Theodoric the Great

Theodoric the Great was king of the Ostrogoths from 471 and ruler of Italy from 493 until his death in 526. Raised as a hostage in Constantinople, he conquered Italy at the emperor's request, kept its Roman administration running, and for a time dominated the Germanic kingdoms of the West. Later German legend remembered him as the hero Dietrich von Bern.

Theodoric was born around 454, the son of the Gothic nobleman Theodemir of the Amal family and his concubine Ereleuva, in Pannonia, where the Ostrogoths had just broken free of the Huns after the death of Attila. In 461, aged seven or eight, he was sent to Constantinople as a hostage to guarantee a treaty with the emperor Leo I. He spent about ten years at the imperial court and received a Roman education. Returning home around 469–470, he defeated a Sarmatian king near Singidunum, modern Belgrade, with some 6,000 warriors.

Through the 470s and 480s Theodoric competed with a rival Gothic leader, Theodoric Strabo, for the favour of the eastern emperor Zeno, alternately serving and fighting the empire. His followers plundered parts of the Balkans, sacking Stobi and later Larissa. Zeno tried to buy his loyalty, making him a senior commander in 483 and consul in 484, but by 487 Theodoric was blockading Constantinople itself.

Zeno found a solution to two problems at once. In 488–489 he sent Theodoric to overthrow Odoacer, the Germanic king of Italy, who had begun to act independently of Constantinople. The Goths marched west with their families, defeated the Gepids on the way, and beat Odoacer at the Isonzo and Verona in 489 and on the Adda in 490. Odoacer held out in Ravenna until February 493, when the two agreed to share power. In March, at a banquet celebrating the treaty, Theodoric killed Odoacer with his own sword, and his men massacred Odoacer's followers.

Theodoric settled his Goths, perhaps some 40,000 people, mainly around Pavia, Ravenna and Picenum. He kept separate systems: Goths served as soldiers under their own customs, while Romans kept Roman law and staffed the civil service, with learned officials such as Cassiodorus. He called himself king, never emperor, but wore purple, named consuls and was addressed by Italians as princeps. He restored aqueducts, walls and palaces in Rome and filled his capital, Ravenna, with churches, a palace and the stone mausoleum in which he was buried. An Arian Christian ruling a Catholic population, he was at first tolerant; in 519 he made the people of Ravenna rebuild synagogues that a mob had burned.

Theodoric married Audofleda, sister of the Frankish king Clovis, and married his daughters and sister to the kings of the Visigoths, Burgundians and Vandals. After Clovis defeated the Visigoths in 507, Theodoric became regent for his young grandson Amalaric, and from 511 he ruled the Visigothic kingdom in Spain directly, so that his power reached from the Atlantic to the Danube.

His final years were darkened by mistrust. In 523 he had the philosopher Boethius, a senior court official, arrested on charges of treason linked to a supposed senatorial plot, and executed him in 524. Pope John I died in 526 amid quarrels with the emperor Justin I over the treatment of Arians. Theodoric died of dysentery on 30 August 526, and his grandson Athalaric succeeded him under the regency of his daughter Amalasuintha. Within decades, the armies of Justinian I destroyed the Ostrogothic kingdom.

Our 500 map shows Italy in the early years of his reign, with the Frankish realm of Clovis to the north-west and the Byzantine Empire to the east.