Q how to survive a gothic speaking people?

Zen9

Banned
More thoughts. .
..perhaps while the Catholic Church will tolerate Arians, it might not be the same as acceptance.
Which means that Arian Kings are never going to be quite as acceptable inside the HREG. Nor Arian Electors.

Useful, yes.
A buffer with the Orthodox world, yes.
Guarding the border, yes.
Dying to defend the West....you can almost see their minds "we'll defend the borders to the last Arian and Goth".
And the more that goes on the more entrenched the view from the Gothic side.
A lack of trust.
A sense of grievance even.

When Arians want to retake Arius's birthplace in North Africa. Catholics won't be so interested.
When Catholics take that, they won't necessarily handle the issue of Arian Pilgrims sensitively.
 

Zen9

Banned
I think it's one thing to hold onto a territory and plant roots there. It's another thing to expand into neighbouring territories, defeat the highly mobile steppe nomads and hold that as well.
Conquering the Balkans is spreading them too thin and setting them up for a worse outcome.
 
True but not all migrations are the same, some are stronger than others, some affect areas that would be more advantegous to mass assimilation, some affect certain social classes more etc.

Yes, but given how little we know of numbers and manner of arrival of these late Roman migrations, all we have are the examples. And the examples, generally speaking, say "we were not many and we assimilated rapidly into Roman culture and society". Archaeologically speaking, for example, there is very little evidence of a "different culture" settling in Gaul or Spain. Some belt buckles and fibulae, that's all. Many of the so-called "barbarian influenced military gear" had been adopted by the Roman army a century before already.

Back to my point: the Goths need to settle in a previously un-Romanised area, or very sparsely romanised, in order not to merge with Roman culture and disappear as a linguistic and cultural entity.
 

Zen9

Banned
I'm still going with Croatia, Bosna and Slovenia here.
It seems by one source, the very arrival of the Croats is under Gothic leadership, as supposedly Totila had ravaged the area and destroyed Salona.
This being under Svevlad and his descendents Selimir and Ostroilo.....

So had Ostrogothic rule stayed in effect there, somehow separated and distancing itself from events in Italy. Then it would seem reasonable that the Croats would end up absorbed into the Goths, rather than visa versa OTL.
As we just have more and more Goths settling there.
Under such rule, Totila might be persuaded to leave them be.

So playing both sides a Gothic ruler in Dalmatia/Pannonia might find a way to let Narses pass through without defeat.

Perhaps by having good relations with the Gepids?
 
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I already responded to this, but here's my stereotypical over-the-top population movement TL: The Ostrogoths of Patagonia and Siberia.

Zeno offs Basiliskos after the debacle of the Burning Ships, and after Odoacer bumps off Romulus Augustulus he attacks Odoacer and kills him, selling Thela, Odoacer's son, and his surviving army to the Aksumites to use as slave soldiers. After a few months the Himyarites piss off the Aksumites and the Ostrogoths are sent on a flotilla to Yemen. Halfway there Thela hijacks the fleet and the Ostrogoths sail like hell out from the Red Sea.
They follow the trade routes to Azania, where the Ostrogoths dissolve into infighting. Onoulphus, Thela's uncle, takes a third of the fleet and sails back north, but gets caught in the monsoon and is swept into the area of the Mon Kingdoms. They are captured and sold as warrior-slaves, eventually reaching Northern Wei where Theodoric, Onulphus' son, stages a mass breakout and escapes into Siberia where they establish a kingdom that falls to the Mongols in 1221, and are still a major population group in the present.

Meanwhile, Thela keeps sailing and rounds Cape of Good Hope in 501. There, they are caught in a hurricane and pushed across to Patagonia where disease wipes out the locals and allows Thela to establish a kingdom around Buenos Aires. From there?

Inca and Spanish stuff.

and,

OSTROGOTHIC CABALLEROS!
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!
 
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