98  

These latter examples suggest that to use the modern word “nobil-
ity” for this group gives much too restricted an impression of their
number. In the entourage sent to the Vandal wedding, they formed
one fifth of its military manpower, the rest being armed servants. If
these proportions were sustained throughout Theoderic’s following,
which, as we have seen, probably numbered at least 20,000 fighting
men by the time he reached Italy, then upwards of 4,000 individu-
als fell into this category. I have argued elsewhere that this group
might be equated in legal terms with the freemen class mentioned
in some contemporary law codes (as we shall see, for ideological rea-
sons Theoderic never issued a law code), and the subordinate class
of fighting servants, again found in other contemporary Germanic
groups, perhaps with freedmen. Other evidence from the fifth and
sixth centuries suggests that this kind of social structure may have
been reasonably general in Germanic society of the period. Note,
for example, Codex Theodosianus, where foederati recruited into the
Roman army are expected to have fighting servants;43 this probably
refers to Gothic survivors of Radagaisus’ attack on Italy in 405/6,
who were recruited into the Roman army by Stilicho. Procopius like-
wise describes a sixth-century Lombard military contingent as con-
sisting of 2,500 “good” fighting men and “3,000” fighting servants.44
More generally, studies framed from a variety of perspectives have
begun to suggest that, while there were certainly richer and poorer,
greater and lesser landowners among the Germanic elites of the early
middle ages, nonetheless political power and participation was much
more widely spread than it was to be in and from the Carolingian
period, when the effects of manorialisation transformed social struc-
tures, producing a smaller, more tightly defined and much more
dominant socio-political elite.45 This suggests a compromise between
nineteenth-century romantic and nationalistic visions of Germanic
groups of the Migration Period, composed entirely of free and equal
freemen, and the much more restrictive social models constructed in

43
Codex Theodosianus 7,13,16, ed. T. Mommsen and P.M. Meyer (3rd edn., Berlin
1962).
44
Procopius, Wars 8,26,12.
45
See e.g. G. Halsall, Settlement and Social Organization. The Merovingian Region of
Metz (Cambridge 1995) (Franks); R. Faith, The English Peasantry and the Growth of
Lordship (Leicester 1997) (Anglo-Saxons); more generally, C. Wickham, “Problems
of comparing rural societies in early medieval western Europe”, Transactions of the
Royal Historical Society 6th series 2 (1992) pp. 221–46.
   99

some modern studies. In my view, the freemen of Gothic and other

Germanic groups formed an elite minority within these groups, but
a comparatively broad one. The Lombard evidence might indicate
that just under half of Lombard fighting men fell into this category.
Among the Goths, the elite fighters who attended the Vandal wed-
ding formed one fifth of the attendant guard of honour.
For present purposes, the main point is what the existence of this
broader elite suggests about political participation and decision-mak-
ing among late fifth-century and early sixth-century Gothic groups.
While there certainly was a small core of “the great and good” who
advised Theoderic and his successors, held major administrative posi-
tions and even commanded their armies,46 this was not the only
politically enfranchised group in Gothic society at this date. Alongside
them, there also existed a broader militarized elite, and there is some
good evidence that they were central to group cohesion and morale.
When all members of this class in a Gothic army sent to Dalmatia
were killed, for instance, the remainder (presumably comprising the
armed servant class) simply surrendered.47 Procopius also records the
highly deleterious effects which the loss of the elite fighters on board
Totila’s 47 raiding ships had upon Gothic confidence.48 Any account
of the creation of the Ostrogoths in the Balkans, therefore, needs to
be modeled in terms of the interests of this group. Theoderic’s super-
group could only come into existence because this numerous and
politically enfranchised group wanted it to.
The full story of how Theoderic the Amal persuaded the former
followers of Theoderic Strabo to join him after the death of Reci-
tach will never be known, but the sources and documented sequence
of events make clear the critical role played in the process by the
power of the East Roman state on a whole series of levels. First, it
was the tax machinery of the state which provided Theoderic with
the subsidies which underpinned his power as leader. As we have seen,
the three-way struggle which developed after 473 between the two
Gothic leaderships and the authorities in Constantinople was all about

46
Examples of such men are known from the Balkans (Anstat, Invila, and Soas:
Jordanes, Getica 56,285; Malchus, Fragmenta 20) as well as in Italy (the well-known
Pitzas and Tuluin), where Theoderic never again led his armies personally on cam-
paign after the defeat of Odovacar.
47
Procopius, Wars 7,7,26–37.
48
Ibid. 8,23,29 ff.; 24,3.
100  

securing Roman subsidies, which those leaderships then redistributed

to their followers. Some of the Amal’s supporters defected to Strabo
in 477/8 when the latter seemed the better bet, and it was the
Amal’s successes in 483/4—he was made both MVM Praesentalis and
Consul (the latter a distinction that even Strabo never achieved)—
which surely made the Thracian Goths ready to attach themselves
to his leadership. He was very obviously by this date the Gothic
leader most likely to succeed.49 More generally, it was probably only
the relative productiveness of the Roman economy, and the redis-
tributive power of its taxation system, which made it possible for
one Germanic leader to command sufficient powers of patronage to
keep so many followers happy at one time. Outside the Empire, lower
productivity and lesser taxation powers would have meant that any
leader had less of a surplus to manipulate and thereby manage his
following. Without coexistence of some kind with the more devel-
oped Roman world, therefore, the creation of Theoderic’s super-
group would have been impossible. This is also true, to my mind,
in the case of other kingdom-founding Germanic groups of the
Migration Period and the early middle ages. Alaric’s unification of
three previously separate Gothic groups—the Tervingi, the Greuthungi,
and the followers of Radagaisus—similarly proceeded on the back
of the wealth of the Roman world, and the same was probably also
true of Clovis’ unification of the Salian Franks. Leaders need patron-
age to distribute, economic productivity defines the surplus they have
available for generating loyalty, and hence the overall amount of
loyalty—as it were—that might be purchased.50
Aside from providing Theoderic with the wealth which made it
possible for him to attract an unprecedentedly large following, Roman
power also worked to create the Ostrogoths in another important
way. In the winter of 477/8, the Eastern Emperor Zeno agreed with
Theoderic the Amal and his Pannonian Goths on a plan for a joint
attack on the Thracian Goths. A total of 38,000 Byzantine troops
were to be committed to the plan, together with Theoderic’s own
forces (c. 10,000) with battle being envisaged somewhere in the vicin-
ity of the city of Hadrianople. In the event, no Roman troops ap-

49
See, in more detail, Heather, Goths and Romans, pt. 3.
50
Attila was able to do the same thing largely from beyond the frontier by
extracting Roman wealth in the form of tribute payments to sustain his Empire.
   101

peared and Zeno’s guides led the Amal straight into a confrontation
with Strabo somewhere in the Haemus Mountains, not south of them
in the environs of Hadrianople. One can only agree with the Amal’s
subsequent complaints to Zeno. He had clearly been deliberately
misled into a trap, to try to force him to fight Strabo on his own.
Zeno’s Gothic policy was duplicitous in the extreme. Rather than
favouring the Amal over his Thracian namesake, what the emperor
really wanted was for the two Gothic groups to fight each other and
inflict mutually significant casualties. The East Romans would then
have been in position to exert their military strength to solve the
Gothic problem once and for all.51 As well as the positive factor that
was Roman wealth, therefore, we must also take into account the
negative factor represented by Roman military power. The two Gothic
groups were playing a dangerous game in the Balkans in the 470s
and 480s. They were using their own military capacities to convince
the Constantinopolitan authorities to pay one of them rather than
the other. The Romans, of course, were always likely to get fed up
with these demands for money with menaces and to take appropri-
ate counteraction, as Zeno was attempting to do in 478.
In these circumstances, it made extremely good sense, if it could
be arranged, for the two Gothic groups to cease to compete with
one another, and to work as one unit. The great obstacle to such
an outcome, of course, was the fact that each group had its own
leadership. While the rank and file could (and did) swap sides,
the same was not true of the Pannonians’ and Thracians’ ruling
dynasties who would have found it difficult if not impossible to
occupy a subordinate position under a former rival, having once
been an independent king; nor, indeed, would their rival have tol-
erated them. They were committed to continuing rivalry, therefore,
but the danger posed by the Roman state made unification a much
more beneficial outcome for their followers. These factors, it seems
to me, dictated the means by which the situation was resolved. The
power of the Roman state meant it was better for the Goths to be
united, but also meant that a head-on confrontation between the
two leaderships was impossible; from 478 onwards, all were well
aware that only the Romans could gain from the casualties this would

51
Malchus, Fragmenta 18,1–3, with the commentary of Heather, Goths and Romans,
pp. 282–6.
102  

generate. When unification came about, therefore, it was through

the assassination of Strabo’s son and heir, Recitach. This removed
the major obstacle to unification without damaging the overall mil-
itary capacities of the Goths: a highly satisfactory outcome for every-
one—except Recitach.
Even Zeno was happy enough to accept Gothic unification in the
short-term, having fostered it by the unprecedented honours he
granted Theoderic: above all the Consulship for the year 484. He
was at this point much more concerned with the threat to his throne
posed by the revolt of the Isaurian general Illus in alliance with
members of the old imperial family. For Zeno, therefore, it was
imperative that there should be no disaffected Goths around with
whom Illus might intrigue. As soon as the threat from Illus subsided,
however, matters changed. Events from 485 to 489 cannot be recon-
structed in great detail, but it is clear nonetheless that the united
Goths were now too powerful for Zeno to tolerate. Such was their
power that their leader, buoyed up by his increased powerbase,
threatened to dominate court politics much as Aspar had done in
an earlier generation. Zeno wanted to get rid of him, therefore, but
didn’t want to fight a costly battle, while the Amal, we know, was
worried that the emperor would resort to assassination: a favoured
move for resolving political problems in contemporary Constantinople.
The end result of this impasse was that both sides, after revolts and
temporary solutions, agreed that the best way to solve their prob-
lem was at the expense of Odovacar. Zeno’s Frankensteinian mon-
ster, the newly united Goths, was shipped off to Italy: the problem
solved by exporting it to the west.52
It is possible, and indeed convincing, thus to explain much about
the creation of the Ostrogoths in terms of positive and negative inter-
actions with the East Roman state. That does not seem to me, how-
ever, a fully sufficient explanation. At least for the Thracian Goths,
or the politically-enfranchised freemen amongst them, a major alter-
native did exist to the option of throwing in their lot with Theoderic
the Amal. For certainly twenty, and perhaps as much as forty years
they had formed part of the East Roman military establishment in
the Balkans. Aside from joining the Amal bandwagon, therefore, they
might have reintegrated themselves into a Roman military world

52
In more detail, with full references, Heather, Goths and Romans, c. 9.
   103

with which they were extremely familiar. In the summer of 488, this
had to be compared to the perils and uncertainties of a huge trek
to Italy, part of it through substantially hostile territory. On the jour-
ney, Theoderic’s followers confronted both Sarmatians and Gepids.
The final achievement of an advantageous outcome in Italy would
also depend upon waging successful warfare upon Odovacar and his
army, which had just proved itself so successful in campaigning
against the Rugi, whose refugees had just attached themselves to
Theoderic’s forces. Some Goths, indeed, but clearly only a minor-
ity, took this option, preferring to remain in the Balkans and the
Roman army rather than following the Amal to Italy.53 Given the
uncertainties of the Italian expedition, why was this such a minor-
ity option?
No doubt much freeman decision calculation took the form of
weighing up possible and probable material advantages in Italy and
the Balkans, and the Roman option had the immediate disadvan-
tage that the imperial throne was currently occupied by Zeno. The
emperor was in origin an Isaurian military commander who had
been lifted to prominence as a deliberate counterweight to Aspar
and his Gothic military supporters.54 The current climate in Constan-
tinople may well not have been very attractive, therefore, for large
numbers of the Thracians. Nonetheless, the fact remains that most
of the Goths chose the option which promised best to preserve their
political autonomy as a distinct, Gothic political unit, rather than
disappear back inside, as it were, the East Roman military estab-
lishment. It is quite possible, therefore, that this also played a major
part in the decision-making processes of Thracian and Pannonian
freemen in the summer of 488, especially as they contemplated the
hazards and highly uncertain outcome of the proposed trek to Italy.
Given the nature of the source material, this thought is not sus-
ceptible to proper proof, and, to that extent, should not be pressed.
It is very important, however, not to collapse the range of options
that one allows to remain in play. The sources do not allow us to

53
See above note 5. The story of the trek is well told in Wolfram, Goths, pp.
279–81.
54
The story is very fully told in E.R. Brooks, “The Emperor Zenon and the
Isaurians”, English Historical Review 8 (1893) pp. 209–38, but the anachronistic nation-
alistic assumption that all Goths and all Isaurians would side naturally with one
another sometimes distorts his analysis.
104  

document that a sense of Gothic identity played a key role in the

decisions being taken in the summer of 488, but, equally important,
neither do they deny it. In such circumstances, sound scholarship does
not consist of reverting to the lowest common denominator—the
point at which sources cease to provide unassailable documentation—
but in defining the range of possibilities which the sources leave
open. And, looked at more generally, the behaviour of the mass of
the Thracian Goths in particular does seem less than fully explained
unless we invoke some factor beyond mere material calculation, like
the operation of an active sense of Gothic identity.
I don’t want to labour the point, but it is worth pointing out that
general circumstances would indicate that an active, shared sense of
Gothicness is not an impossible thing to suppose to have been in
operation. The Thracians and Pannonians are both labelled as Goths
in independent sources, before they united to create the Ostrogoths.55
I would not want to argue that the Pannonian and Thracian Goths,
or their ancestors, had ever previously formed part of a single Gothic
political unit. They had, however, a broader history in common.
Significant processes of migration from north-central Europe to the
Black Sea in the third century underlay the creation of the Gothic
realms of the fourth century.56 The groups caught up in these events
then subsequently also faced the fury of the Hunnensturm which again
provided a common stimulus to the Gothic world, even if different
Gothic groups washed up in different corners of Europe as a result.57
Some common memories of third-century migrations and the arrival
of the Huns, no doubt in the form of mythicising stories, would have
played a major role in the evolving identity of both of the Thracian
and Pannonian Goths. In this context, “mythic” does not simply

55
See above on the evidence for the Thracian Goths prior to the revolt of 470.
Amory, People and Identity, c. 8, has recently argued that East Roman military cul-
ture in the Balkans was such a composite that no genuine and operative sense of
Gothic identity could have survived. He is surely right to see the Balkans as a melt-
ing pot to a considerable extent, but his argument does nothing to counter the
specific evidence in Malchus, John of Antioch and Malalas that, prior to the arrival
of the Amal-led Goths in 473/4, there was already a large and distinct body of
Gothic foederati established in Thrace.
56
General account: Heather, The Goths, cc. 2–3. It sometimes goes unnoticed that
contemporary Graeco-Roman sources (not just Jordanes’ Getica) provide strong sup-
port for the operation of migratory processes of some kind from the Baltic to the
Black Seas in the third century.
57
For a recent survey of the Hunnic revolution, see Heather, The Goths, pt. 2.
   105

mean “false”, but a conceptualization of past events, which accords

them a significant role in the history of the group concerned, which
may or may not be in accord with their real significance at the time
the events occurred.58 There is some evidence, interestingly enough,
that Goths in France in the later fifth century and Goths in Cons-
tantinople in the sixth were telling some similar stories about the
ancient Gothic past, and, in particular, about how they came to find
themselves beside the Black Sea.59 These and similar stories may have
played some role in generating a sense of commonality, which became
politically active, when broader circumstances made it advantageous,
in the Balkans in the summer of 488.
Alongside this shared broader history, it is likely enough that the
new unity of the Pannonians and Thracians was sustained by shared
values, institutions, and expectations. Again, we are entering murky
waters, but a few comments are worth making. First, as we have
seen, it is probable that a shared basic social organization marked
out most of the Germanic groups operating in and around the fringes
of the Roman world between the fourth and the sixth centuries, with
a shared tripartite division of humanity into three castes: free, freed
(but permanently dependent), and slave. This was not something
specifically Gothic, but, in the Balkans of 488, would certainly have
separated Goths off from Roman society.60 They also had in com-
mon the same variant of non-Nicene, Homoean Christianity (com-
monly known as Arianism). Again the evidence for this is better from
the Italian period, but, contrary to some recent assertions, there is
no sign that this was an invention of the Italian period (see below).
The united Goths brought their religion with them from the Balkans.
In other key respects too, Gothic ways of doing things probably
differed from Roman norms: marriage practice, inheritance, and

58
For an introduction to myth in this sense, see e.g. A.D. Smith, The Ethnic
Origins of Nations (Oxford 1986) c. 1.
59
Jordanes in mid-sixth century would appear to have heard similar stories about
the deep Gothic past as those collected by the mysterious Ablabius, who was cer-
tainly working somewhere in the west (quite probably in Visigothic Gaul) in the
later fifth or very early sixth centuries: Getica 4,28–9, with Heather, Goths and Romans,
p. 328.
60
It is very striking that such a categorization of society later replaced Roman
social models among the successor states: see further P.J. Heather, “State, Lordship
and Community in the West (c. A.D. 400–600)”, Cambridge Ancient History 14 (2nd
edn., 2000) pp. 437–68, here pp. 461 ff.
106  

dispute settlement. Again, we have no evidence that there were shared

and specific Gothic ways of doing these things which the Thracians
and Pannonians might have preserved to underpin their unification
in the Balkans. Again, however, there is equally no evidence that
they did not, and, as we shall see in due course, arrangements in
Italy make it very clear that dispute settlement, at least, was carried
on in a manner which was very different from what established
norms in Roman society. Most of these items might be thought of
as generally Germanic rather than specifically Gothic, but in the
Balkans of 488 that really didn’t matter. The key context here was
self-definition against Constantinople and a possible Roman option,
not self-definition against other Germanic-speakers, so that these ele-
ments would have been sufficient for the task in hand.
These intriguing possibilities must not be accorded too much air
time. We have little (but not no) evidence for such commonalities,
one can get most of the way towards a satisfactory explanation for
the unification of the Goths, as we have seen, on the basis of sim-
ple material calculation, and the history of the fourth to the sixth
centuries does throw up examples of new groups being created where
there certainly wasn’t a shared past or common grammar of social
norms. The best instance of this is provided by the Vandal and Alan
coalition which made its way eventually to Carthage. This was born
out of shared perceptions of a need to operate in larger numbers
on a more permanent basis following the punishment inflicted upon
both groups by joint Romano-Visigothic campaigns in Spain between
416 and 418. And where the Vandals were Germanic-speakers like
the Goths, the Alans were Iranian-speaking nomads, with—originally
at least—an entirely different economy and social structure. As one
might expect, the stock-dependent Alans had a much more egali-
tarian social structure in the fourth century than agricultural Germanic
societies of the same period.61 Nonetheless, these very different groups,
when placed under sufficient duress, found it possible to work together.

61
Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae 31,2,25.
   107

B. Ostrogoths in the Italian kingdom

The Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy was an effect of western imper-

ial collapse. As we have seen, Theoderic the Amal put together a
new and very substantial militarized force of Goths in the Balkans
between 473 and 488. Everything suggests that this was a larger unit
than had ever previously existed in Gothic society east of Italy or
outside of the Roman Empire.62 Nonetheless, as the history of its
relations with Constantinople makes clear, this force was not by itself
large enough to confront even half of the Roman Empire and win.
In the short term, it was too large to be easily defeated, but nev-
ertheless not strong enough to force the Constantinopolitan author-
ities into an agreement which they did not want to maintain. There
is every reason to suppose that this would also have been the case
in Italy had Theoderic found there the western half of the Empire
still substantially intact. Like Alaric before him between 408 and
411, Theoderic would have been too powerful to defeat easily, but
not powerful enough to constrain the Ravennate authorities into
accepting his domination.63 In other words, Theoderic’s ability to
carve out an independent kingdom at the heart of the old Western
Empire was the product not only of his own ability to create a new
Gothic force of unprecedented power, but also of the collapse of the
west. In the fractured post-Roman west, Theoderic’s Ostrogoths were
powerful enough to carve out a kingdom; before the fracturing, they
would not have been.
On another level, however, the Ostrogoths can be seen as symp-
tom—if not cause—as well as effect. For, like the Ostrogoths, the
other main kingdom-forming entities at the heart of the old Roman
west were new power combinations, created in similar circumstances.
The Hasding Vandal monarchs, who established themselves in North
Africa, sat at the head of a new coalition of previously separate
groupings: the Hasding Vandals, the Siling Vandals, and a number

62
Although the available figures suggest that Alaric’s newly united Visigoths may
have been similar in order of magnitude: Heather, Goths and Romans, pp. 213–4
(commenting on passages in Zosimus and Photius’ summary of Olympiodorus of
Thebes; these figures are highly problematic).
63
The fundamental problem which confronted Alaric as he sat in only tempo-
rary control of events outside the city of Rome in these years, and recognition of
which on both sides underpinned the eventual peace deal between the Romans and
Alaric’s successors Vallia and Theoderic I: Heather, Goths and Romans, c. 6.