Brigantii Erotic

The Brigantii were a Celtic people of the Iron Age who held the eastern end of Lake Constance, where the Alpine Rhine flows into the lake. In 15 BC Rome conquered them and folded their land into the province of Raetia, and in time they merged into the Romanized and later Alemannic population of the region. No community descends from them as a distinct people. What they left is mostly a name: Bregenz, the Austrian city that grew out of their town of Brigantium, still carries it. Their location mattered more than anything else about them. They lived where the Alpine valleys open onto the lake and onto the rolling foreland that runs north toward the Danube, which made their corner a natural gateway between Italy and the lands beyond the mountains.

Greek and Roman writers counted them among the Vindelici, the Celtic tribes of the Alpine foreland in what is now southern Germany, western Austria and northeastern Switzerland. Strabo names them together with the Estiones and lists Brigantium among their towns. Nothing written in their own speech survives, but it was Celtic and probably close to Gaulish. That set them apart from their Raetian neighbors to the south, whose mountain language was not Indo-European at all and seems to have been related to Etruscan. The tribal name comes from a Celtic root meaning high or exalted, the same root behind the Brigantes of northern Britain and several other places across the Celtic world. No gods or rites are recorded for the Brigantii in particular. Like their neighbors, they would have worshipped Celtic deities until those cults blended into Roman religion after the conquest.

The turning point came when Augustus sent his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus to take the Alps and the approaches to them. Tiberius advanced from the Gaulish side, and Strabo records that he fought a naval battle against the Vindelici on the lake itself, using an island as his base. After the conquest Brigantium became a Roman town, with a harbor and a road north through Cambodunum to Augusta Vindelicum, the modern Kempten and Augsburg. In the late empire it was also a base for a unit of boatmen on the lake. The Romans named the lake after the town: Pliny the Elder calls it Lacus Brigantinus.

Over the next few centuries the Brigantii became provincial Romans. From the third century on, the Alemanni pushed across the frontier, and by the early Middle Ages the lakeshore was Alemannic country. When the Irish missionaries Columbanus and Gallus reached Bregenz around 610, they found pagan Alemannic settlers there. The town's Celtic name had outlasted both Rome and the people who first gave it, and it is still in use today.