This volume explores the “afterlife” of the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy (ca. 493-553 CE), what one of its contributors, Flavia Frauzel, calls a “short” and “politically ephemeral” “experiment,” but one which left “surprisingly durable traces in the peninsula” and beyond (149).
In “Ostrogoths vs. Franks: Imagining the Past in the Middle Ages,” the editor, Fabrizio Oppedisano, begins the collection with a review of the bifocal memory of Ostrogothic Italy as it was curated by different parties in subsequent centuries. One strand reflects the virtual rejection of that legacy by Italian and other churchmen in a kind of damnatio memoriae, a willful neglect or deliberate occlusion of Gothic rule, punctuated by occasional outbursts of the more usual kind of damnatio by clerics like Pope Gregory, Walahfrid Strabo, and others. Their opprobrium was directed primarily against the Homoean or Arian confession of Theoderic the Ostrogothic king who had once considered himself a friend of the Papacy and protected the religious freedoms of his Catholic subjects before helping to resolve the Acacian schism between Rome and the eastern church. It may have been his biggest mistake, since it led him to suspect Pope John I, Symmachus, and Boethius of plotting the political reunification of East and West as well. Hence, Pope Gregory recounts a hermit’s vision of Theoderic’s death in which the captive king is led barefoot and in rags, hands tied, to the brink of a fiery volcano by two of his martyred victims. Others noted the similarity between Theoderic’s death by dysentery in Ravenna, that of the heresiarch Arius in Constantinople and that of Judas Iscariot in Acts 1:18 whose “bowels gushed out.” But the ultimate “deal-breaker” for many Catholic clerics in the later Middle Ages was Theoderic’s execution in 524 of his magister officiorum, their beloved author Boethius, whose imminent “martyrdom” is dramatized in his Consolatio Philosophiae. Walahfrid Strabo in his turn was offended by Charlemagne’s removal of the bronze equestrian statue of Theoderic from Ravenna to Aachen in the spring of 801, where it stood in front of the emperor’s palace under its own name, suggesting that it was the character of the Gothic king’s rule, despite his non-Trinitarian confession, that the emperor most admired and with which he wished to associate himself in his own mind and in the eyes of his subjects. Charlemagne seems to have taken little practical interest in the details of Theoderic’s administration, but focused almost exclusively on that king’s foreign policy, his remarkable resistance to Byzantine coercion and encroachment. Theoderic’s success in countering the ambitions of the eastern empire by extending his own hegemony to the west is the legacy that most excited the Franks in their own their occupation of Italy and one for which they sought inspiration in the Variae of Cassiodorus, ignoring the many letters which dealt with more prosaic internal relations between the king’s Gothic and Roman subjects or between the Amal rulers and the Roman senate.
Nonetheless some Gothic legal innovations found “legs” in Carolingian Italy. Stefan Esders, in his chapter “Roman Law in the regnum Italiae under the Emperor Lothar I (817-855): Epitomes, Manuscripts, and Carolingian Legislation,” expresses his surprise to discover that some features of Ostrogothic law had been silently subsumed into the Roman legal tradition that was adopted by the Carolingian rulers of Italy, especially those codifying a kind of legal pluralism for diverse groups in the new polity. In particular, the ethnicity of individuals at birth was recognized to be a key component of their legal status in which Frankish or Roman (that is, someone of native Italian birth) persons were only two among others recognized under the law, including Alemannic, Bavarian, Burgundian, and Lombard. Individuals in Frankish Italy were thus entitled to live their lives according to “the personality of law” governing their particular group (35), a principle from Ostrogothic precedent that protected the interests of minorities after the Frankish conquest and in fact was intended to encourage even more immigration by Germanic-speaking peoples into the peninsula from north of the Alps. Further rules were then formulated to govern conflicts stemming from competing or overlapping ethnic identities.
Robert Kasperski looks more closely into “The Creation of Two Ethnographic Identities,” those of the Ostrogoths and Langobards. For the first, King Theoderic, with the help of his propagandist Cassiodorus Senator, recruited stereotypes from classical ethnography, including that of the “noble savage,” to construct an image of the Goths as a tough but upright northern people uncorrupted by the luxurious vices of the south in an origin myth later epitomized in Constantinople by a Romanized Goth Jordanes (551 CE). In Jordanes’s account, summarizing Cassiodorus, the warlike Goths became “nearly as wise as Greeks” under the tutelage of their own masters in milder climes, thus combining, as Cassiodorus himself puts it in his Variae, the prudentia of the Romans with the virtus of the Goths. The Goths in this view thus offered “a better version of the Romans,” a people who quickly acculturated to Mediterranean civilization to undertake both its renewal and defense (41). The Langobards, on the other hand, are depicted in the Origo gentis Langobardorum (seventh century) as pagan barbarians, also from the far north, but a savage and uncouth people whose “long beards” demonstrate their barbarity and lack of acculturation to civilized norms, the “very antithesis” in both appearance and behavior to Romans or the heirs of Romanitas, the Franks. The Langobards are thus distinguished from Romans, Goths, and Franks by their aggressive non-Romanitas, visually expressed in their hirsute masculine style (55).
In “The Imperial Image of Theoderic: The Case of the Regisole of Pavia,” Carlo Ferrari retraces the history of Pavia’s well-known equestrian statue that was destroyed in 1796. The gilded bronze was first transferred from Rome to Ravenna, probably by Theoderic the Great in the early sixth century, but then later brought to Pavia, the capital of the Lombard kingdom, Ferrari suggests, by the Lombard king Aistulf, who captured Ravenna in 751, in order to grace the front of a palace built by Theoderic. Ferrari speculates plausibly that this statue was believed to represent Theoderic himself and thus express the later Lombard ruler’s emulation of that Gothic king’s successful rule of all Italy, an ambition soon frustrated for him by the Franks themselves under Pepin the Short.
Danuta Shanzer examines the controversies around three key figures--Boethius, Silvanus, and Theodulf of Orléans--in “Stilo...memoriaeque mandavi [‘The pen...I sent, and the memories’] Two and a Half Conspiracies. Auctors, Actors, Confessions, Records, and Models.” She is most interested in revisiting Theodulf’s involvement in Bernard of Italy’s revolt against Louis the Pious in 817-18, who coerced the bishop’s confession by using the example of Theoderic’s punishment of Boethius.
The following two chapters address the corpus of works collected by Cassiodorus. In “Cassiodorus’ Variae in the 9th Century” Marco Cristini notes that these works werelittle known or regarded during the Carolingian period, and that a detailed interest in their contents does not begin to be seen until the eleventh century when long excerpts are quoted in detail. Even so, certain terms and expressions echoing those of the Variae, especially its first letter, occur in Charlemagne’s letters to the eastern emperor in Constantinople, as well as in the works of Paschasius Radbertus (785-865), a Frankish theologian and abbot of Corbie who treats Cassiodorus like a classical author, as well as in the ninth-century forgery, the Donation of Constantine, supposedly transferring the authority over the western Roman empire to the Pope. Dario Internullo then picks up the fate of this informative collection in “The Revival of Cassiodorus’ Variae in the High Middle Ages (10th-11th century)” and examines reasons for its revival and reuse as part of an incipient “legal Renaissance” (141).
Flavia Frauzel asks in “Epigraphic Stratigraphy: Is There Any Trace of the Ostrogoths in
Early Medieval ‘Layers’ (6th-9th Century)?” She discovers that distinctively Ostrogothic anthroponyms disappear from inscriptions in the seventh century in accordance with other changes in epigraphic practice that she attributes to the devastation of the Gothic War in the sixth century and the subsequent disruptions of the Lombard invasion of the Italian peninsula. Further changes occurred in response to the Carolingian Graphic Reform, which was “of short and ephemeral duration--like the dynasty itself,” but long-lasting in “the permanence of font that we all still use, ‘Times New Roman,’ based on theminuscola carolina,” illustrating “the mutual influence and reciprocal exchange between book and epigraphic writings [which] had by then become a consolidated phenomenon, destined to last through all the centuries of the Middle Ages” (164).
Federico Cantini explores shifts in “The Centres of Public Power Between the Cities and the Countryside in the Light of the Recent Archaeology (Italian Peninsula, Late 5th-9th Century),” especially the changes that occurred between the Gothic and Carolingian periods. The cities remained the seat of rulers and governing institutions, but their wealth depended on rural production centers and the natural resources upon which they drew. Cantini focuses his study on resource-rich Tuscany and notes that, in comparison with the rest of Italy and early medieval Europe as a whole, there was a high degree of resilience and continuity through these several centuries, including official ownership of key urban and suburban sites, as well as of strategic rural resources. There was also a continuity in the rhetorical and institutional models of the late Roman aristocracy, despite the comparative economic impoverishment of the early medieval rulers. These Gothic and Carolingian rulers still chose former imperial public buildings for their own seats of power, restoring or expanding them when possible on the model Late Antique palaces and praetoria, though they soon abandoned the use of curiae, as the Romancuria itself was converted into the church of S. Adriano in the seventh century. Parallel to this shift was a simplification of taxes to rents from land, and these meager revenues often meant that seats of power were soon reduced in size and complexity. Even so, most official residences “were still urban palatia, often standing on two floors, with loggias, opus sectile decorations, frescoes (Monza), mosaics (Theoderic’s palatium in Ravenna), monumental epigraphy in gilded bronze (palace of Arechis II, 758-787, in Salerno), apsidal halls with arcades in front (defined as laubie since the ninth century), sometimes reduced to pergolas and often used to hold placita, chapels, towers, especially after the tenth century (Verona), grand staircases and thrones (Salerno)” (204). Some innovations reflect personal style or preference, as when Einhard reports that Charlemagne selected Aachen for his capital because of its hot springs into which he loved to welcome non solum filios...verum optimates et amicos, aliquando etiam satellitum et custodum corporis turbam ‘not only children...but high nobles and friends, sometimes even a crowd of companions and bodyguards’ (205). A new development was the relocation of manufacturing centers and markets nearer to the palaces and urban seats of power, “where specialist craftsmen could still find customers, merchants could meet wealthy buyers, and rulers came across trades on which they could levy profitable [tariffs]” (205).
Stefano Gasparri offers some general conclusions to the volume as a whole, noting that the memory of the Ostrogoths, and particularly of the long and successful reign of Theoderic the Great, exerted a lasting impression upon the subsequent rulers of Italy in the Langobardic, Carolingian, and post-Carolingian periods, providing a template for the development of early national ethnicities and the composition of origines gentium that were promulgated in the early Middle Ages by authors like Paul the Deacon, dubbed a “cultural mediator” (223) who stressed the role played by the Lombards in transmitting the memory of Ostrogothic rule to subsequent inheritors of royal authority between Aistulf and Charlemagne.
The volume concludes with indices of persons, place-names, ethnonyms, and source texts, the whole collection beaming a much brighter light into the obscure corners of the centuries that followed the brief fluorescence of Ostrogothic rule in Italy, soon darkened by the Gothic War and Plague of Justinian that followed it.