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By Root 334 0

able to recruit many Goths for his Persian campaigns of the later 350s. The price of Constantius’ Danubian peace only became clear in the long term. His eventual successors, the imperial brothers Valentinian (r. 364–375) and Valens (r. 364–378), were spared any serious fighting between the Danube and the Tisza rivers where Constantius had suppressed the Sarmatians and Limigantes. But the absence of those troublesome neighbours only strengthened the power of Quadic and Tervingian rulers in their own territories and Valentinian and Valens each died on campaign, against the Quadi and the Goths respectively. Ammianus recounts how, in 361, the emperor Julian declared himself content to leave the Goths to the slave traders, so little did they merit military attention.[99] No doubt Ammianus wrote with the omniscience of hindsight, and wanted to bring home to us the tragic decline in Julian’s good judgement that would end in his death on a Persian battlefield. But if Julian really did speak those words or others like them, it was a stunning underestimate of Tervingian power. That power, in no small measure a product of imperial policy, would be revealed in three years of bitter warfare between the Tervingian iudex Athanaric and the emperor Valens. Before that, however, another element of imperial policy had begun to impinge heavily on Gothic society, in the shape of Christian missions.

Ulfila and Gothic Christianity

In the long years of stability after 332, Constantine’s ambition to evangelize the Goths was partly fulfilled. Constantine, as we have seen, had become a devoted Christian, certainly by the year 312 if not before. By the time he won his Gothic victory in 332, he had been implementing pro-Christian policies throughout the empire for several decades, particularly in the Greek East, which he had conquered from Licinius as the liberator of eastern Christians from persecution. He saw himself as a bishop to those outside the empire, and clearly regarded himself as called to evangelize the gentes beyond the frontier. The war against Persia which Constantine was preparing at the time of his death was prompted at least in part by his sense of Christian mission. Whether Constantine had explicitly planned for the evangelization of the Goths by 337 is controversial. It is sometimes argued that Constantine deliberately imposed Christianity on those Goths with whom he made peace in 332, but the evidence for that is not good.[100] On the contrary, it may simply have been a matter of chance that an opportunity to bring Christian teaching to the Goths arrived in the person of the Bishop Ulfila, sometimes known as Wulfila or Ulfilas.

Our information on the life of Ulfila is derived from just two sources, a letter written by one of his disciples, Auxentius, and a heavily abbreviated version of Philostorgius’ fifth-century Ecclesiastical History. Ulfila was descended from Cappadocians taken captive in the Gothic raids of Gallienus’ reign, but he himself bore a Gothic name. The date of his consecration as bishop and the start of his mission is debated. He came from Gothia on an embassy to the emperor – perhaps Constantine, perhaps Constantius Ⅱ – and was consecrated in either c. 336 or c. 341 by Eusebius of Nicomedia and other bishops. Eusebius was an adherent of a variety of Christianity associated with the Egyptian priest Arius who had argued that God the Son was subordinate to God the Father in the holy trinity. Arianism had been condemned as false doctrine – heresy – at the council of Nicaea, convened by Constantine in 325 immediately after his conquest of the eastern empire. In rejecting Arianism, the bishops at Nicaea decided that the Father and Son were identical, of the same substance (homoousion in Greek). Despite this, modified forms of Arius’ homoean theology – so-called from the Greek word for ‘likeness’, because it argued that the Father and Son were of like but not identical substance – continued to have considerable appeal, not least to Constantine, who was ultimately baptised by Eusebius of Nicomedia himself. Modern