GOTHS. — Of certainly Scandinavian origin (Goths, from Gotland, the largest island of Sweden, or from Götaland, southern Sweden), known to the Romans from the time of Tacitus, the Goths nevertheless acquire a role in history with their migration into the region of the Vistula and then into the neighboring regions of Germany. Their entire movement is one of infiltration into the lands of the south, into which they spread beginning in the 3rd century, dividing into tribal groups. Perhaps the first to separate from the original unified stock were the Gepids, but the great division would be between the Ostrogoths and Visigoths, whose differing orientations in territorial settlement would become evident by the end of the same century. However, before this, bloody struggles took place at the margins of the Empire between the emperors Maximinus the Thracian, Gordian III, Decius, Trebonianus Gallus, and the Gothic tribes. In 257, advancing as far as Thessalonica, they put an end to Roman rule in Dacia, from which they then spread into the Hellespont and the Greek peninsula.
Of the two great Gothic groups, the one that became more closely intertwined with our history is better known: the Ostrogoths, or Eastern Goths, settled on the shores of the Black Sea, while the Visigoths (or “Western Goths,” though the original meaning of the term “Visi” may rather refer to a title of nobility) were settled west of the Pontus and its great outlet, the Dniester.
After a period of unified monarchy, which can be traced back to the mid-4th century, when both groups acknowledged as king Hermanaric—later overwhelmed by the common invasion—Ostrogoths and Visigoths established their own leaders and acted independently. Under the Amali, a dynasty perhaps descended from Hermanaric and even earlier from a mythical progenitor, Ostrogotha, the eastern group fought the Vandals and Slavs, managing to form a vast kingdom on both sides of the Vistula. But the joint attack shattered the attempt at its inception and helped drive the Visigoths beyond the Danube and bring the Ostrogoths, as federates, into the orbit of Rome. After rebelling, they were defeated by Stilicho. But they returned to the Empire’s alliance, without deriving any benefit from it, when the Huns, in their warlike fury, drew them along in their march westward. By around the mid-5th century, the path to Italy was already in the Ostrogoths’ intentions: Aetius, allied with the Visigoths, halted them. At the death of Attila and the dissolution of the Huns’ fleeting power, the Ostrogoths, renewing their federate bond with the Empire (an unstable alliance, since they invaded Illyricum), fought again under their king Theodemir against the Suebi, Rugians, Quadi, and Marcomanni. The king’s son, Theodoric (v.), was received at the court of Byzantium, both as a guest and as a hostage, until in 474 he inherited power over his people, leading them to new and greater fortunes.
In 489, after Theodoric had requested for himself and his people to cross into Italy as a patrician to fight Odoacer, the Ostrogoths migrated into Italy. The Eastern emperor Zeno, rather than aiming to establish a stable settlement for the Goths, clearly sought to remove such a dangerous ally. The people who descended into the peninsula were a migrating people, not an army of warriors; in a long struggle, Odoacer was defeated, his people dispersed, and the conquerors assigned to themselves far more than a third of the lands, in keeping with the now customary barbarian practice.
The long reign of Theodoric (v.), recognized by Emperor Anastasius in 498, thus unfolded, not without sagacity and foresight, as shown first by the attempt at fusion between the conquered and the conquerors, Italians and Goths, and then by the matrimonial policy, which aimed to bind closer ties with the other major barbarian kingdoms (those of the Franks and Burgundians, the Visigoths and Vandals). Lands even beyond the Alps, to the west and east, were joined to the Gothic Kingdom of Italy; but then relations with the Vandals and Franks entered into crisis, the matrimonial policy suffered setbacks, and the contrast between Romans and barbarians persisted: a difference, above all, of culture and religion, which found its reflection in the sad decline of the old King, marked by the clash with the Roman Senate and the Church of Rome, and the bloodstained trial of Boethius.
The decline of Theodoric became also that of the Ostrogoths: the kingdom weakened during the regency of Amalasuntha, due to the split between those favoring Romanization and the anti-German faction, allowing Justinian to seize the opportunity and, at the same time, to stir up Roman resistance to undertake the imperial reconquest of the peninsula. Resistance was weak at first, then heroic under Totila and Teias. The Ostrogothic people were annihilated in battles of extermination, such as those of Taginae and Mons Lactarius, after which they disappeared from history, finally merging with the Italians or the other Germanic tribes they had hoped to dominate.
The conversion of the Ostrogoths in Italy from Arianism matured during the 6th century alongside the fusion of the people they had sought to dominate.
The Visigoths, on the other hand, after reaching a first moment of great power at the end of the 4th century under Alaric, after the defeat suffered at the hands of Stilicho at Pollentia and the failed attempt to cross into Africa, cut short by the leader’s death in Calabria in 410, had reached Gaul under Ataulf, and then Spain, where they established the Kingdom of Toulouse.
The Visigoths in Spain, among whom Euric’s rule saw a concept of independence and an anti-Roman tendency prevail, after defeating the Suebi of Galicia, the Gallo-Romans of Auvergne, and the Saxon pirates, failed to complete the occupation of the Iberian Peninsula and, always due to religious conflict, suffered the backlash of the rise of Frankish power. The end of the anti-Catholic persecution and the regulation of relations with the Romans (achieved with the Breviarium Alaricianum) came late. The Third Council of Toledo, held in 529, which received the abjuration of King Reccared, who had converted two years earlier, marked the official end of Visigothic Arianism and the beginning of the great development of the Catholic Church in Spain. Once all influence had ceased beyond the borders of the Tolosan Kingdom, the Visigothic monarchy, after having for two centuries mingled its fate with that of the original Spanish civilization, came to an end in 711 with the Arab invasion.