Rome’s Gothic Wars
Michael Kulikowski
225 pages including notes and index
published in 2007
Rome’s Gothic Wars, written by new to me American historian Michael Kulikowski is meant as an entry level introduction to the Goths and their conflicts with the Roman Empire. As such it’s quite short, with the main text being only 184 pages long. As a history it only deals with the Goths as they first entered Roman consciousness, in the late third century CE, up until the sack of Rome by Alaric and his Goths in 410 CE. Kulikowski does deal with the Gothic “prehistory” in passing, but does not deal at all with their later history and evolution into separate Visogothic and Ostrogothic kingdoms. For Kulikowski, those first two centuries of Roman-Gothic interactions form a neatly completed story, one that turned “Goths” into the Goths.
As Kulikowski argues, wondering where the Goths came from before they are first mentioned in Roman histories is pointless, nor should too much attention be paid to the “deeply misleading” Getica of Jordanes, the sole Roman source for the supposed origins and migration of the Goths, as other modern historians still do, attempting to separate the wheat from the chaff. Instead, Kulikowski believes that the Goths were a product of the Roman Frontier, like the Franks and Alamanni, who appear at the same time. Roman military, economic and cultural interactions with the barbaric tribes along their frontiers created new political entities and the Goths were one of them. The Gothic origins lie in the exact same parts of the Roman frontier zones that they first appear in Roman history, north of the Danube and west of the Black Sea and he’s quite harsh on any modern historian who thinks otherwise.
Rome’s Gothic Wars starts with a teaser, as Kurlikowski shows us Alaric before the walls of Rome in the prologue, to which he’ll come back in the last chapter. The rest of the book is divided in two parts, the first dealing with the origins of the Goths and their history, from 238 CE, the year of the first historically recorded Gothic raid on Roman territory up until 332 CE, when the Goths had evolved into one of the bigger important groups on the Roman’s Danube frontier. Kulikowski describes a fairly straightforward story of how the Roman civil wars of the third century provided opportunities for barbarian invaders along the borders, how under the pressure of Rome’s military response to barbaric unrest as well as its economic and political influence in the frontier zones, barbarian groups evolved into larger polities, like the Franks and the Goths, though none of these groups as yet were proper nations as such but groupings of tribes and peoples evolving a common culture under Roman pressure. For Kulikowski, it was Roman expectations of how Goths were supposed to behave as well as much as their internal development that turned Goths into Goths.
It’s in the middle of this story that Kulikowski has to turn to the search for the origins of the Goths, making a detour into the history of this search, from Jordanes through the nationalistic histories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries up until the more nuanced views of today. As said, for him anything other than the idea that the Goths developed their culture where they were first encountered by the Romans is wrong, so he e.g. slags off Peter Heather for his “simple, elegant but wrong” idea about the Huns being the ultimate driver behind the Gothic invasions and the fall of the Roman Empire. Yet if you compare and contrast their views, there certainly are differences, but they are much smaller than you’d expect from what Kulikowski says about his colleagues. For Heather too the Goths only became Goths through their interaction with Rome after all.
The second part of Rome’s Gothic Wars is much less controversial, being a straightforward account of the Gothic wars themselves, from the Goths’ dealings with emperor Constantine, back to the sack of Rome. This is largely a repeat of what I’ve read elswehere already, but it’s well told. Kulikowski is good at providing context for these wars when needed and knowing when not to bother with unnecessary detail.
On the whole this was a bit of an odd book, good as a general introduction to the Gothic wars, but Kulikowski’s somewhat defensive argument about Gothic origins doesn’t quite fit. There’s too little room in the book to do his argument full justice, so it asserts more than it proves here. Nevertheless Rome’s Gothic Wars was a interesting book to read, because of this argument.