BAVARIANS. - Of Marcomannic stock (v. MARCOMANNI) from the great Germanic stem and coming from the territory of present-day Bohemia, the "Baiuvari" or Bavarians, involved in the vast migration of peoples that marks the period of the invasions, settled in the zone watered by the southern course of the Danube, between its two tributaries, the Lech and the Inn, replacing the Celts who had occupied that part of ancient Roman Raetia. There, in 551, Jordanes locates the Bavarians, who, moreover, began immediately afterward a movement of expansion into the subalpine valleys and across the Danube, toward the Nordgau and the Ostmark. They then appear stably organized as a duchy and governed by the house of the Agilolfings. To this house belonged Theodelinda, queen of the Lombards. But even earlier, between the Bavarians and the Lombards, the former having been the first to pass beyond the Arian phase, contacts and relations had arisen, with a clear influence on the people - the Bavarians - of more advanced civilization. This did not, however, prevent Bavaria, like Langobardia, from falling under the domination of the strongest neighbor in the West: the Franks, to whom the ability and fortune of the Carolingians assured a grand place in the development of historical life and culture. The formula of union between Franks and Bavarians nevertheless guarantees, for Bavaria, at least for an initial period, a function as intermediary, and as a source of radiation toward Eastern Europe, of the new Christian-Germanic civilization. And it is precisely then, in the second half of the 8th century, that it fulfills the highest function of its history.
Already in 788, however, the Bavarian dukes feel the goad of lost autonomy: Tassilo, having clashed with Charlemagne, is deposed. And the autonomy of the duchy likewise ceases: divided into counties in its central part, it re-enters the Carolingian defensive system, as for the frontier lands - Nordgau, Austria, Carniola, Verona - over which margraves and marquises are placed. At the division of the Frankish empire, the chief city of the ancient duchy, Regensburg, becomes the capital of the kingdom of the Eastern Franks and of the first of its dynasts, Louis the German. This was the path that led to the rise of a kingdom of Germany, on the very basis of the Bavarian duchy: after a brief period of renewed semi-autonomy, Bavaria enters, with the 10th century, into the great kingdom of Otto I, who makes it a duchy of the crown, with Henry I, his brother, as first duke. Then, after Otto's victory over the Hungarians, who had previously overrun and plundered the country, the border lands return to being an integral part of Bavaria. But a series of events, military and dynastic, now takes them away and now incorporates them again, until, in 976, Austria is constituted as a march under the Babenbergs, and, in 1002, Carinthia is definitively erected into an autonomous duchy.
In Bavaria the dominion of the Guelph house then supervenes for more than a century, around which stirs the convulsed panorama of the age: as the general history, which from then on takes hold of the ancient duchy, demonstrates.
Bibliography3 works
Pier Fausto Palumbo