Early history The existence of Goths in Crimea was first attested from around the 3rd century, when they were first reported. According to
Herwig Wolfram, following
Jordanes, the
Ostrogoths had a huge kingdom north of the Black Sea in the 4th century, which the
Huns overwhelmed in the time of the Gothic king
Ermanaric (or
Hermanric; i.e. "king of noblemen") when the Huns migrated to the Ukrainian steppe. (Doros): Capital of the Crimean Goths|The modern-day ruins of
Mangup (Doros), capital of the Crimean Goths The Ostrogoths became
vassals of the Huns until the death of
Attila, when they revolted and regained independence. Like the Huns, the Goths in Crimea never regained their lost glory. According to
Peter Heather and
Michael Kulikowski, the Ostrogoths did not even exist until the 5th century, when they emerged from other Gothic and non-Gothic groups. Other Gothic groups may have settled in Crimea. In the late 5th century, the Ostrogothic-Roman ruler
Theodoric the Great is known to have attempted, and failed, to recruit Crimean Goths to support his 488–493 war in
Italy. During the late 5th and early 6th century, the Crimean Goths had to fight off hordes of Huns who were migrating back eastward after losing control of their European empire. Several inscriptions from the early 9th century found in a Crimea use the word "Goth" only as a personal name, not an ethnonym. However, that cannot necessarily be construed as evidence of a decline in use of the language, given the total absence of any early written records, from the Crimean Goths themselves.
Byzantium is the biggest cavern fortress on the Crimean peninsula The Principality of Gothia or
Theodoro was formed after the
Fourth Crusade out of parts of the Byzantine
thema of
Klimata that were not occupied by the
Genoese. Its population was a mixture of
Greeks, Crimean Goths,
Alans,
Bulgars,
Kipchaks and other nations, which followed
Orthodox Christianity. The principality's official language was
Greek. The territory was initially under the control of
Trebizond, and possibly part of its Crimean possessions, the
Perateia. Many Crimean Goths were Greek speakers and many non-Gothic Byzantine citizens were settled in the region called "Gothia" by the government in
Constantinople. A Gothic principality around the stronghold of
Doros (modern Mangup), the
Principality of Theodoro, continued to exist through various periods of vassalage to the
Byzantines,
Khazars, Kipchaks,
Mongols, Genoese and other empires until 1475, when it was finally incorporated in the
Khanate of Crimea and the
Ottoman Empire. This is generally considered to be the fall of the Crimean Goths. The French bishop , writing in 1452, claims that the
mamluks (slave soldiers of Egypt) were "commonly Picts and Goths [
Pictes et Gethes], Greek Christians, conquered by the tricks of the Genoese." The confused reference to the
Picts, however, renders the accuracy of the passage questionable.
Early modern era By the mid-16th century, the existence of the Crimean Goths had become well-known to scholars in Western Europe. Many travellers visited Crimea and wrote about the Goths. One romantic report appears in
Joachimus Cureus's
Gentis Silesiae Annales (1571), in which he claims that, during a voyage in the Black Sea, his ship was forced ashore by storms. There, to his surprise, he found a man singing a song in which he used "German words". When he asked him where he was from, he answered "that his home was nearby and that his people were Goths". Another visitor,
Georgius Torquatus (d. 1575) stated that while they spoke their own language, the Crimean Goths normally used Greek, Tatar or Hungarian when dealing with outsiders. In 1690,
Engelbert Kaempfer stated: ==Religion==