The Ostrogothic race—Character of Theodoric—His Administration of Italy—Theodoric in Rome—Foreign Policy of Theodoric—His wars with the Franks and Burgundians—His supremacy in Western Europe—Misfortunes of his later years—Death of Boethius—Failure of Theodoric’s great schemes.

From the formal and constitutional point of view the substitution of king Theodoric for king Odoacer, as ruler in Italy, made no change in the position of affairs. From the practical point of view the change was important, for the new Teutonic kingdom was very much stronger than the old. Its ruler was a younger and a far abler man, the wisest and most far-sighted of all the Germans of the fifth and sixth centuries. Moreover, the military power of the Ostrogoths was far greater than that of the mixed multitude of Foederati who had followed Odoacer. They were a numerous tribe, confident of their own valour after a century of successful war, and devotedly attached to the king, who, for the last twenty years, had never failed to lead them to victory. While they preserved their ancient courage, they had acquired, by a stay of three generations within the bounds of the empire, a higher level of civilisation than any other of the Teutonic tribes. Their dress, their armour, their manner of life, showed traces of their intercourse with Rome; they had been Christians for a century, and had forgotten many of the old heathen and barbarous customs of their ancestors. They possessed, too, first of all Teutonic peoples, the germ of a written literature in the famous Gothic Bible of Ulfilas. There are documents surviving, written in the character which Ulfilas had devised for his people, which show that there were Gothic clergy and even laymen who could commit their contracts to paper in their own tongue. Theodoric himself never learnt to write, but there must have been many among his subjects who could do so. Though the king actually discouraged the Goths from giving themselves up to book-learning, yet in the generation which followed him there were Goths skilled both in Roman and Greek literature,—some even who called themselves philosophers and claimed to follow Plato.

Of all the German nations it seemed that the Ostrogoths were the most suited to form the nucleus for a new kingdom, which should grow up a young and strong yet civilised state on the ruins of the Roman empire. And if any one man could have brought such a consummation to pass, Theodoric was certainly the most fitted for the task. "Character of Theodoric." Ten years spent as a hostage at Constantinople had shown him the strong and the weak points in the Roman system of administration; twenty years spent in the field at the head of his tribesmen had won him an experience in war, both with Roman and barbarian, that made him unequalled as a general. Italian statesmen found him a master-mind who could comprehend all difficulties of the administration of an empire. Gothic warriors looked up to him not only as the most skilful marshaller of a host, but also as the stoutest lance in his own army. Alike when he smote the Gepidae by the Danube, and when he drove the Foederati of Odoacer into the Adige, the king had himself headed the final and decisive charge that broke the shield-wall of the enemy. But Theodoric was even more than a great statesman and warrior: he was a man of wide mind and deep thought. His practical wisdom took shape in numerous proverbs which his subjects long treasured. And, in spite of one or two deep stains on his character, we may say that his brain was inspired by a sound and righteous heart. The essential justice and fairness of his mind shines out in his official correspondence, even when enveloped in the obscure and grandiloquent verbiage of his secretary Cassiodorus. Among all the Teutonic kings he was the justissimus unus et servantissimus aequi, who set himself to curb the violence of the Goth, no less than the chicanery of the Roman, and taught both that he was no respecter of persons, but a judge set upon the throne to deal out even-handed justice. Alone among all rulers, Roman or German, in his day, he was a believer without tending in the least to become a persecutor. No monarch for a thousand years to come could have been found to echo Theodoric’s magnificent declaration that ‘religion is a thing which the king cannot command, because no man can be compelled to believe against his will.’ "Theodoric’s religious views." Though an Arian himself he employed Catholics, Gothic and Roman, as freely as those of his own sect. Even the Jews got strict justice from him, when every other state in the world dealt hardly with them. The abuse which he won from fanatical Christians for resenting the mobbing of a Rabbi, or the profanation of a synagogue, is one of the highest testimonies in his praise. ‘The benefits of justice,’ he said, ‘must not be denied even to those who err from the faith.’ Yet he was not, as were some others who tolerated Jews, a semi-pagan or an agnostic; the very rescripts which grant temporal justice to the oppressed Hebrews end with an appeal to them to leave their hard-heartedness and flee from the wrath to come.

In managing the settlement of his victorious tribesmen on the soil of Italy, Theodoric showed much ability. The third of the land, which Odoacer had confiscated seventeen years before, seems to have sufficed for their establishment. The greater part of the Foederati who had been holding this third, had fallen in battle, and those who escaped the Gothic sword seem mostly to have perished in a simultaneous outbreak of riot and murder, by which the Italians celebrated the downfall of Odoacer, when they heard that he had finally been shut up in Ravenna. "Settlement of the Ostrogoths." Hence Theodoric was able to provide for his countrymen without further spoliation of the native proprietors. He threatened indeed for a moment to deprive of their lands and rights those Italians who adhered too long to Odoacer, but better counsel prevailed, and even those men were spared. So the Goths settled down with little friction among their new subjects: they lay thickly along the valley of the Po, and in Picenum, more sparsely scattered in Tuscany and central Italy; into the south few seem to have penetrated. Nearly all settled down to farm the country-side; only in the royal towns of Ravenna, Pavia, and Verona did the Goths become an appreciable element in the urban population.

Theodoric’s plan for dealing with the government of conquered Italy deserves careful study. He did not abolish the remains of the Roman administrative system which he found still existing, nor did he, on the other hand, endeavour to subject the Goths to Roman law. He was content that, for a time, two systems of administration should go on side by side. The Goths were to be ruled and judged by his ‘counts,’ the Gothic governors whom he set over each Italian province, his ealdormen, as an Anglo-Saxon would have called them, according to the traditional folk-right of their tribe. The Romans looked for justice to magistrates of their own race. If a Goth and a Roman went to law, the case was heard before the count and the Italian judge, sitting together on the same bench.

In the central administration the same mixture of systems was seen. Theodoric’s court was like that of another German king in many ways; he had about him his personal retinue of military retainers, the king’s men, whom the Goths called by the name of Saiones, but whom, in writing our own English history we should call thegns or gesiths. The Saiones went on the king’s errands, served him in bower and hall, and acted as his body-guard on the battle-field. "Central Government." Above their rank and file rose two or three more prominent followers who seem to represent the great officers of the household of the later Middle Ages; such were the chamberlain, regiae praepositus domus, and the great captains who in Roman usage were styled magistri militum, and the king’s high-butler and steward.

But beside his Teutonic court—‘the hounds of the royal hall,’ as Boethius called them—Theodoric kept up a full establishment of Roman officials, bearing the old titles that had been used under the empire—praetorian praefects, masters of the offices, quaestors, and notaries. He showed great skill and discretion in choosing the most honest among his Italian subjects for these posts, so that his courtiers never became an oppressive official clique, as had habitually been the case under the later emperors. He even chose as his praetorian praefect Liberius, who had adhered to Odoacer to the last, and told him that he esteemed him all the more for his fidelity to his first master. The best men in Italy were undoubtedly set to administer the central government; but it was Theodoric’s misfortune that the better the man the more likely he was to indulge in vain dreams of old Roman glory, and to resent in his heart the wise rule of the Ostrogoth. Boethius, the last of the Romans as he may be called, served Theodoric all his life without learning true loyalty to him.

We have not space to notice half of Theodoric’s reforms in the administration of Italy. Most wise among them was the careful restoration of the old roads, aqueducts, and drainage canals, which had been the glory of the early empire. He was himself a great builder, and erected royal palaces at Verona and Ravenna, of which, alas! only the smallest fragments survive. But he spent even greater care in keeping up ancient edifices. In Rome he set apart every year two hundred pounds weight of gold pieces for the repair of palaces and public buildings. He took under his protection even statues and monuments, and added representations of himself to the crowd of effigies which adorned Rome. So thoroughly did he put himself in the place of the Caesars that he even took care to celebrate games in the circus, and harangued the assembled people in the Forum. "Theodoric in Rome." He attended and took part in the debates of the Senate, and endeavoured to strengthen it by the appointment of a few Gothic senators. If he showed some unwisdom in arranging for the resumption of the bread-dole, which had been such a curse to Rome, he atoned for it by a liberal scheme for the rearrangement of taxes, which at once relieved the people and filled the treasury. At his death the royal hoard at Ravenna amounted to no less than 40,000 pounds weight of gold, £1,600,000 in hard cash.

Theodoric’s wise administration at home was accompanied by an equally firm and able foreign policy. His first care was to establish friendly relations with the Eastern Empire. Even before Odoacer had met his death, he despatched an embassy to report to Zeno that he had carried out his commission of conquering Italy, and claimed an imperial confirmation of his title. But the embassy found Zeno just dead, and his successor, Anastasius, engrossed in the suppression of riots and rebellions. It was not till 497 that the emperor recognised the king of the Goths as ruler in Italy. Then, however, Anastasius made up for his tardy recognition by sending to Theodoric the regalia which Odoacer had forwarded to Zeno twenty years before, the robes and palace ornaments, which had last been used by the boy Romulus Augustulus.

During the thirty-three years of the Amal’s reign in Italy he had only one dispute with the emperor: this was a frontier quarrel in 505, caused by troubles in Illyricum. Theodoric had taken in hand the restoration of the bounds of the Western Empire towards the East, and his generals, having subdued Pannonia as far as Sirmium and Singidunum, trespassed on to Moesian soil, and came into contact with the East-Roman armies. There was some trouble for three years, but no great war, though in 508 two of Anastasius’ generals made a destructive raid on Apulia. But peace was ultimately made on the terms that the boundary should be drawn, as in the days of the Western Empire, at the Save and Danube.

Much more important were Theodoric’s dealings with his neighbours to west and north. He took over the task of Odoacer in guarding the old Roman districts beyond the Alps, which had once composed the provinces of Rhaetia and Noricum. Both were now becoming Teutonic rather than Latin-speaking lands. Into Rhaetia had fled many of the Alamanni, or Suabians, when Chlodovech the Frank in 496 drove them out of their lands on the Main and Neckar. This people gladly acknowledged Theodoric as over-lord, in return for his protection against the pursuing Franks, whom the Ostrogoth bade halt at the line of the upper Rhine, between Basel and Constanz. Farther east, in Noricum, the place of the emigrant Roman provincials had now been taken by a mixed Teutonic population, the remnant of the broken clans of the Rugians, Scyrri, and Turcilingi, who were just beginning to call themselves by the common name of Bavarians, under which we know them so well a few years later. They, too, like the Alamanni, were glad to acknowledge Theodoric as suzerain, and pay him tribute.

To the west, Theodoric at his accession found his kingdom bounded by the Alps, for Odoacer had given up to the Visigoths Marseilles, and the other towns which had obeyed the emperor down to the year 476. Beyond the Alps, Alaric the Visigoth now held the mouths of the Rhone and the ProvenÇal Coast, while Gundobad the Burgundian ruled on the middle and upper Rhone, from Avignon as far as BesanÇon and Langres. North of both Burgundian and Visigoth, and far from the Alpine borders of Theodoric, lay the new Frankish kingdom of Chlodovech, now reaching as far as the Loire and the upper Seine.

With all these three monarchs the king of the Ostrogoths had many dealings. At the very beginning of his reign he asked for the hand of Augofleda, the sister of Chlodovech, and hoped that by this alliance he had bound the clever and unscrupulous Frank to himself. By Augofleda he became the father of Amalaswintha, the only child born to him in lawful wedlock, though he had two elder daughters by a concubine ere he came to Italy. "Marriages of Theodoric’s family." Soon after his own marriage with the Frankish princess, Theodoric wedded one of these natural children to Sigismund, the son and heir of the Burgundian Gundobad, and the other to Alaric the Visigoth. Thus all his neighbours became his relatives.

But this did not secure peace between the new kinsmen of Theodoric. In 499 Chlodovech fell on Gundobad, to strip him of his realm, routed him, and shut him up in Avignon, the southernmost of his strongholds; but after many successes the Frank lost all that he had gained, and turned instead to attack the king of the Visigoths. Theodoric strove unsuccessfully to prevent both wars, and was not a little displeased when, in 507, his brother-in-law Chlodovech overran southern Gaul, and slew his son-in-law Alaric in battle. Burgundian and Frank then united to destroy the Visigoths, and might have done so had not Theodoric intervened. The heir of the Visigothic throne was now Amalric, the son of Alaric and of the king of Italy’s daughter. To defend his grandson’s realm Theodoric declared war both on Chlodovech and on Gundobad, and sent his armies over the Alps to save the remnants of the Visigothic possessions in Gaul. One host crossed the Cottian Alps, and fell on Burgundy; another entered Provence, and smote the Frank and Burgundian besiegers of Arles. With his usual good fortune, Theodoric recovered all Gaul south of the Durance and the Cevennes (509), so that the conquests of Chlodovech were confined to Aquitaine. The way was now clear for the Ostrogothic armies to march into Spain, to support the claims of the child Amalric against Gesalic, a bastard son of Alaric II., who had been proclaimed king of the Visigoths at Barcelona. After two years of guerilla fighting, the pretender was hunted down and slain, though he had sought and obtained some help from the Vandal king Thrasamund (511).

For the next fourteen years, till Amalric reached manhood, Theodoric ruled Spain in his grandson’s behalf. "Theodoric king of the Visigoths." He was recognised as king of the Visigoths, in common with Amalric, and ruled both halves of the Gothic race—reunited after an interval of two hundred years—with equal authority, and his royal mandates ran in Spain as well as in Italy. His delegate was Count Theudis, an Ostrogothic noble, who was made regent, and ruled at Narbonne over all the Visigothic realm west of the Rhone; while the Roman Liberius, named praetorian praefect of Gaul, administered Visigothic Provence from the ancient city of Arles.

Theodoric’s power was now supreme from Sirmium to Cadiz, and from the upper Danube to Sicily. He ruled the larger half of the old Roman Empire of the West, and exercised much influence in Gaul and Africa, the two parts of it that were not absolutely in his hands. After the war of 507-10 Clodovech the Frank had died, and his four sons, who parted his realm, made peace with the Ostrogoth; while Gundobad, the Burgundian king, had been fain to follow their example even earlier.

Twelve years of peace followed (511-523) before Theodoric, now in extreme old age, had occasion to interfere in Gaul. Sigismund, the husband of Theodoric’s elder natural daughter, was now king of the Burgundians. He was a gloomy and suspicious tyrant, and drew down the wrath of Theodoric by murdering his own heir, Sigeric, who was the Gothic king’s eldest grandson. To punish this crime Theodoric leagued himself with the Franks, and attacked Burgundy. He conquered, and took as his share of the spoil the lands between Durance and DrÔme, with the cities of Avignon, Orange, and Viviers, the farthest extension to the north-west of the Ostrogothic empire.

The circle of family alliances which Theodoric had made with his European neighbours was extended even beyond the Mediterranean. He married his sister, Amalafrida, a widowed princess, no longer in her first youth, to Thrasamund, the old king of the Vandals. In virtue of this connection he seems to have treated Thrasamund as a younger brother, if not as a vassal. When the Vandal dared to help the usurper Gesalic in Spain, Theodoric imposed a tribute on him, and bade him for the future do nothing without the counsel of his wife Amalafrida. Thrasamund did not resent this treatment, and for the future did all he could to propitiate his brother-in-law.

The Vandal state, indeed, was not in a condition to risk a quarrel with Theodoric. Ever since the death of Hunneric it had been steadily on the decline. In the reigns of Gunthamund (484-496) and Thrasamund himself (496-523) it was continually losing ground to the insurgent Moors of Atlas. Gunthamund, who was not a persecutor like his predecessor Hunneric, had endeavoured to win the favour of the Catholics by allowing them to recall their exiled bishops and open their churches. But these boons did not check the falling away of his subjects, and during his reign the Moors conquered from him the whole sea-coast from Tangiers to the gates of Caesarea. "Vandal Persecutions in Africa." His brother Thrasamund tried the opposite policy, resumed the persecutions, deported two hundred Catholic bishops to Sardinia, and renewed the horrors of the days of Hunneric. Naturally, he was no more fortunate in dealing with the native rebels than his brother had been. A quarrel with Theodoric would have meant ruin, so he kept himself from all foreign war. He died in 523 at a great age, killed, it is said, by the news of a great defeat which his armies had suffered at the hands of the Moors. His successor was his cousin Hilderic, the son of Hunneric and the Roman princess Eudocia, the last scion of the house of Theodosius the Great. Educated by a Catholic mother, Hilderic was himself the first orthodox Vandal king, and ended the long African persecutions. But his reign was not happier than those of his two cousins. His enthusiastic championship of the Catholic cause brought him into collision with the bulk of his Vandal subjects, and he was attacked by a rebellious party, headed by Theodoric’s sister, the queen-dowager Amalafrida, who wished to proclaim as king of Africa one of her late husband’s nephews. Hilderic had the better of the fighting, defeated the rebels, and captured Amalafrida, whom he consigned to a dungeon, to the great wrath of her brother, the king of the Goths (523). As long as Theodoric lived he merely kept her in close confinement, but the moment he heard of the old man’s death, in 526, he had the cruelty to slay the aged queen, a deed which alienated for ever the Vandals and the Ostrogoths.

The captivity of his sister was not the only sorrow which clouded the last few years of Theodoric’s long life. He was left in some trouble as to the succession to his crown. He had married his only legitimate child, Amalaswintha, to a Visigothic prince named Eutharic, of whose prudence and valour much was expected. Theodoric intended him to reign with his daughter as colleague and king-consort, but in 522 Eutharic died, leaving as his heir a boy of only five years of age. Theodoric could not but see that on his death the accession of a woman and a child to the throne would be fraught with the gravest danger, more especially as his nephew Theodahat, the nearest male heir of the Amal house, was known to be an unscrupulous intriguer.

It was perhaps owing to a temper embittered by these family troubles that Theodoric was led, during the last few years of his life, into an unhappy quarrel with some of the best of his Italian subjects. Rightly or wrongly, he had imbibed a notion that the Italians would take advantage of his death to stir up the emperor at Constantinople against his infant heir. The idea was very justifiable; for, in spite of all Theodoric’s wisdom and goodness, most of his Roman subjects never learnt to look kindly upon a ruler who was at once an Arian and a Goth, and it seems that some, at least, of the Senate were secretly corresponding with the emperor Justin. That monarch, the first Eastern Emperor for fifty years who was undisputedly orthodox, had fired the enthusiasm of Catholics all over the world by his attempts to suppress Arianism, and the faithful in Italy were undoubtedly contrasting his action with the strict impartiality of Theodoric, to the latter’s disadvantage. "The Misfortunes of Boethius." In 524 the patrician Albinus was accused by Cyprian, the magister officiorum, of sending disloyal letters to Constantinople. At his trial he was defended by the Consular Boethius, at once a great official and the best-known author of the day, noted as philosopher, theologian, astronomer, and mechanist—in short, the chief representative of the intellect of Italy. Boethius resented the impeachment of Albinus in the most fiery terms. ‘If this man is guilty,’ he cried, ‘then both I and all the Senate are guilty too.’ The accuser, Cyprian, proceeded to take him at his word, and brought forward further evidence to prove that Boethius himself had been one of the senators in correspondence with Justin, or had, at least, done his best to suppress evidence against those who actually were so engaged.^[3] Such an accusation, even if not fully proved, seems to have fired the anger of the old king. He could not tolerate disloyalty in a man whom he had always distinguished by his favour, and preferred to the highest offices. By his orders Boethius was put on his trial before the Senate, and there condemned. For a year Theodoric kept him in prison—a year invaluable to future ages, for in it the captive composed his Consolation of Philosophy, a work which was to be the comfort of many a noble but unhappy soul in the Middle Ages, and to find countless readers from King Alfred down to Sir Thomas More. At the end of a year’s confinement Boethius was tortured and put to death. Possibly he was altogether innocent of the charge laid to his account, that of secret correspondence with Constantinople; but more probably he had actually written harmless letters into which a treasonable purpose was read by the malice of his accusers and the fears of the king.

The death of Boethius was followed by another execution, that of his aged father-in-law, Symmachus, the chief of the senate, whom Theodoric put to death on the mere suspicion that he resented his son-in-law’s cruel end. There seems to have been no further charge laid against him, and no formal trial, so that this action ranks with the murder of Odoacer as the second unpardonable sin of Theodoric’s life (525).

Others also suffered during the last two years of the old king’s reign. In anger at Justin’s persecution of the Arians, he threatened reprisals against the Catholics of Italy, and charged John the bishop of Rome to sail at once to Constantinople, and inform the emperor that further persecution would mean war with the Goths, and involve an attack on the orthodox throughout the Ostrogothic dominions. Moved by these threats, Justin suspended his harrying of the Arians, and treated the Pope with such respect and distinction that he roused the suspicions of the king of Italy. Theodoric thought that John had been too friendly with the emperor, and suspected that the honours and reverence shown him at Constantinople were part of a plan for seducing away the allegiance of his Roman subjects. When the Pope returned he was thrown into prison, where, being already in ill-health, he soon died. He was at once hailed as a martyr by all the Western Church (526).

The Italians thought that the execution of Symmachus and the imprisonment of Pope John foreboded a general persecution throughout Italy. It was rumoured that the Arians had won from the king his consent to an edict closing the Catholic Churches, and that the Goths were to take arms against their fellow-subjects. Considering the tenor of the whole of Theodoric’s previous life, it is most improbable that he had any such wild scheme of intolerance in hand. "Death of Theodoric, 526." But he had certainly grown gloomy, suspicious, and hard in his declining days, and it was well for his own fame, as well as for his subjects, that he was carried off by dysentery not long after the death of Pope John. It would have been still better, both for king and people, had the end come three years earlier, before his first harsh dealings with Boethius. His unpopularity at the moment of his death is shown by the survival of several curious legends, which tell how holy hermits saw his soul dragged down to hell by the injured ghosts of John and Symmachus, or carried off by the fiend himself.

So, after reigning thirty-three years over Italy, and twelve years over Spain, Theodoric died, aged seventy-two, and was buried by the Goths in the round mausoleum outside the gate of Ravenna, which he had built for himself many years before. His body has long disappeared, but his empty tomb still survives, well-nigh the only perfect and unbroken monument that recalls the sixty years of Gothic dominion in Italy.