Celtic peoples from Western Europe had settled around 400 BCE in the eastern Alps.

A Celtic state, Noricum, had developed around the region's ironworks in the second century BCE.

The Romans occupy Noricum without resistance in 9 BCE and make the Danube River the effective northern frontier of their empire.

The area of the Zollfied, a slightly ascending plain in present Carinthia, Austria, had been the cultural and political center of the Celtic kingdom of Raetis.

As the later Roman province of Noricum, when under the rule of Emperor Claudius (41-54 CE) the city of Virunum is established as the province's capital, replacing—or maybe identical with—ancient Noreia.

North of the Danube, various German tribes were already extending their territory by the first century CE.

By the latter half of the second century CE, they were making devastating incursions into Roman territories.

Nevertheless, Roman arms and diplomacy had maintained relative stability until the late fourth century, when other Germanic tribes, including the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, and Vandals, were able to establish settlements in Roman territory south of the Danube.

The Roman province of Noricum gradually becomes indefensible, and much of the Christian, Romanized population evacuates the region in 488.

The Ostrogoths invade Italy in 493, seize control of what remains of the western half of the Roman Empire, and bring the Roman era in the eastern Alps to an end.

The Ostrogothic nation had practically evaporated with Theoderic's death.

With the final defeat of Widion in the early 560s the bulk of the surviving Ostrogoths had returned north and (re)settled in south Austria.

By 580, the Lombards have either absorbed the last of the Ostrogoths of driven them across the Alps and out of Italy.

The Ostrogothic name wholly dies.