Ostrogothic Kingdom

A king sent by an emperor

Drafted from Heather, The Peoples of Europe (1996)formation

Theodoric was born about 454, spent ten years of his childhood as a hostage at Constantinople, and came out of it a Roman patrician and a consul who was also the king of a Gothic army camped in the Balkans and expensive to keep there. In 488 the emperor Zeno sent him to Italy with a commission to remove Odoacer, the commander who had deposed the last western emperor twelve years earlier and been governing as a patrician ever since.

It took five years. In 493, after a three-year siege of Ravenna, the two agreed to rule Italy jointly, and ten days later Theodoric killed Odoacer at the banquet celebrating the agreement — reportedly with his own hands, and reportedly remarking afterwards that the man seemed to have no bones in him.

Sent, not self-made

Theodoric's claim to rule rested on two things at once, and the second is what makes the kingdom unusual: descent from the Amal royal house, and a commission from the emperor at Constantinople.

That second kind of claim is common enough on the eastern frontier — a Jafnid phylarch holding Roman rank from Justinian, a Nasrid king wearing a Persian diadem, Herod voted a kingdom by the Roman senate — and rare in the post-Roman west, where the successor kings mostly stopped pretending. Theodoric did not stop pretending. He was sent by an emperor. He struck coin in the emperor's name and not in his own. He sought imperial confirmation for his rule and, later, for his successor. He used the title rex, never imperator or augustus, and his own chancery describes his position as holding Italy on the emperor's behalf. The arrangement is deliberately ambiguous and the ambiguity was the point: a Gothic king who was also a Roman official could be obeyed by both halves of the population.

Two peoples, two functions

The division of labour was explicit.

The Goths were the army. Gothic families were settled on assignments of land or of tax revenue and owed military service; Romans were barred from bearing arms. That is the same arrangement the Vandals had in Africa, with one difference that turned out to decide both kingdoms: in Africa the Vandals took the land, and in Italy the Goths largely took a share of the tax on it, which left the Roman landowning class intact and much less hostile.

The Romans were the government. The praetorian prefecture went on functioning, the senate went on meeting, consuls went on being appointed, the land tax went on being assessed and collected by the same officials as before 476. Cassiodorus, who served as the king's minister, left twelve books of the official correspondence, and it is Roman bureaucratic Latin about grain shipments, aqueduct repairs and tax remissions — a state whose administrative record is indistinguishable from an imperial province's, headed by a Gothic king.

Sixty years of this produced an Italy governed better than it had been for a century. It had one flaw, and it was the kind that only shows when something outside the arrangement changes.

To all the Goths and Romans

Drafted from Cassiodorus, The Letters of Cassiodorus, Being a Condensed Translation of the Variae Epistolae (1886)expansion

The Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy is unusually well documented for a barbarian successor state, and the reason is that the man who ran its chancery published his own correspondence.

Cassiodorus served the Gothic kings for something over thirty years, rising to praetorian prefect, and the Variae are the letters he drafted in their names — appointments, judgements, instructions to officials, replies to petitions, diplomatic correspondence. He collected and issued them at the end of his career, and his stated motive is worth keeping in view: to demonstrate that his influence had been exerted throughout on the side of law and order and just government, directed equally at the repression of Teutonic barbarism and the punishment of Roman venality.

That sentence is the kingdom's programme, and it is also a defence brief.

What the letters are about

Not war. The striking thing about a collection of state papers from a Gothic kingdom is how little of it is military.

There are letters about the price of grain, the drainage of marshes, the repair of aqueducts, the licensing of a monopoly, the pension of a retired charioteer, the relief of famine-stricken citizens. There are appointments to Roman offices with their full traditional titulature. There are long digressions on natural history and moral philosophy, which Hodgkin doubts were in the originals and which are entirely characteristic of the author.

It is the paperwork of a functioning late-Roman provincial administration, because that is what it was. The Goths took over the machine and kept the staff.

The salutation

The formula that matters most is a form of address.

Theoderic's edicts and circulars are directed universis Gothis et Romanis — to all the Goths and Romans. Two peoples, named separately, addressed together, in one document, by one ruler.

That is the constitutional settlement in three words. The Goths were the army and held their land by military service; the Romans held the civil offices, the law and the church; each kept its own law and its own religion, Arian and Nicene, with the king above both and belonging formally to neither jurisdiction. Nobody was assimilated and nobody was expelled.

Theoderic ruled Italy for thirty-three years on that basis and it worked. The senate met. The consuls were appointed and the emperor at Constantinople confirmed them. The grain dole continued, the games continued, the buildings were repaired, and the letters show the government arguing about municipal water supply rather than about survival.

The limit

It was a settlement that depended on a man rather than on an institution, and Cassiodorus's own collection shows what happened to it. The last letters he wrote were for a different king, and they are addressed differently.

Boethius

Drafted from Heather, The Peoples of Europe (1996)peak

In 524 the magister officiorum — the head of the civil administration, the senior Roman in the kingdom — was arrested on a charge of treasonable correspondence with Constantinople, imprisoned at Pavia, and clubbed to death. His father-in-law, the head of the senate, followed him. The pope died in custody the following year after a failed embassy to the emperor.

Boethius wrote the Consolation of Philosophy in the cell. It became one of the most widely read books in medieval Europe, was translated into English by Alfred the Great and into Middle English by Chaucer, and is the reason a Gothic king in Ravenna is a figure in the history of Western thought at all.

Whether there was a conspiracy

Unknowable, and it is worth leaving contested rather than settled.

The case against: Boethius's own account, which is the fullest, is written by the accused and is a work of consolation rather than a defence brief. There was real correspondence between Italian senators and the eastern court. The eastern emperor Justin had begun persecuting Arians in 523, which threatened the Gothic regime's church directly, and a Roman aristocracy that had spent thirty years being loyal to an Arian king now had a Catholic emperor to be loyal to instead. From Ravenna it would have looked like the beginning of something.

The case for the prosecution being paranoid: nothing came of it, no rising followed, and Theodoric had ruled for thirty-one years without needing to kill senators.

Why it matters

Because it is the moment the arrangement in the first chapter is shown to be conditional.

Two peoples, two functions, one king holding the position of both a Gothic monarch and a Roman official — that works as long as the Roman half has nowhere else to look. From 476 to 518 there was, in practice, nowhere: the eastern empire was theologically estranged from Rome and militarily uninterested in Italy. From 518 the schism was healed and from 527 there was Justinian, and the calculation for an Italian senator changed.

Theodoric died in 526. Justinian's armies were in Italy nine years later, the war ran for eighteen, and it left the peninsula in a condition neither power could pay to hold.

What was lost with it

Sixty years is a short life for a kingdom, and this one left remarkably little that can be counted. No script. No faith carried outward — the Goths were Arians and made no attempt to spread it. No later dynasty invoking its name, because the Lombards who arrived fifteen years afterwards had no interest in it and the empire's official position was that it had never been legitimate in the first place.

What it did was keep the Roman administration of Italy running for sixty years after the empire in the west had stopped, and hand the Consolation of Philosophy to the Middle Ages by killing the man who wrote it. Neither of those is the kind of thing anybody thought to measure.

Universis Gothis

Drafted from Cassiodorus, The Letters of Cassiodorus, Being a Condensed Translation of the Variae Epistolae (1886)contraction

In the summer of 536 the Gothic army, encamped in the field, deposed the king they had and raised a veteran officer named Witigis on a shield among drawn swords, in the manner of their ancestors. Theodahad was put to death on the new king's order. Witigis, being of obscure family, married Theoderic's granddaughter to improve his title.

Cassiodorus wrote the accession letter, and it is one of the best things he ever composed. It is also the moment the Ostrogothic experiment ends, and the evidence is in the first two words.

The address

Theoderic had written universis Gothis et Romanis. To all the Goths and Romans.

Witigis's letter is addressed universis Gothis.

What he says

The text is a boast about how he was chosen, and it reads as a deliberate repudiation of everything the previous forty years had been.

He was raised, he says, by his Gothic ancestors' custom, on a shield, among drawn swords. You should know that I was elected not in the narrow confines of a bedchamber, but in wide open fields; nor was I sought out amid the delicate conversation of flatterers, but to the sound of blaring trumpets — so that the Gothic people, stirred by that din, might find themselves a martial king.

Every clause is aimed at something. The bedchamber is the palace at Ravenna. The flatterers are the Roman civil service. The trumpets and the shield are the Gothic army asserting that it, and not the chancery, decides who rules.

The man who drafted it was the head of that civil service, writing in the voice of the movement that had displaced him.

What had gone wrong

The settlement had one structural weakness and it was visible from the start: the Goths were the army and the Romans were the administration, and the two had different interests as soon as there was a war.

Theoderic's successors could not manage both constituencies. Amalasuintha, his daughter, governed as regent for a child and was accused by the Gothic nobility of raising him as a Roman; when she was murdered, Justinian had the pretext for an invasion, exactly as Gelimer had furnished him one in Africa two years before.

By the time Witigis was raised on the shield, Belisarius had taken Sicily and was in southern Italy. There were five surviving letters written for Witigis and four of them are about negotiating peace with Justinian.

The end of the correspondence

Cassiodorus retired from public life around 538 or 539, at the point where the government he had served for thirty years was becoming a war it could not win.

Belisarius entered Ravenna in 540 with his secretary Procopius in his train. The praetorian prefect was no longer there; he had gone home to Bruttii. Procopius wrote a history of the Gothic war in eight books and never once mentions Cassiodorus's name — an omission Hodgkin, who translated both, calls the thing most difficult to comprehend in the whole business.

Fourteen aqueducts

Drafted from Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books V-VIII: The Gothic War (1919)contraction

In March 537 a Gothic army sat down in front of Rome and cut the water. Procopius was inside the walls, working as Belisarius's secretary, and what he wrote about the next year is the most detailed account of a siege to survive from antiquity.

The aqueducts of Rome, he explains, were fourteen in number, made of baked brick by the men of old, of such breadth and height that a man on horseback could ride along inside them. The Goths tore open all of them, so that no water at all should enter the city. Belisarius then blocked every channel with masonry for a considerable distance, in case anybody tried to come in the same way. Between them, in a few days, the two armies ended the thing that had made Rome possible.

The city had about five thousand imperial troops in it.

What stopping the water actually did

Procopius is precise about the consequences, and they are not the ones a modern reader expects.

Drinking water was not the problem: people who lived far from the river drew from wells. The sewers were not a problem either, since they all discharged into the Tiber and could not be used against the city. What failed was the grain.

All the mills of Rome stood on one hill across the river, turned by water brought up by aqueduct and dropped down the slope, and the ancient Romans had walled the hill and bridged the river precisely so that no enemy could ever destroy them. The Goths did not have to reach the mills. They only had to cut the supply above them, and every mill in the city stopped. There were no draught animals to spare — the garrison could barely feed its horses.

So Belisarius built floating mills. He stretched ropes from bank to bank just below the bridge, where the water comes out from under the arch with the greatest force, moored two boats two feet apart, set a mill on each and slung the machinery between them, and then attached further boats behind, one to the next, with wheels between them all the way down. The current turned every wheel in turn, and the city had flour.

The Goths learned of it from deserters and answered it. They gathered large trees and the bodies of Romans newly killed and threw them into the river upstream, and the current carried them down between the boats and broke the wheels off. So Belisarius hung long iron chains across the Tiber above the bridge; everything the river brought down collected against them, and details of men pulled the trees and the corpses out and carried them ashore. He admits, in Procopius's telling, that he did it less for the mills than because he had begun to fear the Goths might come through under the bridge in boats and be in the middle of the city before anyone knew.

The Romans kept their mills. They lost the baths.

The statues

The other scene worth having whole is at the far end of the city.

The tomb of the emperor Hadrian stands outside the gate by the river, a stone's throw from the walls, and Procopius describes it as a very noteworthy sight: Parian marble, the stones fitted so closely that there is nothing at all between them, four equal sides each about a stone's throw long, higher than the city wall — and above, statues of the same marble, men and horses, of wonderful workmanship. Long before, the Romans had decided the tomb was a fortress threatening the city and had run two walls out to it, making it part of the defences.

The garrison there was small, because that stretch was reckoned the least assailable. The Goths came at it anyway, hidden under the colonnade that runs out to the church of St Peter, and appeared at close range with shields so large that the engines on the wall — which could only shoot straight out — were useless against them. They were getting their ladders up and working round both flanks of the defenders when the men on the tomb, by common agreement, broke the statues in pieces and threw the fragments down on their heads with both hands.

That is the whole war in one paragraph: a Roman garrison, holding an emperor's tomb against a Gothic army in order to keep a city for another emperor, destroying the sculpture to get something to throw.

Why they left

Not because of anything that happened at Rome. A Roman commander named John took Ariminum, close to Ravenna, on the calculation that the Goths would abandon everything else the moment they feared for their capital, and he was right.

Procopius adds one detail he plainly enjoyed. Matasuntha — Theoderic's granddaughter, whom Witigis had married by force to give his election a pedigree — heard that John was at Ariminum and was, in the translation, absolutely overcome with joy, and opened secret negotiations with him about marriage and the betrayal of the city. The dynastic marriage that was supposed to legitimise the war king was being used, within two years, to hand over his capital.

What the siege settled

It was about the spring equinox, and one year had been spent in the siege and nine days in addition, when the Goths burned their camps and set out at daybreak. Belisarius held Rome, which is what the campaign is usually scored on.

What the year did to the city is the part that lasted. The aqueducts were not repaired, and Rome went on for the rest of the war being fought over by armies that cut whatever the previous one had mended. A city built to be supplied by fourteen brick rivers was now a city of wells, and it never again held a population of the size those rivers had been built to water. The Gothic kingdom had spent forty years keeping the machinery of Roman Italy running — the aqueducts repaired, the grain moved, the offices staffed. The war fought to restore Roman Italy broke the machinery in its first campaigning season.

Eighteen years

Drafted from Heather, The Peoples of Europe (1996)end

Theodoric died in 526 with no son. He had designated his grandson Athalaric, aged ten, under the regency of his daughter Amalasuintha, who had been educated at Ravenna in Greek and Latin and who governed capably and was disliked for it by the Gothic nobility. Athalaric died at eighteen. Amalasuintha took a cousin, Theodahad, as co-ruler, and he had her imprisoned on an island and strangled in her bath within a year.

Justinian had been waiting for a pretext and took that one. Theodoric had nominated his successor, which is as much of a rule as the kingdom had, and it failed at the first attempt: nine years from his death to a Byzantine army in Sicily.

What the war did

Belisarius took Sicily in 535 and Rome in 536. The Goths besieged him in Rome for a year. He took Ravenna in 540 by pretending to accept an offer of the western crown and then arresting the man who offered it. Justinian recalled him, the Goths elected Totila, and Totila spent ten years winning most of Italy back — taking Rome twice, once emptying it of its population entirely, and offering terms to a senate that had run out of reasons to prefer either side.

Narses finished it at Taginae in 552 and at Mons Lactarius the year after. Teia was killed. After 553 there was no Gothic army.

Rome changed hands five times in eighteen years. The aqueducts were cut. The senate, which had met continuously for something over a thousand years and had gone on meeting under Odoacer and Theodoric, is not heard of again after the 560s. The city of Rome had held over half a million people when Constantine founded his rival capital and was under fifty thousand by the end of the sixth century, and this war is where most of that difference happened.

What arrived fifteen years later

Italy in 568 had no field army, a ruined administration, a halved population and an imperial government at Ravenna with no capacity to defend the north. The Lombards took the Po valley in a few years and were never dislodged, and the peninsula stayed politically divided for the following thirteen hundred years.

That is the shape of the whole episode. Sixty years of a kingdom that left nothing measurable behind, followed by an empire reconquering a province in order to have it back, spending eighteen years doing it, and handing what was left to the next people who came through the Alps.

Two kingdoms, one campaign

Justinian took Africa from the Vandals in a season and Italy from the Goths in eighteen years, and the two conquests are usually filed separately. They were one policy: the recovery of the western Mediterranean by an eastern emperor who believed the western provinces had never legitimately ceased to be Roman.

The difference in cost is the whole lesson. Africa had a regime with no constituency outside its own people and the cities opened. Italy had a settlement that a substantial part of the Roman population had been willing to live under, and the war to remove it took a generation and destroyed the thing being recovered.

The property of their masters

Drafted from Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books V-VIII: The Gothic War (1919)end

In 541 the Goths, beaten and down to a strip of the north, elected a young man called Totila. He spent the next eleven years taking Italy back from the empire, and he did it by making an offer to people nobody had thought to ask.

Procopius disliked the regime he served and by this stage was writing about it with his teeth set. He gives Totila more credit than he gives almost anyone on his own side, and he does it while recording the things Totila did that were ruinous.

The letter to the senate

Totila's first move on Rome was not an assault. It was a letter to the senate, and its argument is that the Roman aristocracy had betrayed a government that had treated it well.

Men who wrong their neighbours out of ignorance, he writes, or because some forgetfulness has come upon them, may fairly be forgiven by their victims; a man who does wrong out of deliberate intent has nothing left to plead. So consider, he tells them, what defence you will be able to make for what you have done to the Goths. Are you ignorant of the benefactions of Theoderic and Amalasuintha, or have time and forgetfulness effaced them in you? They were not small favours, and they were not long ago, and they were shown to you yourselves.

Then the comparison: having learned by report or by experience what Greek rule is worth to its subjects, did you really decide to hand over to them the affairs of the Goths and the Italians? He tells them to remember how well they entertained those guests, and what kind of guests and friends they got in return, and leaves them to recall what the imperial commanders and the imperial soldiers had been like.

It is an accurate letter. The senators had spent forty years being governed carefully by a Gothic king and then six years being governed by an occupying army that had to live off the country.

The offer

The thing that actually won Italy back is one sentence in Procopius's account of the Lucanian campaign, and it is the most consequential sentence about this kingdom that anybody wrote.

Totila had taken Rome, and had the senators in his hands. The countryside of the south was in arms against him, organised by a local landowner named Tullianus, and the fighting there had gone badly for the Goths. So he had the captured senators send their own household servants down to their Lucanian estates, with a message to their tenants: leave off their present machinations, and till the fields as they were accustomed — for they would have the property of their masters.

The peasants detached themselves from the imperial army and went quietly back on to the land. Tullianus fled. The whole territory south of the Adriatic except one port became Gothic again without another battle.

That is a Gothic king dissolving the Roman landowning class's hold on its own estates by telling the men who worked them that the land was theirs — and doing it through the mouths of the landowners themselves, who were his prisoners. Two generations earlier the Ostrogothic settlement had been built on leaving the Roman aristocracy in possession, and had lasted as long as it did because of it. Totila took Italy back by promising to dispossess them.

The letter about Rome

He was not sentimental about the city. Having decided to march south, he determined to raze Rome first: he pulled down the fortifications in many places until about a third of the defences were gone, and he was on the point of burning the finest of the buildings and making Rome a sheep-pasture.

Belisarius wrote to him. The letter Procopius gives is the best-known thing in the Gothic War and deserves its reputation.

Among all the cities under the sun Rome is agreed to be the greatest and the most noteworthy. For it has not been created by the ability of one man, nor has it attained such greatness and beauty by a power of short duration, but a multitude of monarchs, many companies of the best men, a great lapse of time, and an extraordinary abundance of wealth have availed to bring together in that city all other things that are in the whole world, and skilled workers besides.

To damage such a place, he goes on, would properly be considered a crime against the men of all time, because it robs past generations of the memorials of their ability and future generations of the sight of their works. And then the practical half, which is the half that persuades: one of two things must happen. Either you beat the emperor or he beats you. If you win and you have dismantled Rome, you will have destroyed your own city and not another man's. If you lose, having saved Rome you would be assured of the victor's gratitude, and having destroyed it you will have left yourself no plea for mercy at all — and no benefit from the deed either.

Procopius says Totila read the letter over many times, came to understand the advice exactly, was convinced, and did Rome no further harm.

Then he emptied it. He kept the senators with him and sent everybody else, with their wives and children, into Campania, refusing to allow a single soul to remain, and left the city entirely deserted.

Rome had been the largest city in the world. For a season there was nobody in it.

How it ended

Totila held most of Italy, offered terms repeatedly, and was refused, because Justinian's position throughout was that there was nothing to negotiate. In 552 Narses came west with an army the empire had not previously been willing to pay for, and killed him at Taginae. His successor Teia was killed the year after.

What Procopius leaves on the page is a king who argued in writing that the Roman senate had wronged a government that deserved better, who spared Rome because a letter told him what posterity would say, who emptied it of every inhabitant in the same month, and who won a country back by promising its farm labourers the estates they worked on. None of it was inherited from Theoderic's settlement. It was the opposite of that settlement, and it very nearly worked.

Squillace

Drafted from Cassiodorus, The Letters of Cassiodorus, Being a Condensed Translation of the Variae Epistolae (1886)afterlife

The Ostrogothic kingdom was destroyed in a war that ran from 535 to 554 and ruined Italy more thoroughly than any barbarian invasion had. The Goths disappeared as a people almost immediately afterwards; there is no Ostrogothic successor, no exile claimant, no later dynasty claiming the name.

The one thing that came out of it lasted, and it was done by a retired civil servant on the toe of Italy.

The retirement

Cassiodorus went home to his native province of Bruttii around 538, while the war was still in its early stages, and outlived the kingdom he had served by something like forty years.

At Squillace, on the coast between the town and the sea, he founded a monastery. He called it Vivarium, after the fishponds cut into the rock there. And he did something with it that nobody had done in quite that way before: he made the copying of manuscripts a central duty of the monastic life, wrote a handbook setting out what ought to be read and in what order, and had the community assemble a library of Christian and classical texts and reproduce them.

His stated purpose was the education of monks. The effect was a working argument, in a country in the middle of a twenty-year war, that a religious house should be a place where books are preserved and multiplied.

Why that is the afterlife

Because it is the only part of the Ostrogothic enterprise that outlived the enterprise, and because of what it was preserving.

The Gothic settlement had been an attempt to run Italy as a going Roman concern with a Germanic army — the senate meeting, the consuls appointed, the aqueducts repaired, the correspondence conducted in the full formal Latin of the imperial chancery. Its administrator spent thirty years drafting that Latin. When the arrangement collapsed he retired and spent the rest of his life ensuring that somebody would still be able to read it.

The Variae themselves survived by the same route: copied, in monasteries, by people whose profession he had helped define, until the eleventh and twelfth centuries when Italian and German scholars started looking for records of what the sixth century had been.

The vindication

There is a last thing worth saying about why the letters exist at all.

Cassiodorus collected and published them, on his own account, to show that for more than thirty years the influence he had wielded in the councils of the Gothic sovereigns had been exerted on the side of law and order and just government — directed equally, in his own phrase, at the repression of Teutonic barbarism and the punishment of Roman venality.

That is a man defending a career spent serving a regime that had just been destroyed and would be remembered, by the historians of the winning side, as an occupation. He wanted it on record that the government had been a government.

The defence worked. Almost everything anybody knows about how the Ostrogothic kingdom actually functioned comes from the file he assembled to prove he had done his job properly, kept safe in a monastery he built after there was nobody left to prove it to.