Reign of Ermanaric, king of the Greuthungi

Ammianus Marcellinus, a contemporary, gives him only a few lines. The Huns, he writes, suddenly fell upon the wide and fertile lands of Ermenrichus, “a most warlike monarch, dreaded by the neighbouring nations because of his many and varied deeds of valour”; after holding out for a long time, the king, terrified by rumours of the dangers ahead, took his own life. The story of his conquests comes from the Getica of Jordanes (551). After King Geberic, he says, Ermanaric, “noblest of the Amali”, “subdued many warlike peoples of the north” — Jordanes lists thirteen obscure names, from the Golthescytha to the Coldae — and “some of our ancestors have justly compared him to Alexander the Great”. He then crushed the Heruli, who lived in the marshes by Lake Maeotis (the Sea of Azov), made war on the numerous Venethi, whom Jordanes identifies with the Slavs of his own day, the Antes and Sclaveni, and subdued the Aesti on the farthest shore of the “German Ocean” (the Baltic), ruling “all the nations of Scythia and Germany”.

How much of this is true is debated. Herwig Wolfram accepted a realm stretching from the Black Sea to the Baltic and eastwards to the Urals; Peter Heather doubts that Ermanaric ruled even all the Goths other than the Tervingi, since such an empire would have been larger than any known Gothic polity and would have left greater traces in the sources. The Chernyakhov culture is often identified with Ermanaric’s realm, and a number of archaeologists see in his war with the Venethi a reflection of the spread of the Chernyakhov culture into the lands of the Kyiv culture east of the Dnieper in the 4th century. The dates of the reign are unknown: Jordanes places Geberic’s victory over the Vandals in the time of Constantine the Great and says that Ermanaric succeeded him soon afterwards, and reference works put Geberic’s death around 350; the reign ended with the Hunnic onslaught of the early 370s. Jordanes’ statement that Ermanaric died at the age of 110 is legendary.