Gothic Cross (Pendant in gold)

Goths-Cross, 45 x 62 mm, 24 Carat Gold plated, two-faced design.

The historian Jordanes claimed that the Goths arrived from semi-legendary Scandza, believed to be somewhere in modern Götaland (Sweden), and that a Gothic population had crossed the Baltic Sea before the 2nd century, lending their name to the region of Gothiscandza, believed to be the lower Vistula region in modern Pomerelia (Poland). The archaeological Wielbark (Willenberg) culture is associated with the arrival of the Goths and their subsequent agglomeration with the indigenous population. But the reliability of Jordanes, who wrote in the 6th century, is disputed, and there is also no archaeological evidence for a substantial emigration from Scandinavia. From the mid-second century onward, groups of Goths started migrating to the southeast along the River Vistula,[citation needed] reaching Scythia at the coast of the Black Sea in modern Ukraine where they left their archaeological traces in the Chernyakhov culture. Throughout the 3rd and 4th centuries, the Scythian Goths were divided into at least two distinct entities, the Thervingi and the Greuthungi, divided by the Dniester River. They repeatedly harried the Roman Empire during the Gothic Wars and later adopted Arianism. In the late 4th century, the Huns invaded the Gothic region from the east. While many Goths were subdued and integrated into the Hunnic Empire, others were pushed toward the Roman Empire. The Goths were converted to Christianity by the Arian (half-) Gothic missionary, Wulfila, who then found it necessary to leave Gothic country for Moesia, (modern Serbia, Bulgaria) with his congregation, where he translated the Bible into Gothic, devising a script for this purpose. In the 5th and 6th centuries, they became divided as the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths, who established powerful successor-states of the Western Roman Empire in the Iberian peninsula and Italy. In Italy, the Ostrogothic Kingdom established by Theodoric the Great was defeated by the forces of the Eastern Roman Empire after the Gothic Wars. In Hispania, the Visigoths, converted to Catholicism by late sixth century, would survive until the early eighth century, when it fell to Islam after the Muslim conquest.