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...murky era when a variety of Germanic tribes lived in a land that, according to Tacitus, "either bristles with forests or reeks with swamps." Even then, German tribesmen had a reputation as fearsome fighters, and it was immensely important to the future history of Europe that they annihilated three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest in A.D. 9, leaving the Rhine as the frontier between the Roman and Germanic worlds. But it was the Romans who originally invaded those forests to "pacify" the Germans, as they had pacified Gaul and Britain...
...Germanic tribes began moving into Roman territory during the 3rd century, not as the "barbarian" invaders of popular legend but as immigrants and refugees. Even the Visigoths, who conquered Rome in A.D. 410, subjecting it, in Gibbon's majestic words, to the "licentious fury of the tribes of Germany and Scythia," had originally entered the empire peacefully, and many had loyally served in the Roman army. The celebrated sacking of Rome was primarily a humiliation, nothing like the all-out Roman destruction of Carthage, Thebes and Jerusalem...
...idea of restoring the Roman empire three centuries later inspired Charlemagne to voyage to Rome in A.D. 800 and have himself crowned by the Pope. Both Germany and France claim the Frankish leader, for he governed from Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), and the territory under his rule rather closely resembled what is today the European Community. Not long after his death, however, his empire was divided among three grandsons...
...crazy quilt of kingdoms, duchies, bishoprics, free cities and other flotsam. In the late 13th century, the imperial crown came into the hands of a Swiss family named Habsburg, but the Habsburgs' only real power and wealth came from their family possessions in Austria and Bohemia; the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, a concept that exercised a magic attraction in the Middle Ages, had about as much authority as the United Nations has today...
...then in 1517, the political divisions also became religious -- and correspondingly bloodier. An obscure monk named Martin Luther nailed to the church door in Wittenberg his 95 theses against the Roman Church's sale of indulgences, partial pardons for souls in purgatory. The Lutheran faith, subsequently known as Protestantism, spread rapidly across northern Germany. Then, in the fratricidal ordeal known as the Thirty Years' War (1618-48), the French, Swedes and other nations joined in playing out their political and religious rivalries on German soil. Much of Germany was devastated and the starving survivors reduced to misery...