Part 468

_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.