GOTHS. - Certainly of Scandinavian origin (G., from Gotland, the largest island of Sweden, or from Götaland, southern Sweden), known to the Romans from the time of Tacitus, the G. nevertheless acquire a role in the history with their migration into the region of the Vistula and then into the bordering regions of Germany. Theirs is entirely a movement of infiltration toward the lands of the south, into which they spread from the 3rd century onward, dividing into groups of tribes. Perhaps the first to break away from the primitive unitary stock were the Gepids, but the great division would be between Ostrogoths and Visigoths, whose differing orientation, in their territorial settlement, became manifest toward the end of the same century. But before that, bloody struggles took place on the fringes of the Empire between the emperors Maximinus Thrax, 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 more commonly known is the story of the one that became intertwined with our history: the Ostrogoths, or Goths of the East, from the settlement they had on the shores of the Black Sea, while the Visigoths (or "Goths of the West," although the original meaning of the term "Visi" is rather to be traced to a title of nobility) were settled to the west of the Pontus and of its great tributary, the Dniester.
After a period of unitary monarchy, which can be traced back to the middle of the 4th century, when both groups recognized Ermanaric as king, later overwhelmed by the Hunnic invasion, Ostrogoths and Visigoths created their own leaders and acted independently. Under the Amali, of the dynasty perhaps of Ermanaric and even earlier of a mythical ancestor, Ostrogotha, the eastern group fought Vandals and Slavs, succeeding in forming a vast kingdom on both sides of the Vistula. But the Hunnic attack shattered the attempt at its birth and helped to set the Visigoths in motion beyond the Danube and to bring the Ostrogoths, as federates, into the orbit of Rome. Having rebelled, they were defeated by Stilicho. But they returned to the alliance of the Empire, without deriving any help from it, when the Huns, in their warlike fervor, drew them along with themselves in the march toward the west. Already around the middle of the 5th century the road to Italy appears to be in the intentions of the Ostrogoths: Aetius, allied with the Visigoths, stopped them. At the death of Attila and the dissolution of the fleeting Hunnic power, the Ostrogoths, having renewed the bond of federates with the Empire (an unstable alliance, for they invade Illyria), fought again, under their king Theodemir, against Suebi, Rugii, Quadi and Marcomanni. The king's son, Theodoric (v.), was received at the court of Byzantium, at once guest and hostage, until in 474 he inherited power over his people, leading them to new and greater fortunes.
In 489, when Theodoric requested for himself and his people to pass into Italy as patricians, to fight Odoacer, the Ostrogoths migrated into Italy. The emperor of the East, Zeno, aimed, as is evident, not so much at favoring a stable settlement for the Goths as at removing so dangerous an ally. A migrating people, not an army of warriors, was what descended into the peninsula. In a long struggle, Odoacer was defeated, his people dispersed, and the conquerors assigned themselves far more than a third of the lands, by then falling within barbarian custom.
The long government of Theodoric (v.), which the emperor Anastasius recognized in 498, could thus unfold, not without sagacity and foresight, as shown first by the attempt at fusion between conquered and conquerors, Italics and Goths, then by the marriage policy, which aimed at tightening relations with the other major barbarian kingdoms (those of the Franks and Burgundians, of the Visigoths and Vandals). Lands even beyond the Alps, to the west and to the east, were joined to the Gothic Kingdom of Italy: but then relations with the Vandals and Franks entered into crisis, the marriage policy suffered setbacks, and the clash between Romans and barbarians also persisted: a difference, above all, of culture and religion, which is reflected in the sad twilight of the old King, whom the clash with the Senate and the Church of Rome, and the trial of Boethius, bloodily colored.
The twilight of Theodoric also becomes that of the Ostrogoths: with the Kingdom weakened during the regency of Amalasuntha, owing to the split between Romanizers and anti-Romans, Justinian could seize the opportunity and at the same time stimulate Roman resistance in order to undertake the imperial reconquest of the peninsula. Resistance was feeble at first, then heroic, under Totila and Teia. The Ostrogothic people was exterminated in battles of annihilation, such as those of Taginae and Mons Lactarius, after which it disappears from history, finally drawn to merge with the Italics or the other Germanic stocks that it had hoped to dominate.
The conversion of the Ostrogoths in Italy from Arianism matured during the 6th century in step with the fusion of the people they wished to dominate.
The Visigoths, on the other hand, after having reached a first moment of great power, toward the end of the 4th century, with Alaric, after the defeat suffered at the hands of Stilicho at Pollentia, and after the attempt to cross into Africa, cut short by the death of the leader in 410 in Calabria, had reached Gaul, under Athaulf, and then Spain, establishing there the Kingdom of Toulouse.
The Visigoths of Spain, among whom under Euric a concept of independence and an anti-Roman tendency prevailed, after having defeated the Suebi of Galicia, the Gallo-Romans of Auvergne and the Saxon pirates, were unable to complete the occupation of the Iberian peninsula and, again because of religious conflict, suffered the backlash of the rise of the power of the Franks. The end of the anti-Catholic persecution and the regulation of relations with the Romans (which came about with the Breviarium Alaricianum) arrived late. The Third Council of Toledo, held in 529, which received the abjuration of King Reccared, whose conversion had taken place two years earlier, marked the official end of Visigothic Arianism and the beginning of the great development of the Catholic Church in Spain. With every influence outside the boundaries of the Tolosan Kingdom at an end, the Visigothic monarchy, after having for two centuries merged its story with that original to Spanish civilization, came to an end in 711 with the Arab invasion.
Bibliography24 works
Pier Fausto Palumbo