Gothic (Civ5)/Civilopedia

The Goths were an east European tribe of Scandinavian origins whose two branches, Visigoths and Ostrogoths, played a significant role in the fall of the Roman Empire. Although sharing common language, customs and beliefs, the Visigoths and Ostrogoths followed divergent paths and each founded a medieval kingdom.
The Visigoths settled in Dacia, where they remained peacefully co-existing with the Romans until 376 AD, when their leader appealed to the Byzantine Emperor Valens to move his people south of the Danube to find refuge from the Huns. The treaty lasted until 395, the year that Alaric I took the Visigoth throne. In 408, Roman troops massacred the families of approximately 30,000 barbarian soldiers serving as mercenaries under Roman command. Alaric promptly declared war and invaded Italy, with Byzantine approval. After military victories and three sieges of Rome itself, Alaric's Visigoths captured the city in August 410. Rome was plundered and sacked, and Alaric set up a Visigoth kingdom in Italy. Over the next century, the Visigoths expanded their borders at a steady pace, eventually controlling southern Gaul and all of Iberia. With the capital at Toulouse, the Visigoths forced the Vandals from Iberia, but lost Italy. In 507 the Franks under Clovis decisively defeated the Visigoths at the Battle of Vouille and wrested control of Gaul from them. It was the beginning of a slow decline. The last king of the Visigoths, Roderic, was killed facing the Ummayad onslaught in 711 which marked the opening of the Muslim conquest of Iberia.
The history of the Ostrogoths is somewhat less tangled. After the southern migration they established a vast but thinly populated kingdom between the Danube and Dneipr rivers. It was a multi-tribal empire, ruled by Gothic nobility and included Sarmatians, Gepids, Dacians as well as smaller Celtic and Slavic tribes. The rise of the Huns overwhelmed the polyglot kingdom, and the Ostrogoths accepted Hunnic rule and joined forces. The Ostrogoths were one of Attila's principle vassals fighting in Europe, as at the Battle of Chalons in 451 AD. But in revolt upon Attila's death, the Ostrogoths under Theodemir shattered the power of Attila's heirs at Nedao three years later. The year 454 also saw the birth of Theodoric the Great. In 471 he became king of the Ostrogoths. Within 20 years Theodoric ruled all of Italy, as well as much of the Balkans. But the weakness of the Ostrogoth rule quickly showed itself upon his death. The Byzantines took the offensive and forced the Ostrogoth king Totila to abandon Rome. In 553, at the Battle of Mons Lactarius, the remaining supporters of Totila were killed, captured or executed. The Ostrogoth remnants retreated and resettled in Austria. And the Ostrogoths disappeared from history.