The Goths were a confederacy of tribes, including a small Germanic tribe known as the Gutones or Gutonen (from whom the Goths name may have been derived; Gutones may mean the people) and other peoples, some from the Asian steppes. By the third century c. e. they had gathered around the Greek and Roman cities along the Black sea. The Gothic confederacy became increasingly unified under the command of a single overall war leader or king. They were an important conduit by which cultural elements from steppe peoples traveled west, one of these the use of cavalry.
The Goths later subdivided into the Ostrogoths and Visigoths, who became some of the most powerful of the Germanics and spread into western Europe. The name Goth has also been applied to all the eastern Germanic tribes, including the Goths proper, Bastarnae, Burgundii, Gepids, Heruli,
Lombards, Lugii, Rugii, Sciri, and Vandals, but the histories of the various groups are distinct.
ORIGINS
Events in the interior of Germanic territory in the early centuries c. e., whose details are not known, led to changes and migrations among Germanic and other peoples.
Gothic legend maintained that the Goths had migrated from scandinavia as a whole people in three boats and reached the estuary of the Vistula, but this event is unlikely. in any case by the first century some among them— perhaps the Gauti or Gauts, a people of present-day central sweden—may have settled in the territory between the island of Rugen in present-day northeastern Germany and the Vistula River in present-day northwestern Poland (a region known as Pomerania and later Prussia). Archaeologists have named the culture Willenberg-Wielbark after the Polish town; it was distinct from other cultures in the region in that the deceased were buried without their weapons, a custom maintained by later Goths.
The perhaps ancestral Gutones, are thought to have settled along the eastern bank of the Vistula by the second century. For a time they were dominated by other Germanic peoples in the region, in particular the Vandals, Lugii, and Rugii. In the second half of the second century they began spreading south and southeast to parts of present-day Belarus and ukraine; the core group eventually reached the banks of the Dnieper near present-day Kiev, Ukraine, and by about 214 the Black Sea. Another Gothic legend maintains that they began their migrations southward after a group of foreign nobles entered Goth territory from the far south and either took control of or influenced the leaders of the tribe.
Whether or not such an event happened, the movements of peoples from the Germanic territory had very probably been set in motion by a “systems crisis” there, in which the low level of raiding that had been endemic in Germanic society for centuries flared into large-scale war, as overpopulation and the unequal distribution of wealth created new competition for resources and led tribes that had become more militarized under the influence of the Romans to attack one another with devastating results. The Goths’ consolidation of power and expansion along the Vistula were probably among the causes of the crisis.
In the course of these years other peoples—neighboring Germanic tribes, Balts, and Sarmatians—had become part of a confederation with Gothic military leadership. The Goths, as they became known to the Romans, were thus polyethnic. The Romans originally referred to them as Scythians, after earlier inhabitants of the Dnieper region near Kiev.
C. E.
First century Goths living along Vistula River second century Goths migrate to Dnieper River. c. 214 Goths reach Black Sea.
251 Goths defeat Romans at Abrittus and kill Emperor Decius.
267-68 Goths plunder Athens.
269 Goths defeated by Romans in Battle of Naissus.
C. 290 Goths separate into groups that evolve into Ostrogoths and Visigoths.
C. 370s Huns reach Black Sea, leading to dispersion of various Gothic groups.
The most important and defining characteristic of the Gothic confederacy, as earlier of the Gutones, was its possession of a relatively permanent overall war leader or king. This form of leader was very uncharacteristic of Germanic peoples, who in the past had elected war leaders only as a temporary measure in times of crisis. The very existence of Gothic kings shows that the Gothic confederacy emerged from crisis. The great heterogeneity of the members of this diverse coalition of war bands, tribes, and other groupings required that all accept a single leader, whose significance transcended ethnicity. In this the king of the Goths was a barbarian equivalent of the emperor of Rome.
The territory near the Black Sea where the Gothic confederacy came into being consisted of forest steppe and steppe ecologies, which attracted steppe peoples from central Eurasia. The Goths’ culture shows the influence of these peoples, some of whom joined their group. The Goths have tentatively been identified with materials of what is called by archaeologists the
Goths time line
Cherniakhovo culture. The dispersal of some of the Goths from the Black Sea region and the subjugation of others by the Huns in the late fourth and fifth centuries are reflected in the collapse of the Cherniakhovo culture in some areas at that time and its survival in a form much modified by Hunnic influence.
LANGUAGE
The Goths spoke an East Germanic dialect, referred to as Gothic. With the exception of a few northern inscriptions it is the oldest Germanic dialect known from surviving fragments of the fourth-century translation of the Bible by Ulfilas, bishop of the Gothic Christians, as well as some other scattered writings.
HISTORY
Because the Romans grouped many of the invading “barbarian” tribes together, it is impossible to know with certainty when the first battle between Romans and Goths occurred. The years 213 and 238 c. e. are both given for the first conflict, depending on sources. In any case the Goths were known to carry out raids in the Roman province of Dacia (roughly modern Romania) after their arrival in the region.
In 251 the Goths under Cniva battled troops under Emperor Decius at Abrittus near the mouth of the Danube in present-day northern Bulgaria and, luring the Romans into a swampy area, defeated them, even killing the emperor. The incursions of the Goths were far more devastating to the empire than those of the Marcomanni in the war named after them of 166-180. In the ensuing years, first in 257, the Goths carried out nautical raids on coastal cities of the Black Sea, the Sea of Marmara, and the Aegean Sea, in both Europe and Asia Minor.
The Goths mounted a combined land and sea invasion westward onto the Balkan Peninsula and captured Athens in 267-268 but were defeated by Emperor Claudius II near Naissus (modern Nis Serbia) in 269. He became the first emperor to take Gothicus as a triumphal title (thus establishing the tribal name Goth in the historical record). Emperor Aurelian, who succeeded Claudius, drove the Goths back north of the Danube by 271, after which he took the title Gothicus Maximus. Aurelian’s armies used scorched-earth tactics in the Gothic territories, and the Gothic confederacy was destroyed. Yet, recognizing the continuing threat of the Goths, he made the decision not to attempt to hold the province of Dacia, the last European province established by Rome some century and a half earlier.
Division
The defeat of the Goths by the Romans started a period of new movement and reorganization among the Goths, who by about 290 had formed two political entities. The group later known as Ostrogoths (eastern Goths), centered on the royal family of the Amali, inhabited the region north of the Black Sea east of the Dniester River (part of modern Ukraine and Belarus). Those who would become known as the Visigoths (good Goths or noble Goths) were the western Goths, whose domain extended northwest of the Black Sea from the Dniester to the Danube (part of modern Moldova and Romania). This group was led by a number of aristocratic families, in particular the Balthis.
Their respective domains grew. In the east a possibly legendary Amali king named Ostrogotha founded a royal dynasty. The confederacy he led was known to the Romans as the Greutungi or Scythians, the latter a Greek term for steppe peoples. Little is known about the Greutungi during this time because they were so far from Rome. The first Greutungi king known to history was Ermanaric of the fourth century, who ruled an empire extending from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, centered along the Dnieper River.
In 332 Ariarich of the Balthi dynasty of the Gothic confederation known as Tervingi or Tervingians negotiated the first in a series of treaties with the Eastern Roman emperor Constantine. Among their provisions the Tervingians were to receive annual payments; in return they would supply men for the Roman military. The Tervingians were in general faithful federates of Rome and became deeply influenced by Roman imperial values and structures, although there were both pro-and anti-Roman factions among them. Their polyethnic society more closely resembled the hierarchical, top-down Near East societies than those of the Germanic tribes of the first century C. E. whom Tacitus had described, whose free warriors were able to some degree to govern themselves in their own assemblies.
Friction between the pro - and anti-Roman factions, the former led by Fritigern and the latter by the Balthi leader Athaneric, grew after the mid-fourth century. To unite the Tervingians under his rule, threatened by Fritigern, Athaneric fought the Eastern Roman emperor Valens in a series of battles that culminated in a treaty in 369 in which the Goths were treated as virtual equals rather than federates.
The rivalry between Athaneric and Fritigern was largely played out in religious terms; the pro-Roman Fritigern adopted Arian Christianity (not because he was influenced by the missionary Bishop Ulfilas, who did not profess Arianism, but because Valens practiced it); Athaneric spurned Christianity altogether and sought to maintain the Gothic tradition, perhaps fearing that Christianity would interfere with the cult of the thiudans, which had long been a successful unifying force. From 369 Athaneric conducted persecutions of Christians of all sects. Ulfilas led a congregation into the Roman province of Moesia (modern Serbia and Montenegro and northern Bulgaria).
The fate of the Tervingians was decided externally with the arrival in the 370s, of the Huns, a polyethnic confederacy of steppe peoples out of Asia. Athaneric’s forces were destroyed, and the majority of the elite followed Fritigern across the Danube into the empire. The onslaught of the Huns led to new movements among the respective groups, greater geographical separation, and a renewed period of ethnogenesis. The emergence of the new Gothic confederacy called the Visigoths began as Fritigern and his followers sought a place for themselves within the Roman Empire. This would take some 40 years of repeated migrations, conflict, and suffering, which later led the Visigoths to compare themselves to the biblical Hebrew people wandering for 40 years in the sinai Desert.
The Greutungi to the east were overrun by the Huns. Their king, Ermanaric, may have sacrificed himself to the gods in a desperate plea for aid, and they were subjected to a harsh domination. A small group of them fled to the Roman Empire and were settled in Pannonia, but the majority accepted Hunnic rule, however ambivalent they were about their new masters, and served them faithfully They even adopted Hunnic clothing, weapons, and the practice of skull deformation. Huns and Greutungi shared names—the name Attila is actually Gothic—and Goths bore Hunnic names. At the same time the Greutungi Goths retained their ancient tradition of identifying themselves in terms of their service to their ruler. But it was only on the collapse of the Hunnic confederacy after the death of Attila that the Greutungi became known to other peoples as the Ostrogoths.
The Tervingians under Fritigern pleaded with the Roman authorities for permission to cross the Danube to escape the Huns. The Romans split this group in two. One was given lands in the northern Balkans, where they were allowed to settle; the other was sent to the eastern Roman frontier to augment the military forces there.
Because of their varying fortunes the two Gothic groups even battled each other, Ostrogoths fighting as allies of the Huns and Visigoths as allies of the Romans.
Some Goths, mostly Visigoths, who had settled in Moesia in the fourth century became known as Moesogoths; the Catholic bishop Ulfilas practiced among them. The name suiogoths has been applied to Goths of scandinavia.
The Goths were briefly reunited under one crown in the early sixth century when the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great became the regent of the Visigothic kingdom for nearly two decades.
CULTURE (see also Germanics) Government and Society
The origins of the institution of Gothic war leader or king can be traced to the Germanic social group called the comitatus by Tacitus and Gefolgschaft by modern German scholars. These were warrior bands or societies formed around the nucleus of a successful war leader, one whose good fortune in war signaled the favor of the gods and whose skills promised his followers much glory and plunder. such war bands, although they might participate in tribal wars fought for the good of the whole people, stood outside tribal military lines of command and frequently went out on raids purely for their own benefit.
The original Gutones were unusual among Germanic tribes in that the comitatus was at the center of their tribal structure. The tribal king of the Gutones seems to have combined the functions of the thiudans, or sacred king, with the political and military power of the reiks, or war leader. He had a band of warriors loyal only to him, unlike in most Germanic tribes, the loyalties of whose warriors continually shifted over time. This stable inner circle of the Gutones, focused on their king, would stand them in good stead in the troubled times that started in the second century and allowed them to grow, in some five generations, into one of the greatest powers among northern Europeans.
The tumultuous circumstances under which the groups who formed the nucleus of the Goths moved out of Germanic territory made the warrior band, rather than the tribe, the most effective social structure, giving the Goths an advantage relative to other Germanic tribes. The tribe befitted the relatively settled and peaceful existence of the past, in which few people engaged in large-scale movement. But central Europe of the second to the fourth centuries was a world of war and widespread social dislocation. In response for mutual safety the Goths banded into a comitatus writ large.
They were able to expand their political structure quickly by drawing other war bands and groupings, each under their own leaders, into orbit around the cult of the overall king, who combined the functions of thiudans, sacred king, and reiks, war leader. The individual reiks, or subkings, ruled their territories often from strongholds in the countryside, rather than from towns. Only their own warrior bands or comitati took part in governance, and free villagers were largely excluded from involvement in affairs.
The Tervingian Goths emulated the Roman imperial tradition, interpreting the emperors in terms of their own kings ruling a multiethnic society. A Roman commemorative medallion found in a treasure hoard in present-day Romania has images of the joint emperors Valentinian I and Valens inscribed with the legend Regis Romanorum: “Of the King of the Romans.”
Evolution of Thiudans and Reiks in the Fourth Century The Gothic words used for political and military institutions in a fourth-century translation of the Bible into Gothic are an invaluable means of understanding Germanic political life. The word thiudans had formerly referred to a type of sacred king among some early Germanic tribes. The translation shows that thiudans had now become disconnected from any political meaning for the Goths themselves. The term was used instead to denote the Roman emperor, but more importantly the deity of the Gospels: the Lord God the Father and Christ, King of the Jews. For worldly kings biblical Gothic uses a Celtic term: reiks (compare the Irish ri). Theodoric the Great of the Ostrogoths was called a thiu-da-reiks, denoting his exceptional status.
Technology and Art
Before the coming of the Huns the Tervingian Goths produced exquisite jewelry, vessels, and decorative objects in a style much influenced by steppe peoples, as well as Greek and Roman artisans. They developed a polychrome style of gold work, using gems, particularly garnet, in intricately wrought cells or settings, so that gold objects were literally encrusted with them. This style was extremely influential in western Germanic areas well into the medieval era.
The Cherniakhovo culture, thought to have been produced by the Goths, consisted of a wide range of finely crafted products that attest to the prestige goods culture the Goths had developed under Roman influence. Settlements and graves had Roman goods, including pottery and glassware. Local pottery was well made, wheel-turned, with highly polished surfaces and incised decoration. The makers of the Cherniakhovo culture produced prolific amounts of metalwork such as buckles, pendants, and fibulae. There is evidence of specialized craftsmanship and industrial levels of production.
Religion
The fourth-century leader Fritigern adopted Christianity, possibly a political move to gain support from the Romans; Christianity by that time was the official religion of the Roman Empire. The religious doctrine that he accepted, Arian Christianity, still being debated by church leaders at that time, was ultimately decreed a heresy. The Arian faith of the Visigoths would stand in the way of their rapprochement with Romans in Gaul and Spain when they migrated there in the fifth and sixth centuries.
The most important missionary to the Goths was Bishop Ulfilas, son of a Gothic father and a Cappadocian mother probably descended from captives of a Gothic raiding party. He was educated in Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and at Antioch in 341 was consecrated “Bishop of the Christians in the Getic [Gothic] Land.” His translation of the Bible into Gothic was very helpful in his mission to the Goths. He is commonly described as an Arian Christian—one who denied the divinity of Christ—as opposed to an adherent of the belief that later was adopted by the Christian Church as orthodox—that Christ was one in substance with the Father. But in reality Ulfilas did not adopt either of these positions and simply refrained from speaking on the matter of whether or not Christ was divine (a reticence that has failed to satisfy Roman Catholic historians, by whom he is considered to this day an Arian because he did not strongly support the Orthodox position). The Tervingian leader Fritigern professed Arian belief in the hope of gaining the support of the emperor Valens, who was Arian. Fritigern’s rival, Athaneric, in keeping with his conservative bent, sought to maintain the
Gothic cultic tradition and saw all forms of Christianity as a threat.
The Goths, as important as they are to the history of Europe, were one subgrouping among many Germanic peoples. Their name, however, especially in its adjective form Gothic, has taken on broad meanings. It has been used synonymously with “Germanic” or “Teutonic” (see TEUTONES). It has also been applied to a type of art of the Middle Ages, reflecting a Renaissance contempt for the cultural influence of “barbarian” peoples. It has also been applied more generally to elements of style or behavior from the Middle Ages—that is, the “Dark Ages”—and hence is synonymous with crude, rude, or uncivilized.
Further Reading
Jan Czarnecki. The Goths in Ancient Poland (Miami: University of Miami Press, 1975).
Peter Heather. The Goths (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Malcolm Todd. Everyday Life of the Barbarians: Goths, Franks, and Vandals (New York: Fromm
International, 1988).
Herwig Wolfram. History of the Goths (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
World History
