Word Finder - goths

definition

A punk-derived subculture of people who predominantly dress in black, associated with mournful music and attitudes.

example

Philip had been into goth for many years.

definition

A style of punk rock influenced by glam rock; gothic rock.

definition

A person who is part of the goth subculture.

example

We saw a solitary goth hanging out on the steps of the train station.

Though sacked by the Goths in the 5th century, and later by the Moors, it is still surrounded by massive walls of Roman origin.

See Goths.

On the capture of that city by the Goths in 474 he was imprisoned, as he had taken an active part in its defence; but he was afterwards restored by Euric, king of the Goths, and continued to govern his bishopric as before.

The country was overrun by the Goths in the 4th and 5th centuries, but reconquered by Justinian in 535.

It was taken and destroyed by the Goths in 552, but rebuilt with the help of Narses.

In 488 Theodoric, king of the East Goths, received commission from the Greek emperor, Zeno, to undertake the affairs of Italy.

The Goths, except in the valley of the P0, resembled an army of occupation rather than a people numerous enough to blend with the Italic stock.

The struggle of the Greeks and the Goths was carried on for fourteen years, between 539 and 553, when Teias, the last Gothic king, was finally defeated in a bloody battle near Vesuvius.

Suffice it to say that the rule of the Lombards proved at first far more oppressive to the native population, and was less intelligent of their old customs, than that of the Goths had been.

During his brief reign Decius was engaged in important operations against the Goths, who crossed the Danube and overran the districts of Moesia and Thrace.

The final engagement, in which the Goths fought with the courage of despair, took place on swampy ground in the Dobrudja near Abritum (Abrittus) or Forum Trebonii and ended in the defeat and death of Decius and his son.

The invasion of the Goths and the death of Decius put an end to the abortive attempt.

During his brief reign he set on foot some domestic reforms, and sought to revive the authority of the senate, but, after a victory over the Goths in Cilicia, he succumbed to hardship and fatigue (or was slain by his own soldiers) at Tyana in Cappadocia.

Long after the Goths had lost Rome they still clung to Ravenna, till at length, weary of the feebleness of their own king, Vitiges, and struck with admiration of their heroic conqueror, they offered to transfer their allegiance to Belisarius on condition of his assuming the diadem of the Western Empire.

By the Kabul valley route, which includes at its head the group of passes across the Hindu Kush which extend from the Khawak to the Kaoshan, all those central Asian hordes, be they Sacae, Yue-chi, Jats, Goths or Huns, who were driven towards the rich plains of the south, entered the Punjab.

All that we certainly know about his life is contained in three sentences of his history of the Goths (cap. 50), from which, among other particulars as to the history of his family, we learn that his grandfather Paria was notary to Candac, the chief of a confederation of Alans and other tribes settled during the latter half of the 5th century on the south of the Danube in the provinces which are now Bulgaria and the Dobrudscha.

He is accordingly friendly to the Goths, even apart from the influence of Cassiodorus; but he is also prepossessed in favour of the eastern emperors in whose territories this confederation lived and whose subject he himself was.

We can only say that he wrote on the origin and history of the Goths, using both Gothic saga and Greek sources; and that if Jordanes used Cassiodorus, Cassiodorus used, if to a less extent, the work of Ablabius.

At the root of the work lies a theory, whencesoever derived, which identified the Goths with the Scythians, whose country Darius Hystaspes invaded, and with the Getae of Dacia, whom Trajan conquered.

This laudation, both of the Goths and of their Byzantine conquerors, may perhaps help us to understand the motive with which the Getica was written.

This younger Germanus did nothing in after life to realize these anticipations; but the somewhat pointed way in which his name and his mother's name are mentioned by Jordanes lends some probability to the view that he hoped for the child's succession to the Eastern Empire, and the final reconciliation of the Goths and Romans in the person of a Gotho-Roman emperor.

The custom, indeed, so far from dying out, was adopted by the barbarian conquerors and spread among the Christian Goths in Spain, Franks in Gaul, Alemanni in Germany, and Anglo-Saxons in Britain.

It has frequently been said that the lagoon population was originally composed of refugees from the mainland seeking asylum from the incursions of Huns,, Goths and Lombards; but it is more probable that, long before the date of the earliest barbarian inroad, the lagoon islands already had a population of fisherfolk.

Their development as a maritime people, engaged in small trading and intimately acquainted with their home waters, led Belisarius to seek their help in his task of recovering Italy from the Goths.

Consequently in 395, after a successful campaign against the Germans on the Rhine, Stilicho marched to the east, nominally to expel the Goths and Huns from Thrace, but really with the design of displacing Rufinus, and by connivance with these same barbarians he procured the assassination of Rufinus at the close of the year, and thereby became virtual master of the empire.

He thwarted the efforts of Alaric to seize lands in Italy by his victories at Pollentia and Verona in 402-3 and forced him to return to Illyricum, but was criticized for having withdrawn the imperial forces from Britain and Gaul to employ against the Goths.

Euric's code was used for all cases between Goths, and between them and Romans; in cases between Romans, Roman law was used.

He was discovered there one day by Flavius, the king of the Goths, who built a monastery on the place, of which he was the first abbot.

It was overrun by the Goths on several occasions, and subsequently by the Huns; but its proximity to Constantinople caused its fortunes to be closely connected with those of that city, from the time when it became the capital of the Eastern Empire.

When Valens met his death fighting against the Goths near Adrianople on the 9th of August in the same year, the government of the eastern empire devolved upon Gratian, but feeling himself unable to resist unaided the incursions of the barbarians, he ceded it to Theodosius (January 379) With Theodosius he cleared the Balkans of barbarians..

Totila besieged Florence in 542, but was repulsed by the imperial garrison under Justin, and later it was occupied by the Goths.

The work of his life was the restoration of the Gothic kingdom in Italy and he entered upon the task at the very beginning of his reign, collecting together and inspiring the Goths and winning a victory over the troops of the emperor Justinian, near Faenza.

The Imperial fleet, moving up the Tiber and led by the great general, only just failed to succour the city, which must then, perforce, open its gates to the Goths.

Several cities were taken by the Goths, while Belisarius remained inactive and then left Italy, and in 549 Totila advanced a third time against Rome, which he captured through the treachery of some of its defenders.

By this time the emperor Justinian was taking energetic measures to check the Goths.

But his successes against the Vandals and Goths caused Chosroes to begin the war again in S40.

They are mentioned first in the reign of Gallienus (260-268), when we find them together with the Goths ravaging the coasts of the Black Sea and the Aegean.

The city was seized again by the Goths under Totila, and again restored to the Eastern Empire by Narses in 568.

According to Jordanes (the epitomator of Cassiodorus's History of the Goths) at the funeral of Attila his vassals, as they rode round the corpse, sang of his glorious deeds.

This overthrow of Byzantium was a great loss to the empire, since it might have served as a protection against the Goths, who afterwards sailed past it into the Mediterranean.

From this disaster the inhabitants recovered so far as to be able to give an effectual check to an invasion of the Goths in the reign of Claudius II., and the fortifications were greatly strengthened during the civil wars which followed the abdication of Diocletian.

Here he fought against some of the usurpers who threatened the throne of Honorius; he made some sort of compact with that emperor and, in 414, he married his sister Placidia, who had been since the siege of Rome a captive in the camp of the Goths.

This result he achieved in spite of the Decian persecution (250251), during which he had felt it to be his duty to absent himself from his diocese, and notwithstanding the demoralizing effects of an irruption of barbarians (Goths and Boranians) who laid waste the diocese in A.D.

Of his lost works the most important was the Historia Gothorum, written with the object of glorifying the Gothic royal house and proving that the Goths and Romans had long been connected by ties of friendship. It was published during the reign of Athalaric, and appears to have brought the history down to the death of Theodoric. His chief authority for Gothic history and legend was Ablavius (Ablabius).

Marca, in his Histoire de Bearn, holds that the word signifies "hunters of the Goths," and that the Cagots are descendants of the Saracens.

A far more probable explanation of their name "Chretiens" is to be found in the fact that in medieval times all lepers were known as pauperes Christi, and that, Goths or not, these Cagots were affected in the middle ages with a particular form of leprosy or a condition resembling it.

After the fall of the Roman empire Ancona was successively attacked by the Goths, Lombards and Saracens, but recovered its strength and importance.

He was about to start for Cappadocia against the Goths when he was assassinated, together with Herodes his eldest son, by his nephew Maconius; there is no reason to suppose that this deed of violence was instigated from Rome.

Soon after the time of the latter it was destroyed by the Goths.

Local histories containing more or less ecclesiastical material were written in the 6th and following centuries by Jordanes (History of the Goths), Gregory of Tours (History of the Franks), Isidore of Seville (History of the Goths, Vandals and Suevi), Bede (Ecclesiastical History of England), Paulus Diaconus (History of the Lombards), and others.