The Daughter of Theoderic the Great
The story of Amalasuintha, the only one of Theoderic’s children to be born in Italy, begins almost a decade before her birth. In the year 489, her father Theoderic came to Italy to oust King Odovacer with the blessing of the Byzantine emperor Zeno, who had promised him the right to administer Italy on behalf of Constantinople if he were victorious. Before Theoderic left the East, the emperor entrusted him with the care of the Senate and the people of Rome.7 After four years of intense war and a three-year siege of Ravenna, in 493 Theoderic killed Odovacer and was proclaimed king of Italy by his troops on the same day.8 The Romans welcomed him as the emperor’s choice, probably encouraged by the traditional Roman honors that had been granted to him during the previous decade: Theoderic had held the most illustrious titles, including the patriciate, the title of master of the soldiers, and the consulship (484), and he had been adopted per arma by the emperor Zeno (ca. 478).9 Even if it took a few more years before Emperor Anastasius, Zeno’s successor, acknowledged his position, by 497/8 Theoderic was well established in Italy with the consent of the emperor.10
A thirty-year period of peace followed Theoderic’s defeat of Odovacer, during which Italy flourished.11 While his Goths continued to engage in both defensive and expansionist wars against other kingdoms, the king pursued his program of encouraging harmony between the Goths and the Romans. This program is also known as civilitas, and it included the integration of the Gothic army as the Roman exercitus into the social and political texture of Italy. While the Goths had military duties, the Romans enjoyed their freedom and kept their traditional administrative offices. Prudentia Romanorum and virtus Gothorum: in this way the two peoples of the kingdom are represented in the Variae as complementing each other.12 Italy’s still-large population was rooted in the municipal tradition. Though the Senate of Rome had been reduced in size, it still played a significant role, and many of its members were active in the administration of the kingdom.13 As ruler over the cradle of Roman civilization, Theoderic was particularly open to the Roman world, showing a deep interest in its culture. He welcomed imperial propaganda that presented him, the Gothic king, in the manner of an emperor of the glorious Roman past. The tragedies of the final years of his long reign would ultimately compromise his Roman legacy,14 but at the time of his death Theoderic had been the most successful Gothic king ever to rule, and later he became a legend. Medieval German literature would glorify the wisdom and the military prowess of Dietrich von Bern (Theoderic of Verona, from his victory over Odovacer in the battle of Verona).15 But not even the reverence that the Goths had for Theoderic could compel them to accept his last decision, in 526, to leave the throne to his ten-year-old grandson under the guardianship of a woman.
Amalasuintha was the product of a new generation. Born and raised on Italic soil, she had not grown up wandering or waiting for a permanent settlement but instead grew up holding a recognized place as the daughter of a king in a court located in a Roman palace. She had not experienced wars but rather had enjoyed the benefits of the longest period of peace that Italy had known during the previous century. Her aunt and her grandmother had been exposed to Roman culture only partially, but Amalasuintha was raised in the civilitas promoted by her father, the product of a monarchy far more Romanized than those in the other parts of the former Western Roman Empire. Educated in Roman style and immersed in Roman culture, she became deeply familiar with imperial models of government at the palace of Ravenna. Her imperial vision of the monarchy would, years later, become an important part of her unexpected government. Yet although the court was largely Romanized, it remained first and foremost the headquarters of a conservative Gothic aristocracy, which had never totally abandoned the traditional views of a monarchy in which the nobility of the king was necessarily combined with his value on the battlefield. This elite was unprepared to embrace a woman in power, even if this power was based on motherhood and had examples in the imperial tradition. As a result, Amalasuintha’s political ambitions would still meet obstruction in the palace of Ravenna.
Amalasuintha’s regency for her son (526–534) spanned some of the most critical events of the sixth century. While she waited for Athalaric to reach majority, Amalasuintha occupied a turbulent political position at the palace of Ravenna, caught between traditional Gothic culture, which would relegate her to the political background, and the Roman world, which had precedents for female power and rule. She lived at the palace under the pressure of the most conservative Goths as part of an unusual, if not bizarre, situation that was inconvenient to the nobility. The struggle for power between the queen mother and the Gothic aristocracy created a stifling atmosphere at the court. Seeking to establish and solidify her regency in the Roman imperial style, Amalasuintha cultivated relationships with Emperor Justinian, and also with the Senate and the Roman Church (though she herself was Arian): the latter especially had been badly damaged in the last three years of Theoderic’s reign, and both now, with her support, enjoyed a period of relative freedom. Her pro-Roman inclinations were also reflected in her efforts to promote culture (as Cassiodorus and Procopius testify), and in the education that she wanted to give to her son.
International politics, however, would ultimately force Amalasuintha to seek a new alliance to support her rule. The dramatic growth of the Frankish kingdom was unfolding, as the Merovingian kings expanded into the weak Visigothic kingdom of Amalaric in Spain. The Burgundians and Thuringians, former allies of Theoderic, also fell victim to the Franks, and by 534 most of Gaul was under Frankish control. It was perhaps the pressure of these events and the threats of the palace aristocracy that convinced Amalasuintha to “entrust” herself and Athalaric to the protection of Emperor Justinian (the sources unanimously make reference to the commendatio). By 532/3, with a careful pro-Roman policy, she wielded full control over military and political officials of the Gothic kingdom. She had some of her political enemies assassinated, and she appointed key figures of the Roman Senate to the most important offices.
This situation was short lived, however. In 534, shortly before reaching the age of majority, Athalaric became seriously ill. Amalasuintha knew that, as an unmarried woman, she could not rule over the Goths for long. Probably it was at this point that she first began to consider leaving Ravenna for Constantinople. But when Athalaric ultimately died later that same year, the Ostrogothic kingdom urgently needed a monarch. Struggling to keep her power and to preserve Theoderic’s kingdom under the Amal royal name, Amalasuintha conceived a brave political plan to rule in her own right. She created a new paradigm of power, the consortium regni, that allowed her to continue to rule as queen while still presenting a public face that honored conservative Gothic tradition. She now emerged officially as a regina (a title she had carried previously), but she was no traditional Gothic queen, living in the shadow of a royal husband. Instead, in late 534 she appointed her older cousin Theodahad, the last surviving direct male heir of the royal family, to rule as her coregent—not as husband and wife, but as male and female monarchs sharing power. Even more astounding, her proposal of a co-regency consisted of a full gender reversal in the rhetoric of power. As the “male” character of the ruling unmarried couple, Amalasuintha would make final decisions; the coregent would follow her guidance and provide her with advice. This was Amalasuintha’s condition for Theodahad to rule.
Radical as this development must have seemed to the Gothic aristocracy, the co-regency was not without precedent in the Roman world. In fact, the idea drew from imperial models (though real husband-wife rulership was also exceptionally rare in the East). The biggest difference between Amalasuintha’s co-regency and Roman/Byzantine examples lay in her decision not to marry the new king: after all, Theodahad already had a wife. And for Amalasuintha, a marriage would jeopardize her position and relegate her to the same position as other queens of that generation, whose powers were much more limited in comparison to those of the Roman empresses.
Amalasuintha’s ingenious solution must have disappointed not only the Goths but also Justinian, who had his own plans for Italy. Justinian had been planning to bring both Amalasuintha and Theodahad, the only possible Amal heirs to the throne, to Constantinople, freeing the way for him to take control over Italy as part of his plan to reconquer the western Mediterranean. So Amalasuintha’s ingenious solution to her predicament ultimately sealed her