Introduction

Last time we talked about the provinces of Hispania, rich and insulated for most of their time inside the empire, turned upside down by the invasion of the Vandals, Alans, Suevi, and Visigoths in the early years of the fifth century. On this podcast, the Vandals and Visigoths have gotten the most love, and will continue to, if I’m honest, but for this episode, the Suevi will at last have a moment to shine.

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I’ve done the Suevi dirty. Of all of the tribes I’ve mentioned over the course of the last 47 episodes, the Suevi have had the longest history of interaction with the Romans, but have barely had a whole paragraph to themselves in these pages, much less a whole episode. They’ve been kind of an appendage to the other hordes that have come up, tagging along with Vandals as they made their way across the Rhine in 406 and into Hispania in 409. Only to disappear into the upper left corner of the map and be mostly ignored. I think I may have even used the phrase “they’re not bothering anyone” at some point, and in this I was so very wrong wrong wrong.

So we have to start of course with the question, who are the Suevi, and how do you spell their name, before we move on to the question of the kingdom they established in Gallaecia, and their conflicts with the locals and the other barbarian groups with whom they shared the peninsula. I doubt that we’ll get all the way to the ultimate destruction of the Suevi Kingdom, but we will hit the highlights, and then when we do get to that moment in a later episode, you’ll at least have some idea of what was destroyed. Quickly let me shout out to Francisco, who emailed me from Portugal the other day and expressed his excitement for this episode, as you never get to hear about the Suevi, because the Visigoths hog all the limelight. I hope that I can give some insight, and fill in some gaps for you, Francisco, though it’s possible that you already know all there is to know, because the source material for the Suevi Kingdom in particular is sparse indeed.

Origins

To start with the spelling/pronunciation issue. You’ll see Suevi spelled with Vs or Bs, or with Is or Es, without any of them really being more popular than the other. I know I’ve been inconsistent throughout the run of this podcast, and fully intend to continue doing so, probably even within this very episode. So there’s that. Moving on…

Julius Caesar was the first to mention the Suevi in his reports on the Gallic wars, and called them the most warlike of the Germanic peoples, who had no permanent settlements and did not till the soil, but lived by animal husbandry and raiding, who were gathering in strength along the upper Rhine, near the headwaters of the Danube, and threatening the tribes of Gaul. He refers to them as a single people, though later writers disagree. 

Most agree with Tacitus, writing about a hundred years after Caesar, that the Suevi are yet another confederation of other tribes. If you’re a fan of Roman history, you may have heard some of the names of these component tribes before; like the Quadi, the Marcomanni, or the Semnones. Tacitus notes that these various tribes shared similar languages, and occupied a region called Suevia, which seems to have been roughly in the space between the Elbe and Oder Rivers. In the reign of Augustus, the Suevi stayed out of the wars of Arminius, and so didn’t participate in the massacre of the Tutoberger forest. Like other Germanic tribes, the Suevi served in the Roman army as auxiliaries at least as early as the reign of Vespasian in 69 CE.

Rising populations in Germania led to a reshuffling in ways that are poorly understood, triggering migrations and rearrangements of tribal loyalties. The Marcomannic wars were fought partly in response to such migrations in the late second century, and involved several Suevic tribes, including the Marcomanni themselves, and new tribal units were formed out of the old Suevic bloc. Some tribes allied with neighbors further west and formed a new confederation known as the Alemanni, while other tribes emerged under the Suevi umbrella, such as the Juthungi and the Langobardi, later to be known as the Lombards.

At some point in the late fourth century, a collection of Suevic-speaking peoples, pushed by the large-scale arrival of Goths and their relatives fleeing the Hun invasions, moved westward, and at some point connected with bands of Vandals and Alans on the banks of the Rhine. As always, there is fuzziness in these definitions, and the army that crossed the Rhine probably included people identifying with dozens of smaller tribes or groups who found common cause and gradually coalesced into larger coherent cultural groups. Suevic peoples of various tribes remained behind in the old lands in Germania, and gave their name to the region of Swabia.

Culture

With such a wide confederation, it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s hard to nail down cultural features of the Suevi pre-migration. The most well-known feature was undoubtedly the hairstyle known as the Suebian knot. This twisted hairdo is complex to explain but there are plenty of images available, and seems to have been mainly worn by higher-status male Sueves. The style is widely attested in Roman artwork, and survives on the heads of two bodies, the Osterby Man, dated to the late first to early second century, and the and the Dätgen Man, dated somewhere between 135 and 385 CE.

The presence of those bodies at that relatively late date also tells us more about the Suevi than that they appreciated a snappy ‘do. The Osterby man in particular is interpreted as the victim of human sacrifice. Later writers, notably Hydatius, maintain that the Suevi maintained their paganism all the way to their settlement in Hispania, and while there is no mention of human sacrifice in that context that I could find, we have here the first Germanic people since the Franks to clearly maintain their heathenry for a significant time after entering the Empire. Later on that would make them the target of missionaries from both Arian and Catholic churches.

It’s difficult to say anything definitive about Suevian culture, since we are talking about a long stretch of time and a wide variety of individual tribes. Caesar claims that the Suevi did not till the land or live in permanent settlements, but by the fifth century, the Suevi that settled in Gallaecia had certainly at least begun to occupy permanent abodes. They favored small, widely spread farmsteads in rural areas, judging by Hydatius’ statement that in Gallaecia, the “barbarians govern over the provinces” while the Hispano Romans were concentrated in towns and cities. This combined with the writings of Orosius, gives an overall more peaceful image of the initial barbarian settlement than elsewhere in Hispania, with the Suevi – who would have been considerably outnumbered by the local population, working small farms and hiring themselves out as bodyguards to the locals. It’s possible that like the praetorians or mamluks of other eras, it was this protective role that brought them greater political influence as Roman authority rapidly disappeared, leading to a fairly smooth transition from Roman administration to Suevi dominance. That’s largely speculation, though, and this is not a hill on which I, or anyone else, should be prepared to expire.

History

That’s enough background I think, let’s get back to something that resembles political history, yes? Hydatius is pretty much our only source, and frankly the information he offers is pretty weak tea at times, but I will do my best to flesh out what I can as we go.

Hermeric

The first king of Suevi, who led them into Hispania, was a character named Hermeric, who was definitely the band’s leader from 419 and probably earlier. There’s no solid evidence for his birth or origins; some believe it was he that led the Suevi contingent of the great barbarian army across the Rhine, some that he came to power later. In the absence of anything solid at all, modern scholars have been free to argue about everything. First is whether Hermeric and his Suevi arrived in Hispania at the same time as the Vandals and Alans, or if they came separately a few years later. They seem to have traveled straight through the western passes over the mountains, through the territories of the Basques, and made straight for Gallaecia without much diversion through the rest of the region. Similarly there’s the question of the relationship with the Roman State; was there a foedus of some kind in place from an early date, or were the Suevi squatting?

Hydatius tells us that in 411 the barbarian peoples decided the lands they would rule by lot, though what exactly that means in practice is again disputed, and that is the only textual evidence of how Suevi may have come to occupy the northwest. According to Hydadius, only the west of Gallaecia was given to Hermeric, who made Braga his capital, with the east being given to the Hasdingi Vandals.

If an agreement had existed, it seems to have pretty conclusively broken down by 416, as the Visigoths waged war on Vandal and Suevi alike on behalf of Rome. All we can really know about Hermeric is that he was a warrior, and in 419 he pivoted deftly from war with the Visigoths to war with the Vandals, though that went poorly for him, and the Vandals pressed the Suevi hard until Roman intervention, the resulting agreement removed the Hasdingi Vandals from Gallaecia, and they relocated southward into Baetica, there to take up coastal raiding.

 Hermetic’s activities in the following decades are obscure, he doesn’t show up in Hydatius’ chronicle again until 430, but not much seems to have changed. The entry reads, “The Suevi under their king Hermeric plundered the middle regions of Galicia, but their men were partly slaughtered and partly taken captive by the people who held the better protected forts.” The previous status quo seems to still be in place; the Hispano-Romans are holed up in their cities and fortresses, the Suevi rule the countryside. Though it does raise the question of how were those cities being fed? The total population of Suevi couldn’t possibly have been large enough to produce the agricultural produce needed to support urban life, even on the reduced scale of the late-empire world, surely?

Archaeology may give us a partial answer here. Like in Italy and all around the western empire, really, there is evidence that the fora and large houses were put to new use. The large rooms of great houses were subdivided, many used for storage or the processing of food, and some agriculture was brought inside the walls of the cities. There is almost no evidence of new construction. Even with smaller populations and home production, though, there must have been a population of peasants out there producing food, both to feed the cities and for the Suevi to buy or steal. If it weren’t for mentions of the Suevi working their own lands, it’s hard to think of their king as anything more than a bandit chief.

Peace between the Suevi and the Galician locals was finally brokered when those locals sent an emissary to Flavius Aetius, asking for help. That emissary was none other than our own Bishop Hydatius, who was able to return from his mission with an imperial legate, Censorius by name, in tow. Negotiations were successful, and a peace was settled between the Suevi and Gallicians. The details of this peace are utterly absent from the Chronicle, which is irritating, since Hydatius must have had first hand knowledge of the negotiations. All we know is that the Gallicians gave hostages – which is interesting in itself, as hostages are usually used as assurances of good behavior, and it was the Suevi who had been the ones raiding. It could be that this was simply a less violent form of extortion. You want your son to stay as two-handed as he is? Make sure those grain shipments keep coming.

Hermeric’s time as leader of the Suevi was a time of seemingly unrelieved conflict, and it may have weighed on him. After enduring years of some unspecified illness, the old warrior finally decided to hang up his sword in 438, and passed lordship of the Suevi to his son, Rechila. The old king would die in 441, how old he was is moot, but somewhere in the forties is probable. Where Hermeric had maintained his people in place, kept them together and provided for them, Rechila was more ambitious, and would immediately begin working to increase the number of communities from which he could demand tribute – because really, at this stage, that’s what these maps marked Suevi or Visigoth mean.

Rechila 

Rechila got off to a flying start, defeating the Roman comes Hispanorum – count of Hispania – in open battle at the Rio Genil, which is down south in Baetica, and profitably plundering the countryside. The next year, taking advantage of the Roman weakness, he occupied Merida, the capital of Lusitania, and made it his own capital. Not even slowing down to sample the local olive oil, by 441 Rechila was in Seville and according to Hydatius “Subjected the Baetican and Cartheginian provinces under his power”. Taken at face value, that’s quite a coming out, from just Gallaecia to all of Hispania except Tarraconensis in just three years.

Just for context and a bit of orientation, in 441 the Western Empire was under the legal leadership of Valentinian III and the de facto leadership of Aetius, whose energy was focused on the threat posed by the newly recognized Vandal kingdom in Africa. In the East, Atilla was making a name for himself by sacking Constanta on the Lower Danube. All that’s to say that Roma was a bit distracted at the time. The comes who had been killed on the Genil was replaced by a new man named Asturius, but in the face of all this Suevic expansion, he spent most of his energy fighting Bagaudae rebels in southern Tarraconensis, not facing off against Rechila. Which is a nice reminder that while we focus on the migrating hordes, barbarian invasions were not the only issue facing the Roman state.

Relations with the Roman state were likewise not the only concern of the Suevi. In 445 the area around modern Vigo, in Gallaecia, was pillaged by a seaborne raid. Hydatius identifies the culprits as Vandals, which would indicate they had pushed out beyond Gibraltar and were raiding the Atlantic coasts. Few other chroniclers mention such activities though, and given that the Frankish and Saxon pirates were active all along the coast of Gaul, it’s equally likely that the raid on Gallaecia was their doing. 

None of that is to say that Suevic aggression wasn’t ongoing. Conflict between Roman, Visigoth, and Suevi waxed and waned. In 446 Asturius fell to court intrigue in Ravenna and was recalled. He was replaced by a new commander named Vitus, who pushed back against the Suevi’s dominance in Carthaginensis and Baetica, with Visigoth support. Rechila defeated Vitus’ Visigothic allies, and he was forced to withdraw. The Suevi then plundered the territories with new enthusiasm.

Rechila died in 448. Hydatius notes that he “died a heathen”, as his father had. As I noted before, the Suevi held on to their pagan beliefs longer than did the other Germanic peoples entering the empire. That doesn’t mean that we know much about their actual practices, alas, as the chroniclers were uniformly hostile to them and uninterested in recording the minutiae of Germanic paganism. 

Rechiar

In a bit of a turn up, Rechila was succeeded by his son, Rechiar, who was not only a christian,  but a Catholic Christian. The exact date of his conversion isn’t known, but it certainly predates Clovis’ conversion to Catholicism by half a century.  He almost certainly wasn’t raised a Christian, but may have been pushed to convert by his father in order to improve relations with the local bishops. If the accession of this religiously acceptable king raised hopes for a quieter life in Hispania, those hopes were dashed immediately. Rechiar wasn’t going to let religion get in the way of his most important duties as king of the Suevi; namely to keep the supplies and riches flowing to his followers, to keep and grow their loyalty. Hydatius was emphatically not a fan – maybe partly because Rechiar appears to have made no serious effort to bring his people along in converting to Catholicism, maybe because of his marriage in 449 to an Arian daughter of the Visigothic king Theodoric I. This power couple at the top had close to no effect on the religious character of the Suevi, most of whom maintained their allegiance to the old gods. Raids on Tarraconensis, in cooperation with the Visigoths, were a nuisance to Roman administrators, and his willingness to sometimes fight alongside bagaudae rebels may have been another driver of Roman antipathy.

In spite of Hydatius’ disapproval, Rechiar wasn’t all mindless violence. (Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of mindless violence, probably 80%.) Rechiar’s Catholic education, whenever he acquired it, would have come as a package deal with a Roman-style education, and as I’ve gone on and on about, a Roman education was the first step out of barbarism. Rechiar was also the first Suevic king that we know of to issue his own coinage, minted at the capital in Braga. The thin silver coins bear a bust of Honorius – slightly odd, since he’d been dead for 25 years by then – and are in form indistinguishable from Roman coins, except for the inscription on the reverse that reads: “By order of King Rechiarus”. As in Gaul at the same time, the fiction of loyalty to the Empire was being maintained, while at the same time the authority of the local warlord was enforced.

The problem was, the Visigoths were the “official” barbarians of the West, especially after the assassinations of Aetius and Valentinian III. Taking advantage of the chaos, Rechiar brought war to Carthagenensis all the way up to the borders of Tarraconensis, probably intending to conquer the entirety of Hispania. The way Jordanes tells it, Rechiar assumed that his family connection to the royal house of the Visigoths would guarantee his rule over Hispania, as the Visigoths were expanding their rule of Southern Gaul. Maybe such a relationship existed between him and his father in law Theodoric I. But there was no such indulgence on the part of Theodoric II, Rechiar’s brother-in-law, who had bigger fish to fry.

Theodoric II, if you cast your mind back, had acclaimed his friend Avitus, a Gallo-Roman senator, as emperor, and was fighting hard to keep his man in power. Regaining the wealth of Hispania would be key to restoring the Western Empire, and Theodoric undertook the project on Avitus’ behalf. 

In 456, Theodoric II invaded Hispania with a mixed force of Visigoths, Burgundians, and Franks, driving westward across Tarraconensis toward the Gallaecian core of Suevi territory. On the fifth of October, Rechiar met them at the River Órbigo, east of Astorga. The battle was a disaster for Rechiar, who was wounded and forced to flee all the way to the coast, to Porto. The Visigoths paused to sack Braga at the end of October before tracking Rechiar down. He was found in Porto and executed. His birth date is unknown, but he was probably in his forties when he died, and had led the Suevi for ten years. 

From his episcopal seat in Chaves, just 80 miles from Braga, Hydatius probably had first hand knowledge of the sack. He noted that it was not terribly bloody, but was “grievous and lamentable”. The Arian Visigoths robbed the local clergy and stripped the churches, though they stopped short of defiling the nuns. Many captives, most of them Hispano-Romans, were taken as slaves, and the churches converted to stables for the Visigoths livestock, which we’ve seen before. What we haven’t seen before is the inclusion of camels in the list of said livestock, which I thought was interesting and points to still robust trade with Africa. 

Chaos

Once Rechiar was dealt with, Theodoric turned south and reached Mérida, but refrained from plundering it. Hydatius says that he was stopped by a sign from Saint Eulalia, and who knows, maybe that’s true. Apparently feeling that he had made his point, the Visigoths pulled back toward Aquitaine, pillaging as they went. Hydatius makes particular mention of Astorga and Palencia, and by the time they reached Gaul, Theodoric’s army was weighed down with plunder and slaves.

In the absence of any authority, Gallaecia descended into chaos. The Suevi split into two factions, each electing their own king, whose names I won’t trouble you with. Banditry became endemic, not the concentrated banditry of a single army, but local and more widely troublesome banditry. Each of the two Suevi factions attempted to make peace with the Hispano Roman Galicians, but no one seemed capable of keeping their word to one another, and betrayal and massacre followed. The days of Rechiar plundering all around the edges of his domaines probably began to seem like a dream to the inhabitants of Hispania, who now endured a diffuse civil war. There is little to differentiate the claimants to Suevic leadership in Hydatius’ chronicle. All of them are accused of perfidy, of murder, and of atrocity. Hydatius himself was captured by one named Frumarius, and though he gives the date of this indignity (July 26, 460) he doesn’t tell us anything else about the conditions of his captivity. He was released three months later by “the grace of God who showed mercy”, and if you’ll forgive my cynicism, probably also the payment of a ransom.

On top of all this domestic strife, Theodoric II regularly sent armies into Hispania, all the way down to Baetica, to raid and sometimes colonize, these were probably the beginnings of those adventurous young Visigoth lords I mentioned last episode. Theodoric simultaneously set himself up as a mediator in the Suevic civil war, and received ambassadors from the various factions, though nothing ever came of any of those meetings.

Finally, in 465, more or less by attrition, rather than any great military or political skill, a Suevi lord named Remismund emerged as king. All of the other options had simply eliminated each other. Remismund was recognized by Theodoric, who sent a noblewoman to marry him, though her name and relationship to the Visigothic king is unknown. 

The period of civil war had devastated the Suevi’s power and standing in Hispania, and enhanced the Visigoths’, just as Theodoric had intended. While permanent Visigothic settlement was still light, Hydatius notes an increasing frequency of diplomatic missions sent to Theodoric, who became the arbiter in disputes between the Roman and Suevi populations in all territories except Gallaecia itself. The Suevi were back in the box they’d started in. They still raided south into Lusitania, even occupying Lisbon, but any hope of ruling all Hispania was shrinking in the rearview mirror. In another sign of increasing Visigoth domination, around 466, Remismund requested Arian missionaries from Theodoric. Theodoric was more than happy to oblige. Such a request all but acknowledged Theodoric’s superiority, and indicated a determined turn away from Rome. The Visigoths were the power to be reckoned with in the West now, the opinions of Ravenna were more and more only an afterthought. Most of the Suevi nobility converted to Arianism in the next few years.

Signs, Portents, and the Veil of History

Hydatius’ chronicle breaks off abruptly in 468, and with it our only direct textual account of the Suevi kingdom for nearly a hundred years. Even Isidore of Seville can only tell us that many kings ruled Gallaecia between 470 and 550. 

Hydatius leaves us with one of the many signs and miracles that are sprinkled throughout his writing. Hydatius records a sign or portent on average every two and a half years, which is downright sedate compared to Gregory of Tours, who noted about three per year, but they do jump out to the modern reader. It was widely accepted both that the natural world mirrored human affairs and that God sent messages through the natural world. Thus bizarre occurrences could either announce disorder or predict it. While the concept was generally accepted, the degree of interest in them varied from chronicler to chronicler. Hydatius and Gregory were on the intense end of the scale.

The last one is good and weird, so I thought just for fun I’d read the entry mostly in full:

“Also some signs and portents were seen in the places of Galicia. At the river Minius, around five miles from the municipality of Lais, four fish of new sight and appearance were captured. As reported by the Christian and religious [men who had caught them], these fish were marked with Hebrew and Greek letters, as well as the Latin numbers of era, such that they contained the cycle of the year 365,[lx] with an equal interval of months. Not far from the aforementioned municipality, some form of grains that were very green like grass, shaped like lentils and full of bitterness fell from the sky. There were also many other signs that would take a while to mention.”

Okay. I have questions, as I’m sure you do, starting with how did Galician fishermen know both Hebrew and Greek? There isn’t space today to talk about these questions or the other strange happenings Hydatius records, alas. They all connect back to the learned bishop’s conviction that the apocalypse was near at hand, many can be interpreted as perverse reversals of other well known miracles. In this case, perhaps the lentils from the sky are meant to evoke the manna from the Book of Exodus, according to scholar Richard Burgess. There’s much more to get into here, and it doesn’t really belong in a political history, but I thought it added color. If you’d like more, let me know.

The veil of history descended western Iberia once Hydatius went to his eternal reward. The kingdom carried on, but exactly what was going on inside it is impossible to see. Its frontiers shrank, its population Christianized, that’s all we can really know for sure. Conflicts with the Visigoths continued, and intensified once the latter were driven out of Gaul. Even the conversion to Catholic Christianity, which one would think would be well recorded by the clerical historian, has multiple, conflicting accounts. One credits a king called Theodemar with the help of Saint Martin of Braga, Gregory of Tours names a king called Chararic, with the help of relics of Saint Martin of Tours – which shouldn’t be surprising given what we know already about Gregory’s obsessions. John of Biclaro gives credit to a Visigothic missionary around 580, but that is much later than the other evidence allows, and also happens to coincide with the integration of the Suevic kingdom into the Visigothic. You can see that each of these stories has either a political or theological ax to grind, so it’s hard to know how much of it  is reliable, if any of it is.

Conclusion

So there you have it, a history of the Suevi and the Suevi kingdom in 30 minutes or less. Much was simplified of course, and there’s plenty of scholarly argumentation about most of the points I’ve made. So it is with most of the history we’ve talked about on this show, but now at least I feel I’ve done some little bit to lay the ghost of the Suevi. I won’t feel guilty every time I look at the top left corner of Hispania now.

Next time we’ll be back with the Visigoths, to see how things look from the winning side.

That will be in two weeks, if all goes well. In the meantime, check out instagram, where I am @darkagespod, and if you’re feeling generous, you can visit ko-fi.com/darkagespod to leave a tip and buy me a coffee. Thanks to regular contributors Paul, Scott, Jesse, Brendan, Alex, Dusty, Jon, Barchester, Scarlett, and welcome to Susan.

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Until next time, take care.