Map courtesy of The General Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin

One of the first tribes to make its presence felt in the Classical world was the Goths. Beginning in the late second century CE they began to drift out of their homeland in north-central Europe. About a half-century later they had reached the Black Sea just north of the Danube. In 238 CE they crossed the Danube frontier and invaded the Roman Empire, raiding along the coast of modern-day Bulgaria. After about a decade of Roman containment, in 250 the Gothic commander Kniva brought three separate armies onto the field. One was pushed back by the Dacians (in modern Romania) but two armies crossed the Danube. At Stara Zagora in central Bulgaria the Roman army was crushed and the emperor killed. For two decades Goths (often in concert with Vandals) led sea raids against Black Sea towns, and once they even sailed through the Bosporus and raided Greece and Asia Minor. The raid was a success, but the return home was disastrous. Adverse winds took a heavy toll of ships and on land the Goths suffered massive losses. Shortly after 270 Rome had the Gothic depradations more or less constrained, and eventually they became Roman confederates. (This occured certainly by 332, but probably earlier.)

During these raids of the mid-third century large numbers of inhabitants of the Roman colonies were brought back to Gothia as slaves. Many of these were Christians and the religion began to spread among the Goths. The impulse was hastened by Goths living south of the Danube who accepted Christianity because it was the official religion of Rome. One man, Ulfilas or Wulfila, was the grandson of a slave and a Christian. In 340 he was named "Bishop in the Land of the Goths." Ulfilas undertook a translation of the Bible into Gothic, for which he needed an alphabet. This he created by using the Greek alphabet with an admixture of Latin and runic characters. During the early fourth century the intrusion of another group effectively divided the Goths into Ostrogoths (eastern Goths) centered north of the Black Sea in the Ukraine, and Visigoths (western Goths) along the Danube. Around 370 the Hunnish invasion swept westward out of Asia and into Europe. The Ostrogoths were completely defeated (for a while), and the Visigoths were pressed against the Roman frontier. As the result of a Gothic victory in 372, the Romans gave them the land between the Balkan Range and the Danube, but this still did not suffice as a homeland for the Goths. In 395 the Gothic leader Alaric violated the treaty by penetrating south of the Balkan Range. In 408 he besieged Rome when the Emperor refused to give him money or a title for past services. In 410 he entered Rome, although the Christian Alaric spared the churches, and generally did relatively little damage. He then turned his attention Sicily as a steppingstone to the rich Roman grain fields of North Africa. His fleet was destroyed in a storm, and shortly after that Alaric took ill and died. In the following years, the Visigoths settled first in southern Gaul, then moved into the Iberian peninsula.

In 459 a young Ostrogoth with the common Gothic name Theodoric was sent as a hostage to Constantinople. Until he was eighteen, he received a solid Graeco-Roman education there. He returned to his Ostrogoths and led them west and south across the Danube. He continued to lead his people west -- by some accounts as many as 100,000 in all, with 20,000 warriors. In 491 Theodoric gained a military victory over Northern Italy, and two years later had the nominal king, Odoacer, murdered during a banquet. For a period after his death the Ostrogothic kingdom was run by his wife and young son, but in the sixth century the Eastern Roman Emperor invaded and the Ostrogoths as a culture were eliminated.