THE GOTHS/David M. Gwynn, 2017

The Goths keep cropping up.  We blame them for bringing on the collapse of Rome when they sacked the city in 410.  They evidently invented medieval architecture.  And the Gothic spirit animates the juiciest bits of nineteenth century literature, from Edgar Allen Poe to Dracula.  There’s definitely something about those Goths that keeps them in the European imagination, if not on center stage at least lurking in the wings.

This review will involve much summarization, mainly for this reader’s benefit.  But it should serve to illustrate the breadth of the idea of the Gothic.

Visigoths

There are two senses of “Goth.”  The first is the historic people.  These were a collection of Germanic tribes who migrated south from “Scandza,” probably Scandinavia, to settle around the Black Sea.  The settled agricultural civilization there, called the Sintana de Mures-Cernjachov, is well-researched.  It was in contact with the Roman Empire through trade, piracy, and war.  The Goths defeated the Romans in the Battle of Abrittus in 251, when they succeeded in killing Emperor Decius.  But they were more or less kept north of the Danube.

The Goths were the first Germanic group to convert to Christianity.  A descendant of a slave, Ulfila, brought Christianity to the Goths.  He was named bishop in 340.  He also designed the first gothic alphabet, a combination of Latin, Greek and runic characters.  But the Christianity he brought was Arian, which did not recognize Christ as equal with God the Father, something that was to cause tension until the Visigothic King  Reccared  (r. 586-601) converted to Catholicism in 589.

The Goths remained north of the Danube between 250 and 350.  But in 376 they migrated en mass across the Danube.  What brought this on was, of course, assault from the Huns.  What had been a settled culture was most likely shocked by the onslaught of these nomadic invaders.  The mass migration was resisted by the empire.  The tensions led to the Battle of Adrianople in 378, one of Rome’s few catastrophic losses.  

There were two groupings of Goths, the Tervingi and Greuthungi.  These distinctions collapsed in the wake of the Hun attacks and the migration into Roman territory.  What emerged were two new groupings, the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths.  Alaric became leader of the Visigoths.  He led his people into Italy in 401.  In 410 his forces sacked Rome itself, an event that was devastating to the idea of the indomitable empire.  In fact the city was not destroyed; Alaric took pains to preserve churches, for instance.  In retrospect the incident was important because the Goths were the first of many Germanic groups to invade the empire.

The Visigoths went on to make peace with Rome.  Under the terms of the treaty of 418 they were allowed to establish a territory in southern Gaul, called Aquitania (Aquitaine), stretching from Toulouse to Bordeaux.  And the empire struggled on till the last emperor was deposed, in 476.  In the meantime there were major influxes of different tribes, including Franks, Vandals and the most dangerous of all, the Huns.  The Huns were finally stopped in 451 at the battle of Catalaunian Fields.  

The Franks soon moved into all of Gaul, pushing the Visigoths into the Iberian Peninsula.  The Battle of Vouille in 507 was the decisive point. The Visigoths remained in power in Iberia until the Arab invasion of 711. 

Ostrogoths

A second grouping of Goths had not crossed the Danube in 376.  Instead they stayed north of the Danube and came under domination of the Huns.  When the Hun empire crumbled this group, called the Ostrogoths, moved south, retracing the Visigoth trail, eventually arriving in Italy in 489.  Italy by this time was not Roman.  It was under a Germanic king, Odovacer.  The Goths overcame Odovacer’s forces by 493, and established their own kingdom centered in Ravenna.  So by 500 there were two Gothic Kingdoms in large parts of the old western empire, in Italy and Iberia.

The Ostrogoths did not last long, however.  Soon after the reign of their primary leader, Theodoric the Amal (r. 493-526), they were defeated by the forces of Justinian, emperor in the eastern empire.  Ravenna fell in 540.  By 550 the Ostrogoth kingdom was history.  

The Ostrogoths left an important cultural legacy, however.  In the figures of Cassiodorus and Boethius this period saw the last flowering of classical Roman scholarship.  And there were important architectural developments, such as Theodoric’s palace and mausoleum.

Sources on the Goths

The best source on the historic Goths is Getica by Jordanes, a 6th century Byzantine scholar.  For the Visigoths the best source is Isidore of Seville, who wrote a 12-volume history of the Goths—unfortunately, lost, but sections are found in other sources.  And his Etymologies is still intact.  Gregory of Tours and Bede also mentioned the Goths.

The Goths as Cultural Force

Once we move into the eight century the Goths are no longer a separate people.  Their genes, of course, are still carried by their descendants throughout Europe.  And in a sense the memory of the Goths has remained a presence in the same diffuse fashion.  

The Gothic influence on western culture has evolved.  The idea of the Goths has been a potent influence in architecture, history, politics, and literature.  And today the Gothic remains with us in another field, popular culture.  The Goth movement became strong in the 80s and is still alive and well in Euro-American culture, fashion, and magic.  

Once the middle ages were in full steam, after 800, the Goths became a memory.  They were discussed, especially in the Chronica side Historia de duabus civitatibus (Chronicle of Two Cities), by Otto of Freising (d. 1158).  But perhaps the more significant memory of the Goths came in the form of oral narrative.  Gothic history figures in Das Nibelungenlied (the Song of the Nibelungs), an epic song compiled around 1200.  Figures in the Nibelungenlied are based on historical figures.  Attila appears as King Eztel, Dietrich is Theodoric the Amal.  Dietrich is the chivalrous knight who strives for peace.  This same legend of Dietrich became one of the founding legends of Germanic culture, and found expression in Wagner’s monumental Ring cycle, which first premiered in 1846.

Architecture

The Renaissance period generally held a negative view on the Goths.  The Goths were seen as barbarians who destroyed the great civilization of the classic world.  This negative view of the Gothic contributions to history extended to architecture.  Giorgio Vasari 1511-1574) drew a big distinction between classical and medieval architecture, which he called “German” and described as confused and disorderly, with portals using twisted columns and a pile of pyramids and leaves.  Vasari goes on to charge the Goths with buildings done in this style.  “God preserve,” he writes, “every land from the invasion of such ideas and such an order of works.”  The Goths were in one fell swoop made into the bad guys, responsible for all of the sins of medieval architecture.

What is incredible to us is that “medieval architecture” includes some of the greatest edifices ever made.  Today we wonder at the impressive Gothic cathedrals.  The first in the new medieval style was the basilica of the Cathedral of St. Denys, completed in 1144, followed soon by Notre Dame.  The style went viral, showing up in Cologne Cathedral, begun 1248 and not completed until 1880, Salisbury Cathedral, started in 1220, and Avignon.  

The word Gothic was first used to describe medieval style in 1610 in a work by the Belgian Jesuit, Carolus Scribanius.  The new “Gothic” style was so different from the previous, Romanesque, due to structural innovations.  The new cathedrals used flying buttresses and pointed arches, allowing for vaulted ceilings and ample light.  The term entered English in the 1640s in the writings of John Evelyn.  Christopher Wren preferred to call the style “Saracen,” thinking it came from Arab influences, not the Goths.  Nevertheless, the name has stuck.  

A second wave of Gothic architecture, the Gothic Revival, took hold in England in the 1700s, and includes many country manors as well as Windsor Castle and Westminster (rebuilt after the original burned down in 1834).  This fashion peaked in the 1800s.  It coincided with the rise of a new literary mode, the Gothic.

Literature

The trend started with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and continued through Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796).  The Gothic impulse continued into the 19th century with Frankenstein (1818), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Dracula (1897).  All of these works had a few characteristics in common:  a fascination with the past; an obsession with horror, sexuality and desire; and interest in the supernatural and hidden meanings.  By this time what the Gothic represented had gone well beyond the historical facts.

The same infatuations with horror and the supernatural are found in Goth music and lifestyles from the 1980s to the present.  Today “Gothic” immediately brings up a range of emotions and images:  the lure of the repressed, the counter-cultural, the barbaric and the enlightened.  Gothic has become an intrinsic part of western sensibility.

The Gothic, in sum, is a minor but stubbornly persistent thread in western culture.  Gwynn does an excellent job of condensing this material into a useful overview.  It serves its main purpose well—to whet our appetites for more.