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Various aspects of the early, medieval, and early modern history of Germany are covered in the articles Germans; Germanic laws; Germanic religion; Holy Roman Empire; Austria; and in the articles on the major historic German states (Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, WUrttemberg, Baden, Thuringia, Hesse, Mecklenburg (see under Mecklenburg–West Pomerania, Oldenburg, Brunswick, Anhalt, Lippe, Schaumburg-Lippe) and on the free cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and LUbeck. The survey that follows is a very general outline of the complex history of Germany.
History to the Early Middle Ages
At the end of the 2d cent. B.C., the German tribes began to expand at the expense of the Celts, but they were confined by Roman conquests (1st cent. B.C.–1st cent. A.D.) to the region E of the Rhine and N of the Danube. The Romans penetrated briefly (12 B.C.–A.D. 9) as far east as the Elbe River (seedia/T/Teutobur.html">Teutoburg Forest), and from the late 1st cent. A.D. to the 3d cent. they held the Agri Decumates, protected against Germanic inroads by a fortified line from Cologne to Regensburg. In a series of great migrations (4th–5th cent.) the German tribes (who did not all come from present-day Germany) overran most of the Roman Empire, while Slavic tribes occupied Germany E of the Elbe.
By the 6th cent., thedia/A/AnglSxs.html">Anglo-Saxons had established themselves in Britain, and thedia/F/Franks.html">Franks had taken over nearly all of present-day France, W and S Germany, and Thuringia. Clovis I, who first united the Franks late in the 5th cent., accepted Christianity, and St. Boniface in the 8th cent. spread the gospel in the areas acquired by Clovis's successors. In 751, Pepin the Short deposed the dynasty of thedia/M/Meroving.html">Merovingians and established his own, that of thedia/C/Carolingns.html">Carolingians. His son Charlemagne conquered thedia/S/Saxons.html">Saxons and extended the Frankish domain in Germany to the Elbe. He was crowned emperor at Rome in 800.
In the first division (843) of Charlemagne's empire (seedia/V/Verdun-T.html">Verdun, Treaty of) the kingdom of the Eastern Franks, under Louis the German, emerged as the nucleus of the German state. The Treaty of Mersen (870) enlarged it by the addition of part of Lotharingia (Lorraine), but after the death (876) of Louis it was divided among his sons Carloman, Louis the Younger, and Charles III (Charles the Fat). Emperor Arnulf reunited the kingdom, but during his reign (887–99) and that of his son Louis the Child (900–911), last of the Carolingian kings of Germany, the Norsemen, Slavs, and Magyars began to make devastating inroads. These contributed to economic breakdown and localization, manifest in thedia/M/manorial.html">manorial system.
Political localization was evident in the emergence of powerful duchies and in the growth of feudalism. The dukes of Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Upper and Lower Lorraine emerged as the most powerful magnates of Germany. On the death (911) of Louis the Child, they elected the Franconian dukedia/C/Conrad1.html">Conrad I as king. Conrad's reign was spent in struggles against the Magyars and against the rebellious dukes, one of whom (Henry the Fowler of Saxony) succeeded him in 918 as Henry I, beginning a century of Saxon rule. Henry restored some of the royal authority, took territory from the Slavs, and secured the election in 936 of his son, Otto I, as his successor.
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