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would make good sense if Ulfila continued to be involved in diplomacy between emperors and Goths, yet in the 370s, the bishop of Tomi on the Black Sea, and not Ulfila, probably had responsibility for all the Christians of Scythia – both the Roman province of that name and the broader Gothic region beyond the frontier.[105] Regardless of that, Ulfila’s greatest impact on Gothic history came through his invention of an alphabet in which the Gothic language could be written. He based this alphabet on the Greek, but included new letters which could represent sounds not found in Greek.[106] Ulfila had only one purpose in creating this alphabet – to translate into Gothic the text of the Bible, so as to aid the work of evangelization. He translated into Gothic the whole text of the Bible apart, we are told, from the books of Kings, ‘because these books contain the history of wars, while the Gothic people, being lovers of war, were in need of something to restrain their passion for fighting rather than to incite them to it’.[107] This work of translation may well have involved not just Ulfila, but his followers as well, and was probably a product of their time in Moesia, rather than the eight short years they had been able to spend in Gothia. Yet the work they did endured. In the Gothic kingdoms of the fifth and sixth centuries, this Gothic Bible was the basic text for the homoean liturgy, and fragments of the Gothic Bible have been transmitted to us from many different sources. Almost all of these remains come from the New Testament, while only small fragments of Old Testament texts still survive. These biblical texts, however, are the earliest substantial evidence we possess for the morphology and vocabulary of a Germanic language, and are thus of priceless value to modern philologists.

Whether or not Ulfila’s mission was a direct product of Constantine’s own missionary ambitions, it was clearly a result of the Constantinian peace with the Tervingi. We have no way to correlate the growth of Christianity in Gothia with the meagre scraps of Tervingian history that are known to us during the reigns of Constantius and Julian. But we can be sure that Christianity was indeed spreading throughout the region, as retrospective evidence makes clear. As we shall soon see, the aftermath of Valens’ Gothic wars in the 360s brought on a second, much heavier, persecution of Christians in Gothic territory, one that is much better documented in ecclesiastical and liturgical sources. Most of the known victims of this second persecution seem to have been Nicene Goths, rather than homoeans. That would seem to imply that there were in fact two separate strands of missionary work beyond the lower Danube frontier in this period, however obscure their details may be to us.

Tervingi, Greuthungi and Other Goths

Still more obscure than the rise of Tervingian Christianity is the Gothic world beyond the Tervingi. There is no contemporary evidence, and almost everything we know about the larger Gothic world of the middle fourth century – apart from the archaeological evidence for its social structures, which we looked at in the last chapter – comes from retrospective accounts written after the disaster of Adrianople. Jordanes has much to say about this period, but it is almost all fiction that draws genuine figures from contemporary sources and inserts them into a spurious dynastic history of the sixth-century Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great. The one thing we can be quite sure of is that beyond the fourth-century territory of the Tervingi there lay another Gothic realm, whose inhabitants were called Greuthungi. The Tervingi and Greuthungi have been interpreted as the linear ancestors of the later fifth-century Visigoths and Ostrogoths, and the long-standing division of the Goths into two sections under separate royal dynasties is a fixture of older literature (and still maintained by supporters of ethnogenesis-theory, with their insistence that royal dynasties transmit ethnic identity). In fact, the division between Visigoths and Ostrogoths is