Goths

Rouran epoch Göktürk epoch Uyghur epoch Kirghiz epoch

Rouran First Göktürk Tang rule Second Göktürk Uyghur Kirghiz Huns Western Göktürk Türgesh Karluk Khazar

Rouran 400–554
First Göktürk 552–630
Tang rule 630–682
Second Göktürk 682–744
Uyghur 744–840
Kirghiz 840–924
Huns 370–469
Western Göktürk 552–659
Türgesh 699–766
Karluk 766–800
Khazar 650–969

The Goths were a Germanic people. In the fourth century they held the lands north of the Black Sea and the lower Danube. They were the first great people of Europe whom the Huns conquered. For eighty years the history of the Huns in Europe is bound up with theirs.^[1]

Ammianus knows two Gothic peoples: the Greuthungi of king Hermanaric and the Tervingi of Athanaric, whom he calls their judge.^[2] The Gothic tradition preserved by Jordanes calls them Ostrogoths and Visigoths, the eastern and the western Goths.^[3] The Greuthungi are taken for the Ostrogoths and the Tervingi for the Visigoths.^[4]

In the 370s the Huns, together with the Alans they had subdued, broke Hermanaric’s realm. The Ostrogoths came under Hunnic rule. Most of the Visigoths fled across the Danube into the Roman empire in 376. Two years later they destroyed a Roman army at Adrianople.^[5]^[6] The Hunnic conquest of the Goths treats that war. Up to 50,000 Goths reached the Balkans.^[7]

The Ostrogoths kept kings of their own blood under the Huns. These kings ruled “under the counsel of the Huns”. For forty years after the death of their king Thorismund the Ostrogoths had no king at all.^[8] Under Attila the brothers Valamir, Thiudimir and Vidimir ruled them. They served Attila so completely that they could not have refused to fight even their kinsmen the Visigoths.^[9] On the Catalaunian Plains in 451 Ostrogoths fought for Attila and Visigoths against him. The Visigothic king Theodorid fell.^[10] Jordanes notes that the Goths often took names from the Huns.^[11] Attila and his chief men had their wooden houses built by Gothic carpenters in the Gothic fashion.^[12]

After Attila’s death the Ostrogoths took no part in the battle of the Nedao. They received Pannonia from the emperor Marcian.^[13]^[14] Attila’s sons came against the Goths as against runaway slaves. Valamir routed them. Later the Goths drove Dintzic from Bassiana. Jordanes writes that the Huns who remained feared the arms of the Goths from that day on.^[15]

The Goths of the Crimea kept a custom of the Hunnic age. From the second half of the fifth century on, their cemeteries near Yalta and at the Gothic capital Doros hold deformed skulls, bound in infancy. In the sixth and early seventh centuries, up to a tenth of the dead have such skulls, men and women alike.^[16] Modern accounts read the custom as a legacy of the years under Hunnic rule.^[17]

References

^ Thompson 1948, p. 22–24
^ Ammianus Marcellinus; Rolfe 1939, xxxi.3.1–4, p. 395–397
^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 130–131, p. 87–88
^ Golden 1992, p. 89
^ Ammianus Marcellinus; Rolfe 1939, xxxi.3–13, p. 395–481
^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 130–138, p. 87–90
^ Yavuz 2025, p. 90
^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 249–251, p. 121–122
^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 252–253, p. 122–123
^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 199, 209, p. 107, 109
^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 58, p. 67
^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 179–180
^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 144
^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 264, p. 127
^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 268–273, p. 128–130
^ Werner 1956, p. 13
^ Werner 1956, p. 17

Sources

Ammianus Marcellinus
Jordanes (after Priscus and Ammianus Marcellinus)

Literature

John C. Rolfe, Ammianus Marcellinus, with an English Translation, vol. III: Books XXVII–XXXI (1939)
Charles Christopher Mierow, The Gothic History of Jordanes in English Version, with an Introduction and a Commentary (1915)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture (1973)
E. A. Thompson, A History of Attila and the Huns (1948)
Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Joachim Werner, Beiträge zur Archäologie des Attila-Reiches (1956)