Germanic Goths sacked Rome then split into kingdoms across Europe
First mentioned in the third century AD north of the Lower Danube, the Goths raided Rome, defeated imperial armies at Adrianople in 378, and sacked the city itself in 410. Visigoths ruled Spain from Toledo; Ostrogoths under Theodoric built a kingdom at Ravenna in Italy.
Archaeologists link early Goths to the Chernyakhov culture in Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania. Hunnic pressure in the late fourth century pushed masses toward the Danube frontier. Alaric's sack of Rome in 410 preceded the Visigothic Kingdom; Theodoric the Great's Ostrogoths ruled Italy from Ravenna until Byzantine conquest in the sixth century. Crimean Gothic communities survived over a thousand years, though the people eventually ceased to exist as a distinct group.
Their name may connect to Swedish Gutes and Geats, all possibly from a Proto-Germanic verb meaning to pour. Jordanes' sixth-century Getica claimed Scandinavian origins via Scandza, but scholars question early details. Gutones appear near the Vistula in the first century with the Wielbark culture, which shifted southeast toward the Black Sea in the second century, absorbing Przeworsk peoples. Tacitus, writing around 98 AD, pictured the Gotones near the ocean as kingly ruled people armed with round shields and short swords.
Roman authors initially called them Scythians; the Latin name Gothi appears in the late third century. On the Pontic steppe they adopted Sarmatian horsemanship, archery, and falconry while remaining accomplished farmers and seafarers. J. B. Bury called their period the only non-nomadic episode in steppe history. Gothic architecture and modern Goth subculture borrow the name but owe nothing to the ancient people themselves. Their first recorded strike on imperial soil was the sack of Histria, near the Danube mouth, in 238. Much later, the Visigothic kingdom fell largely to the Umayyad Caliphate in the early eighth century, though a remnant in Asturias under Pelagius went on to launch the Reconquista.
Source: Goths
