History of The Alps - Early History (before 1200)

Early History (before 1200)

The Wildkirchli caves in the Appenzell Alps show traces of Neanderthal habitation. During the last glacial maximum, the entire Alps were covered in ice.

According to the book The Seven Daughters of Eve, by Bryan Sykes, MtDNA Haplogroup K arose along the southeastern slopes of the Alps around 12-15,000 years ago. Traces of transhumance appear in the neolithic. In the Bronze Age, the Alps formed the boundary of the Urnfield and Terramare cultures. The mummy found on the Ötztaler Alps, known as "Ötzi the Iceman," lived approximately around 3200 BC. At that stage the population in its majority had already changed from an economy based on hunting and gathering to one based on agriculture and animal husbandry. It is still an open question whether forms of pastoral mobility, such as transhumance (alpiculture), already existed in prehistory. The earliest historical accounts date to the Roman period, mostly due to Greco-Roman ethnography, with some epigraphic evidence due to the Raetians, Lepontii and Gauls, with Ligurians and Venetii occupying the fringes in the soutwest and souteast, respectively. The Rock Drawings in Valcamonica date to this period.. A few details have come down to us of the conquest of many of the Alpine tribes by Augustus, as well as Hannibal's battles across the Alps.

Between 35 and 6 BC, the Alpine region was gradually integrated into the expanding Roman Empire. The contemporary monument Tropaeum Alpium in La Turbie celebrates the victory won by the Romans over 46 tribes in these mountains. The subsequent construction of roads over the Alpine passes first permitted southern and northern Roman settlements in the Alps to be connected, and eventually integrated the inhabitants of the Alps into the culture of the Empire.

With the division of the Roman Empire and the collapse of its Western part in the fourth and fifth centuries, power relations in the Alpine region reverted to their local dimensions. Often dioceses became important centres. While in Italy and Southern France, dioceses in the Western Alps were established early (beginning in the fourth century) and resulted in numerous small sees, in the Eastern Alps such foundations continued into the thirteenth century and the dioceses were usually larger. New monasteries in the mountain valleys also promoted the Christianisation of the population. In that period the core area of supra-regional political powers was mainly situated north of the Alps, first in the Carolingian Empire and later, after its division, in France and the Holy Roman Empire. The German emperors, who received the imperial investiture from the Pope in Rome between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries, had to cross the Alps along with their entourages.

In the 7th century, much of the Eastern Alps were settled by Slavs. Between the 7th and 9th century, the Slavic principality of Carantania existed as one of the few non-Germanic polities in the Alps. The Alpine Slavs, who inhabited the majority of present-day Austria and Slovenia, were gradually Germanized from the 9th to the 14th century. The modern Slovenes are their southernmost descendants.

The successive emigration and occupation of the Alpine region by the Alemanni from the 6th to the 8th centuries are, too, known only in outline. For "mainstream" history, the Frankish and later the Habsburg empire, the Alps had strategic importance as an obstacle, not as a landscape, and the Alpine passes have consequently had great significance militarily. It is not until the final breakup of the Carolingian Empire in the 10th and 11th centuries that it becomes possible to trace out the local history of different parts of the Alps, notably with the High Medieval Walser migrations.