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CHAPTER 18
Mapping the Church and Asceticism in
Ostrogothic Italy
Rita Lizzi Testa*Institutional Development: Dioceses and Metropoles
At the present state of research it is not possible to draw a complete picture of
the institutional development of the Ostrogothic church in all its ecclesiasti
cal articulations. The territory under the authority of Theoderic and his suc
cessors came to consist of two prefectures, but some areas were abandoned
even before the end of the Gothic War.1 Within these boundaries, which varied
over time, the organization of the various ecclesiastical provinces and dio
ceses has not been clearly reconstructed in each case. Indeed the foundation,
development, and/or disappearance of the same bishoprics is often uncertain
because of the absence of reliable episcopal lists, while data from more recent
archaeological or epigraphic sources are not always readily available every
where. Nonetheless, we can try to reconstruct the ecclesiastical geography of
the Italian peninsula, which in some respects is better known than other parts
of the Ostrogothic kingdom, in order to understand how the church of the 5th
and 6th centuries had changed since the previous period.
Metropolitan Districts
Throughout the West, the metropolitan organization of ecclesiastical prov
inces divided into dioceses solidified slowly, moulding itself mostly on to new,
Diocletianic administrative divisions.2 In Italy, the ecclesiastical metropo
les followed the territorial divisions of the region’s two vicariates (Italia
- I am indebted to my colleagues and friends Kristina Sessa and Jonathan Arnold for their
thoughtful suggestions and careful revisions of this chapter.
1 See Arnold in this volume.
2 This organization was already mandated by Canon 9 of the Council of Antioch of 341, which
entrusted the care of an ecclesiastical province to the bishop presiding in its capital, calling
on the bishops of the region to recognize his authority.