On the Origin of the German Alpine Inhabitants of South Tyrol

Appendix.

Statistics.

On the German Alpine Inhabitants of South Tyrol and the Adjacent Venetian Territory. (Continuation.) 5/7

IV. On the origin of these inhabitants.

Anyone seeking to investigate the origin of these German-speaking inhabitants, who are surrounded on all sides by Italians, finds themselves restricted to mere conjectures owing to a complete lack of accounts or ancient documents. Several native historians make mention of this people; the above-mentioned Bartolomei concerns himself most with this subject; however, like all the others, he too seems to assume with certainty that these Alpine inhabitants descend from fleeing remnants of the Cimbrian peoples who, according to Velleius Paterculus B. 2, ch. 12 and Florus B. 3, ch. 3, having been defeated on the Raudine Plain (Plutarch in the Life of Marius asserts that the battle occurred near Vercelli) by the Roman consul Caius Marius in his fifth consulship and by his colleague C. Catulus in the year of Rome 652, sought refuge in the then uninhabited mountains which they now occupy. All of this, however, consists merely of assertions unsupported by any proof.

The author of this article, although far from wishing to decide upon so obscure a subject, nevertheless ventures to put forward his doubts regarding the aforementioned opinion, and confesses that he is presently more inclined to diverge from it than to agree with it, as it seems to him very probable that these Germans are ancient Tyrolean tribes with whom Cimbri may have intermingled, and that rather those who inhabit the valley plains and speak Italian are foreign peoples, or intermingled with such. The author thereby hopes to awaken a fruitful spirit of research among learned friends of patriotic history; in this regard, it would be most gratifying to him to see himself refuted with good arguments.

1. If the complete defeat of the Cimbri, although according to Florus they undoubtedly settled in Italy coming from the Tridentine territory, had occurred not near Verona but according to Plutarch's assertion near Vercelli, one would have to assume that the great defeat suffered by C. Catulus in Tyrol, which struck terror into Rome itself and on account of which Catulus, having advanced into the Veronese area, had to retreat from the Adige, forced him to attempt in Vercelli his junction with the victorious army of Marius, who, after the destruction of the Germans at Air in Provence, upon news of Catulus's defeat against the Cimbri, marched with his legions to his assistance in Piedmont.

But in that case, the distance of the places would make it highly improbable that remaining Cimbrian refugees had fled with all their wives and children in the most arduous manner toward the southern borders of Tyrol; they would rather have sought refuge in the nearer mountains of Vercelli. *)

2. Those critics have very strong arguments on their side who abandon the authority of Plutarch, in which they believe the word Vercelli crept in instead of Verona through a copyist's error, and maintain with Florus and Paterculus that a place in the vicinity of Verona was called the Raudine field, and that the great battle took place there between the combined armies of C. Marius and C. Catulus on the one side and the Cimbri on the other, in which the latter suffered a complete and indeed so terrible defeat that, after all the men had fallen, the Cimbrian women who alone remained with their young children fought despairingly against the Romans from their wagons, with which they had formed a kind of wagon fort, and seeing themselves lost in the end, instead of surrendering, turned their weapons first against their children and then against themselves, thus killing themselves all.

3. Even assuming that this final decisive defeat of the Cimbri occurred near Verona and not near Vercelli, would the wretched, trembling remnants of this nation, poor, stripped of everything, and abandoned by all, really have maintained themselves safe and secure on the nearby, uninhabited mountains, surrounded all around in the deep valleys by hostile peoples so vastly different from them in language and way of life? How could the Cimbri with wives and children have settled and nourished themselves without free and friendly commerce with them? And how would they have been received and tolerated? For wretches wandering far from their fatherland, there is no stronger comfort than meeting a fellow countryman, let alone the entire kindred nation itself. Would they not therefore rather have sought to push further in their flight to the German Tyroleans? And all the more so since, having already arrived as far as Pergine, indeed even to Cembra (since from this name, in Italian Cymbria, borne by that parish where incidentally Italian is currently spoken, one wishes to infer that they had penetrated that far), they had only a short journey of 3 hours to make to find themselves in Salurn, and subsequently in Bozen with its environs, in Brixen, and in the Puster Valley. From this one can, it seems, conclude that if the scattered Cimbri had occupied the aforementioned thirteen Veronese and seven Vicentine communes and the other Tyrolean border places, all these settlements must already previously have been inhabited by German peoples with whom they united, and from whom they expected and found compassionate hospitality and safety. And all the more so since, having spent about a year on their march along the left bank of the Adige after Catulus's retreat, they had already been recognized by them beforehand, and perhaps just as from other places in Germany through which they passed, so too from those mountains they will have taken some inhabitants with them as companions of the expedition.

However, the two initial letters A. V., which he interprets as Agri Veronensis – could they not also be read as Agri Vercellensis? In this doubt there remains only the weak proof of the place where the stone was found. (The famous Marquis Scipione Maffei declares this inscription to be inauthentic.)

*) Bartolomei considers the question decided against Plutarch following the discovery of a stone on the occasion of an excavation in the amphitheater or arena of Verona, which is currently preserved in the Moscardi Museum there and bears the following inscription.

D. F.

C. M. trucidatis

Cimbris in F. Italiae A. V.

R. R. ob insignem ejus

Memoriam

S. P. Q. R.

(To be continued.)