Gepids
The Gepids were an East Germanic tribe who lived in the area of modern Romania, Hungary, and Serbia, roughly between the Tisza, Sava, and Carpathian Mountains. They were said to share the religion and language of the Goths and Vandals.
They are first mentioned by Roman sources in the third century. In the fourth century, they were among the peoples incorporated into the Hunnic Empire, within which they formed an important part. After the death of Attila, the Gepids under their leader Ardaric, led an alliance of other peoples who had been in the empire, and defeated the sons of Attila and their remaining allies at the Battle of Nedao in 454. The Gepids and their allies subsequently founded kingdoms on the Middle Danube, bordering on the Roman Empire. The Gepid Kingdom was one of the most important and long-lasting of these, centered on Sirmium, and sometimes referred to as Gepidia. It covered a large part of the former Roman province of Dacia, north of the Danube, and compared to other Middle Danubian kingdoms it remained relatively uninvolved with Rome.
The Gepids were defeated by the Lombards and Avars a century later in 567, when Constantinople gave no support to them. Some Gepids joined the Lombards in their subsequent conquest of Italy, some moved into Roman territory, and other Gepids still lived in the area of the old kingdom after it was conquered by the Avars.
Few archaeological sites remain that can be attributed to them with certainty. After their settlement of the Carpathian Basin, their population was mostly centred on the Someș and Körös rivers, but they did not intermingle with other nations.
Name
The most common Latin spellings of the Gepid name in plural used a "p", but varied concerning the vowels: Gepidae, Gipidae, Gipedae, Gipides. Similarly, Procopius writing in Greek uses a stem γηπαιδ- which should be transliterated as Giped-. Despite this, the Gepids have been equated with the people mentioned in the Old English Widsith and Beowulf, as Gifðas or Gefþas. These names are considered etymologically equivalent Old English forms of Gepidae that could not have arisen through borrowing from attested Latin forms.Although Walter Goffart has objected that "no serious arguments substantiating the identification seem to me to have been set out", linguists interpret the "p" in Latin and Greek as an insulting Gothic nickname for the Gepids. In addition to the Old English words, placename evidence in Italy, and a single medieval Latin genitive plural form "Gebodorum" are taken to indicate that the "p" was really a fricative sound similar to a "b". Many linguists therefore reconstruct the original Germanic form as *Gíbidoz, based on the Germanic verb "to give", as still found in English, apparently indicating that they named themselves gifted or rewarded or generous.
The modern idea that the recorded name of the Gepids was an insult comes from Jordanes in the sixth century, who reported in his Gothic origins story the Getica, that the name of the Gepids came from gepanta, an insult in Gothic meaning "sluggish, stolid", because the Gepids had lagged behind their Gothic kin when they migrated more than a thousand years earlier.
In contrast, Isidore of Seville in his etymologies, interpreted the second part of the Gepid name as "feet" and explained that the Gepids were known for going into battle on foot, rather than mounted. The much later Byzantine Etymologicum Magnum interprets the name using the Greek word for children, making the Gepids Gētípaides meaning "children of the Goths ". All three of these texts follow a tradition of seeing the Gepids as "offshoots or close relatives of the Goths".
Tabula Peutingeriana, a 4th-century map shows the "Piti" people living next of Porolissum. Whether or not this is a distortion of Gepid is disputed by historians.
Language
There is little direct evidence for the original language of the Gepids, but they were clearly Gothic in culture during the period when the Romans reported upon them. Most likely, the Gepids used the same language as the Goths, but in a different dialect. They had strained political relations with related peoples, the Goths and Vandals. The Byzantine chronicler of the 6th century, Procopius, in his Wars of Justinian, placed the Gepids among the "Gothic peoples" along with the Vandals, Visigoths and Goths proper, "having the same language, white bodies, blond hair and Arian form of Christianity".History
Legendary
All information of the Gepids' origins came from "malicious and convoluted Gothic legends", recorded in Jordanes' Getica after 550. According to Jordanes's narration the northern island of "Scandza", which is associated with Sweden by modern scholars, was the original homeland of the ancestors of the Goths and Gepids. They left Scandza together in three boats under the leadership of Berig, the legendary Gothic king. Jordanes specified that the Gepids' ancestors traveled in the last of the three ships, for which their fellows mocked them as gepanta, or "slow and stolid." The Goths and Gepids then settled along the southern shore of the Baltic Sea on an island at the mouth of the Vistula river, called "Gepedoius", or the Gepids' fruitful meadows, by Jordanes. Modern historians debate whether the part of Jordanes's work which described the migration from Scandza was written at least partially on the basis of Gothic oral history or whether it was an "ahistorical fabrication." Jordanes's passage in his Getica reads:According to Jordanes, the Gepids decided to leave "Gepedoius" during the reign of a king named Fastida. He claims the Gepids moved to the south long after the Goths had already moved, and defeated the Burgundians and other races, provoking the Goths in the process. Fastida demanded land from Ostrogotha, King of the Visigoths, because the Gepids' territory was "hemmed in by rugged mountains and dense forests". Ostrogotha refused Fastida's demand and the Gepids joined battle with the Goths "at the town of Galtis, near which the river Auha flows". They fought until darkness fell, when Fastida and his Gepids withdrew from the battlefield and returned to their land. Whether they still lived around the Vistula or had already conquered Galicia is debated by historians.
Before the arrival of the Huns
The Gepids were the "most shadowy of all the major Germanic peoples of the migration period", according to historian Malcolm Todd. Neither Tacitus nor Ptolemy mentioned them in their detailed lists of the "barbarians" in the first and second centuries AD. They first appear only in the late, and by this time they are already living in or near the area where they remained for the rest of their known history.According to a common interpretation of the unreliable Augustan History of Emperor Claudius Gothicus, Gepids were among the "Scythian" peoples conquered by the emperor when he earned his title "Gothicus": "peuci trutungi austorgoti uirtingi sigy pedes celtae etiam eruli". These words are traditionally edited by modern editors to include well-known peoples "Peuci, Grutungi, Austrogoti, Tervingi, Visi, Gipedes, Celtae etiam et Eruli". The same source also says that Emperor Probus, who ruled between 276 and 282, settled Gepid, Vandals, and Greuthungi prisoners of war in the Roman Empire in the Balkans.
In the 11th panegyric to emperor Maximian given in Trier in 291, which is also the first time the Tervingi and Taifali were mentioned, the passage described a battle outside the empire where the Gepids were on the side of the Vandals, attacked by Taifali and a "part" of the Goths. The other part of the Goths had defeated the Burgundians who were supported by Tervingi and Alemanni. They were however "remote enough from the imperial frontier for them not to appear in the Verona list or in the histories of Ammianus or Orosius".
Modern historians who write of the Gepids' early history sometimes apply a "mixed argumentation", combining Jordanes' narration with results of archaeological research. Historian István Bóna says that the battle mentioned in the panegyric was about 290 in the former province of Dacia, equating it to the battle mentioned by Jordanes, involving Fastida. Archaeologist Kurdt Horedt however also equates it to the battle involving Fastida and proposed that the battle took place east of the Carpathian Mountains after 248 and before the withdrawal of the Romans from the province of Dacia in the early 270s. Walter Pohl only says that the battle must have happened between 248 and 291, and could have been inside or outside the curve of the Carpathians, though he feels it is obvious that it must be in the region of the formerly Roman province of Dacia in Transylvania.
The Gepids' history in the is unknown, because no written source mentioned them during this period. The silence of the Roman sources suggests that their homeland did not border on the Roman Empire. On the basis of Jordanes' reference to the "rugged mountains" of the Gepids' land, historians locate it near the Carpathians, along the upper courses of either the Tisza or the Dniester rivers, in the late. The exact date of the Gepids' settlement in the Carpathian Basin cannot exactly be determined. Archaeologist István Bóna says they were present in the northeastern region already in the 260s. According to Coriolan H. Opreanu, they seem to have arrived around 300. Archaeologists Eszter Istvánovits and Valéria Kulcsár write that no archaeological evidence substantiates the Gepids' presence before around 350.
Graves from the which yielded swords, lances and shields with iron boss were unearthed in cemeteries between the rivers Tisza and Körös. Many scholars attribute those graves to Gepid warriors. Graves of women from the same cemeteries produced artefacts—including bronze and silver clasps, bone combs, and fibulae—which are similar to objects found in the cemeteries of the nearby "Sântana de Mureș-Chernyakhov culture". István Bóna writes that the spread of these cemeteries shows that the Gepids subjugated the Germanic Victohali, who had previously inhabited the same region, before expanding towards the Mureș River in the middle of the.