Goths

The Goths are a people, not a single state

They were an East Germanic people whose most famous origin story comes from the 6th-century historian Jordanes (in his Getica, itself a summary of the lost history by Cassiodorus), who claimed they migrated from the island of Scandza (Scandinavia) under King Berig in three ships, landing at Gothiscandza near the Vistula. Modern scholarship treats this cautiously: many scholars accept the account is partly derived from genuine Gothic tribal tradition (and archaeologically the Wielbark culture of Poland, developing into the Chernyakhov culture of Ukraine, shows a north-to-south movement broadly consistent with it), while others — notably Arne Søby Christensen — regard the Getica's origin narrative as an essentially fabricated construct from Greco-Roman myth. This is the core of the ethnogenesis debate.

By the 3rd century the Goths were raiding the Roman Empire. Under King Cniva they invaded the Balkans and won a major victory at the Battle of Abritus (251), in which Emperor Decius was killed — the first Roman emperor to die in battle against a foreign enemy. During the 3rd century the Goths apparently split into at least two groups: the Tervingi (west of the Dniester, later the core of the Visigoths) and the Greuthungi (east of the Dniester toward the Don, later the core of the Ostrogoths). These names — meaning roughly "forest people" and "steppe/gravel people" — appear only from the late 3rd to early 5th centuries and, per Wolfram and Burns, were probably reciprocal geographic labels that fell out of use after the Hunnic conquest displaced the Goths. The Goths were converted largely to Arian Christianity, and Bishop Ulfilas (Wulfila) created a Gothic alphabet and translated the Bible into Gothic in the 4th century — a monument of Germanic literacy.