page_title: History of the Netherlands
section_title: Arrival of Germanic groups
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Netherlands / The pre-Roman period (800 BC – 58 BC) / Arrival of Germanic groups
caption_attribution_description: Based on p. 108 in the Penguin Atlas of World History, volume 1, from the Beginning to the Eve of the French Revolution. 1988. ISBN 0-14-051054-0. Note that the map assumes that the w:Nordwestblock was Germanized before 500 BC. This is uncertain; alternative proposals hold that the area near the mouths of the Rhine came under a Germanic superstate only in the 1st century BC. The map is drawn on en:User:Dbachmann's blank map: en:Image:Europe plain rivers.png
context_page_description: The History of the Netherlands is a history of seafaring people thriving on a lowland river delta on the North Sea in northwestern Europe. Records begin with the four centuries during which the region formed a militarized border zone of the Roman Empire. This came under increasing pressure from Germanic peoples moving westwards. As Roman power collapsed and the Middle Ages began, three dominant Germanic peoples coalesced in the area, Frisians in the north and coastal areas, Low Saxons in the northeast, and the Franks in the south.
  During the Middle Ages, the descendants of the Carolingian dynasty came to dominate the area and then extended their rule to a large part of Western Europe. The region nowadays corresponding to the Netherlands therefore became part of Lower Lotharingia within the Frankish Holy Roman Empire. For several centuries, lordships such as Brabant, Holland, Zeeland, Friesland, Guelders and others held a changing patchwork of territories. There was no unified equivalent of the modern Netherlands.
context_section_description: The Germanic tribes originally inhabited southern Scandinavia, Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg, but subsequent Iron Age cultures of the same region, like Wessenstedt (800–600 BC) and Jastorf, may also have belonged to this grouping.
  The climate deteriorating in Scandinavia around 850 BC to 760 BC and later and faster around 650 BC might have triggered migrations. Archaeological evidence suggests around 750 BC a relatively uniform Germanic people from the Netherlands to the Vistula and southern Scandinavia. In the west, the newcomers settled the coastal floodplains for the first time, since in adjacent higher grounds the population had increased and the soil had become exhausted.
  By the time this migration was complete, around 250 BC, a few general cultural and linguistic groupings had emerged.
  One grouping – labelled the "North Sea Germanic" – inhabited the northern part of the Netherlands (north of the great rivers) and extending along the North Sea and into Jutland. This group is also sometimes referred to as the "Ingvaeones". Included in this group are the peoples who would later develop into, among others, the early Frisians and the early Saxons.
  A second grouping, which scholars subsequently dubbed the "Weser-Rhine Germanic" (or "Rhine-Weser Germanic"), extended along the middle Rhine and Weser and inhabited the southern part of the Netherlands (south of the great rivers). This group, also sometimes referred to as the "Istvaeones", consisted of tribes that would eventually develop into the Salian Franks.
caption: Distribution of the primary Germanic groups c. 1 AD.
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