They Found 20,000 Bodies From Rome's Lost Army.

This is an iron face. It was once part of a Roman cavalry helmet. It was found in northern Germany buried in the ground where an entire Roman army vanished 2,000 years ago. We don't know who wore it and we don't know how he died but what we do know is this. In the autumn of year 9 an entire Roman army was wiped out in a forest and their battlefield was lost for the next 19 centuries. My name's Joe and this is one Buried Earth video that is well worth your time, do subscribe if you enjoy. So, the man who led the army was called Varus. He was the Roman governor of Germania, the empire's newest frontier, on the wild land east of the Rhine River. Under him were three Roman legions with their cavalry and support troops that potentially came to around 20,000 soldiers, plus an unknown number of servants and families travelling alongside them. This force marched into the forests of what is now northwest Germany. Almost none of them came out. The army was destroyed, its three sacred eagle standards were captured and Varus killed himself before the enemy could take him alive. And here's how deep the wounds went. Those three legions were wiped out from the record, their numbers were never used in Rome again. One of the men who died in that forest was a Roman officer named Marcus Celius. He was 53 years old, a senior centurion, one of the most experienced soldiers in his legion. Some years after the disaster, his brother had a memorial stone carved for him. Back in the safe Roman town of Rhine, the stone shows Celius's face. It lists his rank, his age and how he died in the war of Varus and it carries one strange instruction. If Celius's bones are ever found on that battlefield, the memorial has space left empty, ready to receive them. His bones were never found. After 2,000 years after Celius vanished into the trees, archaeologists began pulling Roman military gear out of a field in northern Germany. Thousands of pieces, coins minted before Varus ever set out, broken weapons from the fighting, human bones with battle wounds still in them and a rusted iron mask, the one that you're looking at right now, that had once covered a Roman soldier's face. We'll come back to what came out of the ground later, but to understand what these objects are and why they matter so much, you first need to know what happened in this forest. Marcus Celius is one of tens of thousands of Roman soldiers whose bones are still out there somewhere in the earth. Ancient writers described the battle, they named Varus, they named the man who betrayed him and they wrote about the killing in horrible detail, but not one of them left clear instructions for the directions to the site itself. So for the next 19 centuries, people searched, different spots across northern Germany were suggested, statues went up, museums were built around theories that later turned out to be completely wrong. The location of one of the worst military disasters in Roman history was simply lost. Then in 1987, an off-duty British army officer with a metal detector found something in a farmer's field, but we'll come back to him later as well because there is so much of this scene to set. So first, we need to understand how this Roman army walked into the forest with no way out and how it happened at the hands of one man they trusted most. By year 9 AD, Rome believed Germania was almost tamed. For 20 years, Roman armies pushed east of the Rhine, they built forts, they made deals with friendly tribes and crushed the ones who fought back. Rome had started treating the entire region as a future province. Varus was sent to govern it, not as a general leading an invasion, but as an administrator, tidying up land that Rome thought it had already won, but that was a mistake. Germania was not beaten, the tribes east of the Rhine had accepted Roman rule because they had no choice, not because they had given up. Under the calm surface, they were just waiting for the right moment and the man Varus trusted to guide him through that region, a young local prince serving on his own staff, was quietly building a rebellion. Varus was around 60, he came from an old Roman family, he had governed rich provinces before, he was tied by marriage to the emperor's own family, he was experienced, powerful and completely trusted by Rome. His advisor was called Arminius, he was in his mid-20s, the son of a chief from one of the largest local tribes, and here's what made him so dangerous. Arminius had been given Roman citizenship, he had served in the Roman army himself, he understood how Romans fought, how they gave orders, and how they trusted their own officers. By year 9, he was back home, serving Varus' side, and Varus trusted him without question. To Varus, the young prince was perfect, a Roman trained soldier, who was also a local royal, a man who could talk to the tribes and keep peace. What Varus didn't know though, was that his advisor had spent the previous year secretly pulling those tribes together into a single army, an army ready to fight Rome. He had convinced them of something simple, the Romans could be beaten, and only if, the tribes struck together, and only if they trapped a Roman army in ground that took all of its strengths away. Another local chief, a bitter rival of Arminius, went to Varus with a warning. The prince is plotting against you, he said. Varus ignored it, the two men were known enemies who had clashed over politics and even over women, so Varus assumed the warning was just jealousy. It wasn't though. In the late summer of year 9, Varus began moving his legions from their summer camp back towards the Rhine for winter, and that was when his advisor brought him a piece of news that would fit the plan perfectly. A small uprising, he said, broken out nearby, nothing serious, but it needed putting down before it spread. Instead of taking the main road home, Varus should make a detour through the forest and deal with it on the way. Varus agreed, it was routine. The Roman army handled this kind of policing all the time, but the uprising wasn't real. The prince had invented it to steer the army off the safe road and into a forest that he knew, and Varus did not. Then he asked to ride on ahead with his own men, to prepare the way. Varus let him go. He wasn't riding off to fight a rebellion, he was riding off to lead the ambush, and that route still survives in the ground today. But just before we continue with today's episode, I wanted to show you something because it's been sat on my desk for a few weeks now and I just keep picking it up. So a massive thank you to today's sponsor, it's The Book. And genuinely, this is one of the best conversation starters I have ever had. I've always had this joke with myself that if I was to ever go back in time, I would be absolutely screwed, because I know nothing about how things work, I just know the final product. This book changes everything. Look, I've just opened it on a random page and it's metals and ores, tells you all the different elements that you can mine and just what to do with them. I move again and it's on cotton and yarn, how you would process it, how you would spin it, how you would make clothing. Although it's called The Book, it's full title is The Book, The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding a Civilization, and it's exactly as it sounds like. And just moving on to the quality and the build of this book, it is absolutely beautiful. The illustrations are a mix of old engineering drawings and medieval art. There's also a hidden quest throughout this whole thing. And just as I'm flicking through here, the quality of the paper, it's a nice good heavy paper, this thing's not going anywhere. It raised over $2 million on Kickstarter, so there's definitely a lot of people that were just interested in the idea of this book, let alone getting the finished product. It's the of thing that you would happily just leave on your coffee table. If you ever have any guests come over and they'll go, hey, what's that? Brilliant. You've got the next half an hour sorted, flicking through it together, going over things that you never thought was possible to know. There's a 10% off link on screen right now. If you use code buriedearth10 and go to that link that's pinned below, I'll put it at the top of the description as well. You can get a good discount on a really, really incredible book for you or someone that you think would love it. But for now, let's get back to the episode. For more than 30 years, archaeologists have walked the exact strip of land where the Roman column would have been squeezed thin. They've mapped it step by step, matching the ancient descriptions of the battle against what the land still looks today. Varus's army marched in. It stretched for miles along a narrow track, with forested high ground on one side and low, wet ground on the other. The army was not ready for a fight. It was strung out in marching order, the loose formation Romans used in friendly country, with soldiers, baggage wagons, servants and even women and children spread along the line. Then the weather turned. Wind and heavy rain hammered the column. The track turned into mud. The Roman line began to stretch and break apart, as different sections struggled through the different speeds. And in the trees ahead, the local warriors were waiting. The Romans had no idea, and as far as they knew, the fighting season was over and they were just on their way home. Then the tree line on both sides came alive with men. The attack came from every direction at once. The Roman writer Cassius Dio, describing the scene long afterward, tells us what it was like. Spears and arrows poured down from the high ground. Warriors burst out of the trees on the flanks and from behind. The Roman column was stretched too thin to form a solid line, and the ground was too broken to fight the way that they were trained to. Because that was the whole trick. The open flat ground. The Roman army was the finest in the world. A wall of shields moving as a body. Arminius had taken all of this away from them. No open ground, no solid line. Rain soaking their shields and ruining their bows, and soldiers couldn't even see the men that was attacking them. The first day was chaos. Some men were overrun where they stood, others held together and pushed on. When the night fell, the survivors did what Romans always did. Even in disaster, they dug in and built a fortified camp. In the morning, they tried to break out. They made some ground through more open country. Then the forest closed in again. The attacks came back, and the column began to fall apart again. By the third day, it was hopeless. Varus was wounded. Many of his officers were dead. The rest of the men were starving and exhausted, and they were surrounded. By the fourth morning, it was over. Varus killed himself rather than to be captured, because capture meant torture or worse. Several of his officers did the same. Others were taken alive, and some of those, according to the Roman sources, were killed on the tribe's altars as offerings to their gods. The three sacred eagles were captured. The most shameful loss a Roman army could suffer, and the dead were left where they lay. Somewhere among all of this chaos was Marcus Celius, the senior centurion, fighting until he could fight no more. Nobody who knew him lived to say where he fell. The three legions had ceased to exist, and a local prince, still in his twenties, had just handed Rome the worst defeat in living memory. Some of that fighting can still be traced in soil today. Germanic weapons have been found lying exactly where they were thrown. Roman shield fittings and cavalry spurs turned up beside the little iron studs of Roman army boots, in patterns that map out where individual men stood and fell. The emperor at the time was Augustus. He was in his early seventies, and he had ruled Rome for over forty years. When the news reached him, he broke. The Roman writer Suetonius, writing a century later, says Augustus tore his clothes and refused to cut his hair or beard for months. Sometimes he would beat his head against a door, shouting a single line, Varus, give me back my legions. We can't prove that exact scene ever happened, but the grief behind it was real. Augustus went into public mourning, and every year, on the anniversary, he marked a day of sorrow. What mattered more, though, was what he did next. Those three legions were struck from the army for good, and the numbers were never used again. Normally, when a legion was wiped out, its number would be handed down to a new one. Not these ones. That was shameful. These numbers themselves were treated as cursed. And Augustus pulled back. He gave up the dream of a Roman province reaching deep into Germania, and from that day on, an empire's border would stay at the Rhine. But that isn't quite the end of all of this. Roman armies did cross the river again, not as conquerors now, but as raiders, coming to punish and to burn. And one of those missions did go back to the forest itself. Those bones were still lying on the forest floor when that mission arrived six years later, and some of them were still there on the same ground when archaeologists came looking in the 1990s, untouched for almost 2,000 years by anyone who knew they were there. The general who led this was Germanicus. In the year 15, six years after the disaster, he marched a Roman army back into Germania. His mission was part punishment and part recovery, and he went to the place where the legions had died. The Roman writer Tacitus, working from older accounts, described what the soldiers found there. The forest floor was still covered in bones. Skeletons lay where the men had dropped six years before. In some places, the bones were heaped together, where groups had made their final stand. In others, they were scattered along the tracks, where fleeing men had been cut down. Skulls had been nailed to the tree trunks, and in the clearing stood the altars, where the captured Roman soldiers had been sacrificed. Germanicus' men gathered up what they could and dug a mass grave. Germanicus himself, the sources say, laid the first piece of turf over it. And here's where modern science meets that ancient account. When those bones were finally buried, some of them had been out in the open for years. Today, experts can look at a single bone and tell whether it was worn down by rain and sun before it was covered. At the site in Germany, some of those bones show exactly that, weathered by years of exposure, just like the writer described. Somewhere in that mass grave, in all likelihood, were the bones of Marcus Celius, the senior centurion, the man whose brother had carved a memorial with an empty space waiting. But no one could tell the soldiers apart. After six years in the forest, there was no way to know Celius' brother never got him back. Germanicus sealed the grave, marched his army home, and left the mound behind them. No Roman ever came to that spot ever again. After that, the location slipped away. The soldiers went home and their service ended. The tribes went back to their villages. Arminius himself was murdered just a few years later, around the year 21, by his own people who decided he had grown too powerful to trust. The Romans stopped pushing that deep into Germania. The forests where the legions died stopped being visited, and stopped being mapped as well. Within a single generation, the exact spot was gone from memory. Rome lasted another 400 years in the west. The Middle Ages came and went. Entire libraries were written about the disaster, and still, nobody knew where it all actually happened. The forest kept its secret for almost 2,000 years, until a British soldier with a metal detector took an interest in an ordinary field. His name was Tony Clunn. He was a British army officer stationed in Germany during the Cold War, and metal detecting was his hobby. He also loved Roman history. Clunn had read the ancient accounts, and studied every theory about where the Varus battle might be. One area drew him in more than the rest. A strip of farmland near a small German village called Kalkriese. It fit the old description in one key way. There was a wooden ridge on one side, and low wet ground on the other, with a natural bottleneck between. Exactly the kind of place a marching army would be forced in to squeeze in for a long thin line. In 1987, with the landowner's permission, Clunn began searching the fields. He found silver Roman coins, then more of them. Every single one had been minted before or during the reign of Augustus, and not one of them were dated after the year 9. He also turned up lead sling bullets, the kind fired by Roman troops. He took the finds to a local museum, and the archaeologists there realised what they might be looking at. In 1989, professional excavations began, and what came out of the ground was extraordinary. Thousands of pieces of Roman military equipment, weapons and armour, coins by tens of thousands of them, the remains of a Roman camp, and human bones. Some lay in pits gathered and buried together, exactly as if they had been collected years after death. Just as the ancient account of Germanicus' men had done, some of the bones still carried the marks of battle wounds. And in one of the fields, they found an iron face, the one at the very start of this video. Since 1989, more than 5,000 pieces of Roman military gear have come out of the ground, and the digging still goes on today. In 2018, the team recovered a nearly complete set of Roman body armour, one of the earliest and most complete found anywhere. And everything points to the same moment in time. The coins stopped dead right after year 9, the weapons match the equipment of the early Roman Empire, and the land itself matches the ancient description of the battle. Recent science has pushed all of this even further. Testing on the iron from the site has found it close match to the metal from a Roman fort, a fort that was home to one of Varus' lost legions before it marched to its end. And if that link holds up, it would be the strongest scientific tie yet to this field and the exact army that died in year 9. Now all of this isn't proven beyond doubt. Some scholars argue the site might belong to a slightly later battle instead, and that debate is still going. But most experts, along with the team that have spent decades digging here, are convinced this is where the disaster happened. This is where the three legions were destroyed. This is where the bones were buried. Two thousand years after the army vanished, we have almost certainly found that forest. The iron face now sits in a museum beside the battlefield, in a glass case next to the coins and weapons pulled from the same ground. The man who wore it is still unknown. And somewhere in the same fields lies Marcus Celius, the senior centurion, maybe in the mass grave, buried nameless two thousand years ago, maybe still lost in the earth. His memorial still stands on the Rhine, where his brother left it. The space for his bones is still empty. The mass came out of the forest two thousand years after the legions marched in. Marcus Celius has never come out. And that's it from me guys, thank you so much for watching. My name's Joe, and this Buried Earth video was so much fun to learn about. On screen right now, two videos I think you're going to absolutely love. Apologies for my pronunciation, I tried a lot harder on this video, I do make mistakes, but I think I got it bang on for this video, I really hope I do anyway. Let us know in the comments, have you heard of this battle before? And apologies for my voice guys, it's feeling a bit rough today. But yeah, I'll see you next video.