A Conversion History Written by the Converters

Almost everything written about the religion of the peoples who moved into the Roman provinces in this period was written by Romans, by Greeks, or by churchmen, and almost all of it was written after those peoples had become Christian. Procopius, writing in the sixth century about the wars in Italy, is a Roman official describing Goths for a Constantinopolitan readership.

Ramsay MacMullen's study of Christianisation in the empire is useful here because it insists on asking what conversion actually consisted of on the ground, and finds that the answer is often a ruler's decision followed by a slow and uneven change in practice, rather than a change of conviction in a population. The Gothic case adds a further complication. Many of the peoples who converted did so to the Arian form of Christianity taught among the Goths by Ulfilas, who also translated the Bible into Gothic, and Arianism was subsequently defeated and its literature largely destroyed. So the religion of the Migration Period is doubly filtered: reported by outsiders, and belonging in part to a Christian tradition that later Christianity suppressed. What its practitioners thought they were doing is, for the most part, not recoverable.