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A Brief History of Germania
Hoping to complete his adoptive father's plans, and shorten the frontier lines, Caesar Augustus launched his invasion of Germania in the first decade of the AD reckoning. The Primitive tribes failed to organize except on one occassion. In AD 9, in the depths of the black forest, a Former Legionary auxiliary led a conglomeration of various Germanic tribes in an ambush of three Legions. It very nearly turned into a rout of the Legions, but the commander on the scene, Varius, turned out to be a tactical genius. Rallying his men in the forest later renamed Varian Forest in his honor, he saved his command and
turned the tide with a brilliant counter attack and the discpline of the Legions.

This desperate battle seemed to break the Germanic tribes, and by 12 AD, the natives resistance was at an end and the organization of the Germania province was begun. The capital of the provence, Coloni Augustius, situated on the Main River (OTL Frankfurt-am-Main) , was a rival to Coloni Agrippias (OTL Cologne) on the Rhine. Like all the northern European Roman cities, it was initially little more than a Legion garrison and the people who supported it. The really important cities were Elbevici (OTL Magdeburg), founded in 30 AD on the Elbe river, a trade post with contacts in Gothia as far off as the Volga river, and the port of Hamn, at the mouth of the Elbe, from which Roman goods penetrated the frozen north of Skandia. By the mid-2nd Century, both cities were as important as Lugudium (OTL Lyons) and Trier as trading centers in Europe. Romanization caught on fast among the Elites -- former Tribal leaders -- but much slower in the rural countryside, much the same as in Gaul. Neverless, by AD 200, the Germani language all but disappeared, except in isolated areas in the deep forest, and along the Jute Coast. Some remnants of the Language exist in a few scattered slang words in areas of the Black Forest today.

In many ways, this was the least Romanized provence, and was the source of many of the difficulties facing Rome in the late 2nd and Early 3rd Centuries.
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basically: POD is Varius successfully rallies his three Legions and beats back the Germanic tribes. A new, shorter 'border' of the Elbe-Danube river line allows greater Roman penetration of Scandianavia culturally, as well as deep into modern Poland and Russia, Romanizing the tribal elites. (This happened even OTL, but here its the early Proto-Norse who get the treatment of Roman contact that OTL happened on the Rhine Border. Goths (Gothia) get the Romanization sooner, instead of after being driven into Rome by the Huns in the 200s.


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