BAVARI. - Of Marcomannic stock (v. MARCOMANNI) from the great Germanic tribe and originating from the territory of present-day Bohemia, the “Baiuvari” or Bavarians, caught up in the great folk migrations that mark the period of the invasions, settled in the region watered by the southern course of the Danube, between the two tributaries, the Lech and the Inn, replacing the Celts who had occupied that part of ancient Roman Raetia. There, in 551, Jordanes places the Bavarians, who, however, soon afterwards began an expansion into the sub-Alpine valleys and beyond the Danube, towards Nordgau and Ostmark. They then appear permanently organized as a duchy and ruled by the Agilolfing dynasty. To this line belonged Theodelinda, queen of the Lombards. But even earlier, between the Bavarians and the Lombards—who had already passed beyond the Arian phase—contacts and relations had been established, with a clear influence on the people—the Bavarians—of more advanced civilization. This did not, however, prevent the duchy of Bavaria from falling, like Lombardy, under the domination of the stronger neighbor of the West: the Franks, whose ability and good fortune ensured the Carolingians a grand place in the development of historical life and culture. The formula of union between Franks and Bavarians, however, guaranteed Bavaria, at least for a first period, a function of intermediary and of irradiator towards Eastern Europe of the new Christian-Germanic civilization. And it was precisely then, in the second half of the 8th century, that it fulfilled the highest function of its history.
Already in 788, however, the Bavarian dukes felt the sting of lost autonomy: Tassilo, having come into conflict with Charlemagne, was deposed. And the autonomy of the duchy also ceased: divided into counties in its central part, it was incorporated into the Carolingian defensive system, while the frontier lands—Nordgau, Austria, Carniola, Verona—were placed under margraves and marquises. With the division of the Frankish empire, the chief city of the ancient duchy, Regensburg, became the capital of the kingdom of the East Franks and of its first dynast, Louis the German. It was the path that led to the rise of a kingdom of Germany, based precisely on the Bavarian duchy: after a brief period of renewed semi-autonomy, Bavaria entered, in the 10th century, the great kingdom of Otto I, who made it a duchy of the crown, with his brother Henry I as the first duke. Then, after Otto’s victory over the Hungarians, who had previously overrun and plundered the land, the frontier territories returned to being an integral part of Bavaria. But a succession of military and dynastic vicissitudes now took them away and now reincorporated them, until, in 976, Austria was constituted as a margraviate under the Babenbergs, and, in 1002, Carinthia was definitively erected as an autonomous duchy.
For more than a century, the Guelf house succeeded in dominating Bavaria, around which the convulsed panorama of the time revolved: as the general history that from then on took possession of the ancient duchy demonstrates.
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