Charudes

The Charudes or Harudes were a Germanic group first mentioned by Julius Caesar as one of the tribes who had followed Ariovistus across the Rhine. While Tacitus' Germania makes no mention of them, Ptolemy's Geographia locates the Charudes (Χαροῦδες) on the east coast of the Cimbrian peninsula (see Hardsyssel). Their name suggests that they may have at one point settled in Hardanger in the county of Hordaland, Western Norway.

Sometime before 60 BC, the "rex Germanorum" Ariovistus had been petitioned by the Celtic Sequani for assistance in their war against the Aedui. In return, Ariovistus was promised land grants in Gaul, although exactly where is not certain. Gathering forces from a wide area of Germany, Ariovistus crossed the Rhine with large numbers and defeated the Aedui at the Battle of Magetobriga. It is in the context of Ariovistus' subsequent land claims that the Harudes are first mentioned by Caesar:

"But a worse thing had befallen the victorious Sequani than the vanquished Aedui, for Ariovistus, the king of the Germans, had settled in their territories, and had seized upon a third of their land, which was the best in the whole of Gaul, and was now ordering them to depart from another third part, because a few months previously 24,000 men of the Harudes had come to him, for whom room and settlements must be provided." (Commentaries on the Gallic War, I.31)

In the following battle against Caesar near Vesontio (Besançon), the Harudes formed one of the seven tribal divisions of Ariovistus' host. After suffering a crushing defeat at the hands of the Romans, the Germans fled back over the Rhine.

The Harudes (in the graecized form "Charydes") are next mentioned in the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, in which Augustus claims that his fleet had "sailed from the mouth of the Rhine eastward as far as the lands of the Cimbri to which, up to that time, no Roman had ever penetrated either by land or by sea, and the Cimbri and Charydes and Semnones and other peoples of the Germans of that same region (Cimbrian peninsula) through their envoys sought my friendship and that of the Roman people". The naval expedition in question took place in 5 AD under the generalship of Tiberius and is also attested by Velleius Paterculus.

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