Hey folks, haven’t done that in a while, oh my.
Germany is one of the most powerful economies in the world.
Time and time again, Germany seems to serve as a world leader, and the glue holding together
the European Union.
Now, I imagine when I mention I’m doing a history of Germany, you’re thinking of
THAT TIME.
But you’re in luck.
This video is part one of a series, and here, we’ll be talking about ancient Germanic
tribes, Charlemagne, and the Holy Roman Empire.
This is Germany…
before Germany?
Hi, I'm Tristan, and this is Step Back.
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So to get started we really have to go back to a long time ago; like hundreds of thousands
of years ago, the earliest sign that there were humans in Germany actually goes to a
1907 discovery that shows that there were at least human or human-like creatures living
in Germany about six hundred thousand years ago.
And then about half that time ago, about three hundred thousand years ago there were some
of the oldest weapons ever found on earth also found in Germany.
There's a lot of evidence that non-human hominids lived in Germany such as the Neanderthals.
This is all about maybe 40,000 years ago.
You may also remember that some of the oldest pieces of human art like theVenus of Willendorf
are actually from Germany.
They're some of the oldest things ever they're like these statues of these very curvy busty
women that were thought to be used as either some sort of primitive form of stone pornography
or as like fertility statues, people are still trying to figure this one out.So this is like
a scale of hundreds of thousands of years.
It's like a scant comprehensible amount of time.These people however were not the ancestors
of the first Germans Actually the first German people are suspect to have come from Scandinavia
probably about two and a half thousand years ago.
over the next five hundred years the people who came from Scandinavia settled in the region
that would become Germany and sort of took it over.
we don't actually know that much about Germans in this period except that they were groups
of tribes that fought regularly against the Romans in the south
so a lot of our evidence about what life was like for the Germans comes a lot from the
writings of their sworn enemies which is always a red light in history books
Romans were fighting and conquering German tribes throughout the 1st century CE so right
around the time when the CE and BCE are meeting each other
and what this did is it caused a cultural blending to occur between German culture coming
from Scandinavia and Roman culture coming up from the south
so that being said a lot of Germany remained firmly outside of Roman territory a lot of
the German tribes that weren't flat out conquered and kind of turned into these more urban more
organized centers started to organize around the frontiers of Roman territory
because there was a lot of value to be made either trading with the romanized Germans
or by raiding into Roman territory and sacking it and taking things and going back to their
homes and one of the things about Germany that's
important for understanding it today is that the Romans when they took parts of Germany
split it up into these administrative regions that are actually a lot of the regions of
modern-day Germany and Austria as we all know though the Roman Empire had
an expiry date and it began to crack and crumble and you probably heard many many times that
barbarians sacked Rome well most often they're referring to the Germans
when they're referring to the quote "barbarians" so as the Roman Empire began to crumble at
the fringes German tribes began to move into those areas
around the same time there was also a spread of Christianity into Germany
so a religion that's actually not dissimilar from the pagan Norse religion to a new religion
you know Christianity Catholicism essentially
another thing that occurred in this time period was the Huns
they were a Central Asian group of nomads led by a general you probably know him as
Attila the Hun moved into what is modern-day Germany and also settled and ruled over Germany
for several centuries you probably have heard of the Huns and you
might have also heard that during World War one the Germans were referred to as the Huns
sort of bringing this Conqueror mythology along with it
that being said by the fifth century the influence of the Huns started to wane and the German
tribes that had been romanized that had been hunned had been living in the shadow of this
crumbling Roman Empire started to settle into early duchies and started to migrate into
more Roman territory as it fell away now the period after this is typically called
the Dark Ages but it's far from descriptive you know it's not a time when there was massive
declines there was actually a lot going on in Germany
Germany was organizing and starting to coalesce into larger units
so in this period the tribes in Germany fought with each other lived with each other made
deals and traded until they were conquered by an empire from France called the Franks
which was a sort of tribal confederacy which is when several tribes band together as tributaries
to a single powerful tribe think of it like the Aztec empire
the Aztecs had a lot of neighboring city-states that acted as tributaries towards Tenochtitlan
which was the center of the Aztecs themselves and this was pretty similar to how it worked
in Germany the Germans became a tributary force towards
the Frankish rulers in France and because of this loose affiliation there was not a
ton of work that needed to be done in order to maintain and hold the empire together
and at this time the region was much more sparsely populated than it is today
so the Frankish Empire actually got really really big
and during that time there is also all sorts of various invasions that expanded the rulership
of the Frankish Empire into more and more of Germany
over what would be calling the Dark Ages the most important one we have to point out
though is that in the year 751 a leader of the franks called Pippin III took the title
of King which comesfrom the Christian Roman tradition
and so as king he finally became the first of the Frankish leaders to become the representative
of the church in Rome a descendent of his is probably the more famous
one that you remember who was in Germany called Charles the great but you might know him more
as Charlemagne and under the rulership of Charlemagne the
Frankish Empire grew into aeven larger power in Europe
it conquered large parts of modern Germany and even invaded down into what it was called
Lombardy but is basically today northern Italy and after his death wehave what historians
call the Carolingian Empire and on Christmas of800 CE the Pope actually crowned Charlemagnethe
emperor of Rome which sparked the birth of a state that would
exist in one form of another all the way until the 19th century when Napoleon
would crumble it let's talk a little bit about that state
so Charlemagne's long reaching borders would only last for a few generations
by the time the rulers were Charlemagne's grandkids the Empire had been split into three
different countries one would roughly be France one would roughly
be northern Italy and one would be modern-day Germany
you probably know these as West Francia East Francia and Lombardy
and the first leader to break off into a German state would be the leader named King Henry
the Fowler but was more important as his son Otto I who
was crowned by the Pope the title of Holy Roman Emperor
which is a title that would be held in Germany for nearly a thousand years
and he had a lot of power in the Roman Church he solidified under his own rule
even for a while the Holy Roman Emperor had a lot of influence over who would be elected
Pope and then around the 11th century Europe began
to get involved in the Crusades which was a large campaign to invade Muslim
territory in the Middle East and the holy Roman Empire played more than
its part in that invasion there are several famous Crusader Knight orders
that come from the Holy Roman Empire like the Teutonic Knights for example
they are also part of a Holy Roman Empire expansion East
which started to displace and move Slavic peoples out of regions that would be modern-day
eastern Germany there is also an interesting group called
the Hanseatic League which was a series of powerful trading cities
in northern Germany that more or less controlled alot of the trade in the Baltic Sea
and the Holy Roman Empire was not exactly a unified cohesive unit
the Holy Roman Empire always suffered from civil wars
and at once even went to war with the papacy over this series of internal strifes and conflicts
the central core the power of the Holy Roman Emperor himself began to decline
and more power began to go to regional princes and powerful clergy members
by the end of this period the Emperor was an elected position
which was chosen from a body of powerful leaders called electors
which was a high honor in the nobility of the Holy Roman Empire
only a handful would be able to choose who'd become Emperor
some holy roman emperors would try to centralize this but it never really worked out in thelong
term and then things started to change when the
14th century rolled around and the Black Death ravaged Europe
it's a massive pandemic that wiped outbetween 1/3 and some estimates say over half of the
European population Germany of course was no exception
some say it was even one of the hardest hit countries by the Black Death
and because of it there was a series of wars and major religious upheavals that happened
all across Europe at one point there was even a time where five
people claimed at the same time that they were all Pope
and in this chaos in the Holy Roman Empire one family based out of modern-day Austria
in the southeast called the Hapsburgs would start to become
more prominent in the internal politics of the Holy Roman Empire and eventually would
become emperor and with only a few years of exception were
pretty much the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire all the way until it collapsed
so from this point onwards Austria wasgoing to be the seat of imperial authority in Germany
now as we get to the Renaissance the early modern period
in the 16th century the Holy Roman Empire would go through another major upheaval
Martin Luther the founder of the Protestant church was from Germany
and all of the stuff in the protestant Reformation happened primarily in Germany
the church was split into what would be called the Protestant Reformation
which was a bloody fight between Catholics and Protestants that would fight for over
a hundred years and Germany was smack in the middle of it
almost evenly split between Catholic princes and Protestant Prince's Germany was in a state
of civil war probably mounting in the biggest of these conflicts which was called the 30
Years War where approximately 40% of Germans died
now in this chaos just like when the Austrians came to preeminence
in the previous period of chaos there was a new group
sort of in that region where the Slavics were displaced a new kingdom that was highly authoritarian
centralized and militaristic called the Prussians began to become more and more prominent
so after the 30 Years War they became another major power and would be the seed of what
would later become the German Empire which is something that's going to be talked
about with Emperor Tigerstar also in this period the Holy Roman Empire
got into a ton of other conflicts they fought the Turks they fought the French
one time they even invaded Poland for some reason
but their time was limited in the late 18th century the French had a
massive liberal revolution you might know it as the the French French
Revolution and out of that revolution came a powerful
new centralized leader in Paris named Napoleon Bonaparte
you might have heard of him and the French used the revolutionary zeal
to invade countries to liberate and modernize them
and Germany was no exception large parts of the Holy Roman Empire fell
to Napoleon and in them he set up these puppet kingdoms that banded together under arough
coalition called the coalition of the Rhine these countries would abandon feudalism and
had major new liberal reforms imposed upon them
the remaining parts of holy roman empire were part of the major coalition of powers that
was designed to stop france's expansion maybe because conquering their land and beheading
their princess isn't exactly the best way to make friends with the holy roman empire
and it was in 1806 when napoleon had conquered enough of germany that he declared the holy
Roman Empire to be dead discarding it as ananachronism of a previous age
Prussia the nascent Empire in the making actually tried to stay out of the war
and they managed to do so until the 1812 attempted invasion of Russia that Napoleon tried to
do and many will agree was one of the most epic
disasters in military history it was so bad that those puppet German kingdoms
that he setup under the coalition of the Rhine actually turned on Napoleon
and by the time the Napoleonic era was over by the time that Napoleon was sitting on an
island in the South Atlantic by the time he was dead
there was basically no Holy Roman Empire left all centralized organization was gone
however there were powerful players there was Austria there was Prussia and
the treaty that came after the Napoleonic period Prussia gained a lotof territory and
became one of the most powerful countries in Europe
it was poised to run over and take over all of these small German kingdoms and This is
where Emperor Tigerstar will pick up the story in part 2.
After his video, go to the Alternate History Hub for the history of modern Germany, including,
yes, the world wars.
Trust me, this is but the fastest of overviews.
German history is huge, and because its European history there’s like 100 times more books
written about it than other places.
So if I missed your favourite war or didn't talk about the importance of your small region
of choice I’m sorry, I tried!
Still, read on, there’s way more than what I said.
I wanna thank 12 tone for the theme song as well as patrons Don and Kerry Johnson, Kolbeinn
Mani, Scott Smith, Martin King, and Michael Kirschner.
Come back next time for more, Step Back.