Military Transformation Among Germanic Peoples During the Age of Roman Empire and the Early Middle Ages

Abstract

During the Roman imperial period and the early Middle Ages, the Germanic peoples underwent a long process of military transformation, in which their warfare habits changed or were significantly transformed. This change was primarily driven by the fact that until the fall of the Western Roman Empire, three great military cultures coexisted: the Germanic, the Roman and the Steppean, between which wars and armed conflicts broke out from time to time and which influenced each other’s development. In my thesis, I will describe the process by which the Germanic peoples adopted and applied the elements of warfare from the other two war cultures. The sum of these elements resulted in a form of warfare that formed the basis of medieval warfare.