Two stories, one of military disaster two millennia ago and one of the modern historical and archaeological detective work that has enabled the ancient story to be fully told for the first time.
Varus’s last battle
Augustus Caesar pushed the frontiers of Roman dominion outward in almost every direction. The frontier between the subject province of Gaul and barbarian Germany was to prove especially troublesome, and the whole might of Rome was eventually to be challenged by one barbarian leader, Arminius, of the Cherusci tribe. But Arminius, whom Tacitus called the liberator of Germany, was not the first German to threaten Rome. A century before, after pushing the Roman armies as far as Orange, in southern France, the Germans had advanced on Italy itself. They were stopped, however, by one of Rome’s outstanding generals, Marius, who defeated them at Aix-en-Provence in 102 BC and obliterated them at Vercelli the following year.
Augustus had gradually pushed Rome’s eastern European frontier to the Danube. But a frontier consisting of the Rhine and the Danube made a very long and devious line, including a right angle along their upper courses. An Elbe-Danube line would be a great deal shorter, communications would be easier, and potentially hostile tribesmen would be safely enclosed within the Empire. So Augustus’ younger stepson, Drusus, crossed the Rhine to fight four successive campaigns in Germany. He reached the Weser and finally, in 9 BC, the Elbe. The Romans built fortresses, and the entire area from the Rhine to the Elbe was regarded as a new Roman province, Germania.
The Germans were, for the most part, semi-civilized pastoral nomads. Tacitus, the greatest historian of the era, vividly describes these people with their wild blue eyes, reddish hair, and hulking bodies, politically unstable tribesmen who loved a fight but disdained work. The Romans hated their new province, ‘bristling with woods or festering with swamps’, but Roman influence gradually seeped in, and modern excavations show that a good deal of trade was conducted.
One Roman governor after another fought laborious campaigns to consolidate the new conquests and frontiers. The greatest weakness lay in the fact that the shorter Elbe-Danube frontier could not be completed until Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) was conquered too. This became obvious when an astute German chief, Marobodus, led his tribe, the Marcomanni, on a migration from occupied southwestern Germany into free Bohemia and established authority over the German tribes of Saxony and Silesia. The Roman government decided that it was imperative to put a stop to the expansion of Maroboduus. In AD 6, therefore, 12 legions were launched in a massive three-pronged invasion under the supreme command of Augustus’ elder stepson and heir apparent, Tiberius. But a huge revolt broke out in northern Yugoslavia, putting an end to the campaign against Maroboduus. Nevertheless, he agreed terms with Rome and was recognised as a king and as a friend of the Roman people. Meanwhile, the Yugoslavian revolt, described as Rome’s gravest foreign threat since Hannibal, took three years to suppress.
The new province of Germany watched these events with keen interest. The Romans were not all-conqering, after all; they had given up their war against Maroboduus and made him their ally. The Yugoslavian rebels had shown that prolonged resistance to their power was not beyond the bounds of possibility.
Earlier, in AD 4, Tiberius, at that time Governor of Germany, had given an important West Germanic tribe, the Cherusci, the privileged position of a federated state within the Empire. Members of their ruling class were made Roman citizens, among them the young prince Arminius (Herman). Arminius entered the imperial service as an officer in its auxiliary military forces, gaining the status of a Roman knight. But the Romans overestimated the extent to which they had successfully assimilated their new province. Encouraged by revolts in the Empire, German aspirations to freedom and prowess in arms both found their champion in Arminius.
These were the circumstances when the new Roman governor, Publius Quinctilius Varus, reached Germany. Husband of Augustus’ grandniece, Varus was among the Emperor’s closest friends and had a hard-won reputation for firmness and order. When he arrived in Germany, however, he miscalculated the situation. He regarded the country as already subjugated and believed he could impose civilian methods of control, such as were possible in the rich, well-organised provinces he had hitherto governed. Like his predecessors, he proposed to winter on the Rhine but spend the summer at advanced posts far inside the recently conquered province. And so in AD 9 he established a summer camp for his three legions (6,000 men in each) in Cheruscan territory. Two other legions were left behind on the Rhine. His own advance headquarters were on the west bank of the Weser.
Varus befriended the Cheruscan chiefs, Segestes, and his brother Segimerus, little realising that Arminius and Segimerus were even then plotting against him. Some of the chiefs, in particular Segestes, tried to warn the governor of this impending treachery, but Varus was persuaded to lend the conspirators legionary detachments, which they said they needed to guard certain posts and escort supplies for the Roman army. Moreover, when the time came for Varus to withdraw to the Rhine for the winter, the plotters persuaded him to change his route. He had intended to march back to his winter camp at Vetera by the military road, but a fictitious report of a local rising induced him to make a northwesterly detour through difficult wooded country. The conspirators saw the main army off from their summer camp on the Weser. As Varus took his leave, the Cherusci asked to rejoin their tribes - ostensibly to recruit men to help put down the revolt that they had invented.
Ferocious storms and foul weather followed every step of the legions’ march towards the Lippe, and then to the north west to go to the assistance of Arminius in pursuit of the alleged German tribal uprisings. The column moved slowly. It was encumbered by a heavy baggage train and large numbers of women, children and servants. As it proceeded through the rough country, felling trees and making paths and causeways it was suddenly showered with missiles. The Germans had attacked. As that first day lengthened into late afternoon, the Romans were dogged by harrying ambushes, with flights of spears and javelins whistling down at them from the wooded slopes. The legionaries were hampered by the wind, rain and mud that had always made them dislike Germany. They had too few auxiliaries – cavalry, archers and slingers – to strike back effectively. All they could do was press on and hope to reach the nearest fortress. The storms were now tearing through the woods, throwing trees and branches into their path, splitting their forces, and providing continuous ambush positions for the Cherusci. Alarmingly, the Romans were now being attacked both from the flanks and from the rear. They suffered heavy losses.
When the day ended they made camp and hastily fortified it with earthworks. Here they burnt a large number of their baggage and stores wagons because they were having great difficulty keeping them moving through the entanglements of the forests and ravines.
Next morning they renewed their march and the going became a little better as they moved continuously towards the north west, but they were still hemmed in by close country and ravines. Then harrying attacks began again, and went on throughout that day. But towards evening they broke free of the Berglands and into open country, regrouped, and quickly built another camp. Some 13,000 soldiers of the original three Legions that had started out on the march from summer camp had been slaughtered, their bodies littering the hills and ravines of the Teutoberger Ridge, over 20–30 km to the south-east of their last position.
The decimated Legions, possibly now only 7,000 strong, and the remaining force of badly mauled cavalry, would have spent the night knowing their end was near. It was reported that one of the commanders, Numonius Vala, lost his nerve and rode off with the remains of his men in the vain hope of reaching the Rhine. His cavalry force broke out during the night, trying to thrust forward hrough the hills due west, possibly through an area known as Borgewedde, and on to the friendly lands of the Ems, and beyond. Most likely they were wiped out to a man by tribesmen poised in the hills and waiting for such a move.
Varus was wounded. He knew what the Germans would do to him if they caught him alive. To avoid this fate, he killed himself. Some members of his staff followed his example, and the two generals who were left in charge did not long survive. One mistakenly offered capitulation, which turned into a massacre; the other fell fighting as the Germans broke through to where he and a few selected Legionaries were trying to burn the body of Varus and bury the remains. They were swiftly killed.
At first light the largest remaining contingent of Legionaries broke out to the north west, towards a narrow defile lying between the hills of the Kalkriese Berg, and the Great Moor to the north. However, they ran straight into a well planned back-stop ambush established by Arminius at the point where the northern edge of the nearby Berglands fell steeply down into a narrow gap between the hilly ground, and the boggy moorlands beyond. It was a perfect pincer movement, and with the exception of a few handfuls of fleeing Legionaries, all were slain. From a set position of earth ramparts disguised as grass banks, the tribesmen were able to pick off the Roman force by sections as they squeezed into the narrow gap, harried from the rear and left flank and with no room to fight in their normal organised formations. Very few escaped through the ambush pipe to the moors beyond.
The entire Roman force, possibly some 20,000 men in all, was thus destroyed.
In the summer of AD 15, some 6 years later, Augustus’ grandnephew Germanicus, now in command on the Rhine, took his troops to visit the site to pay his respects to the fallen and give them proper funeral rites. Tacitus described the scene. ‘It lived up to its horrible associations. Varus’s extensive first camp, with its broad extent and headquarters marked out, testified to the whole army’s labours. Then a half-ruined breastwork and shallow ditch showed where the last pathetic remnant had gathered. On the open ground were whitening bones, scattered where men had fled, heaped up where they had stood and fought back. Fragments of spears and of horses’ limbs lay there – also human heads, fastened to tree-trunks. In groves nearby were the outlandish altars at which the Germans had sacrificed the Roman officers.
‘Survivors of the catastrophe, who had escaped from the battle or from captivity afterwards, pointed out where the generals had fallen, and where the Eagles had been captured. They showed where Varus received his first wound, and where he died by his own unhappy hand. And they told of the platform from which Arminius had spoken, and of his arrogant insults to the Eagles and standards, and of the gibbets and pits for the prisoners.’
Lost and found
At some point in the centuries that followed, the site of the final massacre and the running battles leading up to it was forgotten. However, early in the 16th century, the Lippischer Wald was renamed the Teutoberger Wald, and in 1875 a monument to Arminius was erected on the supposed site of the battle, near Detmold. But this location has been repeatedly challenged, with archaeologists and historians offering up some 750 alternatives. I was one of the many people fascinated by this mystery and, a month after arriving in Germany in 1987 to begin a tour of duty with the Armoured Field Ambulance Unit in Osnabrück, I began my own surveys and research.
I started with a visit to the local museum and a first meeting with Professor Dr Wolfgang Schlüter, the county archaeologist. Learning of my particular interest, he suggested I start in an area some 20 kilometres north of the city, simply saying it was worth further study. This was, in fact, supported by an earlier authority. Among the documents I consulted was a 19th century paper by the leading German classical historian, Theodore Mommsen. Like many others, he believed he had correctly identified the ‘Teutoberger Wald’ as Varus’s battlefield. His thesis was based on the fact that the resident landowners, the Von Bar family, had accumulated a large collection of Roman coins, a good majority of which were from the reign of Augustus Caesar. Mommsen had originally been informed that these coins had been found by farm workers in the local fields over the centuries (the Von Bar family tree can be traced back to the early 10th century). However, he was also told, perhaps by way of disinformation, that the coins had been collected from finds in other parts of Northern Germany, not just from the local parish area. Nevertheless, Mommsen stood by his theory but had no further evidence for it.
After studying Mommsen’s theory I had noted that a very old road known as the ‘Old Military Road’ (Heerstrasse) ran through this area. I therefore made a small crossroads in the centre of it my main point of reference, and it was from here that I began my investigations in earnest. By June 1987 I had identified and marked what I considered to be three key areas of rising ground, one either side of the military road, and a small knoll lying proud of the northern extremities of the hills some 1,000 metres away to the south. From a number of possible old find sites I had selected one that looked most promising. It was in a field close to the crossroads where a youngster in 1963 had found a single Roman coin. I made my first survey on July 5 and, on that weekend, recovered three Roman denarii. I continued the following weekend, and recovered a further concentration of some 98 Roman silver coins. The following week I presented them to the Professor, who was obviously excited and greatly impressed.
Professor Schlüter made immediate contact with the ‘Munz Coins Kabinet’, a department of the Kestner museum in Hanover. This was managed by one of the world’s leading experts on Roman and early coinage, Dr Frank Berger, a relatively young but vastly experienced scholar. Dr Berger had always had an avid interest in the coins that had been recovered from the Osnabrück area during the 18th and 19th centuries, and had written a thesis on these finds. They included the coins collected by the Von Bar family and, strangely enough, my first large find was on Von Bar land.
By 1939 the Von Bar collection was an impressive one, certainly for the northern regions of Germany, and comprised many silver and copper coins, and a few gold aurei. Up until 1945 it had been maintained in the newer of the two family Schlosses in Kalkriese, known as Gut Barenau. Regrettably however, the whole collection was looted during the final months of the war, apparently by occupying Allied forces. However, it had been carefully catalogued, enabling experts, including Theodore Mommsen, to debate the real source of the coins.
In Hanover, Dr Berger quickly went back to his reference books to check the original listings of the Von Bar collection, and saw a striking similarity between that accumulation and the cache that I had just recovered. It was not so much comparison between like coins, but more the clear similarity in the spread of dates of minting, in particular amongst the silver denarii. The more Berger looked at this the more convinced he became that the Von Bar collection could not have been an accumulation from many districts in Germany. It had clearly been made in the immediate area of the Von Bar estates in Kalkriese. In neither collection were there coins that had been minted later than AD 14, and of those minted AD 1–14, the majority were in pristine condition, as if they had been issued and lost a very short time after minting. The mint marks on these coins showed them to have been made between 2 BC and AD 1 in Lugdunum (Lyon) and issued immediately after 2BC.
Dr Berger then examined another source of information on the movement of Roman troops during their invasion and occupation of Germany. One of the main Roman forts identified and excavated during the late 1800s was the key fort of Haltern. It was one of many main outposts established by the Romans on the east-west axis through the German heartland centring on the River Lippe. Excavations there had recovered a few thousand coins. There was a larger proportion of copper coins in this find than in the Von Bar collection and in my own find; one would expect to find more lower denomination coinage in such a site. But the denarius coin graphs showed a remarkable similarity in terms of period, age spread and condition.
Dr Berger concluded that some of the Roman troops occupying Haltern during that period had moved through the area of Kalkriese during the same year, and judging by the comparable condition of the Augustan coins, in the same season.
The Roman historians, Tacitus and Cassius Dio, both record that Varus spent the early part of AD 9 in Haltern; indeed Varus’ own personal-mint marked coins had been found there during the excavations of the 1800s. They also describe how he then deployed to summer quarters, probably out along the Lippe towards the German highlands. As they go on to tell, neither he nor his legions, XVII, XVIII and XIX, ever returned. But the accounts do not pinpoint where their journey ended.
During the autumn months I spent many hours in the museum with Professor Schlüter and his staff, poring over old records and maps of the areas surrounding the find site, and also spent a great deal of spare time searching the Kalkriese fields. The first main task was to ascertain where people and troops might have moved through the area in former times, and to identify the routes they had taken. Although the old military road cutting across the moorlands initially seemed the obvious answer, I was beginning to get a different picture. I had plotted the sites of former coin finds onto modern maps and a pattern was beginning to emerge. This indicated a possible line of march well to the north of the previously accepted areas of concentrated Roman activity.
Over the next 6 months, well into the start of spring 1988, I delivered countless bags of various artefacts to the museum, including more silver denarii from the areas immediately surrounding the original coin find site; and the staff enthusiastically examined them. Through spring and summer I concentrated on the large fields, even moving over the canal into the area some 500 yards short of the crossroads and slowly but surely the finds formed a pattern. Lines began to appear linking the road running east-west around the Berg through the knoll to the military road about 1500 yards away to the NW. The shape was that of a small starburst, with the sparks all bursting out in one direction, suggesting that a large body of people had fanned out from the apex to the field and the knoll in a 90 degree arc north and north-west down to the crossroads, the military road, and the lands beyond.
On 12 July 1989, on my son’s birthday, exactly two years after my first major find in Kalkriese, I returned to the apex of the woods which fell away from the large knoll on the edge of the Berg. Here I found a copper half As coin which proved to be the most crucial piece of evidence yet. Dr Berger was able to match it to the 11 rare copper coins found at Haltern which bore Varus’s personal mint mark. It was known that Varus had lodged there in AD 9. No examples had been found in the camps along the Lippe, nor in the Detmold area where the Statue of Arminius stands today. None had been found anywhere else in the North German plains and Teutoberger Wald, except here, in Kalkriese, and this was only the first.
The archaeological team in Osnabrück went into overdrive. From 1988, Professor Schlüter had kept two of his staff on a continuous survey of all the outlying fields and areas that I had previously researched. Now the immediate area of the single coin site became the focal point.
After a month of exploratory digs on the wooded knoll, the team made their first significant find, a perfect full as of Augustus Caesar with the personal mint mark of Publius Quinctilius Varus. Over the next few months they continued their trench excavations through the wooded knoll, finding many Roman bronze fibulae and further copper coins, including more with Varus’s personal mark. The excavations had now reached the very eastern edge of the wood, and it was here, after a final trench was dug, that the team found what looked like the profile of a sunken earth wall. Through late winter and early spring of 1990 they extended the excavations into the field, working with metal detectors and getting stronger and increasing numbers of signals as they worked down through the soil to the sand bed below. An oxidised lump of iron recovered this way proved to be the most spectacular find of all, a ceremonial parade mask depicting the Emperor, Augustus Caesar.
The work continued. A mass of artefacts continued to be recovered and extra staff were drafted in, including, in June of that year, another archaeologist, Dr Susanne Wilbers-Rost. A huge pioneer’s axe was recovered, and many bronze pieces, both small and large, some of them from Roman armour. Soon after her appointment Dr Wilbers-Rost was able to confirm that an earth wall had been erected on the slope of the hill, supported at its eastern side by a series of timbers. That linked with my own theory of the general layout of the site as a very effective ambush position. But was this where Varus had lost some 20,000 men? The area was far too small to accomodate that number. Most likely this was the site of the final, and devastating, phase of a running battle that had taken place on the way to Kalkriese. On the basis of topographical research and existing archaeological evidence I had come to the conclusion that the whole battle site lay north of the River Lippe and east of the River Ems in the highland feature known now as the Teutoburger Wald. The legions had come up from the Teutoburger Wald and away from their original route leading to the Lippe, lured by Arminius into changing direction to the north-west up towards Kalkriese. They were cut to pieces by a series of guerrilla skirmishes from the flanks and rear as they moved through the Teutoburger Highlands to meet their end at the Kalkriese gap.
The excavation work continued and the finds and conclusive evidence that this was the site of the final battle built up. Then, in 1994, a large concentration of bones was discovered. These bones (later dated as approximately 2000 years old) had been laid in the ground, not thrown away or left where they had fallen. There were human bones, a layer of soil and then some horse bones. This was a mass grave.
It had always intrigued Prof Schlüter and the team that no bones or human remains had so far been found in the excavations. The belief was that the chemical content of the subsoil in the area was such that human bones could not have survived 2000 years. But now we had undoubtedly located the burial supervised by Germanicus, as recorded by Tacitus. Augustus’s lost legions had been found!
About the author
Major Tony Clunn MBE was born in Kent, England, and joined the army at the age of 15. He spent 35 years in the British Army retiring with the rank of Major. Tony and his family live in Schwagstorf in the area around Felsenfeld. As well as contacts in Osnabrück and Kalkriese, he has further connections with other museums and archaeological institutes in northern Germany.
Further reading
Clunn, Major Tony, In Quest of the Lost Legions: The Varusschlacht (Minerva, 1999)
Cowan, Ross, Warrior 71: Roman Legionary 58 BC-AD 69 (Osprey, 2003)
Dio, Cassius, The Roman History (Penguin, 1987)
Simkins, Michael, Men-at-Arms 46: The Roman Army from Caesar to Trajan (Osprey, 1984)
Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome (Penguin, 1956)
Wilcox, Peter, Men-at-Arms 129: Rome’s Enemies (1) Germanics and Dacians (Osprey, 1982)