Liberius serving Theoderic

Liberius, serving Theoderic as praetorian prefect, supervised an important first piece of business: the settling of Theoderic’s followers on available land in Italy. At least half a dozen times in the fifth century across the Latin provinces of empire, such settlements were negotiated and imposed, all bringing with them both disruption and relief. Just how much disruption is a matter of controversy, for no case is really well documented and, clearly, property was seized and reassigned in different ways in different cases.7 From early times, gifts of land had been Rome’s way of rewarding loyal armies.

Here in the 490s, Theoderic’s overthrow of Odoacer and the expulsion of his loyalists created one set of opportunities for settlement—probably rather good opportunities, assuming that each regime had feathered its own nest properly. Loyalists of Odoacer’s regime may very well have lit out for another province when their protector fell, while others were certainly evicted or murdered. Even if we take all that as normal postwar conduct, acceptable in its time, it is still difficult to determine how many innocents were additionally dislodged. There would, at any time in this period, have also been land and houses that were owned but not actively occupied, and it was always easier to detach vacant property from a larger set of holdings and reassign it than to seize owner-occupied assets.

Theoderic’s men profited handsomely

In principle, the government had the right to seize as much as one- third of any given property, but the total number of Theoderic’s followers who might have benefited from that privilege was nowhere near capable of digesting one-third of the property of Italy, and no historian now tries to claim such a thing. The most plausible explanation is that all property holders in Italy saw one-third of their tax revenues redirected to support the army and followers of the new regime—and so, in principle, they suffered no material disadvantage, while Theoderic’s men profited handsomely. In practice, the new regime’s motivated reinvigoration of tax collecting probably cast heavy burdens on the unwary, but those burdens were alleviated by the knowledge that traditionally resourceful methods of tax evasion would soon restore economic affairs to something like their normal, preoverthrow condition. Corruption has a way of simultaneously exacerbating and mitigating tyranny.

Making room for a new regime was not without costs and brutalities, but by 493 Italy must also have been reasonably relieved to find itself under consistent and predictable rule. The new power, patient, persistent, and resourceful in diplomacy, supported by Constantinople as no ruler in Italy had been for at least a quarter century, could be expected to prevail for a good long while. Those hopes were not to be disappointed balkan tours.

While Theoderic had been conducting his barricade of Odoacer in Ravenna, the emperor Zeno had died in Constantinople. His successor, Anastasius I, the most capable and effective emperor in at least a century, was a cautious man who revealed only slowly his opinion of Italy’s new state of affairs. Festus had returned from Zeno’s court at Constantinople in 490 without the signal success of official recognition that Theoderic had hoped for.

For a few years, Theoderic was careful to settle affairs in Italy, but then in 497 he sent Festus to Constantinople again as the head of a delegation. By now, Theoderic could make a very good case that he had brought peace, order, and good Roman government to the Italian peninsula, and he could profess himself a loyal and faithful colleague of the emperor in Constantinople. The forms of empire were carefully observed, and Festus could and did speak for the senate and its traditions and authority—with- out mentioning that the senate was a shadow of its former self. Anastasius was persuaded to recognize Theoderic’s position.

Festus returned bearing the official ornaments and regalia of the western empire, the same ones that Odoacer had sent back to Constantinople twenty years earlier in a hollow show of fealty after he dispensed with resident puppet emperors in the ancient capital. Their return was a sign to those who would read it that Theoderic had acceded, if not to the throne itself, at least to the very highest and most official Roman status next to the throne.

The winter passed in stalemate

The winter passed in stalemate, and the spring of 491 saw the siege continue. In July, Odoacer made an attempt to break out of Ravenna, but failed. This long standoff was an uncertain time for the rest of the peninsula. If Theoderic had men to spare, they were out working to gain control of the tax revenues and machinery of government, while Odoacer had to suffer a slow suffocation of power in Ravenna.

A few years later we hear the story of an astute local potentate in the south. Cassiodorus, the father of a more famous writer of the same name, had served in high government office at the court of Odoacer, holding both of the senior finance portfolios: “count of the sacred generosity” and “count of the private estates.” Now he was governor of Sicily. His grandfather had come west with the child emperor Valentinian III in the 420s, when Constantinople made its last serious attempt to shape the political destiny of the west, and evidently received the gift of land in southernmost Italy as a reward. Such rewards also brought protection and support for the regime that gave them, as the Cassiodori went native. Their loyalty shifted with the political fortunes of emperors and warlords, but they remained ever after tied to land they praised all the more enthusiastically for having been immigrants there.

As the long siege progressed, Cassiodorus the elder was one of those leaders elsewhere in Italy who reasoned that support for Theoderic was the wisest course, and Theoderic’s eventual success proved him right. Fifteen years after the siege of Ravenna, when all was clear, the son of this Cassiodorus wrote the script for Theoderic to use in praising the father as a staunch supporter from the earliest days of his reign. Cassiodorus the father became governor of his own home province as a result, then praetorian prefect soon after, and he retired at the point when his son was beginning an equally illustrious career as Theoderic’s loyal servant. Other provincial leaders were making similar choices to give their support to Theoderic and the future while Odoacer languished in Ravenna.

No change in the military situation

The winter of 491—492 dragged on with no change in the military situation. In 492 Theoderic consolidated his position by seizing control of Ariminum (Rimini) about thirty miles south of Ravenna on the Adriatic. There was little military use of the sea in those days, but we can imagine at least some harassment and interdiction of shipping in and out of the Ravenna harbor from this new base.

Still another winter arrived, Theoderic’s fourth in Italy, and the siege continued. In February 493, just when the food supply in the surrounded city would be at its lowest level, John, the aged and widely venerated bishop of the city, emerged from its walls under a flag of truce, leading a procession of churchmen bearing crosses, incense-burning thuribles, and gospel books. John threw himself to the ground before Theoderic, singing psalms and begging for peace, welcoming the king “who had come from the east.”6 Theoderic welcomed the approach and agreed to share his rule with Odoacer, an improbable arrangement between bloody rivals, but also a promise that broke the deadlock. On March 5, the gates were opened and Theoderic entered the city amid the urgent bustle that accompanied restoration of normal life.

Ten days later, on March 15, Theoderic invited Odoacer to be his guest at a banquet to cement amity and partnership in the palace Valentinian III had built half a century earlier. The appearance was false: in mid-banquet (our sources here are late and unreliable as to details, but the main fact is beyond dispute), Theoderic drew his sword and moved toward Odoacer travel ottoman bulgaria.

“Where is God?” Odoacer cried.

“This is what you did to mine,” replied Theoderic, and murdered his rival on the spot. Loyalists and defenders of Theoderic claim that Odoacer had murdered Theoderic’s relatives (there’s one way this might have been true), but we cannot overlook the calm, premeditated treachery of Theod¬eric’s act in a nearly theatrical setting. Odoacer’s most loyal followers were promptly massacred, hacked down in palace or camp, and their bodies left unburied long enough to make sure the deed was known and feared. Odoacer’s brother took refuge in a church but was dragged out and killed; his wife starved to death in prison; and his son fled but was hounded, cap¬tured, brought back to Theoderic, and massacred. This was how regimes changed in those days.

Odoacer’s regime had dried up and begun to scatter before the propi¬tious winds of Theoderic’s power. The new ruler was able to establish his own authority broadly and easily in north Italy and south Italy and down through Sicily. He himself almost never ventured south of the Po valley—that grand visit to Rome was a great exception—and he depended on the willing cooperation and the taxpaying of the whole peninsula and its breadbasket island beyond for his authority.

The idea was compelling

The idea was compelling. Odoacer was the latest, most original, and most successful of a series of generals who had grasped the reins of control in the western provinces during turbulent times. He never had any advantage except his talent—no tribe of followers, no official recognition, no wealthy supporters—but he brought stability in hard times. He would not have been human without ambitions, and, as we have seen, he may even have been related to Zeno’s recent opponent Basiliscus. He had, surely, few reasons to pay much attention to what an uncomprehending and unhelpful Constantinople might want of him and every reason to think that with the right partner in the east he could achieve great things. But he was alone, and Theoderic, general and former consul, was the perfect leader to send west to seize Italy from him, and settle there to rule as the emperor’s viceroy. In 488, Theoderic agreed to do just this.

A clergyman with ambitions

Ennodius of Pavia was a clergyman with ambitions that he never realized, but we owe to his ambitions various books, pamphlets, and letters that are precious historical sources for this turbulent period. Ennodius may have been a flatterer, but he can still spin us a good yarn. In the account of Theoderic’s rise that he once declaimed at court in Ravenna, the arrival of Theoderic in Italy came as a long procession— made up of people whose homes were now in carts, with baggage, livestock, and families all together— crawled its way westward. A generous estimate would put the number at 20,000, including a secretary with a Greek name, Phocas. The trek covered some 600 miles from its start in Moesia along the Danube to the vicinity of Trieste and Venice, where the travelers first entered the north Italian plain, itself stretching another 200 miles before them. Along the way, Theoderic’s forces fought a pitched battle in the vicinity of the Save River with a people called Gepids, destroying them and killing their leader. Ennodius tells the story prettily: how Theoderic gave a rousing speech, accepted a cup of wine for luck, then took up his reins and led his men into battle “like a river raging in flood through the fields, or like a lion in the midst of a herd.”5 By now, Theoderic had spent almost twenty years in this warrior role, earning his followers’ respect as no palace-bound emperor ever did.

On August 28, 489, Theoderic’s community appeared on the Isonzo or Soica River, then as now more or less the northeastern boundary of Italy. Odoacer, who must have heard a rumor of the approach, took his forces in retreat to Verona on the Adige River, in the center of the north Italian plain, at the beginning of the foothills of the Alps, within equal reach for defensive purposes of Milan, Ravenna, and the northeastern frontier across which Theoderic was arriving. On September 28, there was a battle here, recorded as a victory for Theoderic. Odoacer retreated southeast to Ravenna, while Theoderic moved west to consolidate his position. One of Odoacer’s generals, Tufa, turned coat and handed over Pavia, just south of Milan, to Theoderic, giving him a secure base. Tufa then wavered again, and so Theoderic and his people spent the winter of 489-490 in Pavia under some pressure, while eyeing Odoacer in his capital at a distance travel ottoman bulgaria.

Theoderic now proved himself astute, resourceful, and traditional in ways that had never emerged in the Balkans. He made immediate contact with the leading dignitaries of the city of Rome, with some representatives and spokesmen probably traveling to and for all winter. The great senator Festus, the most senior former consul still living, agreed to go to Constantinople to seek official recognition for Theoderic as imperial ruler in Italy. At about the same time, Theoderic began to issue coins in Milan in the name of Zeno—just what the emperor’s designate would be expected to do.

Through 490, he remained in the vicinity of Pavia, engaged in diplomacy in several directions, notably with a government in southern Gaul under the control of some of his distant relatives. In August of that year, Odoacer advanced from Ravenna, and the forces fought a second battle near Milan. Theoderic prevailed again; and this time, when Odoacer retreated to Ravenna, Theoderic pursued him, effectively trapping him in his own capital.

Ravenna is a tough town to attack, surrounded by water and swamp, on land boggy enough to grow asparagus. This hemmed-in quality had recommended the site to the timorous emperor Honorius almost a century before when he moved his own court from Milan to Ravenna, looking for a place easy both to defend and to flee.