In ancient times, the term barbarian referred to any group or tribe that wasn’t part of the great European civilizations, namely the Greeks and Romans. Later, unchristianized people generally fell into this category. When we think about barbarians that terrorized Europe throughout the ages, the Huns, Mongols, and Vikings almost always come to mind.
Either by sea or by land, “civilized” Europe seemed, at times, unable to get a reprieve from these incessant marauders. Here’s a list of 10 other such barbarian tribes that terrorized Europeans throughout history…
10. The Chatti
As the Romans were steadily expanding out of the Italian Peninsula, they came in contact with many other barbarians they had not previously encountered. Among the fiercest of these tribes were the Germanic peoples. It was not until Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars during the 1st century BC that the Romans made a clear distinction between them and the Celts. Fast forward roughly 100 years and the Chatti, a Germanic tribe, were among Rome’s most powerful enemies of the 1st century AD.
In his literary work entitled Germania, the famous Roman historian and politician Tacitus provides some truly insightful glimpses into just how menacing the Chatti truly were. He describes the people as having “hardy bodies, well-knit limbs, fierce countenances, and unusual mental vigor.”
He goes on to talk about a certain custom of the Chatti; a sort of ferocious initiation ritual. “As soon as they reach manhood they let their hair and beard grow as they will. This fashion of covering the face is assumed in accordance with a vow pledging them to the service of Valour; and only when they have slain an enemy do they lay it aside. Standing over the bloody corpse they have despoiled, they reveal their faces to the world once more… The coward who will not fight must stay unshorn.”
Tacitus also describes the older Chatti warriors as always being the first to start the battle and making up the first ranks of their military formations. Even in peacetime, these veterans maintained a ferocious look on their faces and would fight “until old age leaves them without enough blood in their veins for such stern heroism.” It’s believed that around the 3rd century AD, the Chatti became part of the coalition of the Franks.
9. The Harii
Located further to the East in what is now Czechia, Slovakia, Southern Poland, and Western Ukraine, the Harii were further away from civilized Europe and were, therefore, less documented. And while there’s some confusion around who the Harii people were, we have gotten some detailed descriptions about how they waged war. Unlike the Chatti, whose prowess in battle came from their stern heroism, the Harii relied on camouflage and psychological warfare.
Tacitus says that “they [the Harii] black their shields and dye their bodies, and choose pitch dark nights for their battles. The shadowy, awe-inspiring appearance of such a ghoulish army inspires mortal panic; for no enemy can endure a sight so strange and hellish. Defeat in battle starts always with the eyes.”
As to their identity, some scholars believe the Harii to be a somewhat small Germanic tribe part of the Lugii federation, which itself was part of the larger Suevi confederation of tribes. Others believe the Harii to be Continental Celts predating the Germanic migration to the area.
Some scholars believe the Harii were not even a tribe, to begin with, but a specialized army of young warriors that worshiped Woden (Odin). They were inspired to replicate the Einherjar (those who fight alone), mythical ghost warriors who’ve entered Valhalla and were personally chosen by Odin to fight the last battle of the world, known as Ragnarok.
8. The Picts (Caledonians)
Known to the Romans as Caledonians, the Picts were a people of Celtic or even older origin. Initially used as a pejorative by the Romans, the name Pict literally translates to “painted one.” This was based on their custom of either painting or tattooing their bodies. Yet, by the 7th century AD, the Picts began self-identifying as such. They lived in present-day northeastern Scotland and came in direct contact with the Romans after their invasion of the island.
Around the year 80 AD, roughly 40 years after the initial Roman invasion of Britain, Roman governor and general, Julius Agricola, started the invasion of Scotland. Although they won the Battle of Mons Graupius against the Picts, the Romans didn’t follow up and retreated instead. Modern scholars speculate that the battle didn’t go exactly as was recorded by the Romans, which is further corroborated by the fact that they made very few other attempts at conquering Pictish lands. They, instead, switched to a containment strategy by building Hadrian’s Wall in 122 AD, and the Antonine Wall further north in 142 AD.
According to the Roman soldier and historian, Ammianus Marcellinus of the 4th century AD, the Picts were “roving at large and causing much devastation.” Their go-to military tactics were primarily hit-and-run. They feigned retreat as soon as a battle started and while the Romans were setting up camp later in the day, the Picts would pour out of the woods and attack them. They would also lure the Roman cavalry into traps by following similar tactics.
7. The Vandals
The Vandals were another Germanic tribe originally from present-day southern Poland, which began migrating West with the arrival of the Huns at the start of the 5th century AD. They invaded Gaul and moved into the Iberian Peninsula, settling there in 409 AD. By 429, however, they were driven out by the Visigoths, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar into Northern Africa. In 435, they became clients of Rome but only a few years later, they would break that treaty, capturing Carthage and establishing their own autocratic kingdom.
Over the coming years, they conquered the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Malta, Mallorca, and Ibiza; effectively taking control of the majority of Rome’s grain supply. Their pirate fleets now also had firm control over the Western Mediterranean. In fact, the Old English word for the Mediterranean was Wendelsæ (Sea of the Vandals).
In 455, they also invaded Italy and captured the city of Rome, plundering it for all its riches. Although it’s well-known that they didn’t destroy any buildings or kill the city’s inhabitants, this act was later used by the French abbot Henri Grégoire de Blois during the French Revolution of the 18th century to come up with the word “vandalism.” In 533, the Byzantines invaded their lands and in a single campaign defeated the Vandal kingdom, ending their reign.
6. The Avars
While the Huns were among the first and fiercest nomadic tribes to have originated somewhere in Central Asia and wreaked havoc on the European continent, they were certainly not the last. Not even a century after the Hunnic Empire disintegrated in the second half of the 5th century AD, another group of warmongering horse lords from the East took their place. These were the Avars and although not as notorious as their predecessors, they would carry on a similar legacy of war and destruction. It was the Avars who introduced the iron stirrup into Europe as well as the main cause for the southward migration of the Serbs and Croats.
Their first appearance in Europe was during Emperor Justinian I’s rule of the Byzantine Empire (527 to 565 AD) who hired them as mercenaries against other troublesome tribes. After Justinian’s death, the Avars began looking for a place to settle and they found it in the Pannonian Plain (present-day Hungary); exactly where the Huns centered their empire previously. Under the leadership of Bayan I, the Avars expelled the Gepids from the area and began expanding their newly found Khaganate in all directions. Some sources say that Bayan killed the Gepid King, Cunimund, and even turned his skull into a wine cup.
Over the following two centuries, the Avars would conduct many raids against their neighbors, displacing or subjugating tribes to use as “cannon fodder” in their wars or extort those they couldn’t defeat outright. Their main focus of attack was the Balkan Peninsula, deep inside the Byzantine Empire, even laying siege to Constantinople in 626 AD. Their end came with Charlemagne of the Franks. He was able to defeat them once and for all, conquer their capital known simply as “The Ring,” and take their huge treasure hoard back to Paris. By 796 AD, the Avar Khaganate was no more.
5. The Drevlians
The Drevlians – roughly translated to forest dwellers – were an East Slavic people living in present-day Ukraine and Belarus, northwest of Kiev, during the 6th and 10th centuries AD. One thing that seems to have set them apart from most of their neighbors is that, together with the Polyanians (field dwellers), they were the only tribes to have a monarchical rule. Moreover, the Drevlians seem to have “thought in common with their prince,” which hints towards some direct democracy. But this is not what appalled Christian Europe about the Drevlians, nor was it their prowess in battle. It was actually their pagan customs surrounding marriage.
If the Medieval Slavic ecclesiastical writers had only praise for the Polyanians, saying, among other things, that they were respectful towards their wives, parents, siblings, and parents-in-law, the Drevlians were the complete opposite. In The Rus’ Primary Chronicle from the early 12th century, the Drevlians are said to have “existed in bestial fashion and lived like cattle. They killed one another, ate every impure thing, and there was no marriage among them, but instead, they seized upon maidens by capture.”
They would meet a brutal end, however, at the hands of Olga of Kiev. After they assassinated her husband, Grand Prince Igor of the Kievan Rus, Olga wanted vengeance. She started by burying the Drevlian ambassadors alive and luring the Drevlian nobles into her bathhouse which was burnt down with them still inside. She then organized a feast in the Drevlian capital of Iskorosten to commemorate her husband, but after everyone got drunk, Olga ordered the people massacred, set the city ablaze, and enslaved the survivors.
4. The Pechenegs
The Pechenegs were a semi-nomadic Turkic people that terrorized much of Eastern and Southeastern Europe throughout the 8th and 12th centuries. During the 9th century, the Pechenegs occupied a large territory between the Ural and Volga Rivers, constantly fighting with their eastern neighbors, the Khazars and the Oghuz. At the instigation of the Byzantine Empire, the Pechenegs began expanding westwards, attacking the Kievan Rus and forcing the Magyars across the Dnieper River and into the Carpathian Basin.
Throughout much of the 10th century, they would fight many battles with the Rus, even killing Prince Svyatoslav I in 972 and turning his skull into a chalice, as was apparently customary with many steppe nomads. It’s believed that during this time, many Slavic people living between the Danube and Carpathian Mountains began migrating north of the Dniester River to escape them. However, the tables would begin to turn by the end of the century, and the beginning of the 11th with the Pechenegs being systematically expelled from the Pontic Steppes, most notably by the Cumans.
It was at that time that they began intensifying their raids into Byzantine territory across the Danube River, even laying siege to Constantinople in 1090. They were, however, defeated by Emperor Alexius I with the help of the Cumans (more on them in a bit), and again at the Battle of Beroia in 1122, effectively putting an end to the Pechenegs as an independent people.
3. The Magyars
The Magyars are believed to be a mixture of Turkic and Ugric people who lived in western Siberia during the first several centuries of the first millennium AD. They would migrate to the southwest around the 5th century and by 830 AD, they crossed the Don River, north of the Black Sea. They were comprised of seven tribes and were later joined by an additional three of Turkic Khazar descent, known as Kavars.
After the Pechenegs pushed them out of the Pontic Steppe, they moved into the Pannonian Plain in Central Europe in 895. They quickly subdued the people living there, defeated the Great Moravian state in 906, and completely obliterated the East Frankian army at the Battle of Pressburg one year later.
For the next 60-plus years, up until 970 AD, the Magyars became the scourge of Europe. They raided and pillaged across most of the continent from present-day Denmark to Spain and Portugal, and from the Balkan and Italian Peninsulas to Western France. After that point, the Magyars became Christianized and in the year 1000 AD founded the Kingdom of Hungary.
Even today, the Hungarians still call themselves Magyars, after the largest of the original seven tribes. The name Hungary comes from On-Ogur, which was the name given to them by their neighbors while still living in the Pontic Steppes. This name translates to “ten tribes.” The letter H was added later by some scholars who believed them to be descendants of the Huns.
2. The Cumans
From the 11th to the mid-13th century, Eastern Europe between the Volga and Lower Danube rivers was dominated by three peoples. These were the Kievan Rus to the North, the Volga Bulgars to the East, and the Cumans to the South. They were a semi-nomadic Turkic group of people who were never politically centralized and lived in a confederation of loosely connected but independent tribes. Nevertheless, they posed a significant military threat to all their neighbors, with their lands extending from the banks of the Danube River in the West all the way to present-day Kazakhstan in the East.
The Cumans first came in contact with the Kievan Rus in 1055 and a few years later began invading their lands, causing much devastation. The resulting war lasted a total of 175 years. They would go on and attack all of their neighbors, including the Kingdom of Hungary, the Volga Bulgars, the Kingdom of Poland, the Byzantine Empire, and all statal entities within the Balkans.
They also played the role of kingmakers, helping the Bulgars and Vlachs gain independence from the Byzantines to form the Second Bulgarian Empire. They also aided the Kingdom of Georgia to halt the advance of the Seljuks and become the most powerful kingdom in the region.
Their end came in the late 1230s and early 1240s with the Mongol invasions. Although the Cumans put up fierce resistance, they were eventually defeated. Their confederation was broken, and the individual tribes were either absorbed or sought refuge with their neighbors. Many Cumans had already settled in their neighbors’ lands in previous decades, most notably in Hungary, where they became integrated into each nation’s elite.
1. The Barbary Pirates
Named after the local Berber tribes of Northwestern Africa, the Barbary Pirates were the bane of the Mediterranean Sea from the 16th to the 19th centuries AD. Although North African piracy was far older than that, it was not until the arrival of Barbarossa, that united the small pirate states of Algeria and Tunisia under the Ottoman Empire’s protection in the 16th century. During the 17th century, the Barbary pirates also switched from galleys to sail ships, after learning their significant advantage from a Flemish renegade, Simon Danser.
Although comprised mainly of local Berbers, these pirates also recruited many Arabs and other Muslims, as well as some European Christians. Throughout the following centuries, they plundered merchant ships, raided villages, and enslaved people from the Italian coast, France, the Iberian Peninsula, England, the Netherlands, Ireland, and as far away as Iceland.
After commerce all but stopped in the Mediterranean, the United States began paying tribute to the Barbary states in 1784. This eventually led to the First Barbary War (1801–05) between the Americans and the pirate state of Tripoli, which helped stifle piracy in the region. It was not until the full-scale conquest of Algeria by France in 1830 that the Barbary pirates were fully subdued.