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.