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The Goths were a Germanic tribal confederation originating in Eastern Europe. Driven west by the ferocious Huns, they sought official permission for entry into the Roman Empire. Soon after gaining it, however, they inflicted a shattering defeat on a larger Roman army at Adrianople in Thrace in AD 378.
Following that battle, the Goths were a wild card, at times serving in Rome’s armies, then sacking Rome in 410, but later allying with the Romans to stop Attila’s Huns at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451. Gothic kingdoms established during the wreck of the Western Roman Empire survived in Italy and Spain until the 6th and 8th centuries respectively.
In English, ‘Gothic’ (from Latin gothicus) is an adjective meaning pertaining to the Goths or the language that they spoke. ‘[T]he learned Cassiodorus’, wrote English historian Edward Gibbon, for example, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789), ‘gratified the inclination of the conquerors in a Gothic history.’
The Goths would be closely associated with barbarism, so ‘Gothic’ became a pejorative term. Renaissance architects disparaged many non-classical, medieval-style buildings, with their representative flying buttresses, stained-glass windows, and pointed arches, as ‘Gothic’, and this survived as the general name for the style, as in: ‘This we now call the Gothick Manner of Architecture (so the Italians called what was not after the Roman style),’ observed the English architect Sir Christopher Wren, according to his son’s Parentalia (1750).
Gothic would also be applied to a type of gloomy horror literature. The debut Gothic novel was English author Horace Walpole’s 1764 The Castle of Otranto. Such works typically feature medieval buildings and ooze with atmospheric fright and mystery. Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein is perhaps the most famous of the Gothic literary genre.
