CHAPTER 37
Goths and Huns
Walter Pohl
The Events
In ca. 375CE, a large group of Huns appeared in the steppes of Eastern Europe
(Maenchen-Helfen 1973; Wolfram 1988; Heather 2005; Pohl 2005; Halsall 2007;
Kulikowski 2007). At the time, most of the region north of the Danube and the Black
Sea was dominated by Goths, who had gradually migrated there from modern Poland in
the third century. In the steppes north of the Black Sea, the Ostrogothic king Ermanaric
ruled over a multi-ethnic population. In parts of modern Romania, Visigoths and other
ethnic groups lived in decentralized confederation. Both realms were destroyed by the
Hun onslaught; part of the population fled into the relative safety of Roman provinces,
and the rest remained north of the Danube under Hun domination. Large groups of
Roman Goths soon rebelled against their poor treatment by imperial officials, and routed
an army led by the emperor Valens in person at Adrianople in 378. After a series of
skirmishes and negotiations, the Visigothic core group of the victorious barbarians was
settled as a unit of the Roman army under its own leadership in the Balkans (Wolfram
1988). These Goths provided essential support to Roman emperors (e.g., in the bloody
civil war of Theodosius I against the usurper Eugenius in 394), but they increasingly
also resorted to blackmail, rebellions, and raids to increase their stipend, and to move
to richer provinces. Most famously, King Alaric I played this game in the first decade
of the fifth century in Italy. The apex of this dramatic chain of events was that Alaric
led his Goths to plunder the city of Rome for 3 days in 410, a symbolic gesture that
sent shock waves throughout the empire. After years of further maneuvering, successes,
and setbacks, these Visigoths were stably settled in Aquitaine around Toulouse, where
they gradually carved out their increasingly autonomous and expansive “kingdom of
the empire.” After they had been driven from most of Gaul by the Franks in 508, the
A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean, First Edition. Edited by Jeremy McInerney.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.