Search for "Falchovarii" and you will find very little, and that is no accident. The name appears in the Notitia Dignitatum, the late Roman register of offices and units, as the label of an infantry unit, and I know of no second ancient source that mentions it. Whether a people, a sub-tribe or merely a recruiting label stands behind it cannot be shown. This article sets out what the entry says, what scholars infer from it, where the interpretations come from and where the evidence simply ends.
We know some peoples of late antiquity from battle reports, embassies and panegyrics. The Falchovarii we know from a list. They appear in the Notitia Dignitatum as a unit of the auxilia palatina, the auxiliary infantry of the mobile main army, under the second master of soldiers at the imperial court (magister militum praesentalis II). The text gives no more: no garrison, no campaign, no commander, no year.
That is not unusual. The Notitia names hundreds of units, and for most we have only the name and its place in the administrative scheme. In the case of the Falchovarii the name is also not a familiar tribal name. Tacitus knows Chatti, Bructeri and Chamavi; I know of no mention of the Falchovarii in the Germania. This article is therefore mainly about a question of source criticism: how much people is there in a unit name?
A word on method. For this piece I read the Notitia text in a Latin edition online, Ueda-Sarson's unit page and a few survey pages. I did not read the manuscripts, Seeck's critical edition or the specialist literature in full. The source list at the end separates what I read myself from what reached me only through summaries.
The Notitia Dignitatum is a state handbook in two halves. The eastern and western halves of the empire each get a list of civil and military offices, with illustrations of the insignia of office and, for the troops, shield designs. The usual dating puts the text in the early fifth century. The western half is thought to have been revised later; how many layers it contains is the subject of a long debate. I give only the rough state of research as survey works such as the Wikipedia article on the auxilia palatina present it, and I have not checked the dating discussion myself.
What matters here is the transmission. The Notitia does not survive in the original. We have Renaissance copies that go back to a medieval codex, and the pictures in them are copies of copies. Ueda-Sarson, who reconstructs unit shield patterns, mentions for instance a Paris manuscript and a "Froben" pattern; colours and forms can differ from copy to copy. Anyone who speaks about a Falchovarii shield is speaking about a drawing passed through several hands, not about a find.
There is also a problem of content. A register records a state of affairs, never completely and never at one moment. Units appear in it that existed only on paper, and units are missing that existed in fact. That the Falchovarii are listed proves that this unit existed in the Notitia's administrative scheme. It does not prove when it was raised, how strong it was or where its soldiers came from.
In the Latin text I read, the heading under the second master at court is "Auxilia palatina decem et septem", seventeen palatine auxiliary units, and the name Falchovarii stands in that list. It appears a second time in the caption to the master's insignia, in a row of shield descriptions. I found no further occurrence in the text, and I know of no mention in any other ancient writing.
"Auxilia palatina decem et septem: … Vindices. Bucinobantes. Falchovarii. Thraces. Tervingi. Felices Theodosiani. …"Notitia Dignitatum, Oriens, section on the second magister militum praesentalis, Latin text as given by Documenta Catholica Omnia (read only through a retrieval tool, order of lines not checked against a facsimile); roughly: "Palatine auxiliaries, seventeen: … Vindices, Bucinobantes, Falchovarii, Thracians, Tervingi, Felices Theodosiani …" Translation mine.
In the Latin text I read, the Falchovarii stand eleventh of seventeen: before them the Vindices and Bucinobantes, after them the Thraces, Tervingi and Felices Theodosiani. Ueda-Sarson also counts them eleventh. I checked this only against the online text, not a facsimile or Seeck. Position in the list follows rank, not geography, and is no argument for an origin.
It is striking that very different names stand in the row. The Bucinobantes are an Alamannic people opposite Mainz named by Ammianus Marcellinus (29.4.7); the Thracians denote a region; the Tervingi are a Gothic group (the usual classification). A unit could thus be named for a people, a landscape or a tribe from beyond the frontier. That is the pattern we know: the name says something about recruitment, not necessarily about the later soldiers.
One observation argues for more than a mere hapax. Under the first master at court stands a unit called Anglevarii. Ueda-Sarson reads the two as a "twinned pair" split between the two masters, and infers a shared origin from the closeness of the shield designs. On his reconstruction both shields have an indigo ground and a two-headed animal motif; under the first master the rim is red and the motif red, while the Falchovarii motif looks blue and somewhat "spikier". This pairing is the author's conclusion, as he says himself, not a statement of the Notitia.
The pattern of splitting is known from other cases: units that were raised together appear later apart under different commands. That it happened to the Anglevarii and Falchovarii is conceivable. It is not documented, since beyond the similar shields and the ending of the name there is no hint. At first sight this looks more convincing than it is: many names share the ending -varii, as we shall see.
Ueda-Sarson links the name Anglevarii to the Angles, who in Roman times are said to have lived in what is now southern Jutland. That too is an interpretation; the name can equally be tied to the Angrivarii, whom Tacitus places on the middle Weser. Both proposals are known in the literature, and I cannot decide here which carries better.
The Notitia illustrates many units with a shield design. On Ueda-Sarson's reconstruction the Falchovarii pattern has an indigo, rimless ground, a yellow boss and a blue two-headed animal motif. Such double-headed motifs occur more than a dozen times in the Notitia, above all among the auxilia palatina; the Falchovarii motif is closest to that of the Exculcatores in the western half.
The page also shows, for comparison, a die from Torslunda in Sweden (roughly sixth century), a late Roman belt buckle from Upavon in Wiltshire and a shield on the Arch of Constantine in Rome, built by 315 at the latest. The author sets these images side by side but claims no link to the Falchovarii. Neither do I: a similar motif does not prove a common origin, and the reading of the figures on the arch varies. Michael Speidel has read them as dragons; Ueda-Sarson thinks goats possible. I have not seen Speidel's book, only this attribution as given by Ueda-Sarson.
Anyone who wants to derive from the shield that the Falchovarii practised a Germanic dragon cult overstretches the drawing. Notitia shield designs were assigned to a unit by the army; they are unit badges. They tell us something about administration and rarely anything about the customs of the soldiers.
The second part of the name is comparatively easy to grasp. The ending -varii occurs in a series of peoples' names: Ampsivarii, Chattuarii, Angrivarii, Anglevarii, Bavarii. It is generally taken as a Germanic word for "inhabitants" or "people of", related to Old English ware, as in "Cantware" for the people of Kent. This explanation is widespread in the research; I have not checked it against a specialist publication here and give it as the consensus of survey literature.
The beginning Falcho- is harder. Ueda-Sarson gives two proposals. The first traces the name to the Veluwe in the Netherlands and reads it as "unproductive", related to English fallow; the Falchovarii would then be the "people of the fallow land". The second links it to Latin falx, sickle, and so to "falcon". The author himself writes that the exact origin of the name is uncertain. His page does not say whose proposal it was originally, and in the time available I could not trace it.
Two cautions. First, the Veluwe connection is a hypothesis that ties a name to a landscape without any source placing the Falchovarii there. Second, the falcon reading is catchy but also only an echo, and echoes are the commonest source of error in name research.
Even the spelling is not fixed. As with nearly all Notitia names, copyists confused letters, and in manuscripts "ch" and "c" turned into various things. The name we read is the form the tradition handed down, not necessarily the one a soldier pronounced.
What is to be suspected behind the name? There are three possibilities, and none can be excluded.
First, an independent tribe that entered Roman service during the imperial period. Against this speaks the complete silence of geographers and historians. Had it been a larger group, Ammianus or the panegyrists of the tetrarchic age would presumably have named it somewhere. That is an argument from silence and carries only so far: of the late antique authors we possess only a fraction.
Second, a sub-group of a larger people that the Romans led separately. That would fit the suggestion that the Falchovarii were the counterpart of the Anglevarii. The name would then at home perhaps have been a village, district or settlement name that few understood. This too cannot be proven.
Third, a pure army name. Roman units often kept the name of their first recruits for generations, even when men from quite different regions served in them. The auxilia palatina are in any case regarded as troops whose names partly point to the place of recruitment and partly were honorific titles (Cornuti, Brachiati); according to survey accounts many of the named units were raised in eastern Gaul or among Germans. On this reading "Falchovarii" would merely be the name of a unit that at some point took in men from a district called Falcho-.
What separates the three readings is, in the end, whether the name existed before the unit was raised. Only then would it be a tribal name in the strict sense. If the unit received the name from the administration, say as a collective label for recruits from one stretch of land, there would never have been a "people of the Falchovarii", and the search for their homeland would be a search for something that existed only on paper. I regard none of the three as proven.
This article does not commit itself. Whoever claims the Falchovarii were "a Frankish tribe" or "a Saxon district" goes beyond the sources. What can be seen is only this: a name with a Germanic ending, in a list that contains many Germans.
A name becomes more tangible when set beside better-known ones. Tacitus places the Chamavi north of the Lower Rhine and in the Germania as settlers in former Bructeri land; in the fourth century they appear in Ammianus, Julian and Eunapius as opponents and recruits of Rome. According to livius.org the Notitia even lists an eleventh cohort of Chamavi in the Thebaid in Egypt, an example of how far a unit could stand from the home of its name. More on the page about the Chamavi.
The Angrivarii sit in Tacitus on the middle Weser, where they built a boundary bank against the Cherusci; their region later belongs to Engern in Saxon territory. Whether the Anglevarii of the Notitia are their descendants or a different name is open. The Bucinobantes, finally, are an Alamannic people opposite Mainz named by Ammianus Marcellinus; they stand in the same list as the Falchovarii. Anyone wanting to know how much can be said about such a sub-tribe with better sources will find it in our article on the Bucinobantes.
A case with similarly thin evidence is the Chaibones, who, as far as I can see, occur only in one panegyric to Maximian from about 289. The comparison is instructive: there too location, size and origin are missing, and the assignment to the Franks is not given in the sources. With the Falchovarii it is one step weaker, since we have no narrative source, only the register.
From these neighbours a location cannot be triangulated. The Notitia orders units by rank, not by geography. That the Falchovarii stand next to the Bucinobantes does not mean they are to be sought near the Main or the Rhine.
That Germans served in large numbers in the Roman army in the fourth century is well attested. The auxilia palatina go back, in the usual account, to Constantine's army reforms of the 320s; some of the oldest units bore honorific names, others the names of the peoples from whom they were raised. A. H. M. Jones estimates the strength of such a unit at 600 to 700 men, according to the summary on Wikipedia; direct evidence is lacking. I give these figures as an estimate, not as established fact.
Recruitment ran along several routes. Defeated groups were settled on imperial soil as laeti or dediticii and obliged to serve. Individual warriors joined voluntarily, others came through treaties with their leaders. A name like Falchovarii may go back to such a group, to an auxiliary force that a master of soldiers assembled from a small group in the Rhine-near regions. This too is a conjecture that the sources do not contain.
What matters for classification: a unit with a tribal name in the fourth century was not an ethnically closed troop. Reinforcements, losses and refilling turned the name into tradition. Such a composition is better documented for units like the Franks than for the Falchovarii, about whose single soldier we know nothing.
Whoever reconstructs a people from a register easily makes the mistake of taking the list for a map. Three peculiarities of the Notitia need attention. First, it counts some units twice, as "seniores" and "iuniores", without our always knowing whether two formations or a division stand behind this. Second, lists were updated over time, and entries could remain after a unit had perished; the time layer of a single entry is therefore hard to determine. Third, names are particularly vulnerable in the manuscript tradition, because they have no meaning in the surrounding sentence by which a copyist could orient himself. A familiar word is corrected, an unfamiliar one is dragged along.
For the Falchovarii this means: a scribal error cannot be ruled out, even if the form looks stable with two mentions in the text. I know of no proposal to read the name as a corruption of another form, but cannot exclude that one exists in the literature. Equally unknown to me is whether the unit still existed in the decades after the Notitia.
The gaps are as much part of the finding as the entry. I know of no inscription naming the Falchovarii, no papyrus document and no coin legend, and likewise no grave find that could be linked to them. That such evidence is lacking does not exclude them; inscriptions for late Roman palatine units are rare, and my overview is limited. I did not search a database such as the Clauss-Slaby epigraphic database.
Archaeologically the situation is harder still. A soldier of the Falchovarii could not be recognised as such from his equipment: late Roman belt fittings and weapons are found in cemeteries on the Rhine and Danube, but without unit labels. Archaeology can show men in Roman equipment with Germanic burial customs. It cannot say in which unit they served.
So only a sober statement remains: the Falchovarii are a palatine unit with a Germanic-sounding name, listed in the Notitia. Their origin, their settlement area and the length of their existence are open. That is less than an encyclopedia would like, but it is what the sources bear.
This site is otherwise about the Viking Age, and the question arises why the Falchovarii stand here. The answer: they stand for the background. Between the Notitia (around 400) and the first attested Viking raids (late eighth century) lie some four hundred years. A connection between a late Roman auxiliary unit and Norse seafarers cannot be established, and whoever asserts one skips that time.
What the Notitia does show is exchange between Romans and Germans: men from beyond the Rhine, from the North Sea coast and perhaps from southern Jutland were taken into Roman formations. This contact shapes the fashions in weapons and jewellery of the Migration Period, which later also appear in the north. Even so: the double-headed animal on the shield and the animal styles of the north share a visual language, but no demonstrable line. More on the difference between early Germans and the Viking Age in Germanic peoples and Vikings compared.
Who were the Falchovarii? According to the Notitia Dignitatum an infantry unit of the late Roman palace army. Whether a people stood behind it cannot be shown.
Where did the Falchovarii live? Unknown. The Veluwe is named in one interpretation of the name but not attested in any source.
What does the name mean? The ending -varii is mostly read as "people" or "inhabitants". For the beginning there are at least two proposals ("fallow" and "falcon/sickle"); neither is secure.
Is there a link to the Anglevarii? Both units stand in the Notitia under the two masters of soldiers, and their shields resemble each other. Ueda-Sarson takes them for a twin pair; that is his conclusion, not a statement of the source.
Can anything be said about their appearance? Only about the shield design in Notitia copies, and that is a copy of copies.
The Chaibones · The Franks · The Saxons · The Frisians · Germanic Tribes of the Rhineland.
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