Ostrogothic Kingdom

At a glance

Who were the Ostrogoths before Italy?

The Ostrogoths were one of the Gothic peoples north of the Black Sea in late antiquity; the wider family is described under Goths. The earliest detailed account, by the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, does not use the word "Ostrogoths" at all. He calls the people beyond the Dniester the Greuthungi and their king Ermenrichus "a most warlike monarch, dreaded by the neighbouring nations". When the Huns attacked in the 370s, Ermenrichus "put an end to his fear of these great perils by a voluntary death".

Jordanes, a writer of Gothic descent who finished his Getica in AD 551, has Hermanaric wounded by two brothers avenging their sister and dying "at the great age of one hundred and ten years". Ammianus wrote within a few decades of the events; Jordanes drew on Gothic legend nearly two centuries later.

That the Greuthungi and the Ostrogoths were simply the same people is a modern assumption: the poet Claudian, in AD 399, lists "Ostrogoths and Gruthungi together" as if they were two groups. Jordanes explains "Ostrogoths" as "eastern Goths", named after a king Ostrogotha "or from the place", a learned etymology of the sixth century.

For about eighty years these Goths lived under the Hunnic Empire, keeping kings of their own "though subject to the Huns". At the Catalaunian Plains in AD 451 they fought for Attila under "the brothers Valamir, Thiudimer and Vidimer". After Attila's death the subject peoples rose against his sons at a river "called Nedao" in Pannonia. Jordanes gives no year and does not say which side the Ostrogoths took; the date 454 in modern books is an editor's reckoning, and the river is unidentified. Afterwards the Ostrogoths held Pannonia, with Thiudimer living "near Lake Pelso".

Were the Amals an ancient royal dynasty?

That is what the court wanted the world to believe. Jordanes lists seventeen generations from a hero called Gapt, through Amal, "from whom the name of the Amali comes", down to Theodoric; the founders were "not mere men, but demigods, that is Ansis". A second branch ran from Hermanaric to Eutharic, who married Theodoric's daughter Amalasuntha, "thus uniting again the stock of the Amali".

The pedigree came from the court itself. The Getica abridges a lost twelve-book Gothic history that the Roman minister Cassiodorus wrote, according to a sixth-century note, praecipiente Theodoricho rege, at King Theodoric's command. A letter Cassiodorus drafted for the boy king Athalaric praises him because "he restored the Amals to their proper place … evidently proving that up to the seventeenth generation we have had kings for our ancestors. He made the origin of the Goths a part of Roman history". It was propaganda: a royal house as ancient as Rome's aristocracy.

Modern historians are sceptical. Jordanes himself inserts a convenient forty years in which "no other king succeeded". James O'Donnell wrote in 1992 that "the implicit structure of almost all modern Gothic study has been dictated by Jordanes"; Walter Goffart saw the Ostrogoths and Visigoths as "historically contingent collocations" rather than ancient tribes. Peter Heather stressed the mass of the Goths, while Herwig Wolfram explained Gothic unity through royal families, and Arne Søby Christensen (2002) called the migration story a "migration myth".

Who was Theodoric the Great?

Theodoric was the son of Thiudimer and a concubine whom Jordanes calls Erelieva; the Anonymus Valesianus, a Latin chronicle of the period, says that "being a Catholic" she took the name Eusebia at baptism. No ancient source gives his year of birth. The historian Thomas Hodgkin thought that "several circumstances point to 454 as a probable date".

As a boy he became a hostage of the Eastern Roman Empire: "He had now attained the age of seven years and was entering upon his eighth", says Jordanes. He grew up at the court of the emperor Leo in Constantinople and returned at eighteen, then took Singidunum (Belgrade) for himself.

His father led the Goths into Macedonia and, dying at Cyrrhus, named Theodoric his heir in the mid-470s (the year is given as 471, 474 or 475). For a decade Theodoric was both a Roman general and a threat to Constantinople, competing with a rival Gothic leader, Theodoric Strabo, "born of another stock, not of the Amali". The emperor Zeno, Jordanes says, adopted him as his "son-at-arms" and gave him an equestrian statue, and he was consul in 484, yet his Goths also plundered Roman provinces. He set out for Italy "from the city of Nova", Novae on the lower Danube.

How did Theodoric conquer Italy?

Italy had been ruled since AD 476 by Odoacer, the general who deposed the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire. Three sources tell three stories of the plan. In Jordanes, Theodoric asks Zeno: "Send me there with my race." In Procopius, Zeno "advised Theoderic to proceed to Italy, attack Odoacer, and win for himself and the Goths the western dominion". In the Anonymus Valesianus, Theodoric was to rule "only until the arrival of Zeno".

The Goths moved as a people, who "placed in their waggons the women and children and such of their chattels as they were able to take with them". They entered Italy in 489. Odoacer was beaten on the Isonzo and before Verona; much of his army went over to Theodoric, and his general Tufa changed sides twice. In 490, with Visigothic help, Theodoric won again on the Adda "on the 11th of August".

Ravenna, protected by shoals and by the marshes of the Po, held out for nearly three years while Theodoric camped in the pine forest outside. Inside, says the Anonymus, a measure of wheat rose "to the price of six gold-pieces".

When was the Ostrogothic Kingdom founded?

The usual date is AD 493. Through the bishop of Ravenna, Procopius writes, the rivals agreed to "reside in Ravenna on terms of complete equality". Theodoric entered the city in late February or March 493.

Soon afterwards, according to the Anonymus Valesianus, Theodoric "with his own hand slew him with a sword as he was coming into the Laurel Grove", claiming to have forestalled a plot, and Odoacer's soldiers and family were killed the same day. Procopius is more guarded: Theodoric "caught Odoacer, as they say, plotting against him, and bidding him to a feast with treacherous intent slew him". Jordanes' editor Charles Mierow called it "the darkest blot on the career of Theodoric the Great".

No emperor crowned him. Zeno had died in 491, and "the Goths, without waiting for the command of the new emperor, made Theoderic their king". The two ancient counts of his reign, thirty-three years (Anonymus) and thirty-seven (Procopius), start in 493 and 489 respectively.

Was Theodoric a king or an emperor?

Procopius says that Theodoric "did not claim the right to assume either the garb or the name of emperor of the Romans, but was called 'rex' to the end of his life", yet "in fact he was as truly an emperor as any". Peace with Zeno's successor Anastasius came in AD 497, according to Hodgkin, when the emperor "sent back to him all the ornaments of the Palace".

Theodoric told Anastasius: "Our royalty is an imitation of yours, … a copy of the only Empire." Jonathan Arnold (2014) argued that "Theoderic was unequivocally the Roman emperor in the West"; his reviewer Henning Börm replied that no source says the regalia were meant for Theodoric to wear, and that an Arian confession was then an almost unmistakable mark of a "barbarian". The safest description is a Gothic king who ruled Italy like an emperor.

How did Goths and Romans live together?

Theodoric's government kept the two peoples legally separate. A model letter of appointment for a Gothic count (comes Gothorum) explains the system: disputes between two Goths were judged by the count "according to our edicts"; between a Goth and a Roman, the count sat with "a Roman jurisconsult"; and between two Romans, Roman judges decided, "that thus each may keep his own laws". The Goths were the army. The Romans kept the Senate, the civil offices and the tax system, staffed by aristocrats such as Cassiodorus, Boethius and Liberius, a loyal official of Odoacer whom Theodoric made praetorian prefect.

The court's watchword was civilitas, a word that Hodgkin rendered as good order, civilisation or law-abidingness. "The true mark of civilitas is the observance of law," Theodoric wrote to the Jews of Genoa. A later letter put it as Gothorum laus est civilitas custodita: the Goths' glory lies in keeping that order. Contemporaries noticed the balance. The Anonymus Valesianus says Theodoric "so governed two races at the same time, Romans and Goths, that although he himself was of the Arian sect, he nevertheless made no assault on the Catholic religion", and that the Romans called him "a Trajan or a Valentinian". It also records one of his sayings: "A poor Roman plays the Goth, a rich Goth the Roman."

How the Goths were provided for is disputed. A letter praising Liberius says he handled "the assignment of the [Gothic] Thirds (in Tertiarum deputatione)", so that "the common holding of their farms proved in practice a reason for concord", and Procopius says the Goths shared out the lands that Odoacer had given to his own men. The older view was that the Goths received a third of Roman estates. Walter Goffart argued instead that the "thirds" were shares of tax revenue, a thesis that John Moorhead accepted in his 1992 study of Theodoric.

Much of this comes from the Variae, the official letters Cassiodorus later collected. O'Donnell observed that they "put the very best possible face on the Ostrogothic kingdom", and Shane Bjornlie reads them as "a full-fledged apology" for the officials who had served the Amals.

The Edictum Theoderici. A short law code of 154 chapters, drawn from Roman law, survives under Theodoric's name, but only through Pierre Pithou's printed edition of 1579; the manuscripts he used are lost. According to the legal database of the University of Cologne, it "probably came to life around the year 500" under Theodoric the Great. In 1955 Giulio Vismara attributed it instead to the Visigothic king Theodoric II, about forty years earlier. Sean Lafferty (2013) defended Ostrogothic authorship and suggested Rome in 500, while arguing that the code challenges assumptions about "just how peaceful, prosperous and Roman-like Theoderic's Italy really was". Rainer Jakobi (2022) concluded from Pithou's readings that "at least, one law certainly shows the individual hand of Cassiodorus". The majority view today favours Theodoric the Great, but the question is not closed.

How far did Ostrogothic power reach?

Further than Italy. In AD 504 Theodoric's count Pitza took Sirmium on the Sava from the Gepids, and in 505 a small Gothic force helped the warlord Mundo defeat the army of Illyricum near Horrea Margi, in the Morava valley. Theodoric also built a network of marriages across the West:

• He himself married Audefleda, whom Jordanes calls a daughter and Gregory of Tours a sister of Clovis, king of the Franks.
• His daughters, born before he came to Italy, married the Visigothic king Alaric II and the Burgundian prince Sigismund, linking him to the Burgundian Kingdom. Their names differ in every source: Jordanes calls them Thiudigoto and Ostrogotho.
• His sister Amalafrida married the Vandal king Thrasamund. Procopius says she went to Africa with "a thousand of the notable Goths as a bodyguard" and about five thousand fighting men, linking Italy to the Vandal Kingdom.
• His niece Amalaberga married Herminafrid of the Thuringians: "we bestow upon you our niece", says the letter that accompanied her.

The system could not stop the Franks. Theodoric wrote to Alaric II urging him not to fight Clovis ("Your enemy will be mine also"), but in AD 507 Clovis defeated and killed Alaric at Vouillé. Theodoric's army then saved the Visigothic south: according to Procopius, the Franks lifted the siege of Carcassonne when the Goths arrived, and Theodoric "conferred the rule of the Visigoths upon his grandson Amalaric", acting as regent himself. From then until 526 the Visigothic Kingdom was governed from Ravenna, though Theodoric's former armour-bearer Theudis became, in Procopius' words, in name a ruler "by the gift of Theoderic" but "in fact an out and out tyrant". Jordanes could write that "there was not a tribe in the west that did not serve Theodoric while he lived, either in friendship or by conquest". The historian Patrick Amory, quoting Moorhead, called the kingdom "incomparably the most powerful state in Western Europe".

What did Theodoric build in Ravenna?

Ravenna had been the capital of the Western Roman Empire since AD 402 and became, in UNESCO's words, "first Ostrogothic and then Byzantine capital". The Anonymus Valesianus says that Theodoric repaired the aqueduct of Trajan, "completely finished the palace, but did not dedicate it", and built palaces, baths and walls at Verona and Ticinum (Pavia), with an amphitheatre at Ticinum. In 1996 eight early Christian monuments of Ravenna were inscribed together as a World Heritage Site; three are Theodoric's.

Sant'Apollinare Nuovo. UNESCO calls the basilica a church "built during the reign of Theodoric as a Palatine chapel". A ninth-century historian of Ravenna, Agnellus, reported its inscription: "King Theoderic had this church erected from its foundations in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord." Its twenty-six scenes from the life of Christ date from Theodoric's time. After the Byzantine conquest it was handed to the Catholics and dedicated to St Martin of Tours, a fighter against heresy; it was named after St Apollinaris only when his relics arrived in the ninth century.

The most famous mosaic in the church shows Theodoric's palace, labelled PALATIUM. According to the Diocese of Ravenna's mosaic foundation, the church was reconsecrated "around 561", and a "damnatio memoriae of Theodoric's court" removed figures from the palace scene and replaced them "with curtains; still today parts of remaining mosaics (hands) show the removal". Several of those hands can still be seen against the columns.

The Arian Baptistery. Ravenna's tourism office says the Goths' baptistery was "presumably built by king Theodoric at the end of the 5th century AD". Its dome shows the baptism of Christ from Theodoric's time, ringed by apostles "almost completely restored in the middle of the 6th century". The Archbishop's Chapel, by contrast, is in UNESCO's words "the only orthodox monument built during Theodoric's reign".

The Mausoleum. The Anonymus Valesianus says that in his lifetime Theodoric built a mausoleum "of squared blocks of stone, a work of extraordinary size, and sought out a huge rock to place upon it". The tourism office dates it to about AD 520. Its roof is a single block 10.76 metres across, which "according to recent calculations" weighs about 290 tonnes. UNESCO calls it "the only surviving example of a tomb of a barbarian king of this period". Theodoric's remains were "moved and lost" after Justinian's decree of 561, when the tomb became a church.

Why did Theodoric's reign end in crisis?

The last years were the darkest, and the sources for them the most hostile. Theodoric had no son. His daughter Amalasuntha married the Amal Eutharic in AD 515, and Eutharic was consul with the emperor Justin in 519, but he died before Theodoric, leaving a young son, Athalaric. In 519 a schism between the churches of Rome and Constantinople also ended. John Moorhead linked the fall of Boethius to senators with ties to the East; Patrick Amory doubted that pro-Byzantine sentiment was the crucial dividing line.

When Christians at Ravenna burned the synagogues, Theodoric made the Roman population pay for their rebuilding; the hostile second part of the Anonymus Valesianus claims he then forbade "any Roman to carry arms, except a small pen-knife". Pope John I, sent to Constantinople on behalf of the Arians, was received on his return "in a hostile spirit" and died "a few days later".

Boethius and Symmachus. When the senator Albinus was accused of writing to Justin "a letter hostile to Theoderic's rule", Boethius, Theodoric's master of offices, declared: "if Albinus did that, so also have I and the whole senate with one accord done it". He was condemned "without giving him a hearing" and, according to the Anonymus, "beaten to death with a cudgel". In prison he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, protesting that he had been condemned "unheard and undefended, at a distance of near five hundred miles away" on "forged letters". His father-in-law Symmachus, head of the Senate, was then put to death "under a false accusation".

J. B. Bury placed Boethius's death in "the late summer or autumn of A.D. 524", as did Hodgkin; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says "probably in 526". Procopius called these deaths Theodoric's "first and last act of injustice" towards his subjects.

Theodoric's death. Theodoric died on 30 August 526. The Anonymus Valesianus claims that the Arians were about to seize the Catholic churches and that the king died "on the very same day", in words that recall the death of the heretic Arius. Procopius says that a fish's head served at dinner looked to him like "the head of Symmachus newly slain", and that he took to his bed in terror and "died not long afterward". Both are moral tales. On his deathbed, Jordanes says, he told the Goths to honour the Senate and keep the goodwill "of the Emperor of the East, as next after God".

Who ruled the Ostrogothic Kingdom?

What happened under Amalasuntha?

Athalaric became king as a child, and his mother Amalasuntha governed for him. Procopius admired her "wisdom and regard for justice"; she returned to Symmachus' and Boethius' children "their fathers' estates". Gothic nobles resisted her plan for a Roman education, claiming that Theodoric "would never allow any of the Goths to send their children to school". The boy king "plunged into a drunken revel which passed all bounds", fell ill and died on 2 October 534.

Amalasuntha, who had already prepared a refuge with Justinian in Epidamnus (Durrës), made her cousin Theodahad co-ruler, a man "versed in the Latin literature and the teachings of Plato" but "extraordinarily devoted to the pursuit of money". Within months he had her confined on an island "in a certain lake in Tuscany called Vulsina", Lake Bolsena, where her enemies killed her. Jordanes says she was "strangled in the bath". A chronicle entry for 30 April 535 may record her death rather than her imprisonment, as Bury argued. Justinian's envoy told Theodahad that this meant "war without truce".

Why did Justinian go to war with the Goths?

Justinian had just conquered Vandal Africa, and he "was aroused as if he had suffered personal injury in the death of his wards", says Jordanes. In AD 535 Belisarius took Sicily almost without a fight while another army seized Dalmatia.

In 536 Belisarius took Naples, entering through its aqueduct. The Goths, suspecting Theodahad of treachery, raised Witigis "upon a shield" and "amid a fence of circling swords", in the words of his own proclamation; Procopius calls him "not of a conspicuous house" but a veteran of the wars about Sirmium. Theodahad was overtaken and killed on the road to Ravenna, and Witigis married Amalasuntha's daughter Matasuntha, "much against her will".

Belisarius entered Rome on 9 December 536. Witigis besieged it for "one year … and nine days in addition", until about March 538, with an army that Procopius put at 150,000, a figure Bury called "far in excess of the truth". In 539 Goths and Burgundians razed Milan, where Procopius claims "not less than three hundred thousand" men died, and famine followed in Picenum. Procopius also reports that a mosaic of Theodoric in the market place of Naples fell apart piece by piece as each of his family died, and finally during the siege of Rome, an omen of imperial victory.

By 540 Witigis was trapped in Ravenna. The Gothic nobles offered to make Belisarius "Emperor of the West"; he pretended to accept and entered the city in May 540. Procopius, who was there, says the Gothic women "spat upon the faces of their husbands" at the sight of how few the conquerors were. Witigis, Matasuntha and Theodoric's treasure went to Constantinople.

Who was Totila?

The Goths north of the Po chose new kings: Ildibad, murdered in 541; the Rugian Eraric, killed after five months; and then Ildibad's nephew Totila, who according to Bury "had not yet reached his thirtieth year". His coins call him "invariably Baduila", at first with the head of Justinian, later with that of the long-dead Anastasius, and finally with his own bust.

Totila won back most of Italy within a few years. Procopius says he "commanded them to continue tilling the soil without fear … bringing to him the revenue which they had formerly brought to the public treasury and to the owners of the land". He also refused to return slaves who had deserted to him, since they had his promise "that we will never abandon them to their former masters". Justinian's later law annulling his acts shows how much he had disturbed property in Italy, but Procopius also shows him courting the senators, so this may have been war policy rather than a social programme.

Totila took Rome on 17 December 546, when Isaurian guards opened a gate. The deacon Pelagius begged him, "Spare thine own, O Master", and the killing stopped. Totila pulled down about a third of the walls and emptied the city. Belisarius reoccupied it in 547; Totila took it again on 16 January 550, rebuilt it and held horse races there.

A legend in Pope Gregory the Great's Dialogues has St Benedict foretell to Totila: "Into the city of Rome shall you enter, and over the sea shall you pass: nine years shall you reign, and in the tenth shall you leave this mortal life."

How did the Ostrogothic Kingdom end?

In AD 552 Justinian sent the eunuch general Narses with an army that included 2,500 Lombard warriors and more than 3,000 Herul horsemen. Totila camped near a village called Taginae in the Apennines, Narses at a place "called Busta Gallorum". In the battle, in June or early July 552, Narses dismounted his barbarian allies in the centre so "they might not be too eager to fly". The Goths were routed, and Totila died of a wound in the flight or, in another version Procopius records, by a chance arrow.

Narses sent the Lombards home for burning buildings and assaulting women who had taken refuge in the sanctuaries. The surviving Goths made Teia king at Ticinum; he had about three hundred Roman noble hostages killed and marched south to Campania. At Mons Lactarius, "Milk Mountain", today Monte Lettere near Vesuvius, he fought at the front for a third of the day until a javelin struck him as he exchanged a shield holding twelve spears. The Goths fought on into the next day, then agreed to "depart immediately from all Italy". A thousand under Indulf went north instead. Bury wrote: "He was their last king. The kingdom of the Ostrogoths went down on the hard-fought field under Mount Lactarius."

Agnellus dates the battle to 1 October 552; Procopius' account implies a later date, and many modern works give early 553. Garrisons held out longer. About seven thousand Goths at Compsa (Conza), led by a man whom the historian Agathias calls a Hun, surrendered at the beginning of spring 555. Verona and Brescia were recovered only in 562, when Narses sent the keys of their gates to Justinian.

On 13 August 554 Justinian issued the Pragmatic Sanction for Italy at the request of Pope Vigilius. It confirmed the grants of Amalasuntha, Athalaric and Theodahad but declared that "all the gifts made by Totila shall be void", calling him "the tyrant Totila", and sent slaves who had married free women "during the nefarious times of Gothic ferocity" back to their masters. Its translator Fred Blume notes that "whole districts in the country had been devastated". In April 568 the Lombards invaded Italy.

What did the Ostrogoths leave behind?

Buildings. Some Ravenna churches were finished by the conquerors. San Vitale, according to Bury, "had been designed and begun under the regency of Amalasuntha" and was consecrated in 547 with the mosaics of Justinian and Theodora.

The Silver Bible. The Codex Argenteus contains the four Gospels in the Gothic translation of Bishop Wulfila, in silver and gold ink on purple parchment. Uppsala University Library, which holds it, says it was "probably copied in Ravenna in the period under the Ostrogoths, and possibly for their King Theoderic the Great". Of at least 336 original leaves, 187 are in Uppsala and one, found in 1970, in Speyer. It reached Uppsala via Werden abbey, Rudolf II's Prague and Swedish war booty of 1648, and was given to the university in 1669. Its link with Theodoric's court is likely but not proven.

Dietrich von Bern. In German heroic poetry Theodoric became Dietrich von Bern, "Bern" being the German name for Verona. The Old High German Hildebrandslied, copied in the ninth century, has its hero Hildebrand flee "Otachres nid", the enmity of Odoacer, together with "Theotrihhe", Dietrich. Legend thus reversed history: the real Theodoric attacked and killed Odoacer. In the Nibelungenlied Dietrich lives at the court of Etzel, Attila, although the historical Theodoric was probably born after Attila's death in 453. O'Donnell remarked that medieval legend could "set him free from the majesty of his Ravenna tomb, rechristen him Dietrich of Bern, and let him ride off into the sunset".

A damned king. The Church remembered him differently. Gregory the Great tells in his Dialogues of a hermit on the island of Lipari who saw the dead Theodoric, "without shoes and girdle, and his hands fast bound", thrown by Pope John and Symmachus "into Vulcan's gulph", a volcano. A later local legend in Ravenna, recorded by the city's tourism office, held that lightning split the dome of his mausoleum and killed him as punishment for his crimes.

Common myths about the Ostrogothic Kingdom

The story of Narses and the Lombards comes from Paul the Deacon's History of the Lombards, written in the eighth century. In it, the empress Sophia mocks the eunuch Narses, and he promises to "weave her such a web as she could not lay down as long as she lived", then sends the Lombards fruits of Italy to tempt them. William Dudley Foulke, who translated the work in 1907, pointed out that Lombard troops had served in Italy fifteen years earlier and needed no persuading.

Timeline of the Ostrogothic Kingdom

What the map shows next

The border data draws the Ostrogothic Kingdom from 500 to 560, slightly later than the historical dates of 493 to 552/553; at AD 530 on the map it covers Italy, Sicily and Dalmatia. Before the invasion of Italy the border data shows the Ostrogoths as a separate territory, and a decade earlier Italy still belongs to the Western Roman Empire. Theodoric's Visigothic regency can be seen at Visigothic Kingdom. After the Gothic War Italy passes to the Eastern Roman Empire, and from 568 most of it to the Lombards.