Bagaudes

The bagaudes ( bagaudae in Latin) were, under the Roman Empire of, the name given to the armed bands brigands, deserting soldiers, slaves and peasants without ground which held to ransom the North-West of the Gaulle. The weight of the Roman taxation combined to the misery caused by plunderings of the barbarians seems to be, for the majority of these men, the reason to want to live plunders. This name bagaude drift of the Celtic Bagad, which means troop, assembly. Some bagaudes will obtain an organization politico-soldier. In their greater extension, they will cover both fifth of the territory of Gaulle (North-western mainly).

One can also make a bringing together with the contemporary usurpations which seem also the consequence of the social problems and the political agitation of the time, even if they do not relate to the same social classes and are not identified like bagaude. For example, in 281 the inhabitants of Lugdunum supported the usurpation of Proculus, rich landowner who armed his 2000 slaves. He escaped as soon as the imperial legions approached.

First bagaudes

In 284 (or earlier according to the authors) appeared the first bagaudes carried out by Aelianus in Gaulle of North hardly given of the devastations of the Germanic invasion of 276. Peasants Gallic revolted against the imperial administration. They took Autun and ransacked it. Contents some time by Aurélien and Probus, they revolted again under Dioclétien, having at their head some Amandus. They were overcome in 286 by the emperor Maximien Hercules.

The recovery

The revolts bagaudes began again at the 4th century, during the Germanic invasions as a Gaulle and Spain. Devastations exerted on the rural and urban population, and the anarchy developed by the retreat of the imperial authority sometimes replaced by less assured cruel dominations again induirent the regrouping of armed bands with ruined peasants and deserters, to which united from the cities of the fugitive slaves and the involved in debt townsmen, fighting for their survival or tempted to join plunderings barbarians. Certain historians also saw there aspirations Autonomiste S against the Romain Empire, in the interactions between the bagaudes and the Breton refugees of Armorique or the Basque tribes in Spain. But the hunger and the easy lure of gain seem sufficient motivations during such a time of upheaval.

Bagaude de Tibatto

In 435, Tibatto is the chief of a bagaude which, according to the Chronica gallica , caused the secession of the later Gaulle and to which all the slaves united. Tibatto is overcome and captured in 437. A legend drawn from ecclesiastical sources, in particular of the abbey of St Maur, locates these events on the edges of the Marne at the place Bagaudarum castrum called Saint-Maur-of-Ditches today, close to Paris. The ditches in question were those which would have protégè their camps but these ditches go back to a date much older. A door of Paris on the side of St-Maur would have received, in memory of Bagaudes, the name of carried Bugaudarum , and, by abbreviation, carried Bauda ; it was located on the ground called since Place Baudoyer (behind the Town hall of current Paris). It is acted in fact of an erroneous etymological interpretation. Moreover it is by no means shown that this bond supposed with Bagaudes would relate to the time of Tibatto more than that of Aelianus and Amandus.

Last bagaudes

Shortly after this date, a revolt bagaude repressed in Spain by the Visigoths, on order of the Roman authorities.

In 448, a news bagaude as a Gaulle power station is directed by a doctor named Eudoxe. Beaten, it took refuge at the court of Attila.

A text of 638 relative to Saint-Maur-of-Ditches, in the Paris region, mentions a cutting off of the bagaudes in the locality.

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