Instrumente der Gewalt: Bewaffnung und Kampfesweise gotischer Kriegergruppen
Abstract
Communities of violence have always and accross cultures used weapons, i. e. tools that are manufactured specifically for the purpose of either harming and killing humans and animals (so-called offensive weapons) or of protecting oneself against being harmed and killed by others (so-called defensive weapons). This article examines the arms used by Gothic warriors in the fifth and sixth centuries AD, trying to answer basic questions: What sort of arms did Gothic warriors own and how did they use them in combat ? Where and how did they procure these arms ? What sort of training did they have ? In addition, the article also focuses on the symbolic functions of weapons. It analyzes arms as markers of status and identity and as icons of military virtue, giving special attention to their role in rituals and in the self-representation of rulers. In Gothic Italy, being armed was a feature that distinguished Gothic warriors from Roman civilians, but the type, quality and value of these arms also marked out differences within the Gothic community itself. Rulers were depicted as warrior kings; weapons were prominent in the construction of artificial kinship and the transferal of rulership. The article also studies the code of honour to which Gothic warriors felt bound: Their heroic ethos explains the common practice of entering into single combats before pitched battleswere begun, as warriors wanted to prove their valour in front of as many witnesses as possible.
© 2017 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
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- Instrumente der Gewalt: Bewaffnung und Kampfesweise gotischer Kriegergruppen
- Late Antique Dalmatia and Pannonia in Cassiodorus’ Variae
- Marienbilder im Blachernenheiligtum
- Autoren dieses Bandes
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- The First Millennium Refocused. Eine Debatte
- Vorbemerkung
- Late Antiquity, Islam, and the First Millennium: A Eurasian perspective
- Respondenten
- Accomplissement de la maturation ou éclatement de la pseudomorphose? Autour de la périodisation proposée par G. Fowden
- Problems with periodisation?
- Garth Fowden ed il primo millennio CE
- Garth Fowdens „First Millennium“ aus mediävistischer Perspektive
- Spengler redivivus? Garth Fowden’s First Millennium
- Fowden’s First Millennium
- Aufsätze
- Bittersüße Pfeile. Protreptische Rhetorik und platonische Philosophie in Lukians Nigrinus (2. Teil)
- Instrumente der Gewalt: Bewaffnung und Kampfesweise gotischer Kriegergruppen
- Late Antique Dalmatia and Pannonia in Cassiodorus’ Variae
- Marienbilder im Blachernenheiligtum
- Autoren dieses Bandes
