Germanic peoples, also called Teutonic peoples, are all those Indo - European speakers of the Germanic languages. The origins of the Germanic peoples are obscure. During the Bronze Age, they are believed to have inhabited southern Sweden, the Danish peninsula, and northern Germany, between the Ems River to the west, the Oder River to the east, and the Harz Mountains to the south.
Vandals, Gepids and Goths migrated from southern Sweden in the last centuries BC and occupied the area of the coast south of the Baltic Sea, approximately between the Oder in the west and the Vistula River in the east. At an early date there was also migration south and west at the expense of the Celtic peoples who then inhabited much of western Germany - the Helvetii Celts, for example, who were confined by Germanic peoples to the area that is now Switzerland in By the 1st century BC, it had once spread as far east as the River Main.
By the time of Julius Caesar, the Germans settled west of the Rhine River and to the south they had reached the Danube River. Their first major clash with the Romans occurred at the end of the 2nd century BC, when the Cimbri and Teutoni (Teutons) invaded southern Gaul and northern Italy and were annihilated by Gaius Mario in 102 and 101. Although individual travelers from the time of Pytheas onwards He had visited Teutonic countries in the north, it was not until the 1st century BC. C. when it was very advanced that the Romans learned to distinguish precisely between the Germans and the Celts, a distinction made with great clarity by Julius Caesar. It was Caesar who incorporated into the borders of the Roman Empire those Germans who had penetrated west of the Rhine, and it was he who gave the oldest existing description of Germanic culture.
In 9 BC the Romans pushed their border east from the Rhine to the Elbe, but in 9 AD a revolt by their German subjects led by Arminius ended in the withdrawal of the Roman border to the Rhine. In this period of occupation and during the numerous wars fought between Rome and the Germans in the 1st century AD, huge amounts of information about the Germans reached Rome and, when Tacitus published in 98 AD. the book now known as Germania, had reliable sources of information on which to draw. The book is one of the most valuable ethnographic works in existence; the arqueology It has supplemented in many respects the information provided by Tacitus, but in general it has only tended to confirm its accuracy and to illustrate its perception of its subject.
