The Gepids are a Germanic people of the Ostic branch, close to the Goths, who settled in the lower Vistula, then in central Europe (Carpathian basin, 269-670) during the High Middle Ages.
The Gepids are mentioned for the first time by a Latin source during the year 269. At this time, they threaten Roman Dacia. They drove the Vandals ahead of them and attacked the Visigoths who had preceded them in the region.
In 451, during the battle of the Catalaunian fields (Jordanes, History of the Goths), the Gepids, vassals of the Huns, fought under the orders of Ardaric:the latter had probably been put in power by Attila.
After the death of the king of the Huns, in 453, the Gepids - who constituted an "innumerable" army (Jordanes, ibid.) - settled in Dacia:their chief Ardaric won at the battle of Nedao; in 455, they definitively freed themselves from the tutelage of the Huns by participating in a coalition which defeated the new king of the latter, Ellak, son of Attila. They then extended their territories until around the middle of the 6th century.
In 539, the Gepids, who gave their name to Dacia, formerly Gothia (Jordanes, ibid.) led the war against the Eastern Empire and extended into Moesia.
Around 550, their territory included the lands located between Dobrudja and Tisza from west to east, and between the Carpathians (south and east) and the Danube, from north to south (later Byzantine source, according to Cassiodorus).
In 551, the Gepids were opposed by the Lombards, allies of Justinian I.
It is finally under the blows of the latter pushed by Byzantium from 565 (the Gepids are pushed back north of the Danube) then, above all, under the blows of the Avars, that the Gepids lose their power before disappearing from History .
Some of them followed the Lombards to Italy at the end of the 6th century; after 567/568, the date of the great Avar offensive, a small number of survivors may have remained in Transylvania, but no trace of them remains after 670.
In art, the Gepids have left many examples of one of the best-known ornaments of the era of the migrations of peoples:the eagle-headed buckle, often wrongly called "Gothic".
The historian of the Goths Jordanès, was of Gepid ancestry and the concubine of the Lombard King Alboin, Rosemonde, was a Gepid princess, daughter of King Cunimond who had been defeated and killed by the Lombards. According to legend, Rosemonde, forced by Alboin to drink the wine of victory from her father's skull, murdered the latter before committing suicide with her lover Helmageis (Elméchis).