This essay is mainly about the Church of the Goths and about the Russian Orthodox Church, and their conflict. The essay will be focusing about important persons in these two churches. This essay will be tracing back the roots of the Church of the Goths, since it is a church, that is unknown by most people in this world. My research will be making a distinction of the differences between the Church of the Goths and the Russian Orthodox Church. This essay will also be discussing the heritage of the Gothic people and the theories of the Goths.The methods in the essay, is academic sources, information from the Church of the Goths and from the Russian Orthodox Church. The results shows how the information was found, and now it is published for the first time about the Church of the Goths. This means the Church of the Goths has a stronger ground than first expected. The methods were comparing what the different sources says, and if it was possible to connect the Church of the Goths to the Metropolitanate of Gothia, and so on.

The basic aim of the thesis is to investigate whether the Romans of the East (Byzantines) during the 6th to the 8th centuries were interested in the Latin west and the imperial rule over it. In the first part of the work, the various discourses concerning the origins of the Justinianic conquest or reconquest of Africa and Italy articulated in the contemporary sources are identified and evaluated; the only one which cannot be shown or supposed to have been officially articulated is the discourse of a source of Pseudo-Zachariah Scholasticus which makes African and maybe also Italian exulants complaining in the imperial court about the local rulers responsible for the Vandal and Gothic wars. After some other preliminary studies (e.g. concerning the so-called problem of Theodericʼs constitutional position), it is concluded that the emperor Justinian was not interested in an ideologically founded restoration of the empire, but made the western wars because of his contacts with western aristocrats. In the second part of the thesis, the presentation of the Justinianic western wars and western events or realities in the works of the Byzantine historians from Marcellinus Comes and Procopius to Theophylactus Simocatta (the 6th to the early 7th centuries) is investigated and an attempt is made to explore...