous Commentary. Tacitus claimed that "Tungri" was not their original name:-

The name Germany [Germania], on the other hand, they say, is modern and newly introduced, from the fact that the tribes which first crossed the Rhine and drove out the Gauls, and are now called Tungrians, were then called Germans [Germani]. Thus what was the name of a tribe [natio], and not of a race [gens], gradually prevailed, till all called themselves by this self-invented name of Germans [Germani], which the conquerors had first employed to inspire terror.[11]

The Germani tribes which Caesar had earlier named in this region were the

Caeroesi, and the Segni.[12][13] The biggest and most important tribe were the Eburones, and it is they who appear to have dominated all or most of modern-day Belgian and Dutch Limburg, with a territory probably covering all or most of the flat Campine (Dutch Kempen) northern part of this region, and stretching into neighbouring regions of the Netherlands, Wallonia and Germany. The other tribes are thought to have lived further south, in what is today Wallonia, or else just over the border in Germany – the Condrusi in the modern Condroz, near the Segni, and the Caeroesi in the Eifel
forest region of Germany.

The term Germani for these tribes requires explanation in order to avoid confusion. Caesar also referred to other tribes living over the east of the Rhine as Germani, and he called that region Germania, considering it their homeland. He may have been the first to extend the term in this way, which has now influenced many modern languages. So he distinguished the Germani in the Belgic area as "Germani cisrhenani", and treated the other "Germani" as the ones living in their real homeland, which some Roman geographers came to refer to as Magna Germania.

Whether or not any of the Belgian Germani spoke a

substrate language in the Belgic region. (See Nordwestblock.) So Celtic, while influential culturally, may never have been the main language of the area.[14]

Apart from the Germani, the Atuatuci also probably lived in what would become the Civitas Tungrorum. Caesar treated them as a distinct people from the Germani although their ancestry was also in the east, because they were descended from remnants of the Cimbri. Because they had a fort on large hill, and their name may even mean "fort people" it is thought that the Aduatuci lived in hilly Wallonia, possibly near Namur. Ambiorix, one of the two kings of the Eburones, complained to Caesar that he had to pay tribute to the Aduatuci, and that his own son and nephew were kept as captive slaves by them.[15] But once in revolt against the Romans, he rode first to the Aduatuci, and then to the Nervii, searching for allies.[16]

The Aduatuci and the Germani (in the narrow sense) participated in an alliance of Belgic tribes against Caesar in 57 BCE. Before that battle, information from the Remi, a tribe allied with Rome, stated that the Germani (the Condrusi, the Eburones, the Caeraesi, and the Paemani; but not the Segni) had collectively promised, they thought, about 40,000 men. The Aduatuci had promised 19,000.[12] In 54 BCE, after the defeat of this alliance in the Battle of the Sabis, the Eburones and the Aduatuci rebelled again in alliance with the Gaulish tribes to their south and west, the Treveri and Nervii.

The capital of the Eburones is named by Caesar as

Aduatuca. It is possible that this is the same place as modern Tongeren (Latin Aduatuca Tungrorum), except that the term may simply mean "fortification". One reason for doubt is that Caesar seems to indicate that Aduatuca was near the centre of the Eburone territory, and that the main part of this territory lay between the Meuse (Dutch Maas) and the Rhine, while Tongeren lies entirely to the west of the Maas.[13][17]

After some initial success, the revolt against Caesar failed, and he conquered the area. He states that he tried to annihilate "the race and name of the state of the Eburones", for their "crime" which triggered the revolt, of having killed his lieutenants Quintus Titurius Sabinus and Lucius Aurunculeius Cotta when they had demanded to be quartered amongst the Eburones for winter during a year with bad harvests.[18] Ambiorix fled into the Ardennes, with some horse.[19] Many others escaped towards the forests, morasses, and tidal islands of the coast.[18]

The other king of the Eburones,

Toxandri
.

Roman Empire

See also: Germania Inferior

Under the Romans, for example in the time of

Baetasi also. To the east of the Tungri were the Sunici and on the Rhine the Ubii, whose city was Cologne, the provincial capital. The Tungri, along with many of the tribal states of Germania Inferior, participated in the Revolt of the Batavi.[22]

Tongeren was a major town on several notable east-west Roman routes including

St Truiden-Borgloon-Tongeren, through the villages of Overhespen, Helshoven, and Bommershoven. The more fertile areas south of these roads were more heavily populated and more fully Romanized. In the sandy north of the Civitas, the so-called Campine
(Dutch Kempen) was less fertile, and less populated.

Within the civitas Tungrorum, some information survives about sub-districts (

Batavian revolt.[23]

The name of one of the Germani tribal groups has survived from Caesar's time until today, the Condrusi, who lived in the Condroz of Wallonia. Another survived into medieval times, the Caerosi who lived in the Eifel forest just over the border in modern Germany.

A new name in Roman times is

Toxandri, which appears to have been in the large part of the civitas containing the sandy Campine region in the north, but possibly overlapping into the country of the Nervii, because some Toxandri also appear in cohorts of the Nervian civitas to the west. As with the Tungri more generally, whose name also appears for the first time under the Romans, either this was a new Germanic tribe entering the region, or it has alternatively been suggested that it could be a Latin translation of the name Eburones, whose name had been annihilated by Caesar. Both names apparently refer to the yew tree (Latin taxus).[5]

The pagus Catualinus apparently existed in or near

Heel on the Meuse, which corresponds with Catvalium in the Tabula Peutingeriana map. The name appears to be linguistically Celtic.[26]

The pagus Vellaus, is associated with the name of the forest of

Groote Peel national park between Eindhoven and Venlo.[27] Their name has been compared with the name Vellaus, the name of a god found in some inscriptions.[28]

(It has also been proposed that the

Baetasi might have lived near Geetbets, on the Brabant-Limburg
border, but it seems more likely that they lived in an area closer to the Rhine in modern Germany.)

Map of the Roman Empire and Magna Germania in the early second century

Already during the Gallic Wars of Caesar, tribes of Germanic people were raiding over the Rhine, and many were eventually settled there. As Tacitus wrote, "The Rhine bank itself is occupied by tribes unquestionably German,—the Vangiones, the Triboci, and the Nemetes. Nor do even the Ubii, though they have earned the distinction of being a Roman colony, and prefer to be called Agrippinenses, from the name of their founder, blush to own their origin."[29] The tribes he mentions are all tribes mentioned by Caesar also, as having made attempts to cross the Rhine when he was in the area.

The Ubii, were in the north, the region of the Eburones, and became the people of the region of Cologne and Bonn during Roman imperial times. The other three tribes had been invaders on the upper Rhine, closer to modern Switzerland.

The

Roman empire
proceeded to form two new cisrhenane provinces named "Germania" on the Gaulish, western, side of the Rhine.

So the two Roman provinces named Germania, both mainly on the west of the Rhine, gave an official form to the concept of germani cisrhenani.

The end of the era

As the empire grew older, the pressure from Germanic tribes crossing the Rhine became greater, especially in areas closest to the Rhine. The northern part of the Civitas Tungrorum became depopulated, and was then settled by the

Carolingian dynasties proceeded to conquer a large part of Western Europe
.

As mentioned above, one way in which the old civitas survived was by its medieval Christian diocese, the diocese of Liège, although its seat changed from Tongeren to Maastricht and later to Liège. This diocese was however reduced greatly in the 16th century.

Apart from historical records such as those discussed above, the old name of the Tungri now survives only in place names such as Tongeren and

Tongerloo
.

References

  1. ^
    ISBN 9782804150419
  2. ^ "Liège", Catholic Encyclopedia online
  3. ^ "Diocese", Catholic Encyclopedia online
  4. ^ Wightman (1985:30–31)
  5. ^ a b c Wightman (1985:53–55)
  6. ^ Byvanck (1943, pp. 473–474)
  7. ^ Alberts (1974)
  8. ^ Bonnie, Rick (2009), Cadastres, misconceptions & Northern Gaul: a case study from the Belgian Hesbaye region, p. 74
  9. ISBN 9783110176889
  10. ^ Lamarcq & Rogge (1996)
  11. ^ "Germania"chapter 2
  12. ^ a b "Gallic Wars" II.4
  13. ^ a b "Gallic War" VI.32
  14. ^ Lamarcq & Rogge (1996, p. 44)
  15. ^ "Gallic War" V.27
  16. ^ "Gallic War" V.38
  17. ^ "Gallic War" V.24
  18. ^ a b "Gallic War" VI.34
  19. ^ "Gallic War" VI.33
  20. ^ "Gallic War" VI.31
  21. ^ Wightman (1985:202)
  22. ^ Wightman (1985:104)
  23. ^ Nouwen, Robert (January 1996), "The Vindolandatablet 88/841 and the cohors I Tungrorum milliaria | Robert Nouwen", M. Lodewijckx (Ed.), Archaeological and Historical Aspects of West-European Societies. Album Amicorum Andre van Doorselaer (Acta Archaeologica Lovaniensia Monographiae, 8), 123-134, Academia.edu, retrieved 2013-09-08
  24. ^ Cohors Primae Tvngrorvm, Roman-britain.org, archived from the original on 2013-02-23, retrieved 2013-09-08
  25. ^ Cohors Secvndae Tvngrorvm Milliaria Eqvitata, Roman-britain.org, archived from the original on 2013-07-08, retrieved 2013-09-08
  26. ISBN 9783110169508
    , retrieved 2013-09-08
  27. doi:10.3406/rbph.1930.6726
  28. ^ Byvanck (1943, p. 489)
  29. ^ "Germania" chapter 28

Bibliography

Further reading

External links

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