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among scholars, who nowadays tend to downplay the significance of invasions in explaining why Rome fell, the Goths are often taken to be a paradigm of barbarian migration. As we shall see in the next chapter, the evidence for a Gothic migration out of northern Europe to the fringes of the empire is quite weak. It rests mainly on the evidence of a single ancient source, the Getica of Jordanes, around which complicated structures of scholarly hypothesis have been built. For centuries, the idea of a deep Gothic antiquity has been essential to many different visions of the European past. All modern discussion of the Goths, including the present book, is a product of this long historiographical tradition. To maintain, as here, that Gothic history effectively begins at the imperial frontier in the third century may be in keeping with all the ancient evidence, but it is also controversial. To understand why an interpretation that closely reflects the ancient evidence should be out of step with much modern hypothesis, we need to examine the role that the Goths have played in the intellectual history of modern Europe. Only by doing so can we see how little our present-day disputes over the Gothic past have to do with third-, fourth-, and fifth-century evidence, and how much they have to do with the political developments of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and earlier twentieth centuries.

Chapter 3 The Search for Gothic Origins

Gothic history, as it appears in every modern account, is a story of migration. Traditionally, it begins in Scandinavia, moves to the southern shores of the Baltic around the mouth of the Vistula river, and then onwards to the Black Sea. Depending upon what study one reads, one can find it stated that written sources, archaeology, and linguistic evidence all demonstrate that just such a migration took place, if not out of Scandinavia then at least out of Poland. In fact, there is just a single source for this extended story of Gothic migration, the Getica of Jordanes, written in the middle of the sixth century A.D., hundreds of years after the events it purports to record. Other sources, literary and archaeological, have been brought in to corroborate, correct or supplement Jordanes’ narrative, but his story of Gothic migration underpins nearly every modern treatment of the Goths, consciously or not. And yet Jordanes, as we shall see, is not merely unreliable, he is deeply misleading. To understand why his satisfyingly linear, but ultimately implausible, account is still so pervasive, we have to understand why the idea of Gothic roots stretching back into the deepest mists of prehistory has played so important a role in conceptualizing the northern European past. As we shall see, for the past 500 years the Goths have played an indispensable part in imagining a northern European history untouched by the Graeco-Roman world.

The Northern Renaissance and the Germanic Past

In 1425, the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini discovered the only known medieval manuscript of Tacitus’ Germania. That discovery, and still more the first printing of the text at Venice around 1470, were watersheds in the search for a northern, non-Roman, and ultimately Gothic, past. The Germania is a short treatise on the peoples and customs of the region that the Romans called Germany – which is to say the whole vast tract of central Europe beyond the Rhine and Danube rivers which was in many ways a mystery to the Romans. Probably written in A.D. 98 and based in part on earlier sources, the Germania uses its description of the primitive Germans as a mirror that can reflect the failings of decadent, civilized Rome. Short as it is, the Germania provided early modern thinkers and historians with a lot of food for thought. It opens with a section of ethnography in which Tacitus asserts that the Germans were not immigrants to their lands, but rather pure and uncontaminated by intermarriage with others. This is followed by a long description of German customs, and then by a survey of the different tribes of Germania.

For fifteenth-