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CHAPTER 5
Ostrogothic Cities
Federico Marazzi*Cities in Late Roman Italy: A Problem beyond the Ostrogoths
To take the concept of ‘Ostrogothic cities’ in a literal sense, there would be very
little to report. The Ostrogoths (perhaps with only one exception, in Trento,
discussed later in the chapter) founded no cities, nor can any feature of the
cities they occupied during the period of their rule in Italy be recognized as
distinctly ‘Ostrogothic’, unless we consider the slight number of churches dedi-
cated to the Arian Christian communities. This quite simply means that there
is no way to speak about specifically Ostrogothic cities, and that a more prof-
itable discussion must focus on the nature of Italian cities during the period
of Ostrogothic rule. As is well known, this period spans little less than half a
century, that is to say from Theoderic’s defeat of Odovacer in 493 to the first
years of the Gothic War between the Byzantines and the Ostrogoths. This war
began in 535 and officially ended in 554, but in relation to this topic this chap-
ter will consider 540 as the final date, which corresponds to the moment when
Belisarius’ army conquered Ravenna and ended the regular functioning of the
administrative system of the Ostrogothic kingdom as it had worked during
the previous decades.1
It would be a mischaracterization of the period to underestimate the scale
of the Gothic government’s interest in cities. The main written source for
this period, the so-called Variae collected by Casssiodorus, provide us with
a great deal of information about the attention that King Theoderic and his
immediate successors lavished on the cities located within the boundaries of
their kingdom.2 Italy was presumably the most densely and uniformly urban-
ized territory of the former Roman Empire. The density of its urban network
was perhaps matched only by that existing in some provinces of the eastern
Mediterranean such as Syria and Palestine, since even in Anatolia and Egypt
there were vast, scarcely populated areas with few or no cities at all.
- I wish to express my deep gratitude to Shane Bjornlie for his extensive revision of my text.
1 Tate, Giustiniano, pp. 683–717.
2 Fauvinet-Ranson, Decor civitatis; Tabata, Città dell’Italia.