The Roman–Etruscan Wars, also known as the Etruscan Wars or the Etruscan–Roman Wars, were a series of wars fought between ancient Rome (in both the regal and the republican periods) and the Etruscans. Information about many of the wars is limited, particularly those in the early parts of Rome's history, and in large part is known from ancient texts alone. The conquest of Etruria was completed in 265–264 BC.
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👉 Roman–Etruscan Wars in the context of Etruscans
The Etruscans (/ɪˈtrʌskən/ ih-TRUS-kən) created a civilization in Etruria in ancient Italy, with a common language and culture, and formed a federation of city-states. After adjacent lands had been conquered, its territory covered, at its greatest extent, roughly what is now Tuscany, western Umbria and northern Lazio, as well as what are now the Po Valley, Emilia-Romagna, south-eastern Lombardy, southern Veneto and western Campania.
A large body of literature has flourished on the origins of the Etruscans, but the consensus among modern scholars is that the Etruscans were an indigenous population. The earliest evidence of a culture that is identifiably Etruscan dates from about 900 BC. This is the period of the Iron Age Villanovan culture, considered to be the earliest phase of Etruscan civilization, which itself developed from the previous late Bronze Age Proto-Villanovan culture in the same region, part of the central European Urnfield culture system. Etruscan civilization dominated Italy until it fell to the expanding Rome beginning in the late 4th century BC as a result of the Roman–Etruscan Wars; Etruscans were granted Roman citizenship in 90 BC and in 27 BC the whole Etruscan territory was incorporated into the newly established Roman Empire.
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Roman–Etruscan Wars in the context of Roman expansion in Italy
The Roman expansion in Italy covers a series of conflicts in which Rome grew from being a small Italian city-state to be the ruler of the Italian region. Roman tradition attributes to the Roman kings the first war against the Sabines and the first conquests around the Alban Hills and down to the coast of Latium. The birth of the Roman Republic after the overthrow of the Etruscan monarch of Rome in 509 BC began a series of major wars between the Romans and the Etruscans. In 390 BC, Gauls from the north of Italy sacked Rome. In the second half of the 4th century BC Rome clashed repeatedly with the Samnites, a powerful tribal coalition of the Apennine region.
By the end of these wars, Rome had become the most powerful state in central Italy and began to expand to the north and to the south. The last threat to Roman hegemony came during the Pyrrhic War (280–275 BC) when Tarentum enlisted the aid of the Greek king Pyrrhus of Epirus to campaign in the North of Italy. Resistance in Etruria was finally crushed in 265–264 BC, the same year the First Punic War began and brought Roman forces outside of the peninsula for the first time. Starting from the First Punic War (264–241 BC) the territories subject to Roman rule also included Sicily (241 BC), Sardinia and Corsica (238 BC), islands transformed into provinces.