The Visigoths were the western tribe of the Goths. They were a Germanic people who settled west of the Black Sea sometime in the 3rd century CE. According to the scholar Herwig Wolfram, the Roman writer Cassiodorus (c. 485-585 CE) coined the term Visigothi to mean ‘Western Goths’ as he understood the term Ostrogothi to mean ‘Eastern Goths’. Cassiodorus was simply trying to coin a name to differentiate the two extant tribes of the Gothic people in his time who clearly differed from each other; these tribes did not originally refer to themselves by these names. The Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus (4th century CE) refers to the Visigoths as the Tervingi (also given as Thervingi), which may have been their original name. The designation Visigothi seems to have appealed to the Visigoths themselves, however, and in time they came to apply it to themselves. The Visigoths would eventually settle in the region of modern-day Germany and Hungary until they were driven out by the invading Huns. Some Visigoths, under their general Fritigern (d. c. 380 CE) were granted land by the emperor Valens (r. 364-378 CE) in Roman territory. Their mistreatment at the hands of Roman provincial governors would lead to the First Gothic War and the pivotal Battle of Adrianople (378 CE) in which Rome was defeated by the Goths under Fritigern. The Visigoths would further impact Rome when their king Alaric
I (r. 395-410 CE) sacked the city in 410 CE. After Alaric I, the Visigoths migrated to Spain where they established themselves and assimilated with the Romans and indigenous people living there. The Goths probably came from the region of modern-day Gdansk, Poland (though this claim is contested), before migrating toward the boundaries of Rome. The scholar Walter Goffart argues that there can be no “history of the Goths” before their appearance in Roman texts because prior to this time (c. 238 CE) there was no written history (8). The primary source on Gothic history is Jordanes’ Getica (6th century CE) which draws on Cassiodorus’ work as its primary source and weaves mythological and legendary events in with the historical narrative. Goffart, therefore (among others), claims that the Roman history of the Goths is the only history.
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