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| An international aspect of the Germani | <table of contents> <previous page> <next section> page 3 of 3 |
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| Even less can the Germani be appropriated by any single nation. The Germani were neither the first Germans nor the first Scandinavians. They were, along with others, the ancestors of many Europeans. In their own time, the Germani entertained no thoughts of creating a nation. Germans became conscious of themselves as a nation long after the time of the Germani, after they had developed into a larger Christian culture and well after they had been assimilated into a larger society. The Germani lived during early historical times, late antiquity, and the early Middle Ages. After that they met their end along with Roman and Slavic peoples in the new European nations. Most European nations can look back to the history of the Germani for a chapter in their own histories, not just the Germans. In England it was the kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxons and the conquest by the (Romanized Christian) Normans; in France it was King Clovis I of Merovingian lineage, whose people, the Franks, gave a new name to the Gauls; in Spain it was the Visigoths who, though they fell to the Islamic warrior Taric in 711, began the resistance which finally became the Reconquista; in Italy there was the kingdom of the Langobardi; and the very name of Russia come from a Swedish tribe called Rus. This list conveys the importance of the Germani at the beginning of the Middle Ages. That impact continues up to today. |
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