093 - The Marcomannic Wars

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 93, the Marcomannic Wars. The victory over Parthia had been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, Rome had proven to their enemies that, whether or not the rumors were true that the empire was slipping into decline, for the moment, it was still the premier political, economic, and military force in the Western world. But on the other hand, the legions of Ovidius Cassius, legions that had been so decisive in proving that point, had brought the devastating Antonine Plague back home with them. Thus, Rome's so recently re-established aura of invincibility was immediately shattered by an epidemic that hastened the pace of the empire's decline. In the end, it seems that labor shortages, famines, and undermanned legions were the only permanent spoils of war won by Rome in the conflict with Parthia. While these ill effects were not so immediately felt that the triumph over Parthia could be called a Pyrrhic victory, the conquest of the East definitely wound up a close cousin, as it was, after all, costly to the point of negating all benefit.

Ovidius had spent the years of the Parthian War in Rome, running every other part of the empire, while hostilities unfolded in the East. I didn't mention this last week, but just as the new emperors were forced to deal with the immediate crisis of a Parthian invasion of Armenia, they were also forced to deal with two other crises right in their own backyard. In 162, after less than a year on the throne, the Tiber flooded, causing extensive damage to the capital and triggering catastrophic food shortages. Hunger and panic gripped the city, and both Marcus and Lucius, who were still in Italy at the time, had to scramble to initiate rescue, relief, and clean-up efforts. Both men received high marks for their response, and the suffering of the general population was kept as low as a disaster of that magnitude would allow.

The other crisis that struck Rome in the early years of Marcus' reign was neither immediately recognized nor, frankly, even suspected would become a crisis. In August 161, Faustina gave birth to twins. As so often happened with Roman children, one of the two, a boy named Titus, died in 165, having just barely emerged from infancy. This was a tragedy, but in the grand scheme of things, only a minor one. The far greater tragedy was that the other twin, a boy named Commodus, survived. But that time bomb wasn't set to go off for another 20 years, and for now, the emperor and the empire seemed blessed that this healthy young boy was managing to thrive in a world full of disease, famine, and war.

During the early 160s then, while Rome was dealing with a series of disasters both manifest and dormant, the challenge that would consume the second half of Marcus' reign was just beginning to come into its own. North of the Danube, the disparate German tribes were beginning to rethink their relationship with each other, and question their greater relationship with Rome. After the massacre in the Teutoburg Forest, the Romans had successfully prevented Arminius from uniting all the German tribes into a single force by exploiting the ascendant German leaders' rivalry with the Marcomannic king Merobitus. Famously, when Arminius sent Varus' head to Merobitus in an attempt to persuade the Macromanni to join him, the already co-opted Merobitus sent the head along to Augustus for burial. Without the necessary support from the Marcomanni, by far the strongest single tribe in southwest Germany, Arminius' coalition eventually collapsed and the Romans did not face another serious threat from beyond the frontier for a century and a half.

The basic Roman strategy of divide and conquer was never on better display than in Germany during the years of the early Principate. As I mentioned while discussing the construction of the Limeis Germanicus, the Roman walls were not built to radically cut off quote civilization from quote the barbarians, but rather they were designed to control trade, limit available points of entry and exit, and serve as a base from which to project Roman power north and east. Roman interaction with the tribes was extensive and robust, and at all times, along with the economic exploitation, a political hand was kept stirring the pot and managing the loyalties of the Germans. Not only were some tribes given advantages over other tribes to keep their interests divergent, but elites within those favored tribes were often further enticed and divided from their own people, creating a condition where the tribes were divided from each other both internally and externally. Popular uprisings were suppressed by their own leadership, and hostile tribes were kept in check by their Roman allied neighbors, all without the Romans really having to lift a finger. These deft political machinations lie at the heart of what has occasionally and poetically been dubbed the Roman genius. Along with the discipline of the legions, the unparalleled skill of their engineers, the Roman ability to politically manipulate their enemies into submission was one of the great keys to the success of the empire.

But the times, they were a changing. When the war with Parthia erupted, the Romans were forced to redeploy the legions to meet the threat. This meant that while the east was reinforced, the Rhine and Danube frontiers were depleted. Engineers were forced to rely on locally raised militias rather than proper legions to maintain peace along the border, and it did not take long for the Germans to notice the shift. Though the Romans had for years been able to successfully buy off the tribal leadership, that did not mean that if there was more to get that the various kings wouldn't jump at the chance to grab it. Some wanted unrestricted access to Roman markets, that is, exemption from import and export taxes. Some simply wanted increased cash tributes to keep their tribes loyal, while others wanted the whole hog, the right to migrate south into the empire proper where, in time, they would become full-fledged citizens. With Roman attention diverted east, this might prove the perfect opportunity for the Germans to press for greater concessions.

Against this backdrop, it is possible, though not a confirmed fact, that the Marcomannic king Balamar, technically a Roman appointee, began to sow the seeds for a combined German campaign against the Romans. There were dozens of tribes of various sizes living in and around the Roman border, and getting them all to act in concert with one another was like herding cats, but Balamar put out his feelers and began to get the sense that maybe he could cobble something together. Though his task was made nearly impossible by the years of inter-tribal enmity the Romans had stoked, it seems that by the time the Parthian campaign was wrapping up, Balamar had built up some kind of coalition that was willing to press the Romans from different sides at different times to achieve unified success.

As I mentioned last time, in 166 or 167, a combined army of about 6,000 Germans broke across the border into Pannonia, causing all manner of havoc. They were eventually driven back across the Danube by a locally raised militia, but the surprise attack put the Romans on notice that there was renewed offensive energy brewing across the border. So the governor of Pannonia, Marcus Bassus, called together the heads of eleven German tribes for a summit mediated by Balamar, who was, at that point, still acting officially as an ally of Rome, and who had offered magnanimously to help smooth over the difficulties he himself was likely creating. The upshot of the talks was that the Marcomanni agreed to take the lead in maintaining the good order of their countrymen. Under the guise of this diplomatic peacekeeping mission, Balamar was able to secretly shore up support for his planned invasion of the empire.

The same year as the summit, possibly at Balamar's order, possibly with his blessing, or possibly simply by pure coincidence, a combined force of vandals and a Sarmatian tribe called, if I'm even pronouncing this correctly, the Azeges, invaded Moesia, killed the Roman governor, and then penetrated as far south as Greece, before retreating back across the border laden with treasure. Of the two, the nomadic Azeges would prove to be the more permanent threat. Ironically, they had actually been brought into the dangerous territory they occupied between the Danube and Dacia by Trajan when they agreed to act as loyal clients during his war with the Kebalists. But once the war was over, and the Azeges found their migration routes blocked and hampered by the Romans, relations quickly deteriorated. Though they were technically classified as a client of Rome, the Azeges were more or less simply biding their time through the reigns of Hadrian and Antoninus, waiting for an opportunity to reassert their true independence. With the war in the east sapping Roman strength, and Balamar ready to press his case further west, opportunity seemed to be knocking.

Though there had now been two successful invasions of imperial territory, the Romans had to delay whatever punitive measures they were planning, as they watched the Antonine plague suck the life out of the legions. But by the end of 168, Marcus managed to raise two new legions, and he struck north with Aleutius, where the co-emperors hoped to reinforce and reorganize the Danube border. At the outset, Marcus was probably planning to simply set the old order back to zero. But rather than falling back into their divided and submissive state, the Germans, led initially by Balamar's Marcomannic coalition, instead turned the heat up, and just like that, the last twelve years of Marcus' reign was written. War long the Danube for the rest of his natural life.

Lucius, meanwhile, escaped what fate had in store for Marcus by dying in early 169. Which was probably not such a bad thing for him, as tent life along the frozen Danube was nothing, and I mean nothing, like the pleasures he was used to enjoying in Antioch and Rome. With Lucius dead and buried, Marcus returned to the Danube in the autumn of 169, this time with his son-in-law, the eminently capable Claudius Pompeianus by his side. While they were making preparations for a campaign across the river to assert Roman order, the Izagis invaded Dacia, captured the gold mines, moved south into Moesia, and killed yet another governor. Marcus, naturally, ordered the legions to counter the invasion, but as soon as they moved forward, other German tribes launched their own raids into Roman territory, the most successful of which slashed through the Balkans before reaching and destroying the ancient and sacred temple of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Suddenly, Germans were crossing back and forth across the border at will, plundering whatever they could find before heading back home. The Romans scrambled to plug all the leaks, but all of this was merely a prelude for the great flood Balaamar had planned.

West of the great bend in the Danube, where the river begins its journey south, Balaamar assembled 20,000 men from the tribes he had so carefully cultivated, and led them into the Roman province of Noricum. They clashed with the legionary garrison stationed at Carentum, and blew the outnumbered Romans out of the water. Suddenly, the path to Italy was clear. Leaving behind a contingent to ransack Noricum, Balaamar led the rest of his army southwest. Foreshadowing future disasters for Rome, the Germans made quick time using the well-maintained Roman roads, and before any reasonable response could be initiated, they were banging at the gates of Aquila. This was obviously now a crisis of humongous proportions. No foreign invader had set foot in Italy since 101 BC, when Gaius Marius had defeated the combined army of the Cimbri and the Teutones, but now, almost out of nowhere, a German army was wreaking havoc in the home province. Worse yet for the Romans, a relief army sent under the command of the Praetorian prefect Furius Victorianus was defeated upon arrival, and Victorianus himself was killed in the fighting. But, as the Germans had no siege works, Aquila held, and a second relief force, this time led by Pompeianus and his trusty lieutenant Pertinax, was able to pry Balaamar from his position and force him to retreat back into German territory.

Marcus and the Romans spent the rest of 170 launching armies across the Danube on multiple fronts in an attempt to remind the Germans who was boss. But the results of these actions were mixed at best. The Germans had been purged from the empire proper, but the tribes were able to deal multiple defeats to the Romans in skirmishes and battles north of the frontier. By the end of the year, badly shaken, but at least having reasserted mastery of their own domain, Marcus opened negotiations with the various tribes to see what could be done about re-isolating them from one another. Through a combination of carrots and sticks, Marcus managed to break both the Azeges and the Quadi, one of the other seriously badass German tribes, from Balaamar's coalition, with both promising neither to fight the Romans themselves nor lend support to those Germans who did. The Romans were able to further fracture German unity, as lesser tribes began to get the sense that if they didn't cut their own deal with the empire, that they would be left out in the cold when the big dogs decided to make peace.

Not that diplomacy was the only tool working in the Roman kit. In 171, a mid-sized tribe was taken out of the fighting when their chief was killed in single combat by a rising legionary general named Valerius Maximianus. This duel not only had the immediate effect of pacifying that one particular tribe, but its propaganda value to the Romans was enormous. It was an exploit straight out of Livy's Tales of Rome's Early Heroes, and Marcus was quick to spread the tale of Maximianus' victory to friend and foe alike. With the Quadi and Azeges bought off, and other lesser tribes beginning to question the fancy tales Balaamar had spun about Roman weakness, Marcus pressed forward and led the legions across the Danube on a punitive campaign in 172 to punish those Germans who continued to resist. Though we know little about the details of the campaign, we know that Balaamar and the Marcomanni were humbled enough that peace terms were agreed to that included the return of Roman prisoners of war and the Marcomanni respecting a ten-mile neutral zone north of the Danube. Marcus thought enough of the results of his efforts that coins from the next year bore the happy slogan, Subjugated Germany, and he took for himself the title Germanicus.

But this was not the end of Marcus' adventures along the Danube, not by a long shot. Watching the Romans gain ground provoked fear among both the Azeges and the Quadi that perhaps they had come to terms too quickly. The Azeges in particular worried about noise being made by Marcus, that he felt the eastern nomads, who were not Germans per se, were too dangerous to tolerate in any fashion, and that he considered outright genocide to be the best policy for the Romans to pursue. The Azeges, finding themselves considered not an equal power to be dealt with honestly, but a menace in need of extermination, decided to resume hostilities. But now fighting alone rather than as part of a larger coalition, the Azeges were defeated by the Romans in battle and were forced to withdraw or face the kind of genocidal purge Marcus seemed to be planning.

This defeat of the Azeges prompted rank and file Quadi to revolt against their leadership, expel the Roman approved king, and send money and men to help the Azeges in their struggle for survival. Having already been accused by legionary officers of offering sanctuary to Germans still fighting Rome, this latest affront was too much to bear, and as quickly as they had ceased hostilities, war with the Quadi was back on. And not just war. The combined effect of their clandestine support for Rome's enemies and this latest overt abrogation of the treaty convinced Marcus that the very existence of the Quadi too was too dangerous to tolerate. More and more, this war ceased to be about restoring the old border stability, and began to coalesce as a genocidal campaign to eliminate huge portions of the German population.

In late 173, a combined force of Quadi and Azeges raided Pannonia, but as they made their way back across the frozen Danube, they were surprised by a Roman army led by Marcus personally, who, in a very short time, had transformed himself from a bookish philosopher into a highly effective leader of men. That is not to say that he ceased his intellectual reflections, just that he refused to allow his natural tendency towards intellectual isolation to get in the way of the fact that right now, Rome needed a general, not a philosopher. But when he wasn't consumed with running his various campaigns, Marcus did steal time for himself, and it was during the war with the Quadi in particular that he began to write and compile what would become known as the Meditations, a book mostly comprising self-reflective aphorisms designed to help Marcus himself deal with the immense burden he was forced to bear. I hope to elaborate on this key addition to the Western canon a bit more next week.

In 174, Marcus ordered a two-pronged assault across the Danube, one aiming at the Azeges, led by Marcus himself, and the other aiming at the Quadi, led by Pertinax, who was fast making a name for himself as one of the Empire's key go-to guys. The two campaigns of 174 are notable for providing the Romans with the two great miracles of the war. Two miracles, which cemented in the imaginations of the general Roman citizenry the notion that their elitist, philosophic, and perhaps not entirely liked Emperor Marcus Aurelius was in fact a gift sent by the gods to save Rome from the German menace.

The first miracle came while Marcus was campaigning against the Azeges. The Romans were being pressed hard and defeat seemed imminent, when suddenly the clouds darkened and a lightning bolt struck and destroyed the German siege works. Terrified, the Azegi line collapsed and Marcus rolled to victory. This became known as the lightning miracle.

The second miracle came about a month later, while Pertinax fought the Quadi. The Romans found themselves surrounded by a much larger Quadi force, and though they were able to temporarily resist attack, there seemed to be no escape. Compounding the danger was the fact that the Quadi had effectively blocked Roman access to fresh water, and in the heat the legions were becoming dehydrated. With Roman morale sinking to its breaking point, the Quadi were about to launch what was shaping up to be a massacre, when suddenly the clear skies clouded over and began pouring rain. The demoralized legions suddenly sprang back to life, catching water in their shields and helmets and drinking deeply from this sudden gift from the gods. The Quadi, recognizing that they needed to act fast, closed in on the Romans, many of whom were so busy drinking that they forgot to watch out for the enemy. The ensuing battle was a mass of blood, mud, and rainwater, but the sudden turn in the weather proved decisive, as the Quadi were driven back as much by hail, thunder, and lightning as by any Roman sword. This became known as the rain miracle.

Though neither miracle led to decisive victory, momentum had clearly shifted to the Romans, and though the rest of the year saw nothing but an inglorious series of hard-fought, brutal skirmishes, Roman morale remained high, while German morale plunged. By 175, the Quadi were ready to settle, convinced now more than ever that battling the favored by the gods Romans was pointless. Marcus granted them the same peace he had offered the Marco Mani, though he made a point of simultaneously lifting some of the imposed burdens on the Marco Mani as a reward for keeping out of the recent fighting.

The Azegis held out for a little while longer, but, finding themselves totally isolated, further hostilities seemed pointless. They sent envoys to Marcus requesting terms, but the emperor held to his genocidal line and refused to negotiate surrender. The Azegis were slated for extinction, nothing more and nothing less. But then, just as the Romans had been delivered by a sudden twist of fate, so too were the Azegis. Just as Marcus was closing in for the kill, word came of a crisis in the east. Perhaps spurred by erroneous reports of the emperor's death, Ovidius Cassius, hero of the Parthian war, who had been given the governorship of Syria as a reward for his service, allowed himself to be hailed emperor by his troops in mid-175. The other eastern legions followed suit, and just like that, seemingly without cause or warning, Cassius found himself leading the whole eastern empire in revolt against Marcus.

The Syrian general could perhaps be excused for acting prematurely in a bid to snatch power in the vacuum Marcus's death would have left at the time. His chosen heir, Commodus, was still only fourteen years old. But in persisting with his revolt even after he learned Marcus was alive and well, Cassius became a full-blown enemy of the state. Marcus was forced to set aside whatever plans he had for sealing the deal along the Danube, and rush east to deal with Cassius's revolt head on. This sudden domestic eruption was nothing short of, well, a miracle for the Azeges, whose peace envoys now found themselves returning home with favorable terms. They had to return their prisoners of war and provide about 8,000 horsemen to act as auxiliaries for the legions, but other than that, they would be left alone. Rather than facing extinction, the Azeges found themselves welcomed into the Roman fold.

Next week, we'll follow Marcus east as he attempts to quell the totally unexpected eastern revolt. The breathing space his absence offered the Germans will allow them to regroup for a second round of fighting that will force Marcus to return to the Danube and attempt to finish a job he had come so tantalizingly close to finishing already.