Goths

The Goths appear as a distinct people in the second century on the lower Vistula, moved south-east across the steppe to the Black Sea by around 230, and there split into the two groups that dominate the end of the Roman west. They raided Asia Minor and the Balkans by sea, killed the emperor Decius at Abritus in 251, and were then settled and traded with for a century. Their bishop Ulfilas translated the Bible into Gothic in the fourth century, inventing an alphabet to do it, and converted them to Arian Christianity - which mattered enormously afterwards, because it made every Gothic kingdom in the west heretical in the eyes of its Catholic subjects. The Huns' arrival in the 370s pushed the Tervingi across the Danube as refugees; Roman officials sold them dog meat in exchange for their children and they revolted, destroying an eastern army and killing the emperor Valens at Adrianople in 378. Under Alaric they sacked Rome in 410, the first time in eight hundred years, and were then settled in Aquitaine, from which the Visigothic kingdom expanded over most of Spain and lasted until the Arab conquest of 711. The Ostrogoths under Theoderic took Italy in 493 and governed it for sixty years with the Roman administration intact, until Justinian's reconquest destroyed both the kingdom and the country in twenty years of war. The Gothic language died out; the last speakers were recorded in the Crimea in the sixteenth century. The Codex Argenteus, a silver-and-gold manuscript of Ulfilas's gospels, survives at Uppsala. Theoderic's mausoleum stands at Ravenna under a single three-hundred-tonne stone. Cassiodorus and Boethius both served his government. Boethius was executed by it.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history