Onslaught_The Centurions II, page 41
Sabinus inclined his head in greeting, evidently happy to be the subject of such prurient speculation given its association with the military strongman who had effectively opened the door to empire for his adopted son Augustus. Classicus gestured to an empty chair in the innermost circle of men, and continued speaking as Kivilaz took his seat.
‘The news of your desire for continued war with Rome reached us at a most opportune time, just as the events in Italy that resulted in Vitellius’s death were communicated to us. It seems that in their eagerness to deal out harsh justice to Vespasianus’s brother Flavius Sabinus, who had taken refuge in the holy temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, Vitellius’s desperate supporters committed the most ill-advised act in Rome’s eight-hundred-year history. They set fire to the Capitol, it seems, to smoke the fugitive out of his refuge, and in doing so destroyed the temple of Jupiter as well.’
He paused, looking around him at the gathering, men nodding their heads sagely.
‘As Gauls we are of course fully conversant with our history, and we know of that moment in time when it seemed as if our people would conquer Rome once and forever. But even back then, in the days when Brennus made the Roman army flee for their lives, that most magnificent of temples was spared destruction, for fear of the god’s anger. Perhaps this was our ancestors’ only error, but it was a fatal mistake, for Jupiter has guided Rome’s fate on an upward path ever since. No matter how bloodily her legions might initially be repulsed, the god’s favour has ultimately guided the Romans from being little more than a dungheap city, forever squabbling with its neighbours, to an empire that long since forced upon us the surrender of our freedoms. The destruction of this most holy building by Rome’s own rulers is a sign, our priests tell us, that Rome’s time in the sun is at an end!’
He looked around his audience, clenching a fist for emphasis.
‘But I disagree! This is no mere portent of disaster! When the Romans took fire to the most holy of places in their entire empire, the seat of the gods’ favour, they tore down in a single night what it has taken their ancestors eight hundred years to achieve. By this act of sacrilege, they have forfeited their most powerful god’s support. The power of empire is being wrested from Rome even as we speak, and it is placed within our reach, if we are only bold enough to reach out and take it! As we must, if we are to maintain all that was once good in Rome for the benefit of our own peoples!’
Kivilaz nodded magisterially.
‘I can see the reasons for your confidence. It is evident to me that the moment has come for the Gallic tribes to take their rightful place and cast off Rome’s yoke. After all, at every turn enemies afflict the empire, weakening it to the point where it is ready to topple.’
Classicus nodded enthusiastically.
‘Indeed! Everywhere Rome’s enemies are on the march, we hear. In the east the Jews have risen, and are fighting for their liberation! The legions in Moesia and Pannonia are besieged in their winter quarters and even the Britons have sensed their moment, it is said, and are even now laying waste to that province’s cities! Some among us counsel caution, to wait and see if these rumours of war and disaster for Rome are well founded …’ He looked around the crowded room. ‘But I say that the time has come to strike!’
He slapped a fist into his palm with a crack.
‘The Romans are riven by discord! Rome itself is under siege by enemies within! The legions are beset and preoccupied with their own wars on every frontier! Rome is finished! All we can do now is to act decisively and without hesitation to bring a swift end to this war, and usher in a new age of peace, safeguarded by our mutual strength! All we have to do is rise, my brothers, and close the Alpine passes with our armies, preventing them from reinforcing the pathetic, terrified remnant of their once mighty legions of the German frontier. And once we are sure of our freedom we can decide the limits we wish to set upon our power, not Rome!’
Kivilaz nodded.
‘Well spoken, Julius Classicus. And what of those remnants of their legions? What of the men cowering under the close watch of my people in the Old Camp, the Fifth and Fifteenth legions in name if not in actual strength? What of the pitiful, demoralised army that squats in Novaesium, overcome with fear at having murdered their own general, the First, the Sixteenth and the Twenty-second Legions? And what of the single, terrified legion that occupies the Winter Camp far to the south? What should we do with them, when the flood tide of our uprising races like a tidal wave up the river and across Gaul, washing against the roots of the mountains and sweeping away Roman rule for ever?’
Classicus nodded, acknowledging the question’s importance.
‘The Old Camp will fall to you soon enough, when the legions trapped there realise that there can be no rescue for them. And the single legion in the Winter Camp will all too soon be overwhelmed when the tribes on either side of the river rise against them. As to the survivors of Vitellius’s army in Novaesium, our intelligence is that they are torn apart by dissension, mutinous and ripe for the taking, and yet it is our opinion that to take arms against them might yet provoke them to useless but bloody resistance. Rather we plan to seduce them by alliance, and once they are with us to deal harshly only with their commanders, the gentlemen of Rome who have led them into the disaster they now face. The legionaries will ally with us, we calculate, in recognition that their best hope of avoiding punishment for their mutiny is to be part of a strong Gaul, united against all external threats in a new empire.’ He looked into Kivilaz’s eyes with a knowing smile. ‘Where you seek to build an empire of the Germans, free of Rome’s influence and control forever, we intend to build a Gallic empire, allied with you to protect all our peoples from Rome, by combining to close off their routes into our territory forever. Let the Romans do what they wish in Italy, their days of dominion over Gaul and Germany are over!’
He took a pair of wine cups and passed one to Kivilaz, raising the other in a toast.
‘To the Gallic and German empires! If we stand united, then no power in the world will be able to push us off our own land!’
Later, with agreement reached as to their respective courses of action, Kivilaz took the hands of Classicus, Tutor and Sabinus, declared his undying support for their uprising, and took his leave escorted by his decurion Bairaz and the dozen carefully picked men of the Guard who had escorted him into the city from their camp beneath its walls.
‘Do you believe all that stuff about the empire being under attack at every point, Kiv?’
The prince shook his head briskly as they walked through the city’s empty streets with their watchful escort both in front and behind them.
‘No more than you, cousin. But if it suits Classicus and his comrades to believe it, or even just to have their people believe it, that’s sufficient for me. Nor do I care overly about their evident desire to build an empire as Roman as Rome itself, for all the good that decadence will do them. All I do care about is that Rome’s long reach is about to be cut off at the elbow, and what strength remains to them north of the mountains will wither and die soon enough when it becomes clear that the gold to pay the legions will no longer be forthcoming. After all, we have two legions bottled up with no hope of rescue, and three more sit and bicker over the murder of that Janus-faced fool Hordeonius Flaccus at Novaesium, not even strong enough to prevent us from riding south past them to meet the Gauls. What hope do you think they’ll have once the Gallic auxiliaries show their hand? They’ll surrender just as quickly as will keep their hides intact, and then we’ll see how long the Old Camp holds out. All in all, I’d say that the days of Rome’s empire in the north are at an end, crushed under the weight of two new empires, one of the Germans, the other of the Gauls. What price their threats of retribution now?’
Historical Note
Researching the Centurions trilogy was a fresh challenge for a writer who has, over the course of writing nine previous stories in the Empire series, become a little blasé about the historical background, events, military units and tactics, weapons and armour and just about anything else you could care to name about the late second century. To find oneself suddenly over a hundred years adrift of one’s chosen period of history was in one respect easy enough – after all, not that much changed over the period in many ways – and yet a bit of a head-scratcher from several other perspectives. The revolt of the Batagwi tribe is on the face of it a simple thing – Romans upset tribal mercenaries, who then rise up and teach them an almighty lesson as to how to manage subject peoples and their armies – and yet the history, and the story that can be teased out of those dry pages left to us by the primary sources Tacitus and Cassius, is far more complex than anything I could have predicted.
To start at the beginning, the Batagwi – Batavians to the Romans – were one of the German tribes subjugated by Caesar in the wake of his rampage through the Gauls, and quickly became a firm ally of what was to become the empire. Providing Rome with a military contingent that sounds like it would have been the match of any legion – eight part-mounted, five-hundred-man infantry cohorts and a cavalry wing – they were a powerful blend of German ferocity in battle with Roman equipment and, to some degree, Rome’s military ethos and tactics. In return for this disproportionate contribution to the imperial forces, they paid no taxes to Rome, an indication of just how valuable their contribution was deemed to be. Their role, to judge from the relatively scant sources, was in the long tradition of shock troops that has continued into the modern era in formations like the Parachute Regiment and the US Marines, hard men trained to high levels of physical competency and tactical aggression and, by consequence of both that conditioning and their collective underlying social backgrounds, lacking some of the instincts to self-preservation that can hamper soldiers from risking everything in pursuit of victory in the moment of decision that occurs on all battlefields. The best equivalent for us to consider with regard to the Batagwi tribe’s contribution might well be the Gurkhas, Nepalese soldiers who have fought with great honour and bravery for the British empire and its post-colonial army, and whose bloody reputation has resulted in their mere presence in the order of battle proving fearsomely intimidating to Britain’s enemies on many occasions.
Parented for decades by the Fourteenth Gemina Legion, it seems that the Batagwi cohorts did a good deal of the initial dirty work on one battlefield after another, as at the battle of the Medway in AD 43. Their sneak attack at dawn across the seemingly unfordable river seems to have destroyed the British tribes’ chariot threat before the battle commenced, and allowed the Fourteenth, under the improbably young Hosidius Geta, and the Second Augustan under the future emperor Vespasian, to establish the bridgehead from which victory would eventually result. Incidentally, for those readers with an interest in the cursus honorum and its age restrictions, the historical record is a little confused with regard to Geta, and the legatus in question might have been an older brother, although age restrictions on command tended to be relaxed by a year for each child born to a family – so we can consider legion command at the age of twenty-four (it was usually no younger than thirty) as improbable but eminently possible, under the right circumstances. The most startling aspect of all this is that on more than one occasion the Batagwi used an organic amphibious capability – and by organic I mean without the assistance of any third party such as a naval unit – to cross rivers and narrow coastal straits and turn an enemy flank by appearing where they were least expected. How did they do this? Swimming while wearing their equipment which, weighing around twenty-five kilos, would obviously overwhelm even the strongest of swimmers in short order even before the encumbrances of having to carry a shield and spear are taken into account. It’s possible that the latter were carried by means of some kind of improvised floatation device, but we cannot discount the possibility that fully equipped infantrymen were carried across the water obstacle and straight into battle by means of the cohort’s horses being used to literally tow them across. This seems to have been what Cassius Dio is describing in The History of Rome:
The barbarians thought the Romans would not be able to cross this [the River Medway] without a bridge, and as a result had pitched camp in a rather careless fashion on the opposite bank. Plautius, however, sent across some Celts who were practised in swimming with ease fully armed across even the fastest of rivers. These fell unexpectedly on the enemy …
This was probably as innovative and disruptive to an unprepared enemy as massed parachute drops were (under the right circumstances) in the twentieth century, and the Batagwi seem to have been viewed as Rome’s best and bravest shock troops, capable of doing the impossible and turning a battle to Rome’s advantage by their unexpected abilities. For a long time this guaranteed them the highest possible status as an allied people, ruled not by a governor but instead by a magistrate voted into office by the tribe’s most exalted citizens, the noblissimi popularium (the ruling class, literally ‘most noble countrymen’). This tended to mean, one suspects, that they were pretty much guaranteed to take a Roman perspective on the behalf of a self-interested ruling class of families, themselves granted citizenship in perpetuity by the early emperors, in the pursuit of a Roman foreign policy that sought to ensure an alignment of the empire’s ambitions with those of the tribe’s rulers.
This relationship went even further than the battlefield, for in 30 BCE Augustus recruited an imperial bodyguard from the Batagwi and the other tribes that dwelt in the same area, Ubii, Frisii, Baetasii and so on. Where the Praetorians guarded the city and in particular its palaces, the corporis custodes protected the emperor himself, and were trusted for their impartial devotion to the task of ensuring his safety and deterring assassination attempts that might otherwise have been considered by the praetorians themselves (and for which they later gained an unenviable reputation). Disbanded briefly at the time of the Varus disaster in AD 9, they were swiftly reinstated when it became clear that the tribe had taken no part in Arminius’s act of outright war, and the Batagwi played a full role in the suppression of the tribes to the north and east of the Rhine that was to follow. They remained at the side of a succession of emperors until late AD 68, when the new emperor Galba made what appears to have been the fatal mistake of dismissing them for their loyalty to Nero, thereby leaving himself open to assassination by an improbably small number of praetorians.
It is important to understand just what this meant to the Batagwi, and why they took the dismissal quite as badly as they undoubtedly did. The bodyguard were, of course, a source of enormous kudos to the tribe and their local neighbours, and a significant source of income to boot, but the importance of their place in Rome went deeper than simple national pride – the influence of their position close to the throne on the tribe itself cannot be ignored. Exposed to Rome, the hub of empire and meeting point for dozens of nationalities and cultures, it was inevitable that the guardsmen would have had the blinkers of their previous existence removed to some degree, and that they would have been eager to share their new experiences and learning with friends and families. Anthony Birley argues in Germania Inferior (in an article entitled ‘The Names of the Batavians and the Tungrians’) that many guardsmen would have been likely to have been given new Latin or Greek names on their entry into service, as their own names might be unpronounceable for a Roman, and the perpetuation of these names into the Batagwi mainstream as proud parents sought to rub a little of a brother or an uncle’s fame off on their new offspring must have been inevitable, which is the reason why some Batagwi characters in Onslaught have apparently anachronistic Greek names that are in fact entirely valid for their time and place. The guard effectively came to define the Batagwi’s significant status within the empire, a source of enormous prestige at least within the tribe itself. This in turn justified the degree to which they had subjugated their culture to that of Rome, including the incorporation of their religion into the Roman framework, their god Magusanus, as was so often the case with local deities, being deftly spliced with the Roman version of Heracles/Hercules to create a new and mutually acceptable deity. The guard had come to define the Batagwi to a large degree, and when they came home for good late in AD 68 it must have seemed as if the tribe had been cast aside by the previously doting parent regime, with immense impacts on both the Batagwis’ own self-esteem and indeed their relationships with the other local tribes who were equally impacted by this inexplicably sudden and shocking change of fortunes.
Of course the split with Rome was more complex than just the overnight loss of their prestige. It went far deeper than the sudden thunderbolt of late AD 68, and had been growing ever more obvious to those with eyes to see it over the previous years. The Batagwi and their allies the Cananefates, the Marsacii and the Frisiavones had to some degree, if the Roman commentators are to be believed, simply got too big for their own boots. In effect, it seems, they had made the age-old mistake of believing their own propaganda (or at least that of their Roman allies who called them the ‘best and bravest’, in itself possibly a play on the Germanic origins of the tribe’s name, ‘Batagwi’, which might well have meant ‘the best’). They had taken, we are told (admittedly by Roman historians whose sources and motivations may not be entirely unbiased), to strutting around telling anyone who would listen how important they were to Rome, had fallen out with their former parent legion the Fourteenth Gemina – possibly because the legion was lauded by Nero as his most effective after the Battle of Watling Street and the defeat of the Iceni, while the Batagwi had presumably gone relatively unrecognised – and had thereby contributed to the increasing disenchantment with what was later portrayed as their overbearing behaviour. Rescued from internal exile of a sort by the onset of war between the German army of Vitellius and Otho’s loyalist legions – having previously been posted garrison duty standing guard on the Lingones in eastern Gaul ostensibly to prevent a recurrence of the Vindex revolt (a failed uprising that had ultimately led to Nero’s suicide) – they had immediately (if we believe the primary sources who were of course propagandists with their own agenda) taken up where they had left off, telling all and sundry how they had mastered their former parent legion and how critical they were to the success of the war against Otho. It is doubtful if they were much loved by either legions or generals, but rather tolerated for their ability to turn a battle given the chance to do so.
