Ermanaric

The orange area signifies the Chernyakhov Culture, identified with Ermanaric's kingdom, in the early 4th century.

Ermanaric (Gothic: *Aírmanareiks; Latin: Ermanaricus or Hermanaricus; Old English: Eormanrīc [ˈeorˠmɑnriːtʃ]; Old Norse: Jörmunrekr [ˈjɔrmunrekr], Middle High German: Ermenrîch; died 376) was a Greuthungian Gothic king who before the Hunnic invasion evidently ruled a sizable portion of Oium, the part of Scythia inhabited by the Goths at the time. He is mentioned in two Roman sources: the contemporary writings of Ammianus Marcellinus, and in Getica by the 6th-century historian Jordanes. He also appears in a fictionalized form in later Germanic heroic legends.

Modern historians disagree on the size of Ermanaric's realm. Herwig Wolfram postulates that he at one point ruled a realm stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea as far eastwards as the Ural Mountains.^[1] Peter Heather is skeptical of the claim that Ermanaric ruled all Goths except the Tervingi, and furthermore points to the fact that such an enormous empire would have been larger than any known Gothic political unit, that it would have left bigger traces in the sources and that the sources on which the claim is based are not nearly reliable enough to be taken at face value.^[2]

Etymology[]

The first element of the name Ermanaric appears to be based on the Proto-Germanic root *ermena-, meaning 'universal'.^[3] The second element is from the element *-rīks, Gothic WIKI