A group of Germanic peoples who inhabited the region north of the Black Sea before being driven into the Roman empire by the Huns, after which they established several kingdoms in central and western Europe.
Like many other names denoting tribal identity, “Goth” is more convenient than it is precise. It is used to describe a variety of related peoples from Scandinavia who migrated southward through the Baltic region into what is now southern Russia and the lower Danube around 150 C.E.
The Roman historian Tacitus (early second century C.E.) referred to the Goths (Gutones) as living along the Baltic coast of what is now Poland. They were one of many groups associated with the Wielbark culture. Our knowledge of early Gothic history comes largely from the Getica, written by a Gothic historian in Constantinople named Jordanes. Jordanes’s account is based largely on Ostrogothic court records and legends; much of it is pure myth, and it is difficult to ascertain with certainty what parts are reliable.
The Getica describes how the Goths began to migrate south under a leader called Filimer. As they crossed a great river (possibly the Dnieper), their bridge collapsed. Those who had already crossed settled in southern Ukraine, Crimea, and the Caucasus and became known as Ostrogoths. Those left behind moved southwest to the northern banks of the Danube and were known as the Visigoths.
Archaeological findings support the literary evidence, suggesting that large-scale, belligerent movements of Germanic groups through eastern Europe did in fact take place between roughly 150 and 230. This was possibly because of feuds between rival groups within the Wielbark tribes. However, there were most likely many such movements, and Jordanes’s story of one migration and the subsequent division into Ostrogoths and Visigoths is pure speculation.
Beginning in 230, Gothic armies began to launch major raids into Roman territory. In an effort to control the Bosporan trade routes, the Goths invaded and eventually seized Crimea and other areas around the Black Sea. Between 267 and 269, a fleet of 2,000 Gothic ships raided cities around the Aegean. Two Roman emperors, Decius (251) and Valens (378), were killed by the Goths, while Claudius II gained the surname “Gothicus” for his stunning victory on the Danube in 269.
The Goths began to be Christianized during the mid-300s. A Gothic bishop named Ulfilas was consecrated and developed a unique Gothic script for writing. Because Arianism was the dominant sect at the moment, it was to this branch of Christianity that the Goths converted.
In 375, the Huns invaded the Pontic steppes, crushing the Ostrogothic kingdom and forcing the Visigoths west into Roman territory.
The Ostrogoths fell under Hunnic dominion (they would later form a major part of Attila’s armies in his European conquests). Following the breakup of the Hunnic empire in the mid-450s, the Ostrogoths began to settle in Pannonia (modern-day Hungary and northern Yugoslavia). Under Theodoric the Great, a remarkable leader who was both king of the Goths (the Visigoths acknowledged him as their king between 511 and his death in 526) and a Roman consul, the Ostrogoths invaded Italy in 493, capturing and murdering Odovacar (the king of the Heruli, who had seized control of Italy in 476). In 497, the Byzantine emperor Anastasius officially recognized Theodoric as king of Italy.
The Ostrogoths attempted to maintain separation between a Germanic noble class and a largely Roman peasantry. Roman citizens were permitted to be judged by their own laws but were largely forbidden to bear arms or to perform military service. There was also a great deal of tension between the Arian Ostrogoths and their largely Orthodox subjects. Nonetheless, the Ostrogoths were successful at maintaining control over the Italian peninsula for half a century. After Theodoric’s death in 526, his daughter Amalasuntha was regent for her son Athalric. She placed herself under the protection of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I but was murdered in 535, giving Justinian a pretext to reconquer Italy. The Byzantine general Belisarius crushed the Ostrogothic kingdom, but on his recall in 541 a warlord named Totila led an uprising and reestablished the kingdom. In 552, another Byzantine general, Narses, defeated and killed Totila. The Ostrogoths were reincorporated into the Roman empire and eventually lost their national identity. Byzantine hegemony over Italy was short lived; within a generation it had fallen to another German group, the Lombards.
Under the Ostrogothic kings, such scholars as Boethius and Cassiodorus revived the culture of late antiquity. The Catholic Church, despite the Ostrogoths’ Arian leanings, flourished as well; the ecclesiastic legal theorist Dionysius Exiguus and Saint Benedict, the father of Western monasticism, both lived in Italy during this period.
In the late 300s, the Visigoths were caught up in a civil war between a pro-Roman faction led by Fritigern and an anti-Roman faction led by Athanaric. Despite their victory over Emperor Valens at Adrianople (378), the Visigoths could not overcome the Eastern empire and eventually settled in Thrace and along the Danube. With the arrival of the Huns in the 390s, the terrified Visigoths swept into the Roman empire, where, after a few abortive raids, they were settled as federates in the Balkans.
In 395, the Visigoths rebelled under a leader named Alaric, the first true king of the Visigoths. Alaric was an extremely energetic leader and military genius. He led several attacks into Italy beginning in 401, but was defeated by the Roman general Stilicho. However, after Stilicho lost favor with Emperor Honorius and was murdered, Alaric had a free hand. In 410, the Visigoths sacked Rome, which sent shock waves throughout the Latin-speaking world, although in all likelihood the “barbarous” Visigoths conducted themselves with remarkable restraint for the age. After only three days, Alaric withdrew from Rome and died shortly thereafter.
In 412, under Ataulf, the Visigoths left Italy and migrated into southern Gaul and northern Spain. They pushed the Vandals out of most of Spain and conquered Aquitaine, establishing a new kingdom with Toulouse as its capital. Under Euric (466–484), the Visigoths finished their conquest of Spain (the Vandals having departed for North Africa) but began to lose control over Gaul to the rising power of the Franks during the early 500s. By 507, the Franks had taken all the Visigothic territories north of the Pyrenees, and the capital was moved to Toledo.
Like the Ostrogoths in Italy, the Visigoths were separated from their subjects by their sense of Germanic superiority and their Arian faith. They were remarkably tolerant, however, in matters of religion until their conversion to Catholicism in the late 500s. Following this conversion, Visigothic kings, beginning with Recared, issued many laws against religious minorities, particularly Jews. In 654, Roman law was abolished in favor of a common law for both Visigoth and Roman subjects. Church councils began to overshadow the power of the monarchy and civil war became a mainstay of life in Visigothic Iberia. The last king, Roderick, seized power, causing his rivals to appeal to the Muslims for aid. Tariq ibn Ziyad, a deputy of the governor of Morocco, led a token force on a scouting mission into Spain in 711. However, the country was in such a poor state by this point that its armies all but collapsed, surprising even the Arabs with the rapidity of their conquest. Tariq did not have enough soldiers to garrison his conquest, so he was forced to rely on previously disenfranchised peoples, such as the Jews, to aid him in holding the cities he had won.
With the Moorish conquest the Visigothic period came to an end. The Visigoths maintained only a narrow strip along Spain’s northern coast, which became the kingdom of Asturias (the progenitor of all the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula). The distinctive Visigothic culture, however, was quickly lost in favor of the post-Roman culture we know today as Spanish.
The least powerful, the least known, and paradoxically the longest-lived Gothic communities were those that remained in the ancestral home-lands around the Black Sea, especially in Crimea. A Gothic principality around the strongholds of Mangkup and Doros continued to exist through various periods of vassalage to the Byzantines, Khazars, Kipchaks, Mongols, Genoese, and other empires until well into the 1500s, when the Girai Khanate finally incorporated it.
Gothic texts from this region exist as late as the late 1500s and Gothic communities appear to have survived intact until the late 1700s, when Catherine the Great deported many. Their language vanished by the 1800s. The so-called Volga Germans who could be found in southern Russia as late as World War II were not Goths. Rather, they were a distinct people who spoke a West German language akin to modern German, as opposed to the East Germanic Gothic language.
Brian M. Gottesman
See also: Roman Empire.
Burns, T.S. History of the Ostrogoths. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Christian, David. A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia. Vol. 1. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
Jordanes. Getica: The Gothic History of Jordanes in English. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Speculum Historiale, 1966.
Vasiliev, Aleksandr A. The Goths in the Crimea. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1936.
Wolfram, Herwig. History of the Goths. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979.