Gaul

From WCD

Gaul (Lt. Gallia) was the Roman name for the area corresponding roughly to modernday France, Belgium and the Po (Padus) valley of northern Italy. Though Gauls ("Galli") had settled throughout Europe, from Spain to Galatia in Anatolia, this was the area the Romans most closely associated with them. The Romans had never had any easy relationship with the Gallic tribes, who made periodic incursions into Italy; on one of these raids, in 386 BC, the Gallic leader Brennus actually sacked Rome. A final mass invasion 225 BC, halted only by the Roman victory at the Battle of Telamon, induced the Romans to subjugate the tribes of the Po valley militarily. This they completed with the capture of Milan in 222 BC, organising the region into Cisalpine Gaul, or Gaul on this side of the Alps, though they did not formally create a province from it. The untamed region beyond the Alps they termed Gallia Comata, Long-haired Gaul.

In 121 BC the proconsul Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus conquered a coastal strip of land connecting Cisalpine Gaul with Spain, including the settlement of Narbo (Narbonne), and organised it into the province Transalpine Gaul, thereby providing Rome with a secure land route to her Spanish provinces. This area was sometimes referred to as Provincia ("the Province"), which gave rise to its modern name, Provence. The remainder of Long-haired Gaul was conquered by Julius Caesar in the 50s BC in a protracted series of campaigns that met fierce resistance from the Gauls, particularly during the rebellion of the Gallic leader Vercingetorix that was finally broken at Alesia in 52 BC. Augustus organised the area of Caesar's conquests into three provinces, called Tres Galliae (the Three Gauls): Aquitania, Lugdunensis and Belgica.

A series of barbarian incursions and even a string of emperors whose authority extended only over Gaul during the Crisis of the Third Century AD led Diocletian and Constantine the Great to fortify the region after stability had been restored, and it enjoyed renewed prosperity. During the breakdown of the Western Empire in the fifth century, however, Gaul became the target of a series of barbarian migrations from across the Rhine; Franks and Burgundians settled in the north, and Visigoths in Aquitania. The last Roman possessions in southern Gaul were ceded to the Visigoths in 476. The Romano-Gallic seems to have continued looking to Rome for status for some time, though from the middle of the fifth century they increasingly entered the service of the Germanic kings. The area eventually fell under the sway of the Franks.

References

• Lesley Adkins and Roy A. Adkins, Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome, New York (1998)
• Ramon L. Jimėnez, Caesar against the Celts, New York (2001)
• Angus Konstam, Historical Atlas of the Celtic World, London (2003)
• "Gaul (Transalpine)", The Oxford Classical Dictionary (2003)