I love history, and periodically I run across amazing things while digging through the old books I’ve accumulated over the years. This one may be new to you, but, on the off chance it jogs your memory, do you remember that prehistoric battle beyond the edge of the world?
Life in most of Europe and the Mediterranean went from “surprisingly well-organized” to “dead” in the span of only a few generations around 1200 B.C., a time period known as the Bronze Age Collapse. Almost every city in the region was destroyed, many permanently. Some Egyptian records survive of the period, speaking of war and Pharoah’s successful defense of Egypt against marauders from the sea. (The records are less forthcoming about the fate of the Egyptian holdings in the Levant, which were unsuccessfully defended.)
We know little else about the period, though. Most of the people who would have written annals disappeared with their cities, and whoever did the burning rarely recorded their reasons for posterity. One of the few stories from the era that survived is that of the destruction of Troy, though the casus belli seems to have been a later embellishment (or, at minimum, is probably unrelated to the destruction of civilization in the rest of the region). Ironically, most of the Greek cities mentioned came to the same end as Troy within a generation or three.
There are a lot of unanswered questions here, but in the less civilized periphery we barely even have questions. People lived there, of course, but in small villages that left us little or no record beyond their structures, refuse, and the occasional inexplicable megalith.
At least, that’s what everyone thought. Then someone found an arm bone stuck in the ground near the Tollense River.
Over twenty years later, the excavations are ongoing, and the story they tell has completely rewritten the history of Northern Europe. At some time around 1250 B.C., a group of over one thousand battle-scarred, heavily armed, and heavily armoured warriors left the great cities of the Mediterranean and traveled almost to the Baltic Sea before being defeated and routed in a massive battle at a strategic bridge over the Tollense.
These guys were professionals. A thousand such men could have been the core of many armies of the period, or even a thousand years later. Instead of seeking work with one of the great empires in the region, or sacking a minor city and making it their own (the later Mamertines, who probably had comparable numbers, had much success with this formula), this band of warriors turned north into the hinterlands.
What could have been up there that attracted their attention? We have no idea. There must have been enough food along the way for them to pillage to keep them alive, though, because it’s a long walk from the Mediterranean to the Baltic.
Then, on the far northern edge of the continent, this group of warriors fought a pitched battle with someone and lost. Not an ambush, men slaughtered in their beds or on the march. These men had time to put on their armor (though it was stripped from some corpses by the victors). There was a planned battle at this bridge, and there someone was able to rally a force large enough and well-trained enough to stop a thousand skilled warriors. Who? We don’t know. There aren’t even legends surviving of a civilization in this period and region that could have put together a force like that.
So, thirty-two hundred years ago, just before their world began to burn, one thousand hard-bitten warriors marched two thousand kilometers into the trackless wilderness, armed up for battle, and then had their rear ends handed to them by a nameless foe. This is amazing. It’s the ultimate fill-in-the-blank story generator. We have just one moment in time, petrified in hundreds of burials in a swamp. What led up to it? Your imagination is the limit. How did it go down? However you think it did. What were the repercussions in Northern Europe? Your guess is as good as mine.
Read the articles I linked to let the milieu sink in and get the facts, and then let your imagination run wild. I have, ever since I first ran across this incident, and it’s tremendous fun. A hundred people could write a hundred different historical novels about this event, all consistent with what we know so far, and tell a hundred completely different stories. Why not add your own to that list?