Who is arminius

Arminius dilahirkan dari keluarga pemimpin puak yang menghuni tepian Sungai Weser. Pada usia empat tahun ia dibawa oleh pasukan Romawi, bersama saudaranya, untuk dididik kemiliteran karena wilayah itu menjadi taklukan Romawi. Pada akhir kedinasan militer, mereka kemudian dikembalikan ke sukunya. Namun, Arminius malah merancang usaha perlawanan sekembalinya ia ke wilayah puaknya dengan mengumpulkan kekuatan berbagai puak-puak Jermanik lainnya. Pengalaman berperang di berbagai wilayah taklukan Romawi misalnya di Dalmatia dan Pannonia juga membuat ia percaya diri untuk bisa mengalahkan pasukan Romawi.

Dalam sejarah Jerman, Arminius sering digambarkan sebagai pahlawan pembebas bangsa Jerman dari penaklukan Romawi, walaupun pada saat itu belum dikenal bangsa Jerman. Sekembalinya dari kedinasan militer pada sekitar tahun 7 M, ia menghimpun sejumlah pemimpin puak Jermanik untuk bangkit melawan Romawi. Pertempuran yang paling besar dan penting adalah yang berlangsung pada tahun 9 M, di kala pasukan gabungan puak-puak Jermanik memorak-porandakan kekuatan Romawi di Teutoburgerwald , di utara kota Detmold, Niedersachsen sekarang, sehingga jenderal Romawi yang bernama terbunuh atau bunuh diri.

Kepalanya dipenggal dan dibawa Arminius kepada , pemimpin puak Jermanik paling berpengaruh yang belum mau bergabung dengan sekutunya. Kekalahan ini membuat Kaisar Tiberius melakukan negosiasi dengan para pemimpin puak Jermanik, sambil melancarkan serangan balasan di bawah pimpinan jenderal Germanicus, hingga akhirnya menghentikan usaha itu pada tahun 16 M dan mempertahankan batas wilayah Romawi tetap di bagian barat Sungai Rhein. Kelak, para kaisar penerus Tiberius memperluas wilayah di timur Rhein dengan membangun batas buatan yang dikenal sebagai , suatu dinding demarkasi yang membentang ribuan kilometer dari Rhein hingga ke Passau, sekarang.

Selepas menghadapi perlawanan militer Romawi, kembali puak-puak Jermanik mengulangi "kebiasaan" lama mereka untuk saling berperang. Dalam salah satu perselisihan dengan kelompoknya, Arminius terbunuh atau dibunuh pada usia sekitar 37 tahun. Kepahlawanan Arminius ini dibangkitkan oleh Martin Luther, yang "mentahbiskannya" sebagai Hermann, dan dijadikan simbol cita-cita persatuan bangsa-bangsa Jerman yang pada masanya terpecah-pecah dalam berbagai kerajaan yang bergabung secara sangat longgar di bawah Kekaisaran Romawi Suci.

Akibatnya adalah mulainya penambahan "dari bangsa Jerman" deutscher Nation dalam beberapa penulisan resmi konfederasi itu. Pada abad ke kembali Arminius dikaitkan dengan tokoh legendaris Siegfried Sigmund dalam istilah Nordik "Sang Pemenggal Naga", untuk membangkitkan semangat persatuan bangsa Jerman.

But within a few hundred years, Rome had conquered much of the Italian peninsula, and by b. 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. There are many reasons, according to ancient historians, that the imperial Roman legate Publius Quinctilius Varus set out so confidently that September in a.

He led an estimated 15, seasoned legionnaires from their summer quarters on the WeserRiver, in what is now northwestern Germany, west toward permanent bases near the Rhine.

They were planning to investigate reports of an uprising among local tribes. Like his patrons in Rome, Varus thought occupying Germany would be easy.

The German frontier held a deep allure for Augustus, who regarded the warring tribes east of the Rhine as little more than savages ripe for conquest. Between 6 b. In time, despite growing resentment of the Roman presence, the tribes exchanged iron, cattle, slaves and foodstuffs for Roman gold and silver coins and luxury goods. Some tribes even pledged allegiance to Rome; German mercenaries served with Roman armies as far away as the present-day Czech Republic.

One such German soldier of fortune, a year-old prince of the Cherusci tribe, was known to the Romans as Arminius. His tribal name has been lost to history. He spoke Latin and was familiar with Roman tactics, the kind of man the Romans relied on to help their armies penetrate the lands of the barbarians. For his valor on the field of battle, he had been awarded the rank of knight and the honor of Roman citizenship.

On that September day, he and his mounted auxiliaries were deputized to march ahead and rally some of his own tribesmen to help in putting down the rebellion. A rival chieftain, Segestes, repeatedly warned Varus that Arminius was a traitor, but Varus ignored him.

Arminius had instructed the Romans to make what he had described as a short detour, a one- or two-day march, into the territory of the rebels. As they progressed, the line of Roman troops—already seven or eight miles long, including local auxiliaries, camp followers and a train of baggage carts pulled by mules—became dangerously extended. Meanwhile, a violent rain and wind came up that separated them still further, while the ground, that had become slippery around the roots and logs, made walking very treacherous for them, and the tops of the trees kept breaking off and falling down, causing much confusion.

The nearest Roman base lay at Haltern, 60 miles to the southwest. So Varus, on the second day, pressed on doggedly in that direction.

On the third day, he and his troops were entering a passage between a hill and a huge swamp known as the Great Bog that, in places, was no more than 60 feet wide. As the increasingly chaotic and panicky mass of legionnaires, cavalrymen, mules and carts inched forward, Germans appeared from behind trees and sand-mound barriers, cutting off all possibility of retreat.

Varus understood that there was no escape. Rather than face certain torture at the hands of the Germans, he chose suicide, falling on his sword as Roman tradition prescribed. Most of his commanders followed suit, leaving their troops leaderless in what had become a killing field.

Only a handful of survivors managed somehow to escape into the forest and make their way to safety. The news they brought home so shocked the Romans that many ascribed it to supernatural causes, claiming a statue of the goddess Victory had ominously reversed direction.

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. More than 10 percent of the entire imperial army had been wiped out—the myth of its invincibility shattered. Based on these records, the story of Arminius was revived in the sixteenth century with the recovery of the histories of Tacitus, who wrote in his Annales II, 88 :. 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.

Arminius was not the only reason for Rome's change of policy towards Germania. Politics also played a factor; emperors could rarely trust a large army to a potential rival, though Augustus had enough family members to wage his wars.

Also, Augustus, in his year reign, had annexed many territories still at the beginning of the process of Romanization. Tiberius, successor of Augustus, decided that Germania was a far less developed land, possessing few villages, with only a small food surplus, and therefore was not currently important to Rome. It would require a commitment too burdensome for the imperial finances and for excessive expenditure of military force for a new achievement. Modern scholars have pointed out that the Rhine was a more practical boundary for the Roman Empire than any other river in Germania.

Armies on the Elbe, however, would have to have been supplied by extensive overland routes or by ships travelling the hazardous Atlantic. Economically, the Rhine already had towns and sizable villages at the time of the Gallic conquest. The Rhine was significantly more accessible from Rome and better equipped to supply sizeable garrisons than the regions beyond.

Rome would control Germania by appointing client kings , which was cheaper than military campaigns. Rome chose no longer to rule directly in Germania east of the Rhine and north of the Danube; Rome preferred to exert indirect influence through client kings, so Italicus, nephew of Arminius, was appointed king of the Cherusci; Vangio and Sido became vassal princes of the powerful Suebi , etc.

An Icelandic account [12] [13] states that Sigurd "slew the dragon" in the Gnitaheidr—today the suburb Knetterheide of the city of Bad Salzuflen, located at a strategic site on the Werre river which could very well have been the point of departure of Varus's legions on their way to their doom in the Teutoburg Forest.

In Germany, he was rechristened "Hermann" by Martin Luther and he became an emblem of the revival of German nationalism fueled by the wars of Napoleon in the 19th century.

Another theory regarding Arminius' Latin name is that it is based on the Latin word armenium a vivid blue, ultramarine pigment made from a stone. Thus, Arminius would have been called "blue eyes," and his brother Flavus "the blond" — as references to the stereotype physical features which the Romans assigned to their Germanic neighbors.

Proponents of that theory argue that his father, too, Segimerus, the modern form of which is "Siegmar" also bore a name with the stem "sieg," or "victorious". The Hermannsdenkmal Monument. In , Heinrich von Kleist 's published, but never performed, the play Die Hermannsschlacht. The play has been revived repeatedly at moments propitious for raw expressions of National Romanticism and was especially popular during the Third Reich. In , construction was started on a massive statue of Arminius, known as the Hermannsdenkmal , on a hill near Detmold in the Teutoburg Forest; it was finally completed and dedicated during the early years of the Second German Empire in the wake of the German victory over France in the Franco-Prussian War of — The monument has been a major tourist attraction ever since, as has The Hermann Heights Monument , a similar statue erected in the United States in The Hermann Heights monument was erected by the Sons of Hermann , a fraternal organization formed by German Americans in New York City in and named for Hermann the Cheruscan that during the nineteenth century flourished in American cities with large populations of German origin.

Hermann, Missouri , a town on the Missouri River founded in the s and incorporated in , was also named for Arminius.