Quadi Erotic

The Quadi were a Germanic people who held a kingdom on the north bank of the middle Danube, in present-day western Slovakia and northern Hungary, from about 20 AD until they slipped out of the written record around 400 AD. By then many of them had probably joined the Suebian migrations that ended in northwest Iberia. They were Suebi, close neighbors and frequent allies of the Marcomanni to their west, and theirs was the easternmost of the Suebian kingdoms along Rome's river frontier. That kingdom began as a Roman arrangement. Around 20 AD Rome settled the displaced followers of two deposed Marcomannic rulers beyond the Danube and put a Quadian noble named Vannius in charge. He ruled for some thirty years. Then his own nephews, Vangio and Sido, drove him out with help from neighboring peoples, and Emperor Claudius gave him refuge rather than an army. Tacitus later observed that Quadian kings relied on Roman money far more than on Roman soldiers. He also noted that a subject people, the Cotini, worked iron mines and paid tribute to the Quadi and the Sarmatians.

Their language was never written down. It survives only in personal names, which are enough to place it among the Suebian dialects of Germanic. Their religion is just as thinly documented, a Germanic polytheism known mostly through what Roman writers said of the Suebi in general. What does survive is their long collision with Rome. In the Marcomannic Wars of 166 to 180 AD, the Quadi fought Marcus Aurelius for years. Cassius Dio places the rain miracle, a sudden storm that saved a trapped and thirsty Roman army, in their country. A line in the emperor's Meditations records that part of it was written among the Quadi on the Granua, today's Hron. In 179 a Roman force stationed at Laugaricio left an inscription on the castle rock at Trenčín, and it is still visible there.

The relationship never settled. In 374 a Roman commander murdered the Quadian king Gabinius at a banquet, and the Quadi answered by raiding Pannonia with their Sarmatian neighbors. The next year, while receiving Quadian envoys at Brigetio, Emperor Valentinian I flew into such a rage that he died of a stroke. After that the name thins out. Jerome lists the Quadi among the peoples who overran Gaul in the early 400s. Many historians see them among the Suebi who founded a kingdom in Gallaecia centered on Braga, while some probably stayed on the Danube under Hunnic rule. No living community carries their name. What remains is Roman stone, excavated graves in Slovakia and an emperor's notes written at the front.