Baiuvarii


The Baiuvarii, Baiovari or early Bavarians were a Germanic people who are first mentioned in contemporary records starting in the 6th century, soon after the end of the Western Roman Empire,
The Baiuvarii originally lived in what had been the Roman province Raetia, south of the Danube, in what is now southern Bavaria. They became a stem duchy within the Frankish empire, the medieval Duchy of Bavaria, which expanded and eventually stretched to include present day Austria.
The Bavarian language developed among the Baiuvarii. It is a West Germanic language closely related to Standard German. Modern dialects of Bavarian are still spoken by Bavarians, Austrians and South Tyroleans.

Language

Early evidence of the language of the Baiuvarii is limited to personal names and a few Runic inscriptions. However, by the 8th century AD, the Austro-Bavarian language was already well-established.
The language of the Baiuvarii was West Germanic, like its descendants medieval Old High German, and the modern Bavarian language. It was so similar to the contemporary languages of the neighbouring Alamanni, Thuringi, and Langobards, that it is difficult to tell them apart. This southern group of languages or dialects which are precursors to Old High German are sometimes distinguished from closely related northern dialects, such as those spoken by the Franks, as "Elbe Germanic". However, the model used to define this term is now considered obsolete, in favour of the idea that all or most of continental West Germanic languages were in one dialect continuum after the Migration period.
A peculiarity of Bavarian compared to its neighbours is that it appears to have loaned words from East Germanic languages, such as Gothic.

Name

The name of the Baiuvarii had many written variants, but these differences reflect different spelling conventions which were used. For example, the use of the letters "b", "v", "u", "uu" and "o" was common when representing the same w-like sound in words from Germanic languages. Similarly, versions with a letter "g" such as Bogari, Baguvarii, are using that letter to represent a palatal glide, or y-like sound. Versions with an initial p such as Pagoarii, Paioarii, Peigiro reflect the normal Upper German version of the High German consonant shift, which still distinguishes southern dialects of German today, and so this represents a real variation in pronunciations.
Modern scholars reconstruct the original Germanic pronunciation before the first written forms as *Baiwari, and singular *Baiwarjōz. According to Rübekiel, the standard modern terms such as German Baj-u-waren and English Bai-u-varii are based on a misunderstanding of early medieval spellings such as Baiuuari, where "uu" really represented a single w-like consonant, and not an "uw" syllable.
Different etymologies have been proposed, but modern scholars normally understand the name as a compound of two elements: *Baia-/Baijo- which is believed to be a Germanic evolution from the pre-imperial Celtic tribal name Boii; and -warjōz which is a common Germanic suffix used to create the names of peoples, by associating them with nouns such as regional names.

Earliest attestations

Roman Noricum, now in Austria, was under the military control of the Rugii in the north, and Ostrogoths in the south. The earliest attestations are the following, starting in the 6th century, when the term seems to have been new.
  • Jordanes, writing in 551, described the Baiuvarii, already living east of the Alemanni in 469/70.
  • Various versions of the Frankish Table of Nations, starting from about 520, use spellings Baioarius, Baweros, Baioeros, Bawarios, Baioarios, Boguarii and Bogari, and describe the Baiuvarii as a people with kinship to the Burgundians, Thuringians and Lombards.
  • Venantius Fortunatus mentioned a region called Baivaria near the Lech river, and a person who was a Baiovarius. This was near the country of the Breuni who still lived near the river Inn. The Lech flows northwards from the Austrian alps to the German Danube. The Inn was the boundary between Raetia and Noricum, and today forms part of the border between Germany and Austria. This seems to indicate that the first Baiuvarii were in a relatively small area.
Notably however, biography of Severinus of Noricum in the late 5th century, written by his contemporary Eugippius, does not mention them at all. Instead, it describes the still Romanized region around Passau and Künzing in present day eastern Bavaria, and Roman Raetia, as coming under attack from Alemanni, Thuringians and Heruli.
In 534 the Baiuavarii are also notably absent from the letter of the Frankish king Theudebert I to the eastern emperor Justinian, although Theudebert was claiming to control the area. Similarly the contemporary 6th century historian Gregory of Tours mentioned the first known Duke of Bavaria, Garilbald, because he married the widow of Theudebert, but his whole history never mentions Bavaria. Hardt for example therefore suggests that the Baiuvarii "only visibly started to develop an identity as a people" after "the appointment by the Frankish king of a dux, who actively endeavoured to organize the various Germanic and Roman groups and units living in the former province of Rhaetia".

Possible sources of the name

The Baiuvarii probably didn't exist under that name before the 5th century. However, the Boii, who seem to be the basis of the first element of the Baiuvarii name, almost disappeared from the written record around the time when the Roman empire began, centuries earlier. The form of the name is Germanic, both because of the conversion of the o-sound to an a-sound, and also the -varii suffix. This has led scholars to propose different ways in which the Baiuvarii name can be indirectly derived from the much older name of the Boii tribe. By explaining this, scholars also hope to get indications about how the Baiuvarii came into existence.
A common and old proposal is that the Baiuvarii name somehow evolved from the classical version of the geographical term "Bohemia" which was already used by Latin and Greek writers in the first century AD. Strabo called it Buiaimon, Velleius Paterculus called it Boiohaemum, and Tacitus called it Boiemum. Modern scholars see this as a Germanic word, coined by the Suebi who settled there under Maroboduus, long after the Boii departed. The second component is Germanic *haim-, the source of modern English "home" and modern German "Heim". One of the last classical reports of this name is the 2nd century mention of a people called the Bainochaemae. Claudius Ptolemy described them in his Geography as living near the Elbe, east of the Melibokus mountains, and north of the Asciburgius mountains. According to this proposal, the Baivari migrated south or east from the original Bohemia, which is believed to have been somewhere in the present-day Czech Republic. However, the "haim" part of the placename, which would have made the evidence for this specific etymology clear, does not appear in the name of Bavarians, leaving only the name of the Boii.
There are proposals that the name does not come from Bohemia at all, but directly from the Boii name itself, which was preserved in more areas to the east of Raetia, and not just in Bohemia. Examples which have been proposed include the following:
  • Within Roman Pannonia there was also a civitas of the Boii which continued to exist within the empire. It lay on the Danube near present day Vienna, in the north west of the Roman province of Pannonia, bordering on Noricum. By about 400 AD, when the Notitia Dignitatum was made, this area's military defence included Suebian Marcomanni troops many of whom had by this time been moved south of the Danube, into the empire.
  • The Ravenna Cosmography mentions a country called Baias, which was part of a mountainous region it called Ungani, stretching from the southern Elbe far to the east. To the north of Ungani was Saxony, and to the south was Pannonia.
  • Ptolemy in the second century reported a "large nation" called the Baiani or Baimi between the "Luna Forest" and the Danube. This population is believed to have been the "Vannius Kingdom", which was established on Quadi territory after a civil war in the first century AD.
  • Boiodurum, was the older settlement next to the Roman fort of Passau, and its name indicates that it was in a region still associated with the Boii in Roman times. In the Notitia Dignitatum Boiodurum's tribune is under the Dux of Noricum Ripensis and Pannonia I, while the tribune of Batavis is under Raetian command. In Ptolemy's Geography it is in Vindelicia.
  • Another name associated by scholars with the Boii name in late antiquity is the country called Bainaib, possibly from *Bain-haim, recorded in the Origo Gentis Langobardorum as one of the places the Langobards stopped on their trek from the lower Elbe to the Middle Danube. It came between places called Antaib and Burgundaib.
  • The name of the Baiuvarii is probably also preserved in the list of great rulers of peoples in the Old English poem about Widsith, the traveller. It lists "Becca" as ruler of the Baningas, along with better-known rulers such as Attila who ruled the Huns, and Ermanric who ruled the Goths.
There are also several proposals about the ethnic background of the population who brought the Baiuvarii name with them to Raetia, and made it the name of the mixed community. However, most of the proposals involve the Suebian Germanic peoples to the east of Raetia such as the Marcomanni and Quadi, who disappeared from contemporary records during the time of Hun rule in the area.
A third proposal is that the name of the Boii still survived in Raetia itself, making no migration necessary. In other words, people who still identified themselves as dwellers upon old lands of the pre-imperial Celtic Boii were still living in the Norican–Raetian region, and were the name-giving element in the mixed population that remained there after Rome abandoned Raetia. According to Karl Bosl in 1971, Bavarian migration to present-day Bavaria is a legend, and Walter Goffart more recently agreed that there is no reason to assume any single large immigration in order to explain the 5th century origins of the Baiuvarii.