Gothic Culture ID

The Gothic culture descends from the Goths, an East Germanic people who migrated from the lands around the Baltic into eastern and central Europe and went on to play a decisive role in the late Roman world.

The Goths were a mobile, martial people whose society centred on warrior retinues bound to their leaders. Divided into groups that history remembers as the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, they established kingdoms on former Roman soil, in Italy, Gaul, and Iberia.

Gothic religion was at first the traditional Germanic paganism, but the Goths famously adopted Arian Christianity, a form that set them apart from their Roman and later Catholic neighbours and shaped their relations with the peoples they ruled.

A landmark of Gothic culture was the translation of the Bible into the Gothic language by the bishop Ulfilas, which produced one of the earliest substantial texts in any Germanic tongue.

Though their kingdoms were eventually absorbed by other powers, the Goths left a lasting mark on the early medieval history of Europe, bridging the worlds of the Germanic peoples and the Roman inheritance.