Rome's Greatest Humiliation: Roman Empire vs Germanic Tribes

In 9 AD, the rebel chieftain Arminius and his confederation of Germanic tribes ambushed three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest. For days the Romans were relentlessly stalked through the woods and pounced on by their pursuers. All told, up to 20,000 Romans were killed in the chaos, and only a handful were able to escape. The battle proved to be one of Rome's most devastating defeats, and left a scar in the Roman psyche for generations to come. In this Explainer episode, Dan explores the historical context for the battle and its profound consequences for Roman strategy and expansion. He's helped by Dr. Simon Elliott, who provides deeper insights into how the Roman military worked, and where its vulnerabilities lay. Warning: this episode contains accounts of violence that some listeners may find disturbing. Written and produced by Dan Snow, and edited by Max Carrey. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 1:03Speaker 01

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• 1:34Speaker 02

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• 2:26Dan Snow?

  It took the Romans six years to return to that terrible spot. They were certainly in no hurry to revisit a place of horror and shame. Tacitus, the historian, describes it as hideous to sight and memory. Plus, it was the heart of bandit country. Always had been, I suppose. That had been the Romans' mistake. It was a place talked about in hushed tones. There was an acceptance among the men that even the mighty Roman army sustained occasional, rare, catastrophic defeats, every few generations.

• 3:09Dan Snow?

  This, they all knew, was the site of one of those. It was a place which they believed had changed the course of Roman history. They advanced cautiously, they were taking no chances. There were survivors among them who carried the scars from their previous march through this terrain. They shared their stories of the horrors they'd endured in these woods. Perhaps this return healed their wounds. Perhaps it tore them open afresh. The Roman commander on this occasion was Germanicus Julius Caesar, a sign of the imperial family. The Germanicus was an honorific name he'd inherited from his father.

• 3:53Dan Snow?

  It had been given to him for subjugating the German lands. It turned out that that congratulatory epithet might have been a little premature. Germanicus Junior had spent these last few years campaigning in Germany with a single purpose: revenge. Revenge for what had happened here to the Roman eagles. And perhaps, Germanicus and the Romans hoped, that retribution soared. Fire could scour away their shame. Germanicus knew that it had been failures in command that had led to that catastrophe.

• 4:36Dan Snow?

  And he would not make the same mistakes. Now the forest rang with axes, trees were cleared, ravines and swamps were bridged and drained. There would be no ambush this time, so slowly, cautiously, that they made their way to the old battlefield. It was obvious when they arrived. They started to see evidence of their forbears. The tritus littered the ground, broken fragments of weapons and equipment, tools, all the accoutrements of a mass of men, women and children. The mobile Roman town that was an army on the march. All that was left of that now were the pathetic heaps of rotting fabric, broken cart axles,

• 5:20Dan Snow?

  and among that junk, human remains. There were bones, half buried in the mulch of the forest floor. It was like a giant crime scene. The Romans found they could chart the course of what had occurred. There was the fort, built as a desperate refuge. There were the piles of bones where brave groups of legionaries had fought to the last man. There were the earthworks that had entrapped them. There were also, according to Tacitus, human heads prominently nailed to the trunks of trees. The men could see evidence of the altars where senior Roman officers had been tortured to death, where they'd been burned alive.

• 6:02Dan Snow?

  Even years later, they could make out the funeral pyre for these Roman officers, and in a wider sense, they knew that they'd arrived at the site where Roman Germany itself had been immolated. These were the remains of the army, the remains of the men who had died in the Chuterberg Forest, the place where Rome's dream of ever-expanding empire had been killed in a swirling nightmarish ambush. It had been a place of lurking, pouncing invisible enemies.

• 6:37Dan Snow?

  A place where even their gods had abandoned the Romans. The natural world had marched under enemy banners. Hammering rain had turned the ground to mud. Trees, ravines and rocks had taken their place in the enemy line of battle. You are listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. And this is the story of possibly Rome's most celebrated or lamented defeat. Certainly one of the most consequential ones. A defeat that drove the emperor, the first emperor, the founder of empire, to the point of madness. This is the story of the defeat in the Chuterberg Forest. I'll be telling that story, but I'll also be asking for some specialist help

• 7:19Dan Snow?

  from Simon Elliott, the History Hit super contributor, star of many of these podcasts, but also our YouTube films and more recently, our broadcast collaborations with the British Channel Five Television. And if this podcast piques your interest and we have a wonderful documentary and our own History Hit TV channel, presented of course by the Tristorian himself, Tristan Hughes, who's also got a two-part series about this battle on his Ancient podcast. We've got you covered in the History Hit universe for all things Chuterberg. So let's add the final piece to that jigsaw. This is the story of Rome's greatest defeat. The Chuterberg Forest. Enjoy.

• 8:22Dan Snow?

  It was 50 years before the birth of Jesus. And Julius Caesar was on the rampage. He marched his eagles deeper into Western Europe than they'd ever been before. He fought a series of savage campaigns, attended by massive destruction—murder, displacement. The Romans conquered much of what we now call France and the Low Countries. He took his armies to the shore of the Northern Sea, and stunningly, he took his armies across them. He landed in Britain. Julius Caesar was responsible for an avalanche of firsts and superlatives that make him almost unique in European history. And they also explain his iron grip on the fever dreams of would-be conquerors ever since.

• 9:07Dan Snow?

  And during that period of conquest, he came across the Germans. He describes them in his memoirs. "The nature of their food, their regular exercise, and their freedom of life—for from childhood they're not taught a sense of duty or discipline, and they do nothing unless they want to—facilitates their strength and makes them men of immense bodily stature. Moreover, they've regularly trained themselves to wear nothing, even in the coldest places except skins, the scantiness of which leaves a great part of the body bare, and they bathe in the rivers." Julius Caesar obviously rated them. He points out that the Germans are much tougher than the Gauls that he's come up against.

• 9:51Dan Snow?

  They've been softened by Roman luxury that they've been able to import across the border. The Germans, though, far more warlike, a very different story. Now, did the respect that Julius Caesar had for those Germans, did it prevent him from marching into their territory, slashing roots through ancient woodland, laying road, hammering posts into mounds, excavating ditches, planting the eagle, raiding, pillaging? No, it did not. He did not respect them that much. He became the first Roman general to cross the Rhine. He didn't use boats, that was far too demure. As Caesar says himself, don't forget, talking about himself as ever in the third person, which is an enormous flex, "He deemed it scarcely safe, and ruled it unworthy of his

• 10:36Dan Snow?

  own and the Romans' dignity to cross in boats." Instead Caesar built a bridge, and I suspect the engineering the Romans deployed building that bridge was probably more terrifying to the Germans than the advancing legion. It was the first bridge in the history of the Rhine, pile-driving stakes into the riverbed. It took ten days. He crossed the bridge, he raided, he burned, and then he returned after just eighteen days on German soil. And then he torched the bridge. Not unlike his expedition to Britain, Caesar made a big noise about invading, claimed the job had been done, disappeared, and it would fall to his successors to make these claims a little more permanent. In 16 B.C., some German tribesmen, they crossed the Rhine,

• 11:20Dan Snow?

  they fell upon a Roman legion, then actually managed to capture its eagle standard. Now, this was unacceptable, obviously. And it fell to Julius Caesar's heir to deal with this: his great-nephew Octavia, the man who'd won the civil war that followed Caesar's assassination, united the empire, and became its first emperor Augustus. Now, he seemed to believe at this point that an ever-expanding empire was key to ensuring its economic growth, its dynamism, its martial ability, that the conquest would provide a ready supply of slaves, and importantly, they were sort of an outlet for warlike aristocrats who might otherwise look inwards. The conquest would increase the glory of Rome, you name it. There were all sorts of reasons why he wanted Rome to go on expanding. And there was also the issue

• 12:04Dan Snow?

  of Germans raiding into the empire. He couldn't allow that. And so, he decided that Germany was next on the agenda. The man he chose for the job was Nero Claudius Druusus, his wife's son, so his stepson. This well-connected young man crossed the Rhine and began a campaign of conquest. He marched through territory as yet unknown to the Romans. He reached the Elbe, which is the second of three great rivers that roughly... Run north, south through central Europe. You've got the Rhine, you've got the Elbe, which goes from modern Hamburg down to Magdeburg, Dresden and Prague. And then you've got the Vistula beyond the Elbe. Nero Claudius Druusus did a huge amount to bring this territory,

• 12:46Dan Snow?

  largely between the Rhine and the Elbe, under Roman control. Indeed, he won the title Germanicus for his efforts in Germany. In nine B.C., though, he was returning from the Elbe when he was injured in a fall from his horse. The wounds became infected. Now, his beloved brother Tiberius galloped day and night to be with him, and he made it to his bedside when he breathed his last. Memorials to Germanicus were built across the empire, and while they were being erected, Tiberius, his brother, and others finished his work. They conducted a vast and, I think, largely unremembered war, marching to and fro between the Elbe and the Rhine, crushing,

• 13:28Dan Snow?

  enslaving the Germans, but also trying to settle them, trying to introduce them to Roman law and governance and introduce little town planning. On occasion, they were not above moving entire peoples from one region to another to pacify them. Sometimes it was carrot, sometimes stick. They sought out local allies by giving some tribes special status. That's it. Simon Elliott described the process.

• 13:53Speaker 03

  You've got to bear in mind, Dan, that the Roman military is the most efficient, industrial-scale killing machine in the ancient world, and one of the most effective in history. So when the Romans turn their attention to you with military conquest in mind, they're going to throw absolutely everything at it to succeed. And in actual fact, when Druusus and Tiberius were campaigning earlier, north of the Rhine and east of the Rhine, actually, the Romans had enormous armies in play in the field. This is the Roman Empire at the very beginning, when the legionaries are sort of preeminent, they're dominant, and they've got the auxiliaries as well who are also very good. So therefore, very few militaries will stand up to them in the open field, in the open field. That's the key thing. And when you're

• 14:38Speaker 03

  on the receiving end of that, it's nasty, and it's mean, and it's brutal.

• 14:42Dan Snow?

  And they're advancing through Germany, forcing local elites to bend the knee and establishing...

• 14:49Dan Snow?

  Forts, obviously, but also cities, colonies, towns, trying to get these Germans to live like Romans.

• 14:55Speaker 03

  So what happens after a conquest is the Romans encourage the local elites, so the aristocracy, the nobility, the warrior nobility in the Germans' case, to take up the Roman ways. So they encourage them to send their children to Rome to learn Latin. They encourage them to wear togas when they're carrying out public duties. They encourage them to start funding the building of stone-built Mediterranean-style urban environments. But that's after the event. The conquest period is very different. In the conquest period, Dan, it's all about roads. So what you're doing is you're building roads to link up other roads or waterways. So you have the means of transport of getting particularly

• 15:38Speaker 03

  the logistics that you need to the legionary spearheads as they're driving into enemy territory. So as the legions advance, they're building roads and they're building roads and they're building roads. And they're often alongside river systems as well. If you follow the Calcrezi campaign, it's very interesting because Varus' route was always alongside a river. That's because he had a sort of a riverine fleet alongside him, exactly the same as a sort of a British colonial army in the 19th century would, to provide all the logistics to keep his army in the field. So it's all about roads and it's all about rivers.

• 16:08Dan Snow?

  The Roman military had ballooned during the civil war, but there had been a slimming down under Augustus. There were now 30 legions available to the emperor, and something like a third of them, around 10 of them, were fighting in Germany under his stepson Tiberius. As the Romans grew better acquainted with the Germans, they remained fascinated by them. Tacitus, although he's writing later, devotes an entire book to them. They were a people apart, apparently. After all, according to Tacitus, "who would relinquish Asia or Africa or Italy to repair to Germany, a region hideous and rude, under a rigorous climate, dismal to behold, or to cultivate, unless the same were his native country?" He goes

• 16:50Dan Snow?

  on to say they didn't live in cities or towns, but instead in huts scattered any old howl through the forest. He regarded the Germans as a distinct people. "They have never mingled by intermarriage with other nations."

• 17:04Dan Snow?

  But they have remained a people pure and independent, and resemble none but themselves. Hence, among such a mighty multitude of men, the same make and form is found in all: eyes stern and blue, yellow hair, huge bodies, but vigorous only in the first onset. Of pains and labour, they are not equally patient, nor can they at all endure thrift and heat. To bear hunger and cold, they are hardened by their climate and soil. He goes on to talk about a day in the life. Much of their time they pass in indolence, resigned to sleep and repast. All of the most brave, all of the most warlike, apply to nothing at all, but to their wives, to the ancient men, and to even the most impotent domestic,

• 17:49Dan Snow?

  they trust the care of their house and all their lands and possessions. They themselves loiter. The moment they rise from sleep, which they generally prolong till late in the day, they bathe, most frequently in warm water, as in a country where the winter is very long and severe. To continue drinking night and day without intermission is a reproach to no man. Frequent, then, are their scuffles, as usual, among men intoxicated with liquor. And such scuffles rarely terminate in angry words, but for the most part, in maimings and slaughter. Tacitus describes them practising a kind of communal decision-making.

• 18:30Dan Snow?

  There are meetings, there are some kind of votes or acclamation for leaders and policies. And Tacitus says that even women have some say in these meetings. Indeed, some of the northernmost tribes were apparently governed by women. So this is what the Romans thought about the lusty souls that they were trying to pacify and eventually assimilate into Roman life. And yes, violence played a huge part. But there are also subtler ways of bringing the Germans under the Roman yoke. And one of those ways was by taking hostages, young men from the German elite, who could be raised as Romans, and then one day returned to Germany to advance the cause of their adopted Roman masters over their natural ones.

• 19:14Dan Snow?

  Now, one of these young hostages, these young men, taken from Germany... Was called Arminius. He was a prince of the Cherusci tribe. He'd been a child when Augustus's gaze had fallen upon his unfortunate people. And his first memories of tribal gatherings would no doubt have been the debates, the fights within them about what to do about the Romans. His father was a convinced collaborator, and he seems to have won the power struggle within the tribe. The Cherusci became Rome's greatest allies, and his father was happy to see Arminius, his son, taken by the Romans, to be brought up in distant Rome. So off went Arminius with his little brother. They learned Latin. They got an education.

• 19:57Dan Snow?

  They joined the army. And he got a chance to demonstrate his zeal for his adopted imperial masters when Rome was rocked by a big revolt reasonably close to home in 6 AD. Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans set the region ablaze. Arminius got the chance to show his mettle. There was a huge revolt that broke out in Roman Illyria, which is roughly speaking Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Albania, a neighbourhood. Well, as you can imagine, it was a tough neighbourhood. Arminius fought there as an auxiliary. And Simon explained to me who these auxiliaries were.

• 20:37Speaker 03

  It's Augustus who created the auxiliaries. Augustus, when he became emperor, had already inherited, as the last man standing in the late republican civil wars, about 60 legions, no end of allies, and a huge Mediterranean fleet. And he couldn't afford it, so he cut the legions down to 30. But he also formalised the role of the allies, who were the secondary troops, really, who supported the legionaries in the republican armies. So they could be bowmen or slingers, or they could be rough terrain troops, or they were cavalry. So Caesar's cavalry were Gauls and Germans as an example. Now, what Augustus did was formalise that. So he created the auxilia. The auxilia were then the supporting arm for the legionaries.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  Probably one for one in terms of the numbers in the Roman military. So if the Roman military establishment was 300,000, 150,000, or more probably will be auxiliaries. And the auxiliaries did provide line of battle troops, less well equipped than legionaries, but they could fight in the line of battle. They also provided the specialist troops like bowmen, slingers. They also provided crucially the cavalry as well. So if you're serving in the auxiliaries, actually, it's not that different really from sort of being a junior officer or an officer serving in the legions. And the career path for you actually wasn't that different from from sort of being a junior officer in the legions either.

• 21:56Dan Snow?

  And the interesting thing is, if you're fighting a conventional enemy in the field, so the Macedonians or the Persians, the legionaries are doing the bulk of the work. But it strikes me that in the Illyrian revolt, it's irregular, as you said, it's rough terrain work, it's chasing down guerrillas and bands of armed men. The auxiliaries are going to be busy in that in terrain, in that environment.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  I actually think the auxiliaries are going to be busier than the legionaries. I get the sense, I mean, just imagine how expensive this legionary is and his is sort of like Lorica Segmentata banditite armour and his Imperial Gallic helmet and with his huge scutum shield, his beautiful Gladys Hispanienses and his two pillar and his Pugio. That's a very expensive piece of kit, you know. And then it's very expensive to train this soldier that's going to be in the field for 25 years if he survives. And there are 5,500 of them in a legion. And these guys are trained to do all the stuff like build stuff as well. So they're also the people keeping the Roman Empire going in terms of construction work, building roads and things. Given that that's expensive, I'm coming to the view now, when you look at campaigns

• 23:00Speaker 03

  like a Grickola's campaign in Britain in the AD 80s, that Roman military commanders, if they could get away with not using the legionaries, probably would just use the auxiliaries. At Mons Grapis, of course, it was only the auxiliaries that were used, probably because it's easier to feel battlefield replacements into a unit of auxiliaries because they come from one place, Batavia or Tiringia or Illyria or wherever, than the legionaries, because the legionaries have to probably come from the imperial centre. So at the end of a campaign, as with Agricola, when he was fighting in the far north of Britain in the AD 80s, it was much easier to replace auxiliaries than it was, I think his legions were at half strength probably. So he didn't want to commit them unless he had to.

• 23:41Dan Snow?

  The Illyrian revolt was a serious emergency for the Roman Empire, and the majority of the legions that had been in Germany were immediately transferred out. Eight of them. That meant the job of conquest and assimilation was far from complete. Augustus decided to leave three legions behind in Germany. We don't know what Arminius witnessed in Illyria. It was probably bad. Massacres, women hurling themselves off battlements to avoid enslavement, Roman-style pacification. As Tacitus would write of a different campaign: "The Romans make a desert and call it peace." Arminius might have been impressed, he might have been appalled.

• 24:24Dan Snow?

  He also got a chance to see the Roman war machine at work. He got to learn about it from the inside. He saw its awesome strength, but he also learned about its weaknesses. Augustus was understandably focused on the revolt in Illyria, and perhaps for that reason, he hadn't sent his best to Germany. To keep the annexation of this large new province going, the emperor had sent one of his friends, Publius Quintilius Varus. Now, Varus is father of, but on the wrong side of history, he backed the assassins of Caesar over those who swore to avenge him, and he'd been forced to commit suicide. His son, the next Varus, had, seeing which way the wind was blowing, quickly hopped across the other side, he'd become friends and comrades

• 25:07Dan Snow?

  with Caesar's adopted son, Octavian, now Emperor Augustus. Augustus employed him. He sent him around the empire to govern, to quell, to pacify. Varus had been to North Africa, he'd been sent to Syria, and during a revolt in Judea, we hear that he crucified 2,000 rebels. Augustus seems to have thought they'd broken the back of German resistance. Tiberius, his foremost military commander, his stepson, had been taken from Germany and sent to deal with the Illyrian revolt, with all those legions, and so the more political Varus was sent as the first governor of the Roman province. Of Germanic, it now stretched from the Rhine to the Elbe. From Augustus's cosseted perspective in Rome, the job looked done.

• 25:50Dan Snow?

  On the ground, though, in the tangled woodlands, the vast wetlands, the sort of mist-covered, undulating landscape, in those gatherings on the full moons where tribesfolk from fifty separate groups swore to avenge the lives snatched by Roman blades, things felt a teeny bit different. I asked Simon about why Augustus sent Varus.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  I almost get the sense that actually, it came to think that actually the Romans had been more successful than they really had. Because when he appoints Varus to be the guy who's going to establish Germanic, I think he thought it was already a done deal. So you've gone from not being militaristic, to having been a bit, to being a lot, to thinking you'd won, to suddenly you're establishing a new province. And he thought it was done and dusted. If you look at Varus's background, Varus's background actually wasn't as a militaristic military leader. He'd been an administrator in Africa proconsularis, and he was a relative of Augustus as well. So I think he was the right man for the job Augustus thought he had to do.

• 26:57Dan Snow?

  The historian Cassius Dio is always very colourful, but he's writing about 150 years later, and he's known to, well, embellish his subjects. Still, he's one of the few sources we've got, so we've got to go with it. And he says that Germany, well, it presented an uneven picture. There were tracts of pacified ground, but there were definitely areas of hostility. Now, in the former, the Germans were starting to live and eat and dress like Romans. But Cassius Dio warns, with, you know, Captain Hindsight over here, "The Germans had not, however, forgotten their ancestral habits, their native manners, their old life of independence, or the power derived from arms."

• 27:36Dan Snow?

  Another historian describes Varus. He says that he was a man of mild character and of quiet disposition, somewhat slow in mind as he was in body, and more accustomed to the leisure of the camp than to actual service in war. This was the man that Augustus had sent into the heart of Germany. He was also quite rapacious. That historian suggests that Varus had stripped Syria of its wealth while he was governor there, and it wasn't uncommon for the Romans to do that. One of the reasons for the Illyrian revolt, apparently, as the Illyrians subsequently claimed, is that the Romans hadn't sent shepherds to look after their flocks, but wolves.

• 28:16Dan Snow?

  And indeed, in Britain, it would be a grasping imperial official who helped to tip the Roman province of Britannia into revolt when the time came and Boudica marched to war. Cassius Dyer also picks up on that theme. He says, "When Quintilius Varus became governor of the province of Germany, he strove to change them more rapidly. Besides issuing orders to them as if they were actually slaves of the Romans, he exacted money as he would from subject nations. To this, they were in no mood to submit, for the leaders longed for their former ascendancy, and the masses preferred their accustomed condition to foreign domination."

• 28:58Dan Snow?

  Varus, though, didn't read the room. He was pretty relaxed. This was consolidation. It was certainly not a conquest. Cassius Dyer writes, "He entered the heart of Germany as though he were going among a people enjoying the blessings of peace, and sitting on his tribunal, he wasted the time of a summer campaign in holding court and observing the proper details of legal procedure. Consequently, he did not keep his legions together, as was proper in a hostile country, but distributed many of the soldiers to helpless communities, which asked for them for the alleged purpose of guarding various points, arresting robbers or escorting provision trains."

• 29:37Dan Snow?

  Varus is clearly not expecting to have to fight a serious enemy. It all seemed to be going very nicely. All of his reports were favourable. After all, he had great advisers clustered around him. He had men who understood the people and the land. Among them was Arminius. Now, back in Germany after service in Elyria, he was a valued ally, he was a councillor, became very close to Varus. He knew the country and its people, its leaders and its beliefs. He was a faunt of fantastic advice. The two men shared dinners. They became very close. But actually, during that summer, Varus received an unwelcome visitor. Into his presence came a man called Sigestes. He was an older, influential, German tribesman. He warned Varus that there were plots afoot to rebel.

• 30:22Dan Snow?

  And most shockingly of all, he told him that the chief organiser of these plots was Arminius. Varus's friend, his adviser. Sigestes was denouncing him as a conspirator. Varus ignored him. The one obvious flaw with Sigestes's testimony is that Sigestes was known to absolutely hate Arminius, because Arminius had run off with his daughter. Tastus tells us that Sigestes begged Varus to arrest Arminius and all the other chiefs, assuring him that people would attempt nothing if the leading men were removed, and they would then have the opportunity of sifting accusations and distinguishing the innocent. Varus was having none of it.

• 31:07Dan Snow?

  Cassius Dio says that Varus actually rebuked him for being needlessly excited and slandering his friends. Sigestes was sent packing. Arminius remained in the inner circle. The summer days began to shorten, and as the leaves reddened, messengers brought some bad news.

• 31:28Dan Snow?

  There was a revolt, but it wasn't a big one. It was just some local trouble and it needed a brisk slapdown before the winter. Now happily, Arminius had a solution. He knew an ideal route that would allow Varus to march through friendly territory to nip the revolt in the bud and make it back to winter quarters on the Rhine before it got too cold and miserable to campaign. And so off Varus set. Cassius Dyer reports that Arminius escorted him as he set out and then begged to be excused from further attendance in order to assemble allied forces, after which they would come to his aid. What a useful chap. So Arminius spurs ahead to raise local forces and secure the route.

• 32:11Dan Snow?

  He even provided scouts to Varus to show him the way. Bear in mind, there are no paved roads before the Romans arrive in Germany, and roads are super important for empires. They aren't just for getting from A to B, they are arteries of empire, they allow speedy movement. There's a wonderful expression in military history, you'll have heard me mention before, it's a military maxim, "To win battles, you simply have to get there first with the most." You show up in greater strength than is expected before you're expected, ready to fight. Harold Godwinson does it at Stamford Bridge, Henry IV does it at the Battle of Shrewsbury, Napoleon does it every day, Rommel does it, all the best generals do it. And to do that, you need roads.

• 32:52Dan Snow?

  And plus, roads can be quite secure because you've cleared the edges, there are way stations, fortified, strong points along them. This is the architecture of pacification. But Germany doesn't have a good road network yet. And particularly, of course, not in this shortcut, this route that Arminius has suggested. This route takes the Roman legions through hilly, forested, marshy country. The legions found it hard going. Now here's Simon talking to me about a legion on the move.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  Normally, when the Romans are going to operate in a campaign of conquest in open territory, we use Britain as an example, they're probably advancing on a 30 kilometre wide front, where maybe two or three, four legionary spearheads in the centre, ala of auxiliary cavalry on the flanks. And when they come to a centre of native resistance, they may stop if it's important. If they choose not to leave an opponent in their rear, they'll stop and take it out and carry on. But it's on a very broad front. I mean, I'm researching at the moment the route the Romans took from Leicester to Lincoln, late AD 40s, and that's probably on that 30 kilometre wide front. But here they can't. I mean, this is where Varus is, because you don't have this 30 kilometre front,

• 34:04Speaker 03

  you're being funnelled through a forest log road that you're building. You may have one flank secured-ish on a river system, but the other flank's not secure, no matter what you do. And you can't have ala of cavalry 10 kilometres out, hunting down ambushes, etc., because they're not going to be visible to you.

• 34:24Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's Historyhead. This is the destruction of the Romans in the Teutoburg Forest. More coming up.

• 34:34Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail. But suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialised. Now I wonder what will baffle historians about us: mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 35:20Speaker 04

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• 35:48Speaker 02

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• 37:27Dan Snow?

  So as Simon says, big conventional armies love open space, flat plains. Don't forget they've got artillery, they've got catapults and ballista. And those things need proper positioning, they need hard ground, they need a nice open field of fire. You've got to see what you're shooting at at longer ranges. And once in position, these weapons can create a beaten zone, a killing field, out in the open ground in front of your own troops. And those troops will be drawn up shoulder to shoulder, a wall of steel with razor-sharp tips and edges. That's how the Romans liked to fight. And when they did fight like that, they were nearly impossible to beat.

• 38:08Dan Snow?

  Simon took me through what kit the Romans were equipped with, and how it was all designed around this operational concept.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  So his helmet's going to be an early version of the Imperial Gallic helmet. So the Gallic helmet is originally a Gallic bowl design, and then the Romanisation of it included putting a brow protector on it, and putting a neck protector on it, and then putting ear protectors on as well. So it's like a really, really good piece of protection for the head. The shield is the scutum shield, which is a sort of a rectangular body shield, which is absolutely spectacularly successful in open face-on-face heavy infantry battles. We've all seen pictures of testudos, the tortoises they can form and that kind of thing. His body armour is either going to be lorica hamata chain mail, or lorica segmentata bandit

• 38:57Speaker 03

  iron armour, but either of those provides superb torso protection. The senior troops and officers are going to have leg greaves on the lower legs. The weapons of choice would be the gladius Hispaniensis stabbing sword, and then two-pillar lead-weighted throwing javelins, and then finally a pugio knife. And basically, his way of fighting is using a fencing technique in formation with his colleagues, but it's a fencing technique where they loose off the lighter pillar lead-weighted javelin at longer range, then the heavier one at almost point-blank range to bring their opponent's front line down. Then the gladius is drawn, and then they take the blow of the enemy on the shield, which exposes the upper or lower thorax, and then the gladius goes in and guts them, or takes out the upper thorax.

• 39:42Speaker 03

  So it's a highly efficient, industrial-scale killing machine if they fight on their own terms, but here they're not.

• 39:50Dan Snow?

  Here the Romans were in challenging terrain. Varus and his men had entered the vast Chuterberg forest. And shortly after that, the trouble began. The ancient woodland pressed closely in on either side. On a smooth road, you can assume that everyone can move roughly at a set pace. But once you're staggering along a rough hewn road, a primitive road that you're hacking out of the forest as you march, well then that all changes. You're walking along hastily felled logs laid end to end. It's uneven, it's slippery, you haven't got the gradients sorted. You're splashing across riverbeds, you're skirting bogs. Units were starting to move at different speeds.

• 40:35Dan Snow?

  Wagons are falling behind. And don't forget, thousands of humans just moving through a landscape like this utterly destroys the ground, tears it up. If you've ever been to a festival, an outdoor festival, you will have hauled your little trolley with your kids in it, or your tent, or your sleeping bag, your fireball, you'll have all that to and from the car park. And mud and ruts appear after no time at all, even in seemingly the driest of northern European summers. The ground tears under trudging feet and wheels. So the going is slow and hard. Cassius Dio paints us a picture. "The mountains had an uneven surface, broken by ravines, and the trees grew close together

• 41:19Dan Snow?

  and very high. Hence the Romans, even before the enemy assailed them, were having a hard time of it felling trees, building roads, and bridging places that required it. They had with them many wagons and many beasts of burden, as in 'time of peace'. Moreover, not a few women and children and a large retinue of servants were following them. One more reason for their advancing in scattered groups. Meanwhile, a violent rain and wind came up that separated them still further, while the ground, that had become slippery around the roots and logs, made walking very treacherous for them. And the tops of trees kept breaking off and falling down, causing much confusion." You get a sense from that that the march was hell.

• 42:04Dan Snow?

  And that was before guttural German howls announced the start of something much, much worse. We don't know how it began. I imagine ranged weapons. So slings, bows, stones, arrows. A hail of rocks and iron missiles hurled from the thick forest. War cries, insults, challenges. Incantations of priests echoing around the hills. The Germans knew that the surest way to crush a legion was to extinguish its fighting spirit. Scare the men, break them, discourage them. And their bodies are yours anyway.

• 42:49Dan Snow?

  Cassius Dio writes: "While the Romans were in such difficulties, the barbarians suddenly surrounded them on all signs at once, coming through the densest thickets, as they were acquainted with the paths. At first they held volleys from a distance. Then, as no one defended himself and many were wounded, they approached closer. For the Romans were not proceeding in any regular order, but were mixed in helter-skelter with the wagons and the unarmed. And so, being unable to form readily anywhere in a body, and being fewer at every point than their assailants, they suffered greatly and could offer no resistance at all. It was, at that moment," Dio says, "the very moment of revealing themselves as enemies instead of subjects.

• 43:34Dan Snow?

  And they wrought great and dire havoc. The Roman column was confused. The men, the women, the children were knackered. They were beset by insects. Their kit was soaking. They had no dry kindling to coax a fire to heat their rations. The water also had an even worse effect: it soaked their bowstrings, so archers were unable to shoot back. They were slipping and sliding on temporary roads. They were bewildered. We can assume that they rapidly lost confidence in their leadership. But the Romans hadn't built Rome by giving up. And they did what Romans had always done: they dug in." They built, they erected a fort, a place of refuge.

• 44:17Dan Snow?

  Cassius Dio writes that they camped on the spot after securing a suitable place, so far as that was possible on a wooded mountain. And afterwards, they either burned or abandoned most of their wagons and everything else that was not absolutely necessary to them. They hunkered down this fort overnight and perhaps slightly rested and reorganised. They made the decision to press on and try and get through the woods. I've never quite understood personally why they didn't just stay in that fort, but I suppose they would have run out of food and the days were only shortening, the weather only getting worse, and perhaps German numbers were growing all the time. Dio describes, "The next day, they advanced in a little better order. Upon setting out from there, they plunged into the woods again, where they defended themselves from their assailants, but they suffered their heaviest losses while doing

• 45:02Dan Snow?

  so." At some stage in those first two days, it must have become clear, this was not a few opportunistic locals, this was a giant revolt. It was a pre-planned, masterfully executed, crushing blow. And there was plenty of evidence for a controlling hand, of someone who'd thought carefully about exactly how to neutralise Roman advantages, how to beat the unbeatable. Someone who'd not only set the trap, but had coaxed the Romans straight into it. At some stage, the Romans realised that the author of this purgatory was Arminius,

• 45:46Dan Snow?

  the man who'd enjoyed all the blessings of a Roman upbringing, who'd seen the light, who'd looked upon the glories of the imperial capital. He'd lain on couches and tasted Roman wine, the man who'd fought alongside them. He'd been a trusted counsellor, that man. Arminius the auxiliary was in fact Arminius the traitor, the rebel leader. And he and his men were fighting in this forest to liberate Germany. You're listening to Dan Snow's Historyhead. This is the destruction of the Romans in the Teutoburg Forest. More coming up.

• 46:29Speaker 04

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• 46:57Speaker 02

  This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 47:56Dan Snow?

  The desperate column of Romans had no choice. They had to keep marching on. Cassius Dio says that they were still advancing when the fourth day dawned, and again a heavy downpour and violent wind assailed them, preventing them from going forward and even from standing securely, and moreover depriving them of using their weapons, for they could not handle their bows or javelins with any success, nor for that matter their shields, which were thoroughly soaked. Their opponents, on the other hand, being for the most part lightly equipped and able to approach and retire freely, suffered less from the storm. Furthermore, the enemy's force had greatly increased as many of those who had at first wavered joined them, largely in the hope of plunder. And thus, they could more easily encircle and strike down the Romans,

• 48:41Dan Snow?

  whose ranks were now thinned, many having perished in the earlier fighting. Nothing breeds success like success. Now, there was a wonderful amateur archaeologist called Tony Clun. He was actually a British army officer. He was in the Royal Tank Regiment and he was posted to Germany, to this part of Germany. He started metal detecting at the end of the last century around Calcrezi, which is about 12 miles or so north of what is now Osna Brook. And that used to be the Teutoburg Forest. Today, that ancient woodland is gone sadly. It's more fields and plantations of pine. The great bogs were drained in the 19th century. But that's where Tony Clun did his metal detecting. And he began to find evidence of battle.

• 49:24Dan Snow?

  From the coins, it was very clear the dates matched up. He found not a Roman coin from after 9 AD. Tony said in an interview that I found there was every indication that a large contingent of people had splayed out, fleeing from an unknown horror. Well, if we go all the way back to Tacitus, I think he gives us a little glimpse of that horror. He actually describes a battle that took place in Germany a few years later, but I think much of it would have been familiar to Varus's desperate men. Everything was the disadvantage of the Romans. The ground deep in slime and ooze, too unstable for standing fast and too slippery for advancing. The weight of armour on their backs, their inability amid the water to balance the javelin for a throw.

• 50:07Dan Snow?

  Cherusci, on the other hand, were habituated to marsh fighting, long of limb, armed with huge lances to wound from a distance. Success had made the Germans indefatigable. Even now, they took no rest. Even though that's describing a later battle, I think it could easily be applied to the slaughter in the Teutoburg Forest of September of 9 AD. Four days in, while it was impossible to know how many Romans were slumbered at Varus's command, I'm sure some units had splintered off. I'm sure orders weren't getting through to all the disparate elements of the column. We think that the largest coherent group made a night march to escape. Now, this, I think, smacks of desperation. I'm sure that'll work.

• 50:51Dan Snow?

  You're surrounded in impenetrable woodland by the locals, who've curated an arena of nightmares for you. So why not try wandering about at night? And sure enough, it was disaster. They marched into a trap within the trap, and we think this presumably must have been masterminded by Arminius. There was a sort of open track which the Romans were following, squeezed between a hill and a great bog. But across that track, funneling the Romans into an ever narrower passageway, there were earthworks, and a trench, and an embankment, behind which the Germans could shelter and rain down projectiles on the hopeless fleeing Romans. Now archaeologists recently have

• 51:30Dan Snow?

  found evidence of a four-foot-high wall, 12-foot-thick. It's built of sand, it's reinforced by bits of soil, and they've found plenty of artifacts, Roman artifacts, in front of that wall, but very few behind it. Romans with their weapons, armour, their jewellery, their clasps. It seems like they got to that wall, but they got no further. You can imagine the Romans fought like men possessed, men who know their only way to survive an ambush is to hack their way through it. They must have hurled themselves at that wall, sandal feet on the shoulders of comrades to boost them up, to contest the rampart. The Germans atop it, fighting equally ferociously, letting everyone knowing that this was the moment

• 52:15Dan Snow?

  of decision. This was the moment when the Roman force would be utterly annihilated. Or, if it was allowed to escape, the vengeance it would bring down would be truly genocidal. They could not be allowed to leave this forest. Men sliding, slipping, stabbing, clubbing, blood of friend and foe mingling to run in rivulets down soaking skin, the rain washing away tears. Mud and sludge making it impossible to find a footing. An army that was used to working in machine-like unison... Now engaged in a drunken brawl. A force used to receiving orders and acting upon them, being decapitated.

• 53:00Dan Snow?

  The machine misfiring. The Roman legion only works when the people at the bottom subordinate themselves to the guiding intelligence their commanders. When they played their part unquestioningly in the operational scheme of men who they respected and trusted to deliver victory. Now, when men fear that machine is broken, they start to look to their own protection. Well, then you're just a mob of scared individuals. You're no more than the rabble of barbarians that they delighted in despising. Roman soldiers suddenly thinking, no, I will not man this barricade in expectation of relief and reinforcement. No, I will not carry this message to a superior. I will look after my own skin. And they didn't need to look any further than their own leaders. We hear about Gaius Nemonius Valer.

• 53:44Dan Snow?

  He's a key lieutenant of Varus. He's like, we think he's the cavalry commander. And he's described by one historian as in the rest of his life, an inoffensive and honorable man. Yet he set a fearful example. At some stage, Valer must have looked around him and believed the situation to be so hopeless that he did the thing that would almost certainly have condemned him in the eyes of Roman authorities. He entirely abandoned his commanding officer and the infantry. He just galloped off with his cavalry in a desperate attempt to escape. And when you see your cavalry gallop past in full flight, I think you consider your oath of obedience broken. You look to your own survival. The mission is forgotten.

• 54:25Dan Snow?

  And then sadly, for those Roman infantrymen, that's exactly what condemned them. It was starting to act like individuals that I think ensured their destruction. Death waited for them on that battlefield. But death also surely stalked them as they tried to flee from it. Interestingly, death certainly stalked Valer. His cowardice was punished. The historian says, but fortune avenged his act, for he did not survive those whom he had abandoned and died in the act of deserting them. It all reminds me a little bit of Dien Bien Phu, the French catastrophe in Indochina. The French commanders sat there in their HQ and they heard news of their outposts falling one by one to an enemy they had mocked as unsophisticated.

• 55:10Dan Snow?

  And finally, they reached the point where the enemy are swarming around those headquarters and death is now a certainty. The only final sliver of comfort is that you can end it yourself with your own blade. Or you submit to the torture of an enemy who live only to inflict on you the pain they hold in their hearts from brutal years of conquest. Cassius Dio tells us which decision the Roman commander made. Varus therefore, and all the more prominent officers, fearing that they should either be captured alive or killed by their bitterest foes, for they'd already been wounded, made bold to do a thing that was terrible yet unavoidable. They took their own lives.

• 55:55Dan Snow?

  Where news of this had spread, none of the rest, even if he had any strength left, defended himself any longer. Some imitated their leader, and others, casting aside their arms, allowed anybody who pleased to slay them, for to flee was impossible, however much one might desire to do so. Every man therefore, and every horse, was cut down without fear of resistance. There's another historian, Valeus Patelicus, he says, "The general had more courage to die than to fight. For following the example of his father and grandfather, he ran himself through with his sword." Another, Varus, had found himself on the wrong side of the fortune of war.

• 56:40Dan Snow?

  Some men surrendered, I am certain they regretted it. After the battle, men were tortured and murdered. Tacitus said that survivors spoke of the tribunal from which Arminius made his harangue, all the gibbets and torture pits for the prisoners, and the arrogance with which he insulted the standards and eagles. Another historian, Lucinius Aeneas Florus, says that they put out the eyes of some of them and cut the hands off others. They sewed up the mouth of one of them after first cutting out his tongue, exclaiming, "At last, you viper, you have ceased to hiss." The body too of the consul himself, which the dutiful affection of the soldiers

• 57:22Dan Snow?

  had buried, was disinterred. As for the standards and eagles the barbarians possess too to this day, the third eagle was wrenched from its pole before it could fall into the hands of the enemy by the standard bearer, who, carrying it concealed in the folds round his belt, secreted himself in the bloodstained marsh. The archaeology on the battlefield today has been fascinating. They've found poignant objects. They've found remnants of a Roman officer's scabbard. They've found a Roman standard bearer's magnificent silver face mask. You wonder if it's the man who threw off his helmet as he grabbed the eagle and hid it on his way into the marsh. They've also uncovered coins with the letters VAR on them, for Varus, presumably coins which

• 58:03Dan Snow?

  the commander had paid his men. Something like 5,000 objects they've recovered so far. They've got human bones, some showing hideous killing blows. They've got bits of weapons and nails, but also a wine strainer, medical instruments. Three entire legions were destroyed in those woods, including auxiliaries. That's thought to be up to 20,000 men. It ranks in the top tier of Roman military disasters. And it looked like it would get worse. Arminius fell upon any and all Roman forts east of the Rhine. He smashed them. He expunged Romanatus from German soil. And actually, it took everything the Romans could scrape together to protect that frontier with Gaul. And perhaps

• 58:47Dan Snow?

  aided by some uncharacteristic German reticence, they did manage to stop the Germans crossing the Rhine and pressing their advantage into the heart of the Roman world. Back in the very heart of Rome, Emperor Augustus was given the news. The historian Suetonius tells us, "When the news of this came, he ordered that watch be kept by night throughout the city to prevent outbreak, and prolonged the terms of the governors of the provinces, that the allies might be held to their allegiance by experienced men with whom they were acquainted." He was so greatly affected that for several months in succession, he cut neither his beard nor his hair. And sometimes he would dash his head against a door, crying, "Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!"

• 59:33Dan Snow?

  And he observed the day of the disaster each year as one of sorrow and mourning. Varus's catastrophic defeat in the Teutoburg Forest was the end of decades of huge imperial growth. In the words of Tacitus, they were the end of the Roman project to settle Germany. Tacitus says that Arminius was the man who beat Rome at the height of Rome's power and won Germans their freedom. The Romans would return to Germany, but not for settlement, no, no, just for revenge. Tacitus tells us how young Germanicus launched punitive campaign after punitive campaign in Germany. He slaughtered anyone with a connection to the defeat and many more besides.

• 1:00:17Dan Snow?

  And finally, after years of campaigning, he arrived at the site of the battle itself. Six years after, a Roman army present on the ground buried the bones of the three legions, and no man knew whether he consigned to the earth the remains of a stranger or a kinsman, but all thought of all as friends and members of one family, and with anger rising against the enemy, mourned at once and hated. Perhaps Germanicus's campaign healed Roman pride, but either way, it didn't really reverse the damage that had been done. The Romans believe that Varian disaster marked a turning point. Tacitus is clear that was the moment Germany had gained its freedom. The historian Flora says, "The result of this disaster was that the empire which had

• 1:01:00Dan Snow?

  not stopped on the shores of the ocean was checked on the banks of the Rhine." So some historians today are less certain than that, and they point to the fact there were, you know, Germanicus launched expeditions across the Rhine, there were other expeditions. They also talk about how although Germany was never incorporated back into formal empire, there was a network of client states that were established on and across that frontier. They also point out the Roman Empire didn't stop growing. Future emperors were happy to extend the empire when they felt able to. Claudius added Britain. Trajan conquered Dacia and Mesopotamia. Severus tried to tame Scotland. And these historians point out that it's actually the timing of the Teutoburg Forest that's particularly responsible for its impact.

• 1:01:45Dan Snow?

  It came right at the end of Augustus's reign. He died just five years later. And Rome was becoming obsessed with the fragile transition of the imperial crown from a man who had no natural sons. If Augustus had gone on to rule for decades, then perhaps they would have gone back. If Tiberius, his successor, had been braver, he might have let Germanicus not only punish, but try and conquer. But they didn't, and we cannot dwell too much on those what ifs. I finished up by asking Simon this question, and it does seem to me that he sides more with Tacitus. What was the impact of this defeat on the course of Roman history?

• 1:02:26Speaker 03

  Huge, absolutely huge. So when I'm writing about any subsequent Roman military campaign, all the way through to the end of the Empire in the West and even into the Byzantine period, I think the Varian disaster hung heavily over many, if not all, Roman military leaders. We call it the Varian disaster. You know, he's one of these individuals from history whose very name is associated with a disaster, right? That's the way he's remembered. He's cursed, and that's certainly the way the Romans would have seen it. So every Roman military leader afterwards, agricola, anybody, would have had this in the back of their mind, thinking, I'm not doing that again. So when Tiberius goes back for the punitive expeditions, he plays it absolutely safe.

• 1:03:11Speaker 03

  Okay, he hits the whole front with tens of thousands of men, far more men than Varus had, and he makes sure he's scouting properly and not even remotely putting his troops in a position to be ambushed. So the Romans did learn from it, but it hung really heavily over them. I think it actually changed the way the Roman military. Campaign from that point. And of course, secondly, the Romans never really bothered going back to create Germanic again. I mean, they've sort of settled down on the frontier of the Rhine and Danube, don't they? Now, from a Rome perspective, they'd argue, well, it's not really economically worthwhile. But actually, it's exactly the same as the far north of Scotland. It just proves a far too tough nut to crack, I think.

• 1:03:52Dan Snow?

  Well, thank you very much to Simon Elliott for coming on the podcast. And thank you, everyone, for listening to this episode of Down to Snow's History. Remember, if you want to go and watch the documentary by Tristan Hughes, please head over to History Hit TV. It's one of hundreds of documentaries we make every year, thanks to our wonderful subscribers. If you haven't subscribed yet, please go and do that. Thanks as ever for listening to this podcast. I'll see you next time.

• 1:04:27Speaker 04

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• 1:04:55Speaker 05

  This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today.

• 1:05:37Speaker 05

  Subject to credit approval. Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 1:05:47Dan Snow?

  Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.