Thervings

The Thervingi, Tervingi, or Teruingi (sometimes pluralised "Tervings" or "Thervings") were a Gothic people of the Danubian plains west of the Dniester River in the 3rd and the 4th centuries. They had close contacts with the Greuthungi, another Gothic people from east of the Dniester, as well as the late Roman Empire or the early Byzantine Empire.

The name Thervingi may mean "forest people". Evidence exists that geographic descriptors were commonly used to distinguish people living north of the Black Sea both before and after Gothic settlement there, and the Thervingi sometimes had forest-related names. History lacks evidence for the name pair Thervingi-Greuthungi earlier than the late 3rd century (Greuthungi may mean "steppe-people"). The name "Thervingi" may have pre-Pontic, Scandinavian, origins.

The Thervingi first appeared in history as a distinct people in the year 268 when they invaded the Roman Empire. This invasion overran the Roman provinces of Pannonia and Illyricum and even threatened Italia itself. However, the Thervingi were defeated in battle that summer near the modern Italian-Slovenian border and then routed in the Battle of Naissus that September. Over the next three years they were driven back over the Danube River in a series of campaigns by the emperors Claudius II Gothicus and Aurelian.

The division of the Goths is first attested in 291. The Thervingi are first attested around that same date. Their mention occurs in a eulogy of the emperor Maximian (285–305), delivered in or shortly after 291 (or perhaps delivered at Trier on 20 April 292) and traditionally ascribed to Claudius Mamertinus, which said that the "Thervingi, another division of the Goths" (Tervingi pars alia Gothorum) joined with the Taifali to attack the Vandals and Gepidae. The term "Vandals" may have been erroneous for "Victohali" because around 360 the historian Eutropius reports that Dacia was currently (nunc) inhabited by Taifali, Victohali, and Thervingi.

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