11 Facts About Cimbri

The Cimbri were initially successful, particularly at the Battle of Arausio, in which a large Roman army was routed.

In 101 BC, during an attempted invasion of the Italian peninsula, the Cimbri were decisively defeated at the Battle of Vercellae by Gaius Marius, and their king, Boiorix, was killed.

Discord between the Roman commanders, the proconsul Quintus Servilius Caepio and the consul Gnaeus Mallius Maximus, hindered Roman coordination and so the Cimbri succeeded in first defeating the legate Marcus Aurelius Scaurus and later inflicted a devastating defeat on Caepio and Maximus at the Battle of Arausio.

Defeated, the Cimbri returned to Gaul, where they joined their allies, the Teutons.

The adventures of the Cimbri are described by the Danish Nobel Prize–winning author Johannes V Jensen, himself born in Himmerland, in the novel Cimbrernes Tog, included in the epic cycle Den lange Rejse.

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For hundreds of years this isolated population and its present 4,400 inhabitants have claimed to be the direct descendants of the Cimbri retreating to this area after the Roman victory over their tribe.

The population, which kept its independence during the time of the Venice Republic, was later severely devastated by World War I As a result, many Cimbri have left this mountainous region of Italy, effectively forming a worldwide diaspora.

Cimbri are depicted as ferocious warriors who did not fear death.

Major problem in determining whether the Cimbri were speaking a Celtic language or a Germanic language is that, at that time, the Greeks and Romans tended to refer to all groups to the north of their sphere of influence as Gauls, Celts, or Germani rather indiscriminately.

Jean Markale wrote that the Cimbri were associated with the Helvetii, and more especially with the indisputably Celtic Tigurini.

Cimbri is referenced in Italo Calvino's novel If On A Winter's Night A Traveller as a fictional country that warred with a similarly fictionalised version of Cimmeria, thus imposing its own written language onto the Cimmerians.