The Quades (Latin m. quadi) are a West Germanic people, perhaps of Germano-Celtic origin, known in particular thanks to the Roman historian Tacitus.
The Suevi have long been confused with the Quadi, due to a confusion with the term "Swabian". In reality, the Quades are above all to be compared to their closest Germanic neighbors, the Marcomanni, with whom they shared many battles against Rome.
The exact origin of the Quades is unknown. They settled very early in what is now Moravia. Tacitus (La Germanie, XLII, 1), situates them as follows:
“Next to the Hermundures live the Narists and, following them, the Marcomanni and the Quades. The glory and the power of the Marcomanni are their superiority, just like their territory which they acquired by their bravery by expelling the Boiens in the past. Naristes and Quades are worth them. They form in a way the front of Germania from end to end along the entire bank of the Danube. »
Quickly, they seem to have become recalcitrant allies of Rome. Thus, in Augustan times, the future king of the Marcomanni, Marobod, had been held hostage in Rome in his youth. Of the king of the Quades quoted by Tacitus, Tuder, we know nothing. In any case, they maintained an uneasy “alliance” with Rome under Domitian, around 80. To the latter, they refused to provide auxiliaries against the Dacians. Around the same time (the date is uncertain) they destroyed a Roman legion. They also faced the Emperor's troops in a campaign that proved disastrous for Rome in 89.
In the 2nd century, the Quades drove out the Dacians who, established in the south of present-day Slovakia, had been subjugated by Rome at the end of the previous century. The Quades then exerted constant pressure on the Danubian limes with their southern neighbors (namely another Germanic tribe established on the lower Danube, the Marcomanni).
Having crossed the Danube in 167, then clashing with the Roman armies, they recrossed the river in 168, after asking Rome for peace. Again threatening the borders of the empire, under the leadership of their king Ariogaesus, they were defeated on their own territory by Marcus Aurelius in 169, in an unhappy coalition with the Marcomanni. Subdued for a time, they revolted in 177.
In the 3rd century, the Quades were again defeated alongside the Carpes by Philip I the Arab (in 247).
In the summer of 375, they were defeated by Valentinian I who, moreover, would have died of a fit of anger against their ambassadors, in November of the same year.
It was at the end of the 4th century that a new threat appeared:the Hunnic Empire subjugated or dispersed the Quades, like many Germanic peoples, leading to the major phase of the Great Invasions bearing on the Western Empire. Thus, in 406, Quades crossed the Rhine alongside the Vandals. They follow the latter beyond the Pyrenees in 408, before conquering the current province of León and founding a kingdom in Galicia:the Suevian kingdom.
Eventually, eclipsed during the time of Attila's empire (until 453), the presence of the Quades - and more generally of the Germans - on the Danube came to an end when the Slavs settled in the region.