This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Wulfila's congregation was eventually driven to cross the Danube into the Roman Empire, fleeing conflict with the Gothic chieftain Athanaric who opposed the Christianizing of his people, and it was this forced migration, not a peaceful missionary settlement, that placed Wulfila's Bible translation inside imperial territory where later Roman copyists could preserve it.
The Codex Argenteus, a sixth century manuscript written in silver and gold ink on purple vellum, is the chief surviving witness to that translation today, copied roughly two centuries after Wulfila's own death in an East Germanic language no living community still speaks. Without it, Gothic, and by extension the entire East Germanic branch of the Germanic language family, would be almost entirely unknown to modern scholarship.
That linguistic accident gives Wulfila a significance well beyond church history: a bishop's translation project, undertaken to carry Christian teaching to a specific fourth century people, became centuries later the primary evidence historical linguists use to reconstruct how the whole Germanic language family relates to itself, a use his own missionary purpose never anticipated.