HISTORY OF THE GOTHS
Herwig Wolfram
Berkley: University of California Press, 1988
622 pp., $39.95
American students can slip through many a Western civilization course without becoming aware that Gothic art and architecture, which they encounter in the form of color plates inserted into their textbooks, have absolutely nothing to do with the Goths, who appeared several chapters earlier in the account of the decline of the Roman Empire.
But if the Goths get no credit for medieval Gothic cathedrals, let alone Gothic novels and Gothic script, why are these called "Gothic"? What mark did the real Goths make on history? Or did they just destroy Rome and let it go at that?
Herwing Wolfram's book makes the Goths into human beings with a very colorful history. The Goths, whose civilization developed rapidly from relatively primitive origins, were constantly forced to work with, through, or against, the omnipresent superpower of Rome. Overall, they remind the reader of agile and alert Third Worlders forced up against a modern industrial power whose leaders do not quite know what to make of them or how to cope with them.
Wolfram is ideally suited for this task. Having taught paleography and the study of medieval documents for several decades at the University of Vienna before assuming directorship of the Austrian Institute for Historical Research, he has combined throughout his career a meticulous attention to detail with a talent for constructing a meaningful, living whole out of scattered fragments. Some twenty years ago he published a two-volume study on the intituatio, the changing, formal phrasing with which kings and lords of the Middle Ages introduced themselves with self-given Latin designations of rank and dignity. That much makes it sound deadly, but it is a highly readable work that analyzes what images of themselves medieval potentates wanted to publicize and why. Several years ago he published a richly illustrated and (rare for the higher ranks of central European medievalists) overtly popular book, Gold from the Danube: Rome's Heirs and Their Treasures. It presented the jewelry, medallions, and other artifacts of Goths and their fellow barbarians with often humorous insights into what they and their contemporaries must have thought of them.
Quite possibly the Goths originated in Scandinavia, where the Swedes still retain such suggestive names as "Vasterotland" and "Ostergotland." Around the first century A.D., they were migrating from the southern coast of the Baltic Sea southeast to the edge of the Black Sea in what is now the Ukraine. Controlling much of the territory between the mouth of the Danube and the Dnieper, the Goths raided the empire with increasing frequency and ferocity, particularly in the Roman province of Dacia (roughly modern Romania and Bessarbia). The Romans, of course, fought their advances, but the Roman Emperor Decius fell in battle against the Goths, and they went on to invade Asia Minor. They overran Greece in 268, and although they were defeated by Claudius II, who added "Gothicus" to his name in honor of his victory, the next emperor, Aurelian, decided to buy the Goths off: The Romans gave them financial support, amounting to bribes for good behavior, and the province of Dacia as a homeland. In
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