Castra Novaesium

Novaesium was the name the Romans used for the successive legionary camps and fortress at what is now the city of Neuss, on the west bank of the Rhine, in Germany. The earliest occupations, dating from the late 1st century BC to the early 1st century AD, were a succession of earth and timber camps with the legionaries living in tents. In around AD 43, a large legionary fortress was begun, which was progressively fortified with stone walls, gates, and turrets, along with more permanent barracks, officers' quarters and administrative buildings. As the Romans abandoned an expectation of a continually expanding empire the fortress became a permanent structure, and helped to create the Limes, limits of the Roman Empire, along this stretch of the Rhine Valley. The fortress was made smaller in the early 2nd century but remained an auxiliary base which helped define and defend the north-eastern limits of the Roman Empire for a further 200 years.

The foundations of the stone fortress were discovered by Constantin Koenen in the late 19th century. When excavated it was the first complete ground plan of a legionary fortress and came to epitomise the 'playing card' style Claudian era fortress. Further excavations in the 1950s to 1980s revealed progressively more complex precursor camps to the west of Koenen's excavations, leaving a chronology and terminology which remains to some extent unresolved. The whole site was developed for housing as the excavations progressed, limiting the scope for subsequent discovery or clarification. In 2021 the lower Rhine fortifications were inscribed as the Lower Germanic Limes UNESCO World Heritage Site, a series of 102 locations from south of Bonn (Germany) to the North Sea coast (the Netherlands).