The Romans’ View of the Goths
For a Roman watching the slow waters of the Danube, the river was more than geography: it was the empire’s first line of defence. Border watchtowers and garrisoned forts kept the Roman world from the others, from the barbarian tribes. The river and all the defences meant one thing: a hope for a late-Roman people that barbarians could be contained. Sometimes these enemies were driven away, sometimes fed, or even paid away.
When Ammianus Marcellinus, the soldier-historian, records scenes from the late fourth century, he writes in the voice of an empire that had fought the Goths for generations: dangerous, adaptable, and increasingly capable of striking where Rome thought itself safe. The Roman worldview framed many Gothic movements as failures of diplomacy or breakdowns of frontier management, the sort of errors an emperor or prefect could remedy with money, hostages, or force, so long as Rome still commanded respect and resources. Soon, that changed.
Origins and Early Pressure
Romans had long known “Goth” as a name for many tribal groups who moved across the great European steppe into the regions north of the Black Sea. Classical writers offered origin stories, although these stories are mostly mythical. Jordanes and, through him, Cassiodorus relate the Goths to legendary northern homelands, but to Roman eyes the important fact was their appearance on the map of threat: raiding, then settling, then seeking land.
From the third century onward, Gothic expeditions into the Balkans and Greece tested imperial reactions: punitive expeditions, foederati arrangements, and sometimes catastrophic reverses. One frequently quoted Roman success, the victory attributed in later chronicles to Claudius II Gothicus in the late 260s, pointed to this prolonged contest of force and negotiation. Over time, Romans alternated between recruiting Gothic troops into imperial service and treating them as objects of strategic containment.
The Hunnic Shock and the Danube Crossing
The arrival of the Huns in the late fourth century was the external shove that rewrote Roman policy. Pressed from the east, large Gothic groups decided to flee and to cross the Danube and enter imperial territory in 376. The arrangement, nominally a refugee settlement under imperial oversight, deteriorated into misery and exploitation: supplies mismanaged, officials corrupt, and refugees pushed into dependence, an entire series of failures Ammianus and later chroniclers suggest made violent revolt almost inevitable. The imperial response that followed was not a single decisive solution but a string of misjudgements that culminated in open war.
Adrianople — Rome’s Dark Day
The moment the Roman establishment and people feared most arrived on 9 August 378 at Adrianople (near modern Edirne). Fritigern led Gothic forces into battle against the emperor Valens. The decision by Valens to engage without waiting for reinforcements proved fatal.
Contemporary and near-contemporary accounts describe an encirclement and rout: heavy Roman infantry outmaneuvered by mobile Gothic horsemen, the imperial army shattered, and Valens himself killed in the field. For Romans of the era, Adrianople signalled something more than a tactical defeat; it was proof that the army’s aura of invincibility was broken and that imperial control over its frontiers had to be reassessed. The Goths remained in Rome, and they were here to stay. Furthermore, they became a formidable force, capable of endangering even the capital of the Empire. That happened with Alaric in charge.
Alaric, Negotiations, and the Sack of Rome
Alaric is described in Roman sources as both a product and a scourge of Rome’s own foederati system. He spent years operating within the imperial world, mostly serving as a federate commander, bargaining for status, and being alternately courted and rebuffed. Resentment at broken promises and the chaotic politics of the Western court pushed him from negotiation to campaign.
After a series of incursions and sieges, Alaric entered Rome on 24 August 410, and the city was sacked for three days. Contemporary Christian writers, mostly Orosius and Jerome, recorded the shock as if a social and spiritual order had been upended. For many Romans, this was not the administrative end of the empire since Ravenna remained the imperial seat. Still, the psychological blow was immense: the eternal city, the symbolic heart, had been plundered by a “barbarian” king. It was the end of an era.
The Visigothic Kingdom
After the sack, a different phase began. The Tervingi, or the Visigoths, the western branch that had once followed Alaric, progressed from mercenaries and became territorial rulers. In 418, recognized as foederati, they were allocated lands in Aquitaine: a pragmatic Roman solution that meant settling former enemies as a buffer within imperial space, mostly on the border regions.
Over the following decades, Visigothic power consolidated in Gaul and, crucially, in the Iberian Peninsula. Under King Euric (reigned somewhere between 466 and 484), the Visigoths declared an effectively independent kingdom, expanding territorial control and asserting legal sovereignty. Euric’s reign saw the appearance of the Codex Euricianus, a written Visigothic law compiled by a Roman jurist in the Gothic service. This underlined the transformation: Goths no longer only fought Rome, they governed Roman peoples using Roman instruments.
Rome’s administrators watched these developments with mixed feelings. On one hand, the creation of a stable Visigothic nation in Hispania and southwestern Gaul prevented immediate chaos and organized defence. On the other hand, it was an undeniable fragmentation of Western imperial authority; provinces that were once part of the Empire now answered to Gothic kings.
This reconfiguration was not purely violent: it involved negotiation, legal borrowing, and administrative continuation. Roman senators, clergy, and local elites found themselves negotiating status within a Gothic court rather than with the emperor in Ravenna. The Visigoths made Roman law and practice tools of their kingship; in doing so, they both preserved and transformed the late-Roman order. This Visigoth nation lasted up until 711, when the Muslim forces ended their nation.
The Ostrogothic Kingdom
The eastern branch of the Goths, firstly known as the Greuthungi, followed a different arc. Asleep for a time under Hunnic supremacy, the Ostrogoths reemerged after Attila’s death and centuries of political reshuffling. The figure Romans most often recall in this context is Theodoric the Great.
Educated in Constantinople and familiar with Roman administrative customs, Theodoric returned to Italy as a military leader sanctioned by the Eastern emperor to depose Odoacer. His victory in 493 created an Ostrogothic kingdom that consciously adopted Roman governance: civil administration continued in Latin, Roman laws were upheld for Roman subjects, and the Gothic king positioned himself as successor to Rome’s mantle of stable rule. Cassiodorus, Theodoric’s secretary and later a chronicler and statesman, praised the king’s hybrid policy — combining Gothic authority with Roman institutional form.
Yet Theodoric’s Italy was a careful balancing act. He used Roman administrators and preserved much of Roman law to win the loyalty of urban elites, while ensuring Gothic military dominance. This duality meant the Ostrogothic kingdom looked Roman in many of its outward features, even as it was politically independent. After Theodoric’s death, tensions between Gothic rulers and the Eastern Roman polity, which viewed Italy as part of the imperial inheritance, eventually led to conflict and the kingdom’s erosion in the sixth century. Justinian I effectively ended their nation and incorporated their lands into the Byzantine Empire.
Romans and Goths – Life Together
Seen from the precincts of Roman government, the story of the Goths was at once a catalogue of catastrophic defeats and an uncomfortable administrative solution. Adrianople and the sack of 410 remain the dramatic scenes Roman writers returned to when explaining why the old order had fractured.
Yet the same sources, Ammianus, Orosius, Jerome, and Cassiodorus, also record the quieter, structural facts: Goths became foederati, then settled rulers; Gothic kings employed Roman law and administrators; and in doing so, they helped create the political map that would replace the Western Empire. From a Roman point of view, this was both a disaster and a pragmatic succession: a transformation that robbed emperors of exclusive authority even as it preserved many Roman institutions under new kings.
Hello, my name is Vladimir, and I am a part of the Roman-empire writing team.
I am a historian, and history is an integral part of my life.
To be honest, while I was in school, I didn’t like history so how did I end up studying it? Well, for that, I have to thank history-based strategy PC games. Thank you so much, Europa Universalis IV, and thank you, Medieval Total War.
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