SUEBI or SUEVI, a collective term applied to a number of peoples in central Germany, the chief of whom were the Mar comanni, Quadi, Hermunduri, Semnones, and Langobardi ; these tribes inhabited the basin of the Elbe. Tacitus uses the name Suebi in a wider sense to include not only the tribes of the basin of the Elbe, but all the tribes north and east of that river, including even the Swedes (Suiones).
From the 2nd to the 4th century A.D. the name Suebi is seldom used except with reference to events in the neighbourhood of the Pannonian frontier, and here probably means the Quadi. From the middle of the 4th century it appears in the regions south of the Main, and the names Alamanni and Suebi are used synon ymously. The Alamanni (q.v.) seem to have been joined by one or more other Suebic peoples, some of whom accompanied the Vandals in their invasion of Gaul and founded a kingdom in north west Spain. Besides the Alamannic Suebi we hear of a people called Suebi, who shortly after the middle of the 6th century settled north of the Unstrut. There is evidence also for a people
called Suebi in the district above the mouth of the Scheldt. It is likely that both these settlements were colonies from the Suebi of whom we hear in the Anglo-Saxon poem Widsitli as neighbours of the Angli. The question has been raised whether these Suebi should be identified with the people whom the Romans called Heruli. After the 7th century the name Suebi is practically only applied to the Alamannic Suebi (Schwaben), with whom it re mains a territorial designation in Wiirttemberg and Bavaria.
authorities are Caesar, B.G. i. 37, 51 et seq., iv. i. et seq., vi. 9 et seq.; Strabo, p. 290 et seq.; Tacitus, Germania, 38 et seq.; K. Zeuss, Die Deutschen and die Nachbar stamme, pp. 55 et seq., 315 et seq.; C. Bremer in Paul's Grundriss (2nd ed.), iii. 915-95o; H. M. Chadwick, Origin of the English Nation, 216 et seq. (Cambridge, 2907).