Ebook: History of the Goths

New and completely revised from the second German edition.

Translated by Thomas J. Dunlap.

Much studied and much misunderstood, the Goths represent all the barbarian peoples whose presence inside and outside the late Roman Empire accelerated its transformation into the eastern Byzantine world and the western Medieval kingdoms. Herwig Wolfram corrects erroneous perspectives of the past on Gothic history and places it within its proper context, that of late Roman society and institutions.

Rejecting the nationalistic view of the Goths as a "German people," he searches for ethnogenesis, or tribal formation, and finds a series of discontinuous and heterogeneous groups, indiscriminately called "Goths." They gathered around a small military elite which carried a tradition of Gothic origins. From the Oder-Vistula region to the Dnieper, the Black Sea, and then into Italy and Spain, a Goth was anyone who fought alongside this leadership. Through a careful examination of the Gothic traditions as they were set down in the sixth century, and through critical reevaluation of Roman and Greek authors and a judicious use of archaeological evidence, Wolfram offers a convincing new understanding of what it was to be a Goth.

Historians of late Antiquity and all those who have accepted the mythical connection between early barbarian society and the history of the German people will find this perspective enlightening. Wolfram demonstrates that the barbarian world of "the Goths" was both a creation and an essential element of the late Roman Empire.