executive officer among the Anglosaxons was Gerefa, or as it
is written, in very early documents geroefa: but the peculiar
functions of the individuals comprehended under it were
further defined by a prefix compounded with it, as scirgerefa,
the reeve of the shire or sheriff: tungerefa, the reeve of the
farm or bailiff. The exact meaning and etymology of this name
have hitherto eluded the researches of our best scholars."
_J. M. Kemble,
The Saxons in England,
book 2, chapter 5 (volume 2)._
See, also, SHIRE; and EALDORMAN.
GERGESENES, The.
One of the tribes of the Canaanites, whose territory is
believed by Lenormant to have "included all Decapolis and even
Galilee," and whose capital he places at Gerasa, now Djerash,
in Perea.
_F. Lenormant and E. Chevallier,
Manual of Ancient History,
book 6, chapter 1 (volume 2)._
GERGITHIAN SIBYL.
See CUMÆ.
GERGITHIANS, The.
See TROJA;
and, ASIA MINOR: THE GREEK COLONIES.
GERGOVIA OF THE ARVERNI.
"The site of Gergovia of the Arverni is supposed to be a hill
on the bank of the Allier, two miles from the modern Clermont
in Auvergne. The Romans seem to have neglected Gergovia, and
to have founded the neighbouring city, to which they gave the
name Augustonemetum. The Roman city became known afterwards as
Civitas Arvernorum, in the middle ages Arverna, and then, from
the situation of its castle, clarus mons, Clermont."
_C. Merivale,
History of the Romans,
chapter 12 (volume 2, page 20, foot-note)._
For an account of Cæsar's reverse at Gergovia of the Arverni,
See GAUL: B. C. 58-51.
GERGOVIA OF THE BOIANS.
See BOIANS.
GERIZIM.
"The sacred centre of the Samaritans is Gerizim, the 'Mount of
Blessings.' On. its summit a sacred rock marks the site where,
according to their tradition, Joshua placed the Tabernacle and
afterwards built a temple, restored later by Sanballat on the
return of the Israelites from captivity. On the slope of the
mountain the Feast of the Passover is still celebrated in
accordance with the injunctions of the Law."
_C. R. Conder,
Syrian Stone Lore,
chapter 4._
GERMAN, High and Low.
The distinction, made between High German and Low German is
that resulting from differences of language, etc., between the
Germanic peoples which dwelt anciently in the low, flat
countries along the German Ocean and the Baltic, and those
which occupied the higher regions of the upper Rhine, Elbe and
Danube.
GERMAN EAST AFRICAN AND WEST AFRICAN ASSOCIATIONS.
See AFRICA: A. D. 1884-1889.
GERMAN EMPIRE, The Constitution of the new.
See CONSTITUTION OF GERMANY.
----------------------------------
A Logical Outline of German History
Ethnological
Social and political.
Intellectual, moral and religious.
Foreign.
IN WHICH THE DOMINANT CONDITIONS AND
INFLUENCES ARE DISTINGUISHED BY COLORS.
3d-5th Centurles. The Wanderinag of the nations.
Germany was slow in finding the definite place in geography
and history that belongs to it at the present day. It was no
more at first than a name, applied with large vagueness to the
country beyond the Rhine and the Danube, where many restless
tribes, of kindred language and character, were unstably
distributed. In time, the tribes crowded one another into wide
wandering movements, were pushed and pressed together into
confederacies and nations, and went swarming over the Danube
and the Rhine into Roman provinces, to take possession of them
and to be the new masters of the European world; but it was
the Germans, not Germany, who began then to be historic.
5th-9th Centuries--Empire of the Franks.
As a fact in history, Germany emerged first with the Franks,
out of the dust-clouds of the wandering time and the darker
clouds of the Gallic conquest. Fast seated on the great
dividing river, the Rhine, the Franks reached backward into
the land which gave them birth, and forward into the land
which took their name, and gathered a broad empire out of
both. But always the two parts of it refused to be held
together. Neither by Clovis, the first conqueror, nor by
Charlemagne, after three hundred years, were the Kingdom of
the East Franks and the Kingdom of the West Franks bound fast
into one. Under Charlemagne's successors, the Kingdom of the
East Franks began to be Germany, in the growing of the fact as
well as the name.
A. D. 962.--The Holy Roman Empire.
But no sooner had a Kingdom of Germany been created than it
was strangely deprived of the distinctness needful to the
making of a nation. The adventurous Otho, its second Saxon
king, who reclaimed Italy and revived the imperial sovereignty
of Charlemagne, diminished the weight and dignity of his
Germanic realm as much as he advanced himself and his
successors in title and rank. By that elevation of its kings
to a pseudo-Roman throne, Germany lost its own proper place in
history, and was obscured by the shadow of an empire which
soon existed as a shadow only. Its elective kings, forsaking
the title of Kings of Germany, and calling themselves Kings of
the Romans, even while they waited for an imperial coronation
at the hands of the Pope, made the nationalizing of Germany,
as France was being nationalized, by its monarchy, impossible.
10th-18th Centuries.--Contests In Italy.
For three centuries, the ambitions and the interests of the
imperialized monarchy were ultramontane. Its Teutonic seat was
a mere resting-place between Italian expeditions. Its quarrels
with the Popes cast all questions of German politics into the
background. It took no root in German feeling, rallied no
national sentiment, gathered no increase of authority, sent
out from itself no centralizing influences, judicial or
administrative, to resist the dissolving forces of feudalism.
And nowhere else in Europe was the action of those forces so
destructive of political unity. That great Fatherland of the
German peoples, where the slow solidification of a nation
should have been going on as surely as in France, was crumbled
by them into petty principalities, which time only hardened in
their separateness.
A. D. 1273-1440--Rise of the House of Hapsburg.
When, at last, the crown came to be settled in one fast-rooted
and enduring House, it was not fortunately placed. Territorially
the Hapsburgs were planted on the verge of the Teutonic land,
where they fronted the Hungarians and the Svavs and were
threatened by the approaching Turks. Speaking figuratively,
they stood with their backs to Germany, facing their greater
dangers and their greater opportunities, east and south.
Their personal dominions were acquired for the most part
outside of the Teutonic line. Their immediate subjects were of
many alien races, with a few of Greman blood. Their kingship
of Hungary was more substantial in its political weight than
any Germanic sovereignty that they held. From the beginning of
its remarkable dynastic career, the House of Austria was in
all respects quite at one side of the great people whose crown
had unhappily passed to its keeping. The emperor-kings, throned
with less reality at Vienna than at Presburg and Prague, lost
more and more their German character, receded more and more
from the range of German influence. Thus Germany was robbed
again of the centralizing constraints which a vigorous, rising
monarchy of the true stamp, not falsified by a fictitious
imperialization, would have brought to bear upon it, for the
unifying of a great nation.
A. D. 1477-1496.--Burgundian and Spanish marriages.
The marriagcs which linked the Austrian House with the
sovereign families of Burgundy and Spain only drew it still
farther away, and made it more alien than before to the people
of the German North. The imperial government was brought then
under influences from Spain which opposed every tendency of
their feeling and thought. While the strong Teutonic mind
worked its slow way towards personal freedom,--towards
fearless inquiry and independent belief,--a contrary movement
went on in the Austrian court. Between Germany at large and
the circle in which Vienna stood really a center and a
capital, a widening inteliectual breach began when the
Hapsburg brain was narrowed by the astringent blood of
Castile. This appeared, not alone in the rupture of the
religious Reformation, but in all the advances that were made,
from the sixteenth century down, in science, philosophy,
literature and art.
Some advance was always made; but the modern impulses which
woke early in the German race were wastefully spent, during
many generations, for want of any national concentration. No
large channel opened to them; no worthy spirit directed them.
The pettiness of petty politics and courts belittled in most
ways, for a lamentable time, the workings of German energy and
genius.
A. D. 1618.--Brandenburg—Prussia.
The Thirty Years War made chaos in Germany complete. No
semblance of substance in the empire remained. The Kaiser had
become a sovereign less honored than the King of France,
and Vienna a capital less considered than Paris. But the
first nucleus of nationality took form in that chaos, when
Brandenburg drew Prussia to itself, in the union which
produced a new kingdom at the North. The rise of Prussia was
the rise of German nationality. It brought to bear on the
German people the first centralizing influence that had acted
upon them since their kings took the crown of Rome. For the
first time in their history they felt the pull of a force
which drew them towards common lines of action.
A. D. 1740-1786.--Frederick the Great.
A. D. 1800-1813.--Struggle with Napoleon.
The aggrandizement of Prussia by Frederick the Great, though
iniquitous when considered in itself, was splendid work for
Germany. It prepared, for the perils of the next generation, a
power which Napoleon could humble at the moment, but which he
could not crush. It gave footing for the great heroic rally of
the Germanic people, whereby they conquered their place in the
world and secured their future.
A. D. 1866.--The Seven Weeks War
A. D. 1870-1871.--The Franco-German War.
A. D. 1871.--The Empire.
In all that has come to pass since Leipsic and Waterloo, the
logical sequence is plainer than history is wont to show it.
From men of the first decade in this century, who put the
school and the camp side by side in Prussian training, there
came more than from Bismarck or Moltke of the power which
triumphed at Sadowa and Sedan, which has constructed a new and
true Empire of Germany, with its capital at Berlin, and which
has dismissed Austria from German reckonings as mistress or as
rival, but to make of her an ally and a friend.
Within the last third of the nineteenth century, the Germans
may be said to have opened a great national career, such as
the English, their kinsmen, had entered upon nearly two
hundred years before. The energies of their powerful race have
been centered at last, and are acting with new potency, in
commerce and colonization, abroad, and in all modes of human
advancement, at home.
----------End: A Logical Outline of German History ------
{1429}
GERMAN FLATS: A. D.1765.
Treaty with the Indians.
See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1765-1768.
GERMAN FLATS: A. D. 1778.
Destruction by Brant.
See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
A. D. 1778 (JUNE-NOVEMBER).
GERMAN NATIONS, The wandering of.
See GOTHS; FRANKS; ALEMANNI; MARCOMANNI;
QUADI; GEPIDÆ; SAXONS; ANGLES; BURGUNDIANS;
VANDALS; SUEVI; LOMBARDS.
GERMAN UNIVERSITIES.
See EDUCATION, MEDIÆVAL: GERMANY.
GERMANIA.
"On the origin of the name Germania see Waitz D. V. G. i. 24;
he rejects all German derivations and concludes that it is
originally Gallic, the name given (as Tacitus indicates) by
the Gauls first to the Tungri, and afterwards to all the
kindred tribes. The meaning may be either 'good shouters'
(Grimm), or, according to other writers, 'East-men,' or
'neighbours.'"
_W. Stubbs,
Constitutional History of England,
volume 1, page 17, note._
GERMANIANS, The.
See CARMANIANS.
GERMANIC CONFEDERATION,
The First.
See GERMANY: A. D. 1814-1820.
The Second.
See GERMANY: A. D. 1870 (SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER).
GERMANIC DIET, The.
See DIET, GERMANIC.
GERMANIC PEOPLES OF THE ALEMANNIC LEAGUE.
See ALEMANNI: A.-D. 213.
GERMANICUS, Campaigns of.
See GERMANY: A. D. 14-16.
GERMANTOWN, Battle of.
See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
A. D. 1777 (JANUARY-DECEMBER).
GERMANY:
The national name.
"The nations of the Germania had no common name recognised by
themselves, and were content, when, ages after, they had
realised their unity of tongue and descent, to speak of their
language simply as the Lingua Theotisca, the language of the
people (theod). ... Whence the name 'Deutsch.' Zeuss derives
it rather from the root of 'deuten,' to explain, so that
'theotisc' should mean 'significant.' But the root of 'theod'
and 'deuten' is the same. ... The general name by which the
Romans knew them [Germani] was one which they had received
from their Gallic neighbours."
_W. Stubbs,
Constitutional History of England,
volume 1, chapter 3, and foot-note._
"In Gothic we have 'thiuda,' people; 'thiudisks,' belonging to
the people. ... The High-German, which looks upon Sanskrit 't'
and Gothic 'th' as 'd,' possesses the same word, as 'diot,'
people; 'diutisc,' popularis; hence Deutsch, German, and
'deuten,' to explain, literally to Germanize."
_F. Max Müller,
Lectures on the Science of Language,
2d series, lecture. 5._
The account which Tacitus gives of the origin of the name
Germany is this: "The name Germany ... they [the Germans] 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. Thus what was
the name of a tribe, and not of a race, gradually prevailed,
till all called themselves by this self-invented name of
Germans, which the conquerors had first employed to inspire
terror."
_Tacitus,
Germany;
translated by Church and Brodribb, chapter 2._
"It is only at the mouth of the Elbe that the Germany of the
really historical period begins: and this is a Germany only in
the eyes of scholars, antiquarians, and generalizing
ethnologists. Not one of the populations to whom the name is
here extended would have attached any meaning to the word,
except so far as they had been instructed by men who had
studied certain Latin writers. There was no name which was, at
one and the same time, native and general. There were native
names, but they were limited to special populations. There was
a general name, but it was one which was applied by strangers
and enemies. What this name was for the northern districts, we
know beforehand. It was that of Saxones and Saxonia in Latin;
of Sachsen and Sachsenland in the ordinary German. Evidence,
however, that any German population ever so named itself is
wholly wanting, though it is not impossible that some
unimportant tribe may have done so: the only one so called
being the Saxons of Ptolemy, who places them, along with
several others, in the small district between the Elbe and the
Eyder, and on three of the islands off the coast. ... The
Franks gave it its currency and generality; for, in the eyes
of a Frank, Saxony and Friesland contained all those parts of
Germany which, partly from their difference of dialect, partly
from their rudeness, partly from their paganism, and partly
from the obstinacy of their resistance, stood in contrast to
the Empire of Charlemagne and his successors. A Saxon was an
enemy whom the Franks had to coerce, a heathen whom they had
to convert. What more the term meant is uncertain."
_R. G. Latham,
Introduction to Kemble's "Horæ Ferales."_
See, also, TEUTONES.
GERMANY: As known to Tacitus.
"Germany is separated from the Galli, the Rhæti, and Pannonii,
by the rivers Rhine and Danube; mountain ranges, or the fear
which each feels for the other, divide it from the Sarmatæ and
Daci. Elsewhere ocean girds it, embracing broad peninsulas and
islands of unexplored extent, where certain tribes and
kingdoms are newly known to us, revealed by war. The Rhine
springs from a precipitous and inaccessible height of the
Rhætian Alps, bends slightly westward, and mingles with the
Northern Ocean. The Danube pours down from the gradual and
gently rising slope of Mount Abnoba, and visits many nations,
to force its way at last through six channels into the Pontus;
a seventh mouth is lost in marshes. The Germans themselves I
should regard as aboriginal, and not mixed at all with other
races through immigration or intercourse. For, in former
times, it was not by land but on shipboard that those who
sought to emigrate would arrive; and the boundless and, so to
speak, hostile ocean beyond us, is seldom entered by a sail
from our world. And, besides the perils of rough and unknown
seas, who would leave Asia, or Africa, or Italy for Germany,
with its wild country, its inclement skies, its sullen manners
and aspect, unless indeed it were his home?
{1430}
In their ancient songs, their only way of remembering or
recording the past, they celebrate an earth-born god, Tuisco,
and his son Mannus, as the origin of their race, as their
founders. To Mannus they assign three sons, from whose names,
they say, the coast tribes are called Ingævones; those of the
interior, Herminones; all the rest, Istævones. Some, with the
freedom of conjecture permitted by antiquity, assert that the
god had several descendants, and the nation several
appellations, as Marsi, Gambrivii, Suevi, Vandilii, and that
these are genuine old names. The name Germany, on the other
hand, they say, is modern and newly introduced."
_Tacitus,
Germany:
translated by A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb,
chapters 1-2._
GERMANY: B. C. 12-9.
Campaigns of Drusus.
The first serious advance of the Roman arms beyond the Rhine
was made in the reign of Augustus, by the emperor's step-son,
Drusus. Cæsar had crossed the river, only to chastise and
terrify the tribes on the right bank which threatened Gaul.
Agrippa, some years later, repeated the operation, and
withdrew, as Cæsar had done. But Drusus invaded Germany with
intentions of conquest and occupation. His first campaign was
undertaken in the spring of the year 12 B. C. He crossed the
Rhine and drove the Usipetes into their strongholds; after
which he embarked his legions on transport ships and moved
them down the river to the ocean, thence to coast northwards
to the mouth of the Ems, and so penetrate to the heart of the
enemy's country. To facilitate this bold movement, he had
caused a channel to be cut from the Rhine, at modern Arnheim,
to the Zuyder Zee, utilizing the river Yssel. The expedition
was not successful and retreated overland from the Frisian
coast after considerable disaster and loss. The next year,
Drusus returned to the attack, marching directly into the
German country and advancing to the banks of the Weser, but
retreating, again, with little to show of substantial results.
He established a fortified outpost, however, on the Lippe, and
named it Aliso. During the same summer, he is said to have
fixed another post in the country of the Chatti. Two years
then passed before Drusus was again permitted by the emperor
to cross the Rhine. On his third campaign he passed the Weser
and penetrated the Hercynian forest as far as the Elbe,--the
Germans declining everywhere to give him battle. Erecting a
trophy on the bank of the Elbe, he retraced his steps, but
suffered a fall from his horse, on the homeward march, which
caused his death. "If the Germans were neither reduced to
subjection, nor even overthrown in any decisive engagement, as
the Romans vainly pretended, yet their spirit of aggression
was finally checked and from thenceforth, for many
generations, they were fully occupied with the task of
defending themselves."
_C. Merivale,
History of the Romans,
chapter 36._
GERMANY: B. C. 8-A. D. 11.
Campaigns of Tiberius.
The work of Roman conquest in Germany, left unfinished by
Drusus, was taken up by his brother Tiberius (afterwards
emperor) under the direction of Augustus. Tiberius crossed the
Rhine, for the first time, B. C. 8. The frontier tribes made
no resistance, but offered submission at once. Tiberius sent
their chiefs to Augustus, then holding his court at Lugdunum
(Lyons), to make terms with the emperor in person, and
Augustus basely treated them as captives and threw them into
prison. The following year found the German tribes again under
arms, and Tiberius again crossed the Rhine; but it was only to
ravage the country, and not to remain. Then followed a period
of ten years, during which the emperor's step-son,
dissatisfied with his position and on ill terms with Augustus,
retired to Rhodes. In the summer of A. D. 4, he returned to
the command of the legions on the Rhine. Meantime, under other
generals,--Domitius and Vinicius,--they had made several
campaigns beyond the river; had momentarily crossed the Elbe;
had constructed a road to the outposts on the Weser; had
fought the Cherusci, with doubtful results, but had not
settled the Roman power in Germany. Tiberius invaded the
country once more, with a powerful force, and seems to have
crushed all resistance in the region between the lower Rhine
and the Weser. The following spring, he repeated, with more
success, the movement of Drusus by land and sea, sending a
flotilla around to the Elbe and up that stream, to a point
where it met and co-operated with a column moved overland,
through the wilderness. A single battle was fought and the
Germans defeated; but, once more, when winter approached, the
Romans retired and no permanent conquest was made. Two years
later (A. D. 6), Tiberius turned his arms against the powerful
nation of the Marcomanni, which had removed itself from the
German mark, or border, into the country formerly occupied, by
the Boii--modern Bohemia. Here, under their able chief Marbod,
or Maroboduus, they developed a formidable military
organization and became threatening to the Roman frontiers on
the Upper Danube. Two converging expeditions, from the Danube
and from the Rhine, were at the point of crushing the
Marcomanni between them, when news of the alarming revolt, in
Pannonia and Dalmatia, called the "Batonian War," caused the
making of a hasty peace with Maroboduus. The Batonian or
Pannonian war occupied Tiberius for nearly three years. He had
just brought it to a close, when intelligence reached Rome of
a disaster in Germany which filled the empire with horror and
dismay. The tribes in northwestern Germany, between the lower
Rhine and the Elbe, supposed to be cowed and submissive, had
now found a leader who could unite them and excite them to
disdain the Roman yoke. This leader was Arminius, or Hermann,
a young chief of the Cherusci, who had been trained in the
Roman military service and admitted to Roman citizenship, but
who hated the oppressors of his country with implacable
bitterness. The scheme of insurrection organized by Arminius
was made easy of execution by the insolent carelessness and
the incapacity of the Roman commander in Germany, L.
Quintilius Varus. It succeeded so well that Varus and his
army,--three entire legions, horse, foot and
auxiliaries,--probably 20,000 men in all,--were overwhelmed in
the Teutoburger Wald, north of the Lippe, and destroyed. Only
a few skulking fugitives reached the Rhine and escaped to tell
the fate of the rest. This was late in the summer of A. D. 9.
In the following spring Tiberius was sent again to the Rhine
frontier, with as powerful a levy of men and equipments as the
empire could collect. He was accompanied by his nephew,
Germanicus, son of Drusus, destined to be his successor in the
field of German conquest.
{1431}
But dread and fear were in the Roman heart, and the campaign
of Tiberius, delayed another twelve months, until A. D. 11,
was conducted too cautiously to accomplish any important
result. He traversed and ravaged a considerable region of the
German country, but withdrew again across the Rhine and left
it, apparently, unoccupied. This was his last campaign.
Returning to Rome, he waited only two years longer for the
imperial sovereignty to which he succeeded on the death of
Augustus, who had made him, by adoption, his son and his heir.
_C. Merivale,
History of the Romans,
chapters 36-38._
ALSO IN:
_T. Mommsen,
History of Rome,
book 8, chapter 1._
_Sir E. Creasy,
Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World,
chapter 5._
_T. Smith,
Arminius, part 1,
chapters 4-6._
GERMANY: A. D. 14-16.
Campaigns of Germanicus.