Ostrogoths

The Ostrogoths were the "eastern" branch of the Goths, a Germanic people who took shape as a political force in the Balkans in the fifth century after the collapse of Attila's empire. Led by the Amal family, and above all by Theodoric the Great, they conquered Italy in 493 and ruled it from Ravenna until the East Roman Empire destroyed their kingdom in a long war ending in 554. Their surviving people were absorbed into the population of Italy and into the Lombards who followed.

Goths appear in Roman records from the third century, north of the lower Danube and the Black Sea, and their language and material culture point back towards the Vistula. Roman writers divided them into the Tervingi in the west and the Greuthungi further east, with the Dniester as the line between. The sixth-century historian Jordanes equated the Greuthungi with the Ostrogoths and made the Amals heirs of the fourth-century king Ermanaric, but modern historians treat him as unreliable for early events. Herwig Wolfram still accepts the equation; Peter Heather sees the later Ostrogoths as the product of a long process of splitting and merging among mostly Gothic groups. The name itself, from a root meaning "east", is first securely recorded only in 399.

From the late fourth century many Goths were drawn into the Hunnic Empire, and Gothic contingents fought for Attila. After his death in 453 and the battle of Nedao in 454, the Amal brothers Valamir, Vidimir and Theodemir gathered followers in Pannonia, between Vienna and Sirmium. They depended on subsidies from Constantinople, fought neighbouring peoples, and in 473–474 moved into East Roman territory. A rival group, the Thracian Goths under Theodoric Strabo, served the empire as federates. Theodemir's son Theodoric, raised as a hostage in Constantinople, united the two groups after Strabo's death in 481 and his son's killing in 484, and was made consul that year.

With the backing of the emperor Zeno, Theodoric the Great led his Goths into Italy and in 493 defeated Odoacer. From Ravenna he ruled Italy, Sicily, Dalmatia and lands to the north, keeping Roman administration and law and his Roman minister Cassiodorus, while the Goths, concentrated in the north, formed the army. After the Franks killed Alaric II in 507, he acted as regent for his grandson in the realm of the Visigoths, giving him influence over much of Gaul and the Iberian Peninsula. He adapted Roman architecture and ceremonial to his own ends, choosing a tomb design that recalled the memorials of Constantine and other emperors while presenting himself as a ruler in his own right.

The Ostrogoths were Arian Christians, a creed both the papacy and the eastern court opposed. Their Gothic language, recorded chiefly in the Bible translation of Ulfilas, is the only eastern Germanic tongue to survive in continuous texts and among the earliest substantial records of any Germanic language.

Theodoric's death in 526 left a weak succession and feuds among the Gothic nobility. In 535 Justinian I sent Belisarius, fresh from victory over the Vandals, to reconquer Italy. He took Sicily, Naples and Rome, resisted a Gothic siege of Rome and finally entered Ravenna. Under King Totila the Goths recovered most of the peninsula, but in 552 a large East Roman army under Narses defeated and killed him at Taginae, and the last king, Teia, fell soon after. The war devastated Italy. According to Procopius, Goths who remained lived on under Roman rule, and they later joined the Lombard invaders; no separate Gothic people or language survived.

Our maps draw the Ostrogoths in 400, 500 and 600, with approximate outlines. The 600 map shows them after their kingdom had already fallen in 554, by which time Italy was divided between the Byzantine Empire and the Lombards.