Goths. The native name of the Teutonic people known as Goths (in Lat. Gothi, Gotthi) had the two forms Gutans (sing. Guta) and Gutôs (sing. Guts); from the latter was formed the compound Gut-thúda, 'people of the Goths.' Their earliest known abode was on the southern coasts and the islands of the Baltic. The island Gothland derives its name from them. The Scandinavian traditions, reduced to writing in the 12th century, speak of a country on the Baltic called Hreidhgotaland, which must have owed its name to the branch of the Goths called in Anglo-Saxon poetry Hræde, and (perhaps with etymologising corruption) Hrethgotan and Hrêthas. The Hræde are stated in an Anglo-Saxon poem (Widsith) to have had their home on the Vistula. Whether Goths ever inhabited the Scandinavian peninsula is doubtful; the 'Gothland' of Sweden is etymologically not 'the land of the Goths,' but 'the land of the Gauts' (in A.S. Géatas), a distinct, though doubtless a kindred people.
The native tradition of the Goths, according to their historian Jordanis (6th century), represented them as having originated from Scandinavia. This tradition, however, is probably a mere development of the common Teutonic myth which placed the creation of mankind in an unknown region beyond the northern sea, and has therefore no historical value.
The elder Pliny (died 79 A.D.) mentions the Goths (Guttones) in two passages of his Natural History, once in a mere enumeration of the Germanic peoples, and once in what purports to be a quotation from the Greek traveller Pytheas (4th century B.C.). If Pliny's citation be accurate, Pytheas referred to the Guttones as dwelling on the shores of an estuary called Mentomonon, and as trading in amber, gathered by the inhabitants of an island distant from them a day's sail. It has, however, been suggested that the people mentioned by Pytheas were the Teutones living near the mouth of the Elbe. In a Greek MS. it would be easy to misread Tcutones as Guttones, and the former name actually occurs in the context. But even if this be so, we may perhaps infer that in Pliny's time the 'Guttones' were a maritime people, as he quotes the supposed statements of Pytheas without any remark. A generation later the Goths (Gotones, Gothones) are spoken of by Tacitus, who says that among them the kingly power was greater than among the other Germanic peoples, though they still retained their freedom. He relates that in the reign of Tiberius a Marcomannic exile named Catualda, who was resident among the Gotones, collected an army and made himself king of the Marcomanni. The indications given by Tacitus seem to imply that he regarded the Goths as the easternmost people of Germany (the boundary of which was the Vistula), and that their territory reached to the Baltic. Their southward emigrations must have commenced soon afterwards, for the geographer Ptolemy (2d century) assigns to the 'Gythones' a position in Sarmatia (on the right bank of the Vistula), divided from the sea by the Slavonic Wends. The history of their southward wandering is unknown, the story told by Jordanis being obviously mythical. What seems certain is that early in the 3d century the Goths, vastly increased in numbers by the accession of many conquered peoples, were occupying a territory north of the Black Sea and the Danube mouths. The eastern portion of them received the distinctive names Ostrogoths ('East Goths') and Greuthungs ('dwellers on the sand'), while the western portion were called Visigoths ('West Goths') and Thervings (probably 'dwellers among the trees'). Mingled with the Goths proper, or adjoining them, were a number of other East Germanic peoples who, like them, had emigrated from the Baltic coasts. Chief among these were the Vandals and the Gepidae, the neighbours of the Goths on the west and on the north respectively. The geographical position of the Heruli, Burgunds, Scirians, Rugians, and Turcilings at this time cannot be determined. All these nations were often classed together under the general name of Goths.
In the reign of the Emperor Philip the Arab (248-49) the Goths are said to have been ruled by a king named Ostrogotha. (There is no strong reason for regarding this name as an etymological figment: it does not mean 'Ostrogoth,' but is to be compared with such Teutonic names as Austrowald, Easterwine, Earcongota.) In his reign a war broke out between the Goths and the Roman empire: at the battle of Abritta the Romans were totally defeated, and the Emperor Decius and his son were killed. For eighteen years the eastern provinces of the empire suffered terrible ravages from the Goths, but these calamities were avenged by the victories of the Emperor Claudius (thence surnamed Gothicus). After the death of Claudius in 270, his successor Aurelian conceded to the Goths the province of Dacia, on condition of furnishing a body of 2000 men to the imperial army. Such of the native inhabitants as did not choose to remain as subjects of the Goths were provided with new settlements south of the Danube. With some interruptions, the peaceful relations between the Goths and the Romans continued for more than a hundred years. During this period the old names Visigoth and Ostrogoth received a new sense as expressive of a national distinction. The Visigoths or Thervings of later history are the descendants of the people established by Aurelian in Dacia; the Ostrogoths or Greuthungs are the descendants of the Goths who remained in southern Russia.
In the 4th and succeeding centuries writers who affected classicality of diction frequently applied to the Goths the obsolete names of Getæ and Scythians, which in antiquity belonged to the inhabitants of the regions in which the Goths were now settled. Usually the Goths were regarded as the actual descendants of these historic peoples, and the name Gothi seems to have been imagined to be a corruption of Getæ. In the 6th century Cassiodorus, followed by the Goth Jordanis, endeavoured to blend into one story the facts of Getic history, taken from Herodotus and other classical writers, and the Gothic traditions of a migration from the extreme north. In modern times the hypothesis of the identity of Goths and Getæ has been advocated by so distinguished a scholar as Jacob Grimm, but is now generally rejected.
In the middle of the 4th century the Ostrogothic king Ermanarie established by conquest a powerful empire, extending from the Black Sea to the Gulf of Bothnia. About the year 375 this empire was subjugated by the Huns. The Visigoths, with a small portion of the Ostrogoths, escaped a similar fate by crossing the Danube, and placing themselves under the protection of the Roman empire. The oppression of the provincial governors soon provoked a revolt. The eastern emperor, Valens, collected a great army and marched into Thrace for the purpose of subduing the barbarians; but at the battle of Adrianople (August 9, 378) the Romans suffered a ruinous defeat, and Valens himself was killed. The Goths, however, were too ill organised to make effective use of their victory, and Theodosius, the successor of Valens in the empire of the East, and afterwards sole sovereign of the Roman empire, found it possible in a few years to bring back to their allegiance the whole Gothic people, excepting those who were under the yoke of the Huns. This result was not attained without great and dangerous concessions. The Visigoths received large grants of land in Thrace, and the Ostrogoths in Phrygia. They were permitted to govern themselves by their own laws, and 40,000 of their warriors were embodied into a separate army (called federati), receiving a high rate of pay. Many of their nobles also were promoted to high positions in the imperial service. So long as Theodosius lived these measures were successful in securing the loyalty of the Goths; but the excessive favour shown to barbarians who had so lately been enemies provoked serious discontent.
The Goths thus incorporated into the Roman empire had for the most part been converted to Christianity; principally, it is believed, owing to the labours of the Arian bishop Wulfila or Ulphilas (q.v.), a Goth who had received a learned education at Constantinople, and who lived as a missionary among the Visigoths from 340 to 381. The new faith was with extraordinary rapidity accepted, not only by the two great branches of the Gothic people, but by all the smaller nations of kindred race. For two hundred years the Goths remained faithful to the Arian creed taught by Wulfila and his disciples. Unlike the Vandals, who were adherents of the same sect, the Arian Goths were honourably distinguished by their freedom from bigotry. Although themselves the object of the most virulent religious hatred, they were, even at the height of their power, very seldom guilty of persecution.
On the death of Theodosius in 395 the sovereignty of the Roman world was divided between his two sons, Arcadius becoming emperor of the East, and Honorius emperor of the West. One of the first acts of the ministers of Arcadius was to lower the pay of the Gothic soldiery. The Visigoths at once rose in rebellion, and, electing as their king a young officer of distinction named Alaric (q.v.), proceeded to overrun Greece. The emperor was compelled to make terms: Alaric was made military governor of Eastern Illyricum, and remained quiet for three years, preparing for an irruption into Italy. In the year 400 he entered the peninsula, but apparently met with no great success. After being defeated by Stilicho at Pollentia (Easter Sunday, 402), he retired to Illyria, receiving, however, a large sum of money from the Romans as the price of peace. A second invasion in 408, provoked by the disregard of treaty obligations on the part of the Romans, had very different results. Stilicho was dead, and the barbarian soldiers of Italy, exasperated by official tyranny, deserted to the standard of Alaric in great numbers. Rome was thrice besieged; twice the city was saved by the submission of the senate, but on the third occasion it was taken by storm and delivered up to plunder. Although terrible excesses were committed by the Goths, the Roman writers speak with great admiration of the humanity and moderation displayed by Alaric himself. Honorius, secure in the impregnable fortress of Ravenna, and encouraged by hopes of support from Constantinople, refused to come to terms, and Alaric was preparing to effect the entire subjugation of Italy, when his career was cut short by death in 410.
Alaric's successor, Ataulf, abandoned the design of conquering Italy, and led his people into southern Gaul. At Narbonne he married the daughter of Theodosius, the princess Galla Placidia, who had been taken captive by Alaric in Rome. On the approach of a Roman army under Constantius the Visigoths crossed the Pyrenees into Spain, where Ataulf was murdered in 415.
The next king, Wallia, submitted to the Romans, and in the name of the empire conquered nearly the whole of Spain. As the reward of his services, he received permission to settle with his people in the south of Gaul.
The 'kingdom of Toulouse,' founded by Wallia in 418, was increased by the conquests of his successors, until under Euric (who died in 485) it included the whole of Gaul south of the Loire and west of the Rhone, as well as Provence and the greater part of Spain. The most noteworthy event in the history of this kingdom was the great battle fought in 451 on the Mauriac plains near Troyes (commonly miscalled the battle of Chalons), in which the Visigoths under their king Theoderic (or Theoderid) I., united with the Romans and the Franks, inflicted a crushing defeat on the vast army of the Huns under Attila (q.v.). Theoderic was killed, but the result of the battle was the dissolution of the Hunnish empire, and the salvation of European civilisation from the deluge of barbarism which had threatened to overwhelm it.
In the reign of Alaric II., the successor of Euric, the kingdom of Toulouse came to an end. The Frankish king Clovis (Chlodovech, Hlôdawih), whose recent conversion to Catholic Christianity enabled him to give to a war of unprovoked aggression the specious aspect of a crusade against the heretics, invaded the Visigoth territories in 507. The battle fought on the 'field of Voclod,' near Poitiers, decided the sovereignty of Gaul. Alaric was killed, and the Visigoths abandoned to the conqueror all their territories north of the Pyrenees, retaining of their Gaulish possessions only a small strip of country bordering on the Gulf of Lyons. The subsequent history of the Visigoths must be reserved until we have related the history of their Ostrogothic kinsmen.
After their subjugation by the Huns in the later part of the 4th century, the Ostrogoths, Gepidæ, and the smaller 'Gothic' peoples appear to have adopted the nomad life of their conquerors, and they formed part of the vast horde which followed Attila into Gaul. On the collapse of the Hunnish dominion these nations regained their independence. The Ostrogoths settled first in the neighbourhood of Vienna, under their king Walamer, a member of the Amaling family, who traced their descent through Ermanaric and Ostrogotha to a legendary hero named Amala. Immediately after their emancipation the Ostrogoths are found occupying the position of mercenaries of the Eastern Empire. In 462 the friendly relations between Walamer and the emperor, which had been for a time relinquished, were renewed, and Walamer's nephew, Theoderic, the son of Theodemer, a boy eight years old, was sent as a hostage to Constantinople, where he remained ten years, receiving the education of a Roman noble. Shortly after his return the Ostrogoths, pressed by famine, abandoned their homes, and migrated in a body towards the south-east. Their inroads in Mesia and Thrace caused great alarm at Constantinople, and the emperor was constrained to purchase peace by granting them permission to settle in Macedonia, and by bestowing on them large gifts of land and money.
In 474 the young Theoderic became king of the Ostrogoths. After fourteen years spent in petty warfare, sometimes as the ally and sometimes as the enemy of the Romans, he obtained from the Emperor Zeno permission to wrest the dominion of Italy from the usurper Odovacar (Odoacer, q.v.). Like most of the military expeditions of the Goths, the invasion of Italy was the emigration of an entire people; and the number of persons who accompanied the march of Theoderic was probably not less than a quarter of a million. After a war of five years the work of conquest was completed by the capture of Ravenna and the submission of Odovacar, who, it is said, was soon afterwards brutally and treacherously murdered by Theoderic's own hand.
Notwithstanding this evil beginning, the thirty-three years' reign of Theoderic in Italy was one of singular humanity and wisdom, and secured for the country a degree of tranquillity and prosperity such as it had not enjoyed for centuries. The historian Procopius, though a Byzantine courtier, pronounces him not inferior to the best and wisest of Roman emperors. The partisans of Odovacar received a general amnesty; the necessary provision of lands for the Goths was carefully carried out so as to press as lightly as possible on the native population; the fiscal and judicial systems were re-organised, and all acts of extortion or injustice on the part of officials were sternly repressed. The Goths and the Romans continued to be distinct nations, each judged by its own tribunals and by its own laws, limited and supplemented by a new code containing a few provisions which were made binding on all the subjects of the kingdom. The Catholics were granted entire equality with the adherents of the king's own faith; the Jews, in all other Christian lands the victims of oppression, enjoyed under Theoderic full liberty of worship, and protection from all encroachment on their civil rights. It is impossible to read the official letters written in Theoderic's name by his Roman secretary, Cassiodorus, without the deepest admiration for the king's unwearied energy and enlightened zeal for the welfare of his subjects. It is true that in the last three years of his life, when he was worn by age and harassed by suspicions of widespread treason, his fame was tarnished by the judicial murders of Boethius and Symmachus, and by acts of oppression directed against the Catholic Church. But there have been few possessors of absolute power who, on the whole, have used it so nobly.
Theoderic died in 526, and his daughter Amalaswintha was appointed regent on behalf of her son Athalaric, then ten years old. When Athalaric died at the age of sixteen, Amalaswintha associated with herself in the kingdom her father's nephew, the base and cowardly Theodahad, by whose orders she was soon afterwards murdered. Theoderic had not long been dead before the disorderly state of the kingdom testified to the incapacity of his successors; and the Ostrogothic power was threatened by a new danger in the ambition of the Emperor Justinian, who, not content with the formal acknowledgement of supremacy which had satisfied his predecessors, was resolved to make Italy an integral part of his own dominions. In 536 the great general Belisarius was sent for the purpose of conquering the country. The Goths deposed Theodahad, and elected to the throne a distinguished soldier named Witigis, who, on his elevation, married Amalaswintha's daughter Mataswintha. After four years Belisarius, though enormously overmatched in numbers, had subdued all but the extreme north of Italy, and held Witigis and his queen prisoners, when he was recalled by Justinian's jealousy to Constantinople.
Soon after his return the oppression of the imperial representatives in Italy not only provoked into revolt the Goths who had submitted to Roman rule, but excited mutiny among the Roman soldiers, who deserted to the enemy in great numbers. In a few months the new king of the Goths, Hildibad, who had previously maintained a precarious footing in the north, found himself at the head of a powerful army. His career, however, was cut short by assassination; and after a short interregnum the Goths conferred the crown on his nephew Totila, otherwise named Badwila. After a struggle of a few years, in which Totila displayed not only brilliant military talent, but a chivalrous generosity and humanity which extorted the admiration of his enemies, the imperial cause in Italy was felt to be desperate, and in 544 Belisarius was again sent to take the command of the army. But owing to the insubordination of his officers, and to other causes, he had little success, and after five years was recalled at his own request. The enterprise in which Belisarius had failed was accomplished by the aged eunuch Narses, who, in 552, landed in Italy at the head of a colossal army. The Ostrogoths suffered a crushing defeat at Taginæ (Tadino), where Totila was killed. His successor, Teia, fell a few months later in the battle of Mons Lactarius, near Vesuvius. The remnant of the defeated army was suffered by Narses to march unmolested out of Italy; their subsequent fate is unknown. In the course of the next two years the few outstanding Gothic garrisons surrendered, and Italy became a portion of the Byzantine empire. The nation of the Ostrogoths had ceased to exist.
We now return to the history of the Visigoths. The conquering progress of Clovis, after the battle of Voad in 507, was checked by the armed intervention of Theoderic the Ostrogoth, who compelled the Franks to leave the Visigoths in possession not only of their Spanish dominions, but also of a small tract of country in Gaul, including the cities of Carcassonne, Narbonne, and Nîmes. The former Visigothic territories in Provence Theoderic annexed to his own kingdom, and he assumed the guardianship of his infant grandson Amalaric, the son of Alaric II. During Theoderic's life the Visigothic kingdom was administered by him in the name of Amalaric; in Spain, however, his general Theudis practically reigned as a tributary king. After Theoderic's death Amalaric was acknowledged as sovereign of the Visigoths, but his direct rule was confined to the Gaulish dominions, Theudis still retaining the real authority in Spain. A defeat by the Franks having caused Amalaric to cross the Pyrenees, he was murdered in 531 by order of Theudis, who then assumed the crown, and reigned till he died by an assassin's hand in 548. The Visigothic state now became what it had been prior to 419, a purely elective monarchy, and the choice of the kings was frequently attended by civil war. Athanagild, who was placed on the throne by a rebellion in which he was aided by an army from Justinian, reigned prosperously for fourteen years (554-567); but his Byzantine allies (the 'Greeks,' as they were called) seized several of the Spanish cities, and were not completely dislodged until about 625.
The brilliant reign of Leovigild, who made Toledo the capital of the kingdom, was marked by the subjugation of the Suevic kingdom in north-western Spain and Portugal. In 572 Leovigild associated with himself in the kingdom his two sons, Ermenegild and Reccared. The former, a convert to Catholicism, rebelled against his father, but after two years was conquered, and afterwards put to death. It is said that he was offered his life and restoration to his royal dignity if he would return to the Arian faith. By the Catholic Church he was reverenced as a martyr, and was formally canonised by Pope Sixtus V.
On the death of Leovigild his son Reccared, already a crowned king, succeeded without the formality of election. One of his first acts was to announce his determination to adopt and to establish the Catholic religion. The Goths, who were evidently weary of their position of ecclesiastical isolation, and had lost interest in their hereditary creed, accepted the change with surprising readiness. Revolts took place in Gaul and in the former Suevic kingdom, but these were soon suppressed; and the Arian clergy and laity were in overwhelming numbers admitted into the Catholic Church.
The conversion of the Visigoths was a political necessity. The secure establishment of their dominion was impossible so long as they were divided from the subject people by religious differences, and had against them the powerful organisation of the Spanish Church. This formidable adversary was now converted into an ally; but unhappily the weakness of the monarchy enabled the church to exact ruinously great concessions as the price of its support. In the course of the 7th century the Visigothic state became gradually more and more subservient to the church. The kings were elected by an assembly of bishops and court officials, the former often being in a large majority. The three sovereigns who succeeded for a time in vindicating their independence—Swinthila (620-631), Kindaswinth (641-649), and Wamba (672-680)—were eventually either deposed or induced to abdicate; and in the next reign the ground lost by the church was always more than regained. It is hardly too much to say that under the more ecclesiastically-minded kings the country was governed mainly in the interests of the clerical order; and on the whole the influence of the priesthood was so exercised as to foster, instead of to check, the many causes of decay and disorganisation which brought about the ruin of the kingdom. The efforts of Witica (701-710) to carry out extensive reforms in church and state were indeed seconded by the Archbishop of Toledo, but were virulently opposed by the great body of the clergy. Of his successor, Roderic, 'the last of the Goths,' legend has a great deal to say, but history knows only that his defeat on the banks of the Guadalete (August 711) placed the dominion of Spain in the hands of the Moorish invaders. Under the pressure of the Moslem yoke the Christians of the Peninsula became united into one nation, and the Goths ceased to exist as a separate people; but the Spanish nobility have always laid claim to Gothic descent.
The last portion of the Gothic race to disappear as a distinct community was that branch of the Ostrogoths (known in the 6th century as Tetraviteæ) who inhabited the Crimea from the time of Ermanaric. In the reign of Justinian these Goths received a Catholic bishop from Constantinople, and in the official language of the Eastern Church 'Gothia' continued to be the name of the Crimea down to the 18th century. In 1562 the famous traveller Busbecq met at Constantinople with two Crimean envoys, and wrote down a long list of words of their language, which he recognised as having an affinity with his native Flemish. The words are for the most part unquestionably Gothic. It is possible that in the Crimea the Gothic speech may have survived to a much later time; in 1750 the Jesuit Mondorf learned from a native of that region, whom he had ransomed from the Turkish galleys, that his countrymen spoke a language having some resemblance to German.
The Gothic language is now classed by philologists as belonging, together with the Scandinavian dialect, to the 'East Germanic' group, so called in contradistinction to the 'West Germanic,' which includes Old English and Low and High German. In some of its features the East Germanic form of Teutonic speech is more primitive than the other branch—e.g. in the preservation of the inflexional final -z (becoming in Gothic s and in Old Norse r), which in West Germanic is lost. On the other hand, there are certain features (such as the substitution of -aggw-, -iggw-, for the original -auw-, -euw-) in which the eastern branch shows a later stage of development. As the Bible translated by Wulfila is several centuries older than the earliest written remains of any other Teutonic language, the value of Gothic in the study of Teutonic philology is very great, although the mistaken notion that it represents substantially the ancestral form of the Teutonic languages as a whole led the scholars of an earlier generation into many errors which are still often repeated in popular handbooks. The Gothic written character, believed to be the invention of Wulfila, is substantially an adoption of the ordinary Greek alphabet of the 4th century, some letters, however, being taken from the Latin, and others from the Runic alphabet used by the Goths before their conversion. The most scientific grammar of the language is that of W. Braune (Eng. trans. 1883); Douse's Introduction to the Gothic of Ulphilas (1886) is also valuable. The most complete dictionary is still that of Schulze (Magdeburg, 1848), which gives full references to the passages in which the words occur, and also the Greek words which they render in Wulfila's translation. It should, however, be checked by comparison with later works—e.g. with Schulze's abridgment of 1867, or the concise dictionaries of Heyne and Bernhardt. A useful vocabulary, with an outline of the grammar, has been published by Professor Skeat (1868).
The scanty written remains of the Gothic language are scarcely entitled to the name of literature. Wulfila's translation of the Bible, however, is a work of extraordinary ability, and from its early date and its extreme faithfulness is of some value for the textual criticism of the New Testament. The extant portions comprise the greater part of the four gospels, parts of St Paul's epistles, and some verses of Ezra and Nehemiah. The remaining Gothic writings are a portion of a commentary on the gospel of St John, two title-deeds referring to property at Ravenna and at Arezzo, and a fragment of a Gothic calendar. All the existing Gothic MSS. seem to have been written in Italy in the first half of the 6th century. The most important of these, the beautiful Codex Argenteus of the gospels, was discovered in the 16th century in the monastery of Werden in Westphalia, and is now at Upsala. Of Gothic inscriptions in the Runic character only three are known, all probably belonging to the 4th century; two of them are merely men's names (Tilarids, Ranya) scratched on spear-heads, and the third consists of the words Gutani òwi (or òkwi) hailag, 'the holy . . . of the Goths,' on a gold necklet found in 1838 at Petrossa in Wallachia. See Henry Bradley, The Goths, to the end of the Dominion in Spain ('Story of the Nations' series, 1888).