The creation of a Batavian polity needs to be understood not just in the context of social developments in the Late Iron Age Lower Rhineland – as revealed by the archaeological record82 – but also against the specific historical backdrop of Caesar's conquest and its direct consequences for the region. We are confronted here with the harshest side of Roman imperialism, which included large-scale plundering, mass enslavement and even genocide. I wish to focus in this chapter on fundamental changes in the tribal map of the Lower Rhine region in the second half of the 1st century BC. Two key questions arise: 1. what is the relationship between Caesar's conquest of the Lower Rhineland and the ethnic reshuffling that occurred there in the ensuing fifty years? 2. to what extent did groups in the Lower Rhine frontier zone attach importance to Germanic ethnicity?

MAJOR CHANGES IN THE TRIBAL MAP AFTER THE ROMAN CONQUEST

Caesar's Commentaries are the first source to inform us about the ethno-political landscape of the Lower Rhineland. Caesar gives the names of the principal tribes and a specification of their territories (fig. 3.1). The Menapii occupied the coastal area of modern Belgium and the southwest Netherlands as far as the Rhine. Their eastern neighbours were the Eburones, who inhabited the region between the Meuse and the Rhine, and the adjacent area to the west, which corresponds roughly to the present-day southeast Netherlands, northeast Belgium and the neighbouring German Rhineland north of Bonn. For this reason, we can also regard the eastern half of the Rhine/Meuse delta – the core of the later Batavian territory – as belonging to the Eburonean polity. The Eburones seem to have formed a somewhat loose tribal federation; they were led by two kings, each of whom probably had his own territory, since Caesar refers to Catuvolcus, one of their leaders, as rex dimidiae partis Eburorum. Much less is known about the tribes that occupied the right bank of the Lower Rhine. Caesar situated the Sugambri along the German part of the Rhine between the Lahn and Lippe rivers. We can place the Tencteri and Usipetes immediately to the north of the Lower Rhine/Lippe, although – given their search for new territories on the Gallic side of the Rhine – their presence there may have been of short duration.