Although in all these territories indigenous revolts in the years following its annexation, at the beginning of the second half of the 2nd century AD. C. the provinces of Raetia , Noricum , Pannonia (Top and Bottom ) and Moesia (Top and Bottom ) were firmly in the hands of Rome. To these provinces must be added those formed in 124 AD. C. with the Dacian lands conquered by Trajan in 106 AD. C. north of the great border river:the Daciae Apulensis , Malvensis and Porolissensis .
To the north of all these provinces inhabited the barbarians , name that the Romans and Greeks gave to "foreigners" in general and that in this case were made up of a series of tribes of diverse origins (Germanic, Iranian...) and with a low cultural level compared to Rome, such as Marcomanni, Hermundians, Quadi , Sarmatians (Iazygs and Roxolans), Costoboci, Victophalians, Longobards, Obios, Buros, Vandals, Naristos, Free Dacians… Frequently they were at war with each other (encouraged by Rome most of the time), but always vigilant for any Roman weakness to attack the Empire, looking for loot or land.
The first assault
In 166 the Roman Empire was restless . Shortly before, his armies from Britannia and Germania they had ended with various revolts in their provinces and on that date they had just won a war (“directed” by Vero and, in fact, by the experienced generals that Marcus Aurelius put at his side) in the East against the Parthian Empire whose consequences were not good :the Danubian and Rhenish troops (legions and auxiliaries) displaced as reinforcements to the area, on returning to their bases, brought with them the plague that had broken out in the theater of operations and spread it throughout a large part of the western provinces, reaching with special virulence to Italy.
This is the scenario in which one of the major barbarian offensives will take place. on the Empire, the clearest precedent for the waves that hit it in the 3rd and 4th centuries and ended up flooding its western part in the 5th. The entire northern border was affected to a greater or lesser extent, but it was the Danubian lands that that they noticed it the most, perhaps because, being more extensive, the front they presented to the many potential enemies was greater. The memory of the wars that Marcus Aurelius had to fight there has even reached our days and two of the best “Roman” movies begin in those days and in that region:The Fall of the Roman Empire (Anthony Mann, 1964) and Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000).
But before the troops, with their deadly companion, returned to their bases, the barbarians of the Danubian tribes, aware of the substantial decrease in the strength of the garrisons they had opposite, they had already begun their attacks. The first province to receive their “attentions” was Raetia , on the Upper Danube. The province then lacked a legionary garrison and only had auxiliary units stationed there (many of them still in the East), which favored the fact that, in September 166, the Germanic tribes of Marcomanni , Cuados and Victofalianos attacked and burned various bases of said auxiliaries, among them Abusina (Eining, Germany), Ventonia (Pfünz, Germany) and the one stationed in present-day Böhming (Germany), these two north of the Danube, their attack on Augusta Vindelicorum being repulsed with difficulty. (Augsburg, Germany), the provincial capital, defended by forces commanded by Governor Severus Desticius.
But that had only just begun and as the barbarians basked in the flames of their victories at Raetia , at the end of 166 or beginning of 167, 6,000 Lombards and Obians crossed the Danube in the vicinity of the legionary base of Brigetio (Komárom-Szőny, Hungary), in Upper Pannonia , and, marching southeast, penetrated into the adjacent province of Lower Pannonia , whose garrison legion, the II Adiutrix , had not yet returned from the Parthian war. Near the current Hungarian town of Káloz, a force of auxiliary infantry and cavalry under the command of the prefects Macrinius and Candide were able, however, to intercept and defeat them.
Informed of all this, the emperor Marcus Aurelius prepared for defense, as the people of Rome, terrified of a possible invasion from Italy reaching the Urbs and consumed, moreover, by the terrible effects of the plague that killed thousands of people there every day, he demanded action. Thus, invoking all the divine and human powers, while making sacrifices to the gods of the Roman pantheon (and other foreign pantheons) capable of helping, he prepared ("improvised", it would rather be the word) an army with troops from the garrison of Rome (praetorian, urban and vigil cohorts), the only ones he had at his disposal in that place and at that time, as well as sailors from the Tyrrhenian fleets (based on Misenum , Miseno, Italy) and the Adriatic (from Ravenna , Ravenna, Italy). It was not until the middle of the 3rd century that a strategic reserve was created to plug open gaps in the frontier defences. At the head of these troops he put Furius Victorinus, one of the two praetorian prefects (the other was Cornelius Repentinus), and such an army headed north. To protect Rome, and by sea, a strong contingent of legionnaires from the XIV Gemina arrived there. at the command of his legate, Vetio Sabiniano.
The Barbarians of Raetia they consumed all 167 looting the fields of the province, extending their raids to the neighboring Noricum , while other tribes also went on the attack on the central Danube. Thus, in the summer of 167, Iazygous Sarmatians, Costoboks and Free Dacians attacked a sensitive Roman installation:the gold mines of Alburnus Maior (Roşia Montană, Romania), in the Dacia Apulensis . Although the miners fled, Calpurnius Agricola, governor of the then three unified Dacian provinces, formed a combat group with the troops under his command (among them the legions V Macedonica and XIII Gemina ) and defeated the raiders, although they continued to occupy part of the province for a time. On the other hand, in Pannonia Superior , the Marcomanni attacked the partially unguarded cantonments of the XIV in Carnuntum (ruins between Petronell-Carnuntum and Bad Deutsch-Altenburg, Austria) and the X Gemina in Vindobona (Vienna, Austria) (this legion was out of its base, in operations). These camps held out until troops from Lower Pannonia , commanded by Governor Claudius Pompeyano, came to the rescue and defeated the barbarians.
Finally, Marcomanni, Quadi and Victophalians, commanded by King Balomar (probably when), they decided to cross, already in 168, the Alps from Raetia and Noricum , sacking various Noritalic cities, operations that included the destruction of Opitergium (Oderzo). It would be, therefore, in the vicinity of this city when the clash between the army of Furio Victorino and the barbarians took place. We don't know if it was a pitched battle or an ambush, but the fact is that the Romans suffered a resounding defeat that left twenty thousand of his people lying on the battlefield, including Prefect Furio.
This military catastrophe left northeastern Italy wide open to barbarian raids, who turned their attention to the region's richest and most prosperous city, the coastal Aquileia (Aquileia, Italy), and they went against her. They could not take it, for its fortifications, defended by hastily recruited citizen militia (the city had no garrison), proved too much for warriors inexperienced in siege warfare. Their king was killed during the operations and the city held out until its attackers were forced to withdraw in the face of the imminent arrival from the south of a relief army led in person by the two co-emperors and the threat of being cut off from the northeast by another Roman contingent.
In effect, Marcus Aurelius had done things well and with the few troops of the Rome garrison that had not been annihilated with Furio, the Pannonian reinforcements that had arrived there with the Sabinian legacy, a vexillatio (detachment) of the legio II Traiana arrival from Aegyptus and the two new legions he had raised (including gladiators) in the early months of 168, the II Pia and the III Concors (shortly after renamed II and III Italicae ) had formed a reinforcement army. Likewise, he had ordered that the provincial armies of the two Pannoniae , under the orders of the aforementioned Pompeian and his colleague from Pannonia Superior , Julius Bassus, will advance west to cut off the barbarian retreat in the Alps.
On their approach to the mountains, this army defeated a concentration of unidentified barbarians, prompting its members to request a donativum (a bonus) to Marcus Aurelius for his victory. The emperor replied that there was no money in the imperial coffers for such expenses and the soldiers complied with it in a disciplined manner (perhaps it would have cost another emperor with less prestige his life). Other reinforcements from the lower Danube and from the East were also on their way. Marco and Vero then entered Aquileia , while the fleeing barbarians, perhaps also affected by the plague, reached Raetia and Noricum . In a gesture of goodwill, the Quadi, who had lost their king (Balomar?), petitioned Rome to give them one, and the emperors, hoping to control that tribe, appointed them a certain Furtius, a when romanized. To ensure the defense of Aquileia and the region of it, Marcus Aurelius organized a special military district, the so-called Praetentura Italiae et Alpium , where the II Pia stayed as a garrison and the III Concors . Returning to Rome, the imperial tandem was cut in half, as Lucius Verus died of a stroke on the way in early 169.
The Bellum Germanicum Primum
This was the name that the Romans gave (attested to in epigraphic inscriptions) to the period of campaigns between 169 and 175. Thus, although the barbarians had abandoned Italy, they had not ceased the danger, and the Pannonian auxiliary base of Intercisa (Dunaújváros, Hungary) was attacked by the Yazygos. His garrison unit, the cohors I Alpinorum , resisted well and the attackers could not take it, although they did cause serious damage there. Much worse for Rome was the disaster that was to happen in the late spring of 170 at an indeterminate point on the lower Danube, in Dacian territory, where the army of the unified provinces of the Three Daciae and Moesia Superior , commanded by the governor Claudio Frontón, was defeated by the Costóbocos and the free Dacians , costing the life of the governor himself. The barbarians thus saw the doors of the Roman Balkans open and, across the Danube and in two directions, southeast and southwest, rushed into those regions in search of booty.
That summer they were thus attacked and, for the most part, looted, in Moesia Inferior the cities of Tropaeum Traiani (Adamclissi, Romania), whose citizen militia helped a legionary combat group to defeat the barbarians, Nicopolis ad Istrum (Nikljup, next to Veliko Tărnovo, Bulgaria) and Callatis (Mangalia, Romania), in addition to the Durostorum camp (Silistra, Bulgaria), from where the legionnaires of the XI Claudia They were easily rejected. In Thracia , were launched on cities like Apollonia (Sozopol, Bulgaria) or Serdica (Sofia, Bulgaria). In Apollonia or in Callatis They seized ships (and presumably forced crews, as they had no experience in navigation) and by sea they reached as far south as the province of Achaea , where they sacked Eleusis , about 22 km west of Athens and home to the famous mysteries of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone. Also Achaea was invaded by land, in addition to Macedonia . The threatened cities formed militias that, for the most part, were defeated by the raiders who destroyed their cities, as was the case with the Achaeans of Elatea (today ruins next to Elatia, Greece) or Tespiae (Thespia, Greece). That year, or the next, a combat group made up of auxiliary units under the command of Prefect Julio Vehilio Grato Juliano, defeated one of these groups of Costóbocos looters. The barbarian bands that were not killed returned to their lands laden with loot and prisoners.
Marcus Aurelius, for his part, considered the threat to the Nordanubian provinces, due to their greater proximity to Italy, as the main one and established his military headquarters in Carnuntum , where he gathered his Danubian troops and reinforcements from the Germanic and eastern provinces and prepared to attack Quadi and Marcomanni, against whom in 171-173 he would carry out a series of military operations, many of them north of the Danube, in the Barbaricum (name in general that was then given to these lands). This campaign forced Quads and Marcomanni to sue for peace , the barbarians having to accept the installation of military garrisons on their soil, withdraw their warriors at least 7 km from the river, return the approximately 50,000 Roman prisoners that were in their hands (the barbarian prisoners, on the other hand, did not were returned, but settled as settlers in northern Italy). Even the Quadi had to hand over their king, Ariogesus (what would have become of Furtius?), exiled to Egypt.
During the above operations, six battles they deserve to be highlighted. The first is the defeat and death, in the summer of 172, of one of the praetorian prefects, Macrinio Víndex (the other was Baseo Rufo), who, with the contingent under his command, was moving through rugged terrain in the south from Bohemia. The second is another defeat, that of a contingent of auxiliaries from the Cotin tribe against the Marcomanni, perhaps in 173. The others are Roman victories:in 171 two barbarian contingents were annihilated, one in Roman territory by an army corps command of Claudio Pompeyano (new husband of Lucila, daughter of the emperor) and the other when, loaded with loot, he tried to cross the Danube towards the north; that year or in 172, Marcus Valerius Maximian, a competent Roman officer (so much so that, at the end of his career, he would have successively commanded no less than six legions, the most in the history of the Empire; furthermore, note the similarity of his name with the hero of Gladiator ) then prefect at the head of the auxiliary horsemen of the ala I Hispanorum Aravacorum , in a collateral operation, he defeated the Naristos with his unit and killed his chief Valaón in combat, we do not know if alone with his unit or integrated into a larger combat group; perhaps the most famous battle is the one that took place near the Granua river (present-day Hrón, Slovakia), since it implied divine intervention (by what god?), in the summer of, probably, 173.
At that time, a Roman army of auxiliaries and legionnaires (including those of the I Adiutrix , commanded then by the legate Helvio Pértinax, future emperor), led by Marcus Aurelius in person and Claudius Pompeian, operated north of the Danube when he had to face a large barbarian army, which defeated him in the first instance, leaving the Roman survivors fenced. The barbarians then decided to wait until the wounds, fatigue and lack of supplies, especially water, made the Romans surrender. When the situation was worst, an Egyptian magician named Arnufis, a member of the emperor's entourage, invoked the gods to make it rain and solve the most pressing Roman problem. A furious storm was then unleashed, with a profusion of lightning, thunder and lightning, which provided the Romans with the liquid element and frightened the superstitious barbarians, who abandoned the siege and retreated. The Romans did not lose the opportunity and persecuted them, trapping them and annihilating them. This was the so-called "rain miracle" , which had so much repercussion in its day that it even appears sculpted on the monument that commemorates these wars in Rome:the column of Marcus Aurelius. Years later, Christian sources (Tertullian, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Orosius) would say that the prayers were those of the Christian soldiers who formed the legio XII , displaced from the East as a reinforcement, and for that reason would be awarded an honorary name:Fulminata (fulmen =lightning). The truth is that the name of XII Fulminata it is already attested in the last times of the Roman Republic.
In 174, the emperor decided to deal with the Iazygous Sarmatians, for which he settled in Sirmium (Sremska-Mitrovica, Serbia), capital of Lower Pannonia . Defeated these barbarians (one of the battles took place on the frozen Danube, where the Romans, pursuing a group of raiders whom they had previously defeated, had to face, victoriously, a counterattack by their cavalry), in June 175 they sued for peace, which Marco quickly granted, since in Syria the imperial self-proclamation of Avidio Casio had taken place Commander-in-Chief of the East, and he had to go there to take care of the matter. All this also prevented the imperial project of having large areas of the left bank of the Danube annexed to the Empire in the form of the new provinces of Marcomania and Sarmatia . The terms of peace, similar to those of the Quadi and Marcomanni (return of prisoners, withdrawal to a certain distance from the great border river...), included the delivery of 8,000 horsemen to serve as auxiliaries in the Roman army. They were sent toBritannia and these are the "Sarmatian knights" spoken of in the movie King Arthur (Antoine Fuqa, 2004). At that time his young son Commodus (14 years old) was with the emperor, who in Sirmium he was named Caesar, which made him official as heir.
The Bellum Germanicum Secundum
Between the second half of 175 and the spring of 177, the barbarians remained quiet on the Danube, which served Marcus Aurelius well to sort things out in the East (Avid was assassinated by his men), reorganize the area and return to Rome, where, in November 176, he celebrated the victory ceremony over Germans and Sarmatians, accompanied by Commodus , who was named Augustus and associated with power, thus reissuing the diarchy of his father with Lucio Vero.
In 177 hostilities resumed, due to the break of the Marcomanni of the treaty of 173, dissatisfied with their harsh conditions. The Yazygos would not break theirs and would even help the Romans, which would mean that the terms of said agreement would be softened. In August 178, Marcus Aurelius, accompanied by Commodus (who was not without courage, as he proved by once saving his father when his horse sank in a bog during a march through the Bohemian woods), was back on the road. Carnuntum , from where the contingents that defeated the barbarians departed, and the following year the emperor had to move his base further west, to Vindobona , when also entering the war the hermundurus. The Romans continued to defeat the barbarians, in victories such as that of one of the praetorian prefects, Tarruthenius Paternus (the other was Tigidius Perenne), after a full day of fighting. In 179, the II legions and III Italicae had been installed as a garrison in Noricum and Raetia , respectively, and 20,000 Romans wintered in 179-180 in barbarian territory, including 855 legionaries of the II Adiutrix in Leugaricio (Trenčin, Slovakia), 120 km north of the Danube, with his legacy Valerio Maximiano. This seems to indicate that the project of the transdanubian provinces had been taken up again, but it will never be known because the plague, which had reappeared in the Roman ranks, killed the emperor on March 17, 180. Commodus, his successor, preferred to maintain the status quo and, establishing a compromise peace with the enemy, he returned to Rome to enjoy his new position.
Conclusion
The wars waged by Marcus Aurelius in the Danubian Basin responded to a defensive need of the Empire , not to an expansive policy, as in previous times. Faced with the massive barbarian assault, the Roman army, at its height then, knew how to respond well, despite occasional defeats, some very serious. The Empire could not afford to lose these lands, a source of economic wealth and, increasingly, military recruitment. However, such a long border was very exposed and the barbarians would try again with force in the following century, making it much more difficult for the emperors of that time to contain it.
Fonts
- Casius Dio:Roman History. Harvard University Press. Cambridge (Massachusetts), 1961 (reprint of 1914).
- Vopisco Siracusano, Flavio:Life of Marco Antonio, the philosopher , in Augusta History. Akal Edic. Madrid, 1989.
Bibliography
- Birley, A.R. (2009):Marcus Aurelius. The definitive biography. Ed. Gredos. Madrid.
- Görlitz, W. (1962):Marc-Aurèle, emperor et philosophe. Payot. Paris.
- McLynn, F. (2011):Marcus Aurelius. Warrior, philosopher and emperor. Ed. The Sphere of Books. Madrid.