On September 11th, 9 A.D., an epic monumental battle occurred that changed the course of history. 

Roman Legions fight against Germanic tribes in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. A battle that would change history.

By the year 9 A.D. Rome had been an empire for 36 years and was seeking to expand it's territory. North of its borders along the river Rhine was Germania, a territory rich in resources & populated by "barbarians". Rome sees this territory on its northeast border as a natural extension to their expanding empire and sends three legions, composed of around 20,000 men, under the command of General Varus to conquer it. It would end up becoming a military campaign so disastrous it was said to have driven Emperor Caesar Augustus insane for none of the three legions would ever make it back to Rome alive.

The Northeast Border of the Roman Empire with the River Rhine as its border.

"By the beginning of the Christian Era, Rome’s sway extended from Spain to Asia Minor, and from the North Sea to the Sahara. The imperial navy had turned the Mediterranean into a Roman lake, and everywhere around the rim of the empire, Rome’s defeated enemies feared her legions—or so it seemed to optimistic Romans. “Germania” (the name referred originally to a particular tribe along the Rhine), meanwhile, did not exist as a nation at all. Various Teutonic tribes lay scattered across a vast wilderness that reached from present-day Holland to Poland. The Romans knew little of this densely forested territory governed by fiercely independent chieftains. They would pay dearly for their ignorance." - Smithsonian Magazine

A Roman bust of Arminius

His Germanic name is lost to history. What is known is that at a young age, the son of a noble Germanic tribesmen was kidnapped by the Romans. He was given the latin name "Arminius" and trained to be a Roman Legionaire. He was so good at being a soldier that eventually he was promoted to an Officer in the Roman Army and given Roman Citizenship. Arminius was someone special to the Roman army. It was customary that whenever the Romans would conquer a new territory, it was invaluable to have someone on their side who already knew the land, people, and language. When General Varus, commander of the three legions sent to invade Germania would begin his campaign he brought Arminius with him. However Arminius would never stop identifying himself as Germanic and would end up betraying Varus. It would be the biggest betrayal of a Roman since Brutus assassinated Caesar only 53 years earlier.

"General Varus, 55, was linked by marriage to the imperial family and had served as Emperor Augustus’ representative in the province of Syria (which included modern Lebanon and Israel), where he had quelled ethnic disturbances. To Augustus, he must have seemed just the man to bring Roman civilization to the barbarous” tribes of Germany." - Smithsonian Magazine

The Roman column marches into the Teutoburg Forest

Although the Romans hadn't conquered Germania they had a few small outposts in the region where they attempted to establish a colony. However the seasons were changing and they were headed back into Roman territory to winter there. That was when Arminius decided to spring his trap. He told General Varus that a rebellion was taking place in Northern Germania. Eager to establish Roman rule, Varus took the bait and marched his three legions into the vast Teutoburg Forest. The forest was unknown to them. It was a dark, foreign, and densely wooded place, not like the open ground in which the Roman military was good at fighting in. Worse was the weather. Storms began pouring rain causing their trail to become muddy and difficult. Because of the difficulty of the terrain, the soldiers marched in a column (estimated to be between 5-8 miles long,) in order to travel through the forest. However unknown to General Varus, Arminius had already secretly gathered the various tribes of Germania and unified them to launch an assault on the Romans, the very army he was supposedly serving.

The Germanic Tribesmen assault the Roman Column

As the miles long column marched, the Germanic tribesmen began to harasses the tail of the column continually killing the Romans a small contingent at a time. As soon as they would kill plenty of them the tribesmen would disappear into the forest again where the Romans couldn't chase them. Because the tribesmen would only attack a portion of the column at a time, this led to disarray and chaos as their hit and run tactics rendered the superior Roman numbers and style of fighting useless. The front of the column had no idea what was happening when the back of the column was being attacked, the officers ahead of the line couldn't pass orders to portions that were coming under attack, the dense woods and the stretched out column meant they couldn't effectively fight in formation. The long snake that was the Roman column was being cut apart piece by piece. With the legions in disarray the calvary decided to abandon their post. However when they attempted to escape they found themselves surrounded by hordes of tribesmen who cut them all down.

" with no room to maneuver, exhausted after days of hit-and-run attacks, unnerved, they were at a crippling disadvantage.”" - Smithsonian Mag

The Germanic tribes ambush the Romans, cutting of their escape.

The traditional infantry fighting style of the Legions proved ineffective against the guerrilla fighting style of the tribesmen.

September 11th, 9 A.D. Rome loses full 1/10 of its army to Germanic Tribesmen.

When General Varus saw that there was no way they would ever make it out of the forest alive, and realizing that Arminius had betrayed him, he fell on his sword and killed himself. The rest of the Roman officers would follow suit. With no one to lead them the Romans were helpless. Caught between hills and bogs, caught between the forest and the tribesmen, what was left of the Roman Army was trapped with nowhere to go. It was a massacre. When it was all over the Germanic tribes had completely wiped out all three legions, around a full 1/10th of the Empire's army!

"More than 10 percent of the entire imperial army had been wiped out—the myth of its invincibility shattered. In the wake of the debacle, Roman bases in Germany were hastily abandoned. Emperor Augustus, dreading that Arminius would march on Rome, expelled all Germans and Gauls from the city and put security forces on alert against insurrections." - Smithsonian Magazine

A Roman solider staked to a tree.

Those who managed to survive the massacre would be treated to a worse fate. The remaining Roman captives were ritually tortured and executed by the tribesmen. Some were skinned alive, others burned alive, others decapitated, and others crucified to the trees.

"A Garden of Bones"

"Six years would pass before a Roman army would return to the battle site. The scene the soldiers found was horrific. Heaped across the field at Kalkriese lay the whitening bones of dead men and animals, amid fragments of their shattered weapons. In nearby groves they found “barbarous altars” upon which the Germans had sacrificed the legionnaires who surrendered. Human heads were nailed everywhere to trees. In grief and anger, the aptly named Germanicus, the Roman general leading the expedition, ordered his men to bury the remains, in the words of Tacitus, “not a soldier knowing whether he was interring the relics of a relative or a stranger, but looking on all as kinsfolk and of their own blood, while their wrath rose higher than ever against the foe.” - Smithsonian Magine

A 1909 painting depicting Arminius leading the German Tribes against the Romans.

The Roman defeat at the Teutoburg Forest was a loss so severe that Rome never again tried to invade or conquer Germania. Germania would forever remain independent and free from Rome and their cultural influence. The devastating loss of three complete legions would haunt the psyche of Rome. How could the might of the Empire be defeated by barbarians?

"It was a defeat so catastrophic that it threatened the survival of Rome itself and halted the empire’s conquest of Germany. “This was a battle that changed the course of history,” says Peter S. Wells, a specialist in Iron Age European archaeology at the University of Minnesota and the author of The Battle That Stopped Rome. “It was one of the most devastating defeats ever suffered by the Roman Army, and its consequences were the most far-reaching. The battle led to the creation of a militarized frontier in the middle of Europe that endured for 400 years, and it created a boundary between Germanic and Latin cultures that lasted 2,000 years...The historian Suetonius, writing a century after the battle, asserted that the defeat “nearly wrecked the empire.” Roman writers, says Wells, “were baffled by the disaster.” Though they blamed the hapless Varus, or the treachery of Arminius, or the wild landscape, in reality, says Wells, “the local societies were much more complex than the Romans thought. They were an informed, dynamic, rapidly changing people, who practiced complex farming, fought in organized military units, and communicated with each other across very great distances.” - Smithsonian Magazine

A statue of Arminius erected in his honor as the "Unifier of Germany" points his sword towards France.

"Arminius, without doubt Germania's liberator, who challenged the Roman people not in its beginnings like other kings and leaders, but in the peak of its empire; in battles with changing success, undefeated in the war." - Roman Historian

"Arminius was hailed as the first national hero of Germany. “The myth of Arminius,” says Benario, “helped give Germans their first sense that there had been a German people that transcended the hundreds of small duchies that filled the political landscape of the time...By 1875, as German militarism surged, Hermann, (The Modern Name Germans gave to Arminius) had been embraced as the nation’s paramount historical symbol; a titanic copper statue of the ancient warrior, crowned with a winged helmet and brandishing his sword menacingly toward France, was erected on a mountaintop 20 miles south of Kalkriese, near Detmold, where many scholars then believed the battle took place. At 87 feet high, and mounted on an 88-foot stone base, it was the largest statue in the world until the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in 1886. Not surprisingly, the monument became a popular destination for Nazi pilgrimages during the 1930s." - Smithsonian Magazine

"Had Rome not been defeated, says historian Herbert W. Benario, emeritus professor of classics at Emory University, a very different Europe would have emerged. “Almost all of modern Germany as well as much of the present-day CzechRepublic would have come under Roman rule. All Europe west of the Elbe might well have remained Roman Catholic; Germans would be speaking a Romance language; the Thirty Years’ War might never have occurred, and the long, bitter conflict between the French and the Germans might never have taken place.” - Smithsonian Magazine

A Panoramic View of the Statue of Arminius in a German Forest