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CHAPTER 3
Governmental Administration
M. Shane Bjornlie*Introduction
The assessment of Ostrogothic administrative practices has long served as
an index for the extent to which late 5th- and early 6th-century Italy may be
regarded as either a direct continuation of the Roman state or something
fundamentally different in terms of its political culture. The common view of
the 6th century as a watershed between late antique and early medieval Italy
has naturally encouraged much interest in the apparatus of the Ostrogothic
state. For some scholars aspects of the administration—the collection of
taxes, the presence of diverse public offices, the fairly replete numismatic
record, and so on—that survived the economic and political vicissitudes of
the 5th century serve as evidence for the survival of an essentially Roman sys-
tem of government.1 Others have drawn attention to substantial departures
from Roman political and administrative habits, which often originated in
Roman responses to conditions of the 5th century, prior to the arrival of the
Ostrogoths.2 Only scholarship uninflected by the debates of recent decades
would continue to insist upon a view of the administration of 6th-century Italy
as having experienced ‘collapse’ and ‘disintegration’ at the hands of invading
‘barbarians’.3
As more sensitive examinations of the topic have tended to acknowledge,
the very purpose of governmental administration has made it difficult to place
Ostrogothic Italy on a simplistic axis of ‘continuity’ and ‘decline’. At a basic
level the purpose of the administration was to maintain of a set of practices
- The scope of this chapter, in as much as it concerns administrative personnel, overlaps
with other chapters in this volume on the administration of cities (Marazzi) and provinces
(Arnold) and the Senate (Radtki).
1 e.g. Bertolini, Roma di Fronte, pp. 1–9; Goffart, Barbarians and Romans, pp. 60–102; Moorhead,
Theoderic, pp. 136–8; Heather, “Gens and Regnum”, pp. 114–17; Wickham, Framing the Early
Middle Ages, pp. 80–124.
2 Sinnigen, “Administrative Shifts”, pp. 457–66; Morosi, “I comitiaci”, pp. 77–111; Marazzi,
“Destinies”, pp. 119–59; Tabata, “I comites Gothorum”, pp. 67–78.
3 Carney, Bureaucracy, p. 108; Burns, History of the Ostrogoths, p. 163.