Goths

Earliest ancestor (51st Great Grandfather) : Achwlf, King of the Goths (258 AD - ?)

The Goths (Gothic: *Gutans) were an East Germanic tribe of Scandinavian origin who played an important role in the history of the Roman Empire after they appeared on its lower Danube frontier in the 3rd century. Throughout their history, the Goths founded several powerful kingdoms in Europe, and played the major role in the defeat of the Huns and the initiation of the Reconquista.

The first recorded incursion of Goths into the Roman Empire took place in 238. Stretching from the Don to the Danube rivers and from the Black Sea to the Pripet Marshes the Goths established a vast empire referred to as Oium.  In the mid 3rd century the Goths launched several devastating raids against the Roman Empire in Anatolia and the Balkans, conquered Dacia and launched several amphibious expeditions into the Aegean, Mediterranean and the Black sea.

During the third and fourth centuries, the Goths were divided into at least two distinct groups, the Thervingi and the Greuthungi, separated by the Dniester River. They repeatedly attacked the Roman Empire during the Gothic war of 375–82. In the late fourth century, the Huns invaded the Gothic region from the east. While many Goths were subdued and integrated into the Hunnic Empire, others were pushed towards the Roman Empire and converted to Arian Christianity by the half-Gothic missionary Wulfila, who devised a Gothic alphabet to translate the Bible. The Goths would finally conquer the Huns at the Battle of Nedao in 454.

In the fifth and sixth centuries, the Goths separated into two tribes, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths. Both established powerful successor states of the Western Roman Empire. In Italy the Ostrogothic Kingdom was established by Theodoric the Great. The Ostrogothic nobles were defeated by the forces of the Byzantine Empire in the devastating 20-year-long Gothic war of 535–54 which devastated the Byzantine economy and caused up to 15,000,000 deaths, only to result in Germanic Lombardic conquest 10 years later. The Visigoths under Alaric I sacked Rome in 410.

Their fifth-century Visigothic Kingdom in Aquitaine was pushed to Hispania by the Franks in 507, converted to Catholicism by the late sixth century, and in the early eighth century fell to the Muslim Moors. Subsequently, under the leadership of the Gothic nobleman Pelagius, the Visigoths managed to establish the Kingdom of Asturias and would later be credited with the initiation of the Reconquista and the Crusades with the victory over the Moors at the Battle of Covadonga.