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The Visigoths were never called Visigoths, only Goths, until Cassiodorus used the term, when referring to their loss against Clovis I in 507. Cassiodorus apparently invented the term based on the model of the "Ostrogoths", but using the older name of the Vesi, one of the tribal names which the fifth-century poet Sidonius Apollinaris, had already used when referring to the Visigoths.
The Visigoths were a new Gothic political unit brought together during the career of their first leader, Alaric I. [190] Following a major settlement of Goths in the Balkans made by Theodosius in 382, Goths received prominent positions in the Roman army. [191]
The Visigoths with their capital at Toulouse, remained de facto independent, and soon began expanding into Roman territory at the expense of the feeble Western empire. Under Theodoric I (418–451), the Visigoths attacked Arles (in 425 [10] and 430 [11]) and Narbonne (in 436), [11] but were checked by Litorius using Hunnic mercenaries.
Imaginative portrait of Alaric in C. Strahlheim, Das Welttheater, 4.Band, Frankfurt a.M., 1836. According to Jordanes, a 6th-century Roman bureaucrat of Gothic origin—who later turned his hand to history—Alaric was born on Peuce Island at the mouth of the Danube Delta in present-day Romania and belonged to the noble Balti dynasty of the Thervingian Goths.
Possibly in 391, a Gothic chieftain named Alaric was declared king by a group of Visigoths, though the exact time this happened (Jordanes says Alaric was made king in 400 [14] and Peter Heather says 395 [15]) and nature of this position are debated. [16] [17] He then led an invasion into Eastern Roman territory outside of the Goths' designated ...
Jordanes specifies that after defeating the Spali, the Goths hastened to their new homeland in Scythia. Jordanes mentions that this part of his narrative agrees with the work of a lost chronicler of the Goths called Ablabius, and (in a well-known comment) "the ancient Gothic songs, which are almost historical in nature". [19]
Concerning the origin of the Goths before the 3rd century, there is no consensus among scholars. [1] [2] It was in the 3rd century that the Goths began to be described by Roman writers as an increasingly important people north of the lower Danube and Black Sea, in the area of modern Romania, Republic of Moldova, and Ukraine.
The names of only a few of the queens of the Visigoths are known. As the Gothic monarchy was elective, all queens were such only as consorts of their husbands. In his Chronicon John of Biclarum styles Goisuintha "queen" (regina) under the years 579 and 589.