The Battle of the Weser River, sometimes known as a first Battle of Minden, was a battle fought in 16 AD between Roman legions commanded by the Emperor Tiberius' heir and adopted son Julius Caesar Germanicus, and German tribes commanded by Arminius.
Ancient sources identify the location as "Idistaviso", but the precise location is unknown, save that it was not far from the mouth of the Weser River on the North Sea coast of present-day Germany. The battle marked the end of a three-year campaign by Germanicus to restore the Roman frontier at the Elbe, lost in AD 9. The German tribes generally avoided open large-scale combat, but at this battle Germanicus was finally able to force them out in a major engagement. The Romans were victorious, and managed even to capture Arminius' wife Thusnelda. But Arminius escaped with the bulk of his army intact, and Germanicus once again had to withdraw behind the Rhine for the winter.
Tiberius presumably saw no point in continuing the costly military campaign in a backward country, and ordered Germanicus to end his campaign and return to Rome. After this, Rome never again made a serious effort to conquer Germany beyond the Rhine River.
The son, Thumelicus, she bore Arminius while in captivity was trained by the Romans as a gladiator in Ravenna and died in a gladiator bout before reaching the age of thirty.
The last major battle between Germanicus and Arminius, the Battle of the Weser River, took place with heavy losses for both sides in 16 at Idistaviso (Angrivarierwal) near the Weser river, where the Romans avoided another devastating defeat only because, again, Inguiomer failed to heed the agreed battle plan.
But this marked the end of Roman attempts to subdue northern Germany.
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