Introduction 3
sides of the debate. By all accounts, the history of the Ostrogothic regime is
messy with contradictions; but it is also central to a better understanding of
Late Antiquity’s longue durée. Indeed the disparate manners in which later
sources of the early Middle Ages filtered Ostrogothic Italy speak to many of
the same issues of interpretation. For example, Gregory of Tours, an inhabit-
ant of Frankish Gaul born during the early years of the Gothic War (ca. 538/9),
preferred to see the period in terms of the political ascendancy of barbarism
and heretical (Arian) Christian belief. Conversely, in the 8th and early 9th cen-
turies, the Frankish king and emperor Charlemagne cultivated the memory
of Ostrogothic Italy as a means of appropriating the imperial past. For inter-
locutors with Ostrogothic history then and now, understanding 5th- and 6th-
century Italy requires grappling with a chimaera of various personalities. This
volume seeks to make accessible the range of these historical interpretations,
both modern and pre-modern, to non-specialists and to offer specialists new
topics as well as new analyses of traditional questions. As readers will see, con-
sensus and consistency are not features of either the late ancient evidentiary
or the modern scholarly record.
A ‘Long’ and ‘Wide’ Ostrogothic Italy
Many of the chapters in this volume approach the Ostrogothic era expansively
in both time and space. Rather than focus solely on Theoderic’s reign in Italy
(489/93–526), they examine a longer period, beginning with Odovacer, the
first non-Roman ruler of Italy, who deposed the last Roman emperor of the
West in 476, and ending with the ‘official’ conclusion of the Gothic War in 554,
when Justinian issued the Pragmatic Sanction. In truth both of these chrono-
logical parameters invite criticism. Arguably, Julius Nepos was the last west-
ern emperor and his death in 480 marks the true end of the western Roman
Empire as a political entity. Likewise, even after the Pragmatic Sanction, hos-
tilities continued between Gothic and eastern Roman forces in regions north
of the Po for several more years, with substantial Ostrogothic resistance to the
eastern Roman presence in Italy not ending until the capture of Verona in 562.
But they nevertheless provide generally acceptable termini, which expand the
inquiry beyond the regnal dates of the Amal dynasty. Geographically, the chap-
ters examine not only the Italian regions of the Ostrogothic kingdom (i.e. the
peninsula and Sicily) but also the southern Gallic, eastern Spanish, and Illyrian
provinces (see Figure 1.2). Theoderic fought and negotiated to control these
extra-Italian regions, making their inclusion in this volume not simply relevant
but required.