The illustration, printed by Hans Guldenmundt, shows a fully harnessed king with hops on his head, a helmet in his hand and a bundle of barley behind him. It’s beer king Gambrinus, only the crown and the jug of beer are still missing. And of course the corruption from the v (Gambrivii) into an n in his name still had to be adopted generally. However, by 1568 rhetoric Marcus van Vaernewijck from Gent was using exactly that spelling

Gambrinus. Where does this figure come from? To find the answer we must go back all the way to Roman Antiquity. In about the year 98 AD senator Tacitus wrote a short history of the Germans, a primitive people living north of the Rhine and the Alps. Actually it isn’t such a long work, no more than 15 pages if you print it. On the origin of the Germans, he claims that they worshipped a god called Teuto and his son Mannus as their oldest ancestors. Then, it says:

To Mannus they assign three sons, from whose names, they say, the coast tribes are called Ingaevones; those of the interior, Herminones; all the rest, Istaevones. Some […] assert that the god had several descendants, and the nation several appellations, as Marsi, Gambrivii, Suevi, Vandilii, and that these are genuine old names.

The Gambrivians (‘Gambrivios’), of which Tacitus says they didn’t exist, are elsewhere only mentioned in passing by Greek scientist Strabo in his encyclopaedic work Geographia from the early first century,