560 Walter Pohl
to the self-identification of barbarians, for the simple reason that most of them did not
leave any written texts. Jordanes is one of the few cases of a clear statement of Gothic
identity, and he was a thoroughly Romanized author and a loyal subject of the empire.
Debating Gothic Identity
The political language of the Gothic kingdoms could highlight their ethnic character.
Gothic kings occasionally used the titlerex Gothorum. The privileged status of the Ostro-
goths in their kingdom was described aslibertas Gothorum(Gothic freedom). The Gothic
laws were known aslexorleges Gothorum, a term also used for the Arian creed. However,
Andrew Gillett (2002a) is correct in maintaining that, before ca. 600, ethnic ideology
is rather rarely attested in the post-imperial states. The official title of Gothic kings in
both kingdoms seems to have simply been (Flavius)rex, which made it easier to legit-
imize their rule over the entire population of the kingdom. The ethnic perception of the
kingdoms is attested much more frequently in outside designations (e.g., Theoderic’s
letters of state written and collected by Cassiodorus address all the other kings, including
the Visigoths, with their ethnic titles). However, even though ethnic ideology was by
no means an exclusive feature in the post-imperial kingdoms, it is striking that it should
have mattered at all, in the context of a deeply entrenched Latin political culture. In the
post-Roman west,gentes, peoples, became political actors, and most new kingdoms were
named after them; in the long run, the ethnic designations became an integral part of
the political landscape, unlike in the Islamic east (Pohl 2013).
One criticism of Wolfram’s work also related to the debate over Gothic ethnicity con-
cerned the problem of the sources. Was Jordanes’ work, as Jordanes claims, a reworked
version of the lost “History of the Goths” by the Roman senator and high official in
the Gothic kingdom, Cassiodorus, or an original work? Could it contain any genuine
Gothic material, or just ethnographic constructions? The “literary turn” around 1990
favored a rather literary understanding of the text, as proposed by Walter Goffart, who
classed it as a love story (Goffart 1988). However, even Goffart basically acknowledged
that a Gothic history could serve political purposes in the sixth century, even after the
end of the Ostrogothic kingdom. A more fundamental methodological debate arose on
the use of archaeological evidence with regard to Gothic ethnicity. It was conventional
until the 1990s to identify several archaeological cultures with successive stages of Gothic
migration: the Wielbark culture along the Vistula River in the first–third centuryAD,
the third–fifth-centuryCerniakhov culture in modern Ukraine, and the relatively scarceˇ
richly endowed graves from Ostrogothic Italy and the Spanish Meseta (Bierbrauer 1994).
The evidence, however, is especially problematic from the kingdoms on Roman territory,
where, for instance, the lack of finds from Aquitaine and the Iberian coastal areas indicate
that only some Goths used grave goods—if these were Goths at all, and not natives trying
to enhance their status by staging lavish “barbarian” funerary rituals (Halsall 2010). The
general methodological critique of ethnic identifications in archaeology corresponded to
a growing uneasiness with any identification of archaeological evidence with “the Goths,”
although the debate is far from over (Brather 2004; Pohl and Mehofer 2010).
All these debates have brought a number of modifications in the model of Gothic his-
tory proposed by Wolfram, and at the same time, as sketched in the preceding text, his