Suebi

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The Suebi or Suevi were an eastern Germanic people whose origin was near the Baltic Sea .

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Early history

2000 years ago the Baltic Sea was known to the Romans as the Mare Suebicum. Partially because of his unfamiliarity with the various Germanic peoples interacting with Rome at the time, the historian Tacitus referred to all eastern Germanic people as Suebi. More recent scholarship has shown that view to be an oversimplification. The Suebi eventually migrated south and west to reside for a while in the Rhineland area of modern Germany, where their name survives in the historic region known as Swabia. The Suebi under Ariovistus were invited into Gallia by the Aedui but soon came to dominate them and were finally defeated by Caesar in 58 BC.

Closely related to the Alamanni and often working in concert with them, the Suebi for the most part stayed on the right bank of the Rhine until December 31, 406, when much of the tribe joined the Vandals and Alans in breaching the Roman frontier at Mainz, thus launching an invasion of the province of Gaul.

While the Vandals and Alans clashed with the Roman-allied Franks for supremacy in Gaul, the Suebi under their king Hermerico worked their way to the south, eventually crossing the Pyrenees and entering the Iberian Peninsula. Passing through the Basque country, they settled in the Roman province of Gallaecia, in northwestern Hispania, swore fealty to the Emperor Honorius and were accepted as foederati and permitted to settle, under their own autonomous governance. Contemporaneously with the self-governing province of Britannia, the kingdom of Suebi in Galicia became the first of the sub-Roman kingdoms to be formed in the distintegrating territory of the Western Roman Empire. The Suebic kings were the first kingdom separated from the Roman Empire to mint coins.

Suebic kingdom of Gallaecia

The Suebic kingdom in Gallaecia lasted from 410 to 584 and seems to have enjoyed relatively stable government for most of that time. Historians like José António Lopes Silva, the translator of Idatius' chronicles, the primary written source for the period, find that the essential temper of Galician culture was established in the blending of Ibero-Roman culture with that of the Suebi [1].

The number of the original Suebic invaders is estimated as fewer than 30,000 people, settled mainly in the zones of Braga (Bracara Augusta), Porto, Lugo (Lucus Augusta) and Astorga (Asturica Augusta). Bracara Augusta, the modern city of Braga, became the Capital of the Suebi, has it was previously the capital of the Gallaecia Roman province. Suebic Gallaecia was larger than the modern region: it extended south to the Douro and to Avila in the east.

In 438 Hermerico ratified the peace with the Galaicos people and, tired of fighting, abdicated in favor of his son Requila.

In 448 Requila died, leaving a state in expansion to his son Requiario who imposed his Catholic faith on the Suebi population. In 456 Requiario died, and some candidates for the throne appeared, grouped in two factions. A division marked by the river Minius (Minho/Miño) is noticed, probably a consequence of the two tribes, Quados and Marcomanos, who constituted the Suebi nation in the Iberian Peninsula.

There were occasional clashes with the Visigoths, who arrived in the Iberian peninsula in 416 and came to dominate most of the peninsula, but the Suebi maintained their independence until 584, when the Visigothic King Leovigild, on the pretext of conflict over the succession, invaded the Suebic kingdom and finally defeated it. Andeca, the last king of the Suebi, held out for a year before surrendering in 585. With his surrender, this branch of the Suebi were absorbed into the Visigothic kingdom. The kingdom of Galicia, nevertheless, survived on official paper until 1833.

The historiography of the Suebi, and of Galicia in general, was long marginalized in official Spanish culture; it was left to a German scholar to write the first connected history of the Suebi in Galicia, as writer-historian Xoán Bernárdez Vilar has pointed out [2].

Suebi Kings of Gallaecia

See Also

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