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supportive efforts of the wives, she is wrong to believe that Germanic fathers did not care about
their daughters.3 Children mattered immensely to the Germans.
The presence of women near the sites of battles also provide a glimpse of the importance
of chastity for the Germans. “It is recorded that some battle lines, when already broken and
giving way, were restored by the women, by persistent prayers and showing their breasts and
pointing to the nearness of captivity, which the Germans fear much more violently for the sake
of their women, to such a degree that the spirits of states are more effectively kept under control
when the latter are ordered to include girls of high birth among the hostages. They even think
that there is a sacred and prophetic quality in women, and so they neither reject their advice nor
scorn their forcasts.”4 Women made an important contribution to Germanic society even on the
battlefield.
The presence of these women near the fields of slaughter also helped contribute to the
perception of Germanic women as warriors. Romans, seeing these women near the field, may
have believed that they fought in the actual battles. Later historians also depicted these women
as warriors, and some Germanic historians have depicted mythological stories of women who
fought. There are, however, several examples of women that did actually take to the field of
battle in defense of their honor and their kin.
Like Caesar before him, Tacitus assumed that an increased sexual drive limited a
person’s physical strength. “The young men experience love late, and for this reason their
strength is not exhausted. Nor are the girls hurried into marriage; they have the same youthful
vigor and similar stature: they are well matched in age and strength when they enter upon
3 Tacitus, Agricola, Germania, and Dialogue on Orators, trans. Herbert W. Benario (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1991), 73, 67; Wemple, “Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister, 500-900
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 14-5. 4 Tacitus, Germania, 67.
15
marriage, and the children reproduce the strength of their parents.” This also illuminates
important aspects of normal Germanic marriages. Germanic couples were close in age, had a
mutually helpful relationship, and had close ties to their surrounding kin.5
These women were not just helpmates, they were also daughters and family members.
Not only did couples generally share the responsibilities, and wives participate in the wars, but
these marriages were generally monogamous. “For almost alone of the barbarians they are
content with one wife apiece with only a very few exceptions, who are the objects of many offers
of marriages not because of their own lust but on account of their high rank.” He later stated,
“As a result, they live with chastity secured, corrupted by no attractions of games, by no
seductions of banquets. Men and women alike are ignorant of secret correspondence. Although
their population is so great, there are very few cases of adultery, the punishment for which is
immediate and left to the husbands: in the presence of her relatives, the husband drives her naked
from the home, with her hair cut off, and whips her through the whole village. Indeed, there is
no pardon for prostituted chastity; such a woman would not find a husband regardless of her
beauty, youth, or wealth.” The rest of this passage was a veiled attempt to humiliate the Romans
and the debauchery of their sexual relations. Sexual double standards existed in Germanic
society; this fact cannot be denied; however, the existence of concubinage and polygamy that are
the worst of the offences were not as prevalent as some have previously thought.6
The Germans that Tacitus studied had a bridal price instead of a dowry. These gifts were
supposed to be symbolic of the life that the bride accepted:
The wife does not bring a dowry to the husband, but rather the reverse occurs. Parents
and relatives are present and pass judgment upon the gifts, gifts not suited to womanly
pleasure nor with which the new bride may deck herself out, but cattle and a bridled
horse and a shield with framea and sword. In return for these gifts a wife is obtained, and
5 Ibid., 73. 6 Ibid., 72, 73.
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she in turn brings the man some weapon: they consider this exchange of gifts their
greatest bond, these their sacred rites, these their marriage divinities. So that the woman
may not think herself beyond the contemplation of brave acts and unaffected by the
disasters of wars, she is reminded by the very first ceremonies with which her marriage
begins that she comes as a partner in labors and dangers, who will suffer and dare the
same thing as her husband in peace, the same thing in war . . . So must she live and die,
with the understanding that she is receiving things she is to hand on to her children,
unimpaired and in worthy state, which her daughters-in-law may receive and which may
be handed on again to grandchildren.7

Women brought something to the marriage. The concept of the bridal purchase was beneficial to
the woman in question as will be seen in the discussion of property rights below. In this
example, the Germans instituted a partible inheritance that passed through the female line to their
son’s brides. The property stayed with a specific family, and yet it went through the female side.
In later centuries when lawmakers wrote the Germanic codes, the Burgundians mentioned
marriage ornaments that the women brought to the marriage, and historians have assumed that
this was jewelry. There is no way to be certain, but it may have been swords instead of clothing
and baubles.8
Tacitus further illuminated the issues of inheritance when he stated: “Nonetheless, each
person’s own children are his heirs and successors, and there is no will. If there are no children,
the next priority in inheritance is held by brothers, paternal uncles, and maternal uncles.” The
division of inheritance to both the mother’s and the father’s brothers implies that both the male
and the female had property to bequeath.9
Ammianus Marcellinus was a Greek historian who lived during the fourth century AD.
For the majority of his life, he was in the military and served on the frontiers, in his later life he
settled in Rome where he wrote his history of the Roman Empire titled, Rerum Gestarum Libri
Qui Supersunt. In his history there is some information about the invading Germanic tribes, and
7 Ibid., 72. 8 The Burgundian Code, trans. Katherine Fischer Drew (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), 59.
17
like his predecessor Tacitus, his first volume contained a short section about the Germans. He
calls them the “Gauls” and these Germanic tribes were distinct from the Franks and the Alamans,
both of whom he writes about from time to time and were already familiar to the Romans and
Greeks. These newly arriving Germanic tribes were invading the area that the Romans and
Greeks referred to as Gaul.
According to Marcellinus, the Gauls were a fiercesome tribe and their women matched
their mates, thus continuing to document the Germanic tradition of warrior women:
Almost all the Gauls are of tall stature, fair and ruddy, terrible for the fierceness of their
eyes, fond of quarrelling, and of overbearing insolence. In fact, a whole band of
foreigners will be unable to cope with one of them in a fight, if he call in his wife,
stronger than he by far and with flashing eyes; least of all when she swells her neck and
gnashes her teeth, and poising her huge white arms, proceeds to rain punches mingled
with kicks, like shots discharged by the twisted cords of a catapult. The voices of them
are formidable and threatening, alike when they are good- natured or angry. But all of
them with equal care keep clean and neat, and in those districts, particularly in Aquitania,
no man or woman can be seen, be she never so poor, in soiled and ragged clothing, as
elsewhere. 10

The Romans were at war with these German men, and Marcellinus depicted them as less
masculine in an effort to encourage the Roman military. Nevertheless, Germanic women had a
military prowess that seemed to stun the Romans and the Greeks.
Procopius of Caesarea, a Greek lawyer, chronicled the events of the Gothic Wars of the
mid-fifth century. The majority of his writings dealt with men and war, but there were some
interesting bits of information about women. Wartime for women was dangerous and often fatal.
Procopius mentioned several important women, including Amalasuntha, the powerful daughter
of King Theodoric the Great.

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