Jordanes

Jordanes (/dʒɔːrˈdeɪniːz/; Greek: Ιορδάνης), also written as Jordanis or Jornandes,[a] was a 6th-century Eastern Roman bureaucrat,[b] claimed to be of Gothic descent, who became a historian later in life.

Jordanes writes about himself almost in passing:The Sciri, moreover, and the Sadagarii and certain of the Alani with their leader, Candac by name, received Scythia Minor and Lower Moesia.

Jordanes was asked by a friend to write Getica as a summary of a multi-volume history of the Goths by the statesman Cassiodorus that existed then but has since been lost.

He had been a high-level notarius, or secretary, of a small client state on the Roman frontier in Scythia Minor, modern southeastern Romania and northeastern Bulgaria.

[3] Jordanes was notarius, or secretary to Gunthigis Baza, a nephew of Candac and a magister militum of the leading Ostrogoth clan of the Amali.

Jordanes wrote Romana, about the history of Rome, but his best-known work is his Getica, which was written in Constantinople[c] about 551 AD.

Castalius wanted a short book about the subject, and Jordanes obliged with an excerpt based on memory, possibly supplemented with other material to which he had access.

The less fictional part of Jordanes's work begins when the Goths encounter Roman military forces in the third century AD.