Goths

• 1. Introduction

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  The Goths were a Germanic people, and in 410 their forces walked into the city of Rome and sacked it. The riches were plundered, yet the civilian inhabitants were treated humanely and only a few buildings burned. Their leader, Alaric I, died soon afterward. He was buried with his treasure in an unknown grave beneath the Busento river, where it has never been found. Greco-Roman authors first wrote of the Goths in the 3rd century, describing people who lived north of the Lower Danube in what is now Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania. From those northern lands they raided Roman territory and, in large numbers, joined the Roman military. Out of this single people came two kingdoms, one in Italy and one in Spain, a saint canonized in Crimea, and the names later borrowed by an architecture, a body of literature, and a modern subculture. How does one people end up scattered from the Baltic to the Black Sea to Toledo? Why does a king from south-central Sweden, by some accounts, end up commemorated in stone outside Ravenna? And what makes a Roman writer admit that the peasants of his own empire prayed never to live under Rome again?

• 2. Names And Origins

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  In the Gothic language the Goths called themselves Gut-thiuda, meaning Gothic people, or Gutans. The reconstructed Proto-Germanic form is Gutoz, identical to the name of the Gutes from Gotland in Sweden, and closely related to the Geats of mainland Sweden, reconstructed as Gautoz. All these names are thought to trace back to the Proto-Germanic verb geuta, meaning to pour, though the meaning is uncertain. The 6th-century historian Jordanes, writing his book Getica around 551, claimed the Goths began on an island called Scandza and crossed the sea to a region called Gothiscandza under their king Berig. Scholars have long questioned the accuracy of this account for such early history. Most agree some migration from Scandinavia is reflected in the archaeological record, but the picture is not clear, and many envision a gradual movement of perhaps a few elite clans rather than one mass migration of an entire people. Genetic work supports a northern thread. Studies sequenced genomes from the Wielbark culture Goths, finding a large majority autosomally Scandinavian-like, carrying predominantly Scandinavian Y-DNA. The most common haplogroup was I1-M253, characteristic of the Nordic Bronze Age in Southern Scandinavia. The diversity among the I1 carriers suggests the male founders descended from clans across a widespread area of Scandinavia, a quiet confirmation of a memory the Goths carried in their sagas.

• 3. Toward The Black Sea

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  Around 15 AD, the geographer Strabo mentions the Butones, generally equated with the Gutones, among peoples dominated by the Marcomannic king Maroboduus. In 77 AD, Pliny the Elder lists the Gutones among the peoples of Germania, grouping them with the Vandili. By around 98 AD, Tacitus describes the Gotones as Germani who carried round shields and short swords, lived near the ocean, and were ruled by kings a little more strictly than other German tribes. Beginning in the middle of the 2nd century, the Wielbark culture shifted southeast toward the Black Sea, part of a wider southward movement of eastern Germanic tribes probably driven by massive population growth. By 200 AD, Wielbark Goths were likely being recruited into the Roman army. Jordanes tells of the Goths entering Oium, part of Scythia, under the king Filimer, where they defeated a people called the Spali. The historian Peter Heather considers the Filimer story to be at least partially drawn from Gothic oral tradition. By the mid-3rd century the Wielbark culture had helped form the strikingly uniform Chernyakhov culture, which stretched from the Danube in the west to the Don in the east. It was dominated by the Goths and groups such as the Heruli, but also held Iranian, Dacian, Roman, and probably Slavic elements. On the Pontic steppe the Goths absorbed nomadic customs from the Sarmatians, excelling at horsemanship, archery, and falconry, while remaining accomplished farmers and seafarers. The historian J. B. Bury called this the only non-nomadic episode in the history of the steppe.

• 4. Wars With Rome

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  The sack of Histria near the mouth of the Danube in 238 is the first incursion into the Roman Empire attributable to Goths. Early sources called them Scythians, after the unrelated people who had once held their base. From the 240s, Goths were heavily recruited into the Roman army to fight in the Roman-Persian Wars, taking part in the Battle of Misiche in 244. In 250-51, the Gothic king Cniva captured Philippopolis and crushed the Romans at the Battle of Abrittus, killing the Emperor Decius, one of the most disastrous defeats in the history of the Roman army. The first Gothic seaborne raids came in the 250s. An unsuccessful attack on Pityus was followed by another that sacked Pityus and Trabzon, and a still larger force devastated Bithynia, striking Chalcedon, Nicomedia, and Nicaea. After a ten-year pause, the Goths and Heruli sailed with a fleet of 500 ships, sacked Heraclea Pontica and Byzantium, then broke through Thermopylae and raided Athens, Corinth, Argos, Olympia, and Sparta. An Athenian militia led by the historian Dexippus pushed them north, where the Roman army under Gallienus won an important victory near the Nessos river. A second, larger invasion of Goths, Gepids, and Peucini followed, struck by the Cyprianic Plague, and may have damaged the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Learning of the approach of Claudius, these Goths met a Roman army near Naissus, probably in 269. At the critical moment the Romans feigned retreat and sprang an ambush. Some 50,000 Goths were said to be killed or captured. The battle ensured the survival of the Roman Empire for another two centuries.

• 5. Living Beside Rome

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  In 332, the Emperor Constantine helped the Sarmatians settle on the north banks of the Danube to defend the Roman border against Gothic attacks, with around 100,000 Goths reportedly killed in battle. Aoric, son of the Thervingian king Ariaric, was captured. Both the Greuthungi and Thervingi became heavily Romanized during the 4th century, through trade and through a military covenant based in Byzantium. Reportedly 40,000 Goths were brought by Constantine to defend Constantinople, and the Palace Guard afterward was mostly Germanic warriors. Goths who rose high in the Roman military include Gainas, Tribigild, Fravitta, and Aspar. A Gothic eunuch named Mardonius was the childhood tutor and later adviser of the emperor Julian, on whom he had immense influence. The Gothic habit of wearing skins became fashionable in Constantinople, to the dismay of conservatives. The 4th-century bishop Synesius compared the Goths to wolves among sheep, describing a man in skins who trades his sheepskins for the toga to sit beside a Roman consul, then puts the skins back on outside and mocks the toga, saying he cannot comfortably draw his sword in it. The Greuthungian king Ermanaric then embarked on a large-scale expansion. Jordanes compares his conquests to those of Alexander the Great, claiming he ruled all the nations of Scythia and Germany by his own prowess alone. Peter Heather argues the extent of this power was exaggerated, while Herwig Wolfram pictures a vast sphere stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, as far east as the Ural Mountains, a realm one historian saw as a forerunner of Kievan Rus.

• 6. The Huns And The Danube

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  Around 375 the Huns overran the Alans, an Iranian people east of the Goths, then invaded Gothic territory. The Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus wrote that Hunnic domination of the Gothic kingdoms in Scythia began in the 370s. Upon the suicide of Ermanaric in 376, the Greuthungi gradually fell under Hunnic rule, and the Thervingian leader Athanaric sought refuge in the mountains. That same year Fritigern, a rival of Athanaric, approached the Eastern Roman emperor Valens with part of his people and asked to settle on the south bank of the Danube. Valens permitted it and even helped them cross, probably at the fortress of Durostorum. Mistreated by corrupt local officials, the refugees soon faced famine. Some were forced to sell their children to Roman slave traders in return for rotten dog meat. Enraged, Fritigern launched a wide rebellion across Thrace, joined by Gothic refugees and slaves, disgruntled Roman workers and peasants, and Gothic deserters from the army. The Gothic War lasted several years and culminated in the Battle of Adrianople in 378, where the Romans were badly defeated and Valens was killed. Afterward Julius, the magister militum of the East, organized a wholesale massacre of Goths across Asia Minor and Syria, luring them into urban streets from which they could not escape. With the rise of Theodosius I in 379, Rome renewed its offensive. On the 3rd of October 382, Theodosius concluded peace with the Thervingi, making them foederati in Thrace bound to provide troops to the Roman army.

• 7. Two Kingdoms And A Remnant

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  The Visigoths, meaning Goths of the west, were a new political unit drawn together under their first leader, Alaric I, and led by the Balti dynasty claiming descent from the Thervingi. After Alaric, his brother-in-law Athaulf married Galla Placidia, sister of the emperor Honorius, and settled the Visigoths in southern Gaul. Their successors gained acceptance as foederati with a capital at Toulouse. Under Euric they founded an independent kingdom, though they were a tiny minority, roughly 200,000 among some 6,000,000 Hispano-Romans. Pushed out of most of Gaul by the Frankish king Clovis I at the Battle of Vouille in 507, they made a new capital at Toledo. The conversion of Reccared I to Roman Catholicism in the late 6th century began the assimilation of Goths with Hispano-Romans. Their kingdom fell to the Umayyad Caliphate from 711, after the defeat of their last king Roderic at the Battle of Guadalete. The Ostrogoths, Goths of the east, were led by the Amali dynasty. Under their king Theodoric, ordered by the emperor Zeno to invade Italy in 488, they conquered the peninsula from Odoacer by 493 and formed the Ostrogothic Kingdom at Ravenna. Theodoric settled his people, estimated at 100,000 to 200,000, and ruled efficiently, treating the Roman majority fairly. The Eastern Roman Empire then invaded in the Gothic War. The Ostrogoths made a brief resurgence under Totila, killed at the Battle of Taginae in 552, and resistance ended after the last stand of Teia at the Battle of Mons Lactarius in 553. A third strand survived far longer. The Crimean Goths kept their Gothic identity well into the 18th century, allied with the Byzantines, and produced John of Gothia, bishop of Doros, who briefly expelled the Khazars and was canonized as an Eastern Orthodox saint.

• 8. Stone Tombs And Borrowed Names

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  The Mausoleum of Theodoric stands just outside Ravenna, built in 520 AD by Theodoric the Great as his future tomb. Made of Istria stone in two decagonal orders, its roof is a single 230-tonne Istrian stone, 10 meters in diameter. Possibly nodding to the Goths' tradition of a Scandinavian origin, the architect decorated the frieze with a pattern found in 5th- and 6th-century Scandinavian metal adornments. A circular porphyry stone grave sat at the center of the floor, where Theodoric was buried, though his remains were removed during Byzantine rule when the building became a Christian oratory. In Spain the Visigoths left an important collection of metalwork in the treasure of Guarrazar, near Guadamur in the Province of Toledo, twenty-six votive crowns and gold crosses from the royal workshop in Toledo. The two most important crowns belonged to Recceswinth and Suintila, made of gold and encrusted with sapphires, pearls, and other precious stones. Suintila's crown was stolen in 1921 and never recovered. The Gothic language left its own monument. It is the Germanic language with the earliest attestation, known mainly from the Codex Argenteus, now in Uppsala, which holds a partial translation of the Bible credited to Ulfilas. The Goths' name outlived the Goths themselves. Gothic architecture, Gothic literature, and the modern Goth subculture all take their names from the ancient Goths, though the Goths created none of these. The name even traveled into insult. In Spain a man acting with arrogance is said to be making himself act like the Goths, and the word godo became an ethnic slur in Chile, Argentina, and the Canary Islands, surviving in Colombia as slang for a person with conservative views.