Chatti
[3][4] They lived in central and northern Hesse and southern Lower Saxony, along the upper reaches of that river and in the valleys and mountains of the Eder and Fulda regions, a district approximately corresponding to Hesse-Kassel, though probably somewhat more extensive.
According to Tacitus,[5] the Batavians and Cananefates of his time, tribes living within the Roman Empire, were descended from part of the Chatti, who left their homeland after an internal quarrel drove them out, to take up new lands at the mouth of the Rhine.
[9] If not, then the Chatti may represent a survival of an older tribal name, as opposed to the Tencteri, Usipetes, and Ubii who were all were forced from homelands in the same region by the Suebic incursions.
[10] In his second book of Epigrams, Martial credited the emperor Domitian (51–96 AD) as having overcome the Chatti: "Creta dedit magnum, maius dedit Africa nomen, Scipio quod uictor quodque Metellus habet; nobilius domito tribuit Germania Rheno, et puer hoc dignus nomine, Caesar, eras.
[11] Tacitus also notes that like other Germanic tribes, the Chatti took an interest in traditions concerning haircuts and beards.A practice, rare among the other German tribes, and simply characteristic of individual prowess, has become general among the Chatti, of letting the hair and beard grow as soon as they have attained manhood, and not till they have slain a foe laying aside that peculiar aspect which devotes and pledges them to valour.
Over the spoiled and bleeding enemy they show their faces once more; then, and not till then, proclaiming that they have discharged the obligations of their birth, and proved themselves worthy of their country and of their parents.
They have no home or land or occupation; they are supported by whomsoever they visit, as lavish of the property of others as they are regardless of their own, till at length the feebleness of age makes them unequal to so stern a valour.
[12]Between the Rhine and the Chatti, Tacitus places the Tencteres and Usipetes, who apparently had been moved since the time of Caesar into the old homeland of the Ubii, who had in turn settled in Cologne.
The Chatti successfully resisted incorporation into the Roman Empire, joining the Cheruscan war leader Arminius' coalition of tribes that annihilated Varus' legions in 9 AD in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.
[21] They appear again during the build up to the Marcomannic wars, first attacking southwards towards Germania superior and Raitia in what is now southern Germany, in 162, and then while the bigger battles were being fought they were repulsed together with the Hermunduri from the Rhine by Didius Julianus in 175.
[24] The last ancient source to mention the Chatti, if only in a quotation of Sulpicius Alexander describing events of the late fourth century, was Gregory of Tours.
[26] The much later Liber Historiæ Francorum says that after the death of Sunno, his brother Marcomer, leader of the Ampsivarii and Chatti, proposed to the Franks that they should have one single king, contrary to their tradition.
The Chatti eventually may in any case have become a branch of the much larger neighboring Franks and their region was incorporated in the kingdom of Clovis I, probably with the Ripuarians, at the beginning of the sixth century.
In 723 for example, the Anglo-Saxon missionary Winfrid—subsequently called St. Boniface, Apostle of the Germans—proselytizing among the Hessians (Hessorum), felled their sacred tree, Thor's Oak, near Fritzlar, as part of his efforts to convert them and other Germanic tribes to Christianity.
The second century geographer Claudius Ptolemy mentions that the Kasouarioi lived to the east of the Abnoba mountains, in the vicinity of Hesse, but this account of northern Europe is thought to contain confusions derived from using different sources.
