Raetovari Erotic

The Raetovari were a Germanic people of late antiquity. They were a regional branch of the Alemanni who lived around the fourth and fifth centuries in the northern part of the old Roman province of Raetia, in what is now southern Germany. Over time they merged into the Alemannic population that later became the Swabians. No chronicle tells their story. What survives is a name, a likely homeland and a Roman army unit, and each of those says more than you might expect.

Start with the name. It joins Raetia, Rome's province between the Alps and the upper Danube, to the Germanic ending -vari, roughly "dwellers" or "men of" a place. The same ending appears in Baiuvarii, the name that became Bavarians. The Raetovari were simply the people of Raetia. They took their identity from Roman land they had moved into, not from an ancestral founder. That was typical of the Alemanni, who were less a single tribe than a loose federation. Their groups settled the territory Rome gave up after its frontier north of the Danube collapsed in the third century. Their neighbors had the same kind of place names: the Lentienses near Lake Constance, the Brisigavi of the Breisgau, the Bucinobantes across the Rhine from Mainz.

Their home is usually placed in and around the Nördlinger Ries, the broad, nearly round basin left by a meteorite impact some fifteen million years ago. It sits on today's border between Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. The basin is fertile and has clear natural edges, which made it an obvious territory for a settled farming community. The name Ries, and the medieval Riesgau district, are generally read as a worn-down form of Raetia, so the landscape still carries the same word the Raetovari did.

Their ties to Rome did not end with settlement. The Notitia Dignitatum, a register of late Roman military commands, lists a unit called the Raetobarii among the elite palace auxiliaries of the western field army, next to units named for the Brisigavi. The frontier peoples Rome fought along the Danube were also filling its ranks.

Like other Alemanni, they spoke an early, unwritten form of Alemannic and followed traditional Germanic religion. Christianity spread gradually after the Franks brought the Alemanni under their rule from around 500. After that the name fades from view. The people themselves did not vanish. They became part of Alemannic and then Swabian society, and the Swabian dialects spoken across much of the Ries today descend in part from their speech.