The Suebi left their name on Swabia and a kingdom in north-west Spain
Julius Caesar met the Suebi as a single tribe between the Rhine and the Elbe. Within a few centuries the name covered a web of peoples who would found a kingdom in north-west Iberia, give rise to the Lombards of Italy, and speak the ancestor of modern German. The region of Swabia still carries a version of their name.
Their homeland lay near the Elbe in what is now eastern Germany, and archaeologists link their forerunners to the Jastorf culture. Caesar first described them in 58 BC, and Roman writers record a heavy defeat at the hands of Drusus the Elder in 9 BC. As Rome learned more, authors changed their minds about who the Suebi were. Strabo, around 23 AD, saw them as the largest people between the two rivers. Tacitus, around 100 AD, insisted they were not one people but many distinct nations sharing a collective name, with the Semnones regarded as their ancient core and the Marcomanni as the strongest.
The name itself may mean something like those of their own kind. Most scholars today connect it to a reconstructed Germanic word meaning one's own, which also appears in the name of the Swedes, though others have proposed a Celtic word for vagabond.
Relations with Rome swung between settlement and conflict. After the Marcomannic Wars of the late 2nd century crushed a Suebian alliance on the Danube, many moved into or near the empire. A mixed group called the Alemanni seized land that became medieval Swabia, and raids by Suebian peoples troubled Rome through the 3rd and 4th centuries. After the Battle of Adrianople in 378 and the arrival of Huns and Goths, many Suebi headed west around 406, crossing Gaul and reaching Hispania by 409. There they founded a kingdom in Gallaecia that lasted until 585, when the Visigoths absorbed it; local place-names still recall it.
Others joined Attila's empire. After his death in 453, a short-lived Suebian kingdom on the Danube fell to the Ostrogoths. The Langobards, another Suebian people from the Elbe, then dominated the region from about 500 and entered Italy in 568 to found the Lombard kingdom. Linguistically, the Suebi spoke West Germanic tongues that fed into standard German as well as Swabian, Swiss German, Bavarian and Austrian dialects.
Source: Suebi
