http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/68261
Herwig Wolfram
The Goths
pp. 94-97
'Politically the Gutthiuda was composed of several "peoples."386 In times of danger the Gothic subdivisions formed a confederation, they acted as conspirantes in unum.387 The Tervingi had no monarchic kingship; there was no thiudans among them.388 The individual subdivisions (kunja) were ruled by chiefs (reiks).3S9 At those times when the common policy of the GutÂthiuda was at issue they made up the tribal council. If we may draw an analÂogy to the Jewish Sanhedrin, this tribal council was called gafaurds. Since the unfree as well as the free underclass was excluded, the council was composed of the chiefs (reiks) and representatives (sinistans, maistans) of each kuni.390
To meet both external and internal threats, the oligarchic council could reactivate a kind of monarchy, the Tervingian judgeship. Although the judge's authority covered the entire barbarian confederation, it was intended to be temporary and territorially limited. The Tervingian judge was not allowed to leave the tribal territory. When Athanaric was negotiating a peace settlement with Valens in 369 the emperor addressed him as king. To this the Gothic prince replied that he preferred the title judge, since the judge embodied wisdom (ÏοÏία), the king only power (δÏναμιÏ).391 With this differentiation the unity of the phrase in the Gothic Bible "God's power and God's wisdom" (gudis mahts jah gudis handugei) is broken.392 Athanaric would not have objected to being a thiudans, but this monÂarchic kingship did not exist among the Tervingi. When the Latin-speaking Valens addressed him as rex, Athanaric had to understand it in the sense of reiks. The title reiks would have limited Athanaric's authority.393 He was more than that, he was a iudex gentis, a judge of the whole tribal confederation, indeed a iudex regum, "judge of kings" (reiks).394 It is possiÂble that the Gothic Bible had the Tervingian judge in mind when it described the functions of Pontius Pilate. He is usually the kindins, but he also carried the more general name of ragineis, "counselor." In deviation from the etymology, kindins means no longer the lord of a kind, "kin," comÂmunity of descent, but the person with authority over an entire barbarian confederation. He receives his commission from the Roman emperor in his role as "judge among the children of the Jews"-as he is still called in the Saxon Heliand. We can therefore see reflected here the constitutional reality of the Danubian Goths of the fourth century.395 Like the Jews, they have no thiudans of their own; instead, for them, Christians or pagans, the emperor is the "king of the Roman people," the rex Romanorum or thiudans.396
The title kindins - like that of thiudans, like that of the Burgundian hendinos (king), like that of the Latin tribunus, and like that of a possible Gothic *drauhtins - is an age-old name for a tribal leader. Since there was no Tervingian thiudans and since the imperial thiudans did not exercise direct authority in the Gutthiuda, the Tervingian tribal council bestowed upon each Gothic judge the mandate for the Gothic land. In this capacity Athanaric dispatched reiks with tribal forces across the frontiers, conducted in person war against the Romans in the Gothic territory (like his reputed grandfather had done), made peace with Valens, persecuted the Christians (like his reputed father had done), and tried in vain to resist the advance of the Huns inside the Gutthiuda.397
Among the Tervingi there was a preeminent "royal family" that we may perhaps identify as the Balthi. The Romans, however, noticed other people among the Goths who wore the "royal insignia" and who assumed a special position because of their "dignity and descent." Gothic leaders certainly did not form an exclusive stratum, let alone a class. Rather, ancient authors noted that the tribes had two divisions in their leading stratum which they called "kings and chieftains." Perhaps the Goths expressed this duality with reiks, on the one hand, and maistans (the magnates) and sinistans (the eldÂers), on the other. But whereas the maistans together with the "leaders of one thousand warriors" were among the retainers of a biblical thiudans, the Jewish elders were both an authority of political self-government as well as the bearers of the national tradition. The high priest, pharisees, and elders of the people {sinistans manageins) form the high council (the gafaurds) that persecuted Christ, condemned him, and finally handed him over to the kindins Pilate.398 Into this pattern fit the two actual persecutions of Gothic Christians: in the first Ulfilas and his followers were driven from the land by a "godless and law-breaking judge of the Goths";399 the second began when a "prince of injustice" enforced the decisions of the aristocratic me-gistanes (the tribal council) against the religious minority.400
The Gothic judge functionally resembles the Gallic ήγεμÏν and the ver-gobretos of the Haedui. As in Gaul at the time of Caesar, the Danubian Tervingi assigned certain duties to a quasi-monarch, a judge. But the Gothic judgeship is a dead end from the point of view of institutional history; it does not have a future. Instead the reiks, whose army followed him anyÂwhere, was on his way to becoming a king of the army. Vidigoia against the Sarmatians and Geberic against the Vandals could have been the first such reiks who led the tribe in offensive wars.401 But what is significant is that this military mandate of a nonroyal leader is attested only south of the Danube, at a time when the Tervingian judgeship had already ceased to exist. Alaviv and Fritigern called upon the "entire people" to leave the tribal territory, and they led the people into the foreign Roman land.402 Both men were reiks and thus occupied a position derived from their initial role as chiefs of Tervingian subdivisions (kunja). Fritigern's rule over a Tervingian kuni can be inferred from his confrontation with Athanaric, Although Alaviv is not directly attested as a reiks, it is almost certain that he was one since Alaviv was initially at least of equal rank with Fritigern, if not actual!; higher.403 The Gothic reiks might also have been called *drauhtins if military authority was emphasized.404
Undoubtedly the kuni formed the most important political unit, but it was at the same time also a community of descent, unlike the Gutthiuda to which it was subordinated. The etymological relationship between kuni anc gens was thus semantically preserved. A Goth belonged to the kuni as ar inkunja, ÏÏ
μÏÏ
λÎÏηÏ. The head of a kuni was the reiks. No reiks could claim monarchical power.405 A reiks owned a "house"; as lord of the house - frauja - he exercised authority over his dependents, among whom! were armed retainers. The latter were called andbahtos and siponjos. Latini and Greek sources give them the usual names for dependents.406 Within the confederated kunja a royal family was dominant; but here, as well, we can detect no monarchical selection. Instead, "numerous gradations" existed. The memory of this early political organization survived in the sixth-century belief that the Balthi had held only the second rank after the Amali.407
The number of Tervingian kunja is unknown. Only some of them can be located. The group led by Atharid had its home along the river Musaeus-Buzau in Muntenia,408 whereas Athanaric's own kuni was probably settled - before it moved into the Transylvanian Caucaland409 - in Moldavia on both banks of the Prut. In the neighboring region to the west, with its rear secured by the Danube, probably lay the territory of the subtribe that Fritigern represented.410 The region where the twenty-six martyrs were burned to death was ruled by Winguric, and very close to him must have been the land of the unnamed reiks whose wife Gaatha brought the remains of the martyrs into the Roman Empire. Since Gaatha's son Arimir still inherited his father's position, Arimir's Goths apparently belonged to those Tervingi who continued to live north of the Danube even after 376.411
Each kuni had its own shrines and priests and no doubt its own cult. With the fall of the old Gothic monarchic kingship the Tervingi seem to have lost much of the common tribal religion. This would explain why the concept of a community of descent shifted from the level of the Gutthiuda down to that of the kuni. Although the Tervingian tribal confederation was thereby opened to non-Gothic elements, it was at the same time politically and culturally fractured. It was the task of the judge to prevent the dissoÂlution of the gens in times of crisis; accordingly, we know from Athanaric's period both politico-military and religious measures aimed at stopping the disintegration of the tribe or even reversing it.412 Like the Gothic special Denies, like the Tervingian Gutthiuda and its judgeship, the kuni and its Independent leadership also fell victim to the great migrations.413 The gens became the exercitus Gothorum, the polyethnic Tervingian community became the army of the Goths, still polyethnic but led by a "real" king.414'
Torsten