Theodoric the Great

Theodoric the Great ruled Italy for thirty-three years and governed it better than the emperors who preceded him. Born around 454, he was the son of an Ostrogothic king and was sent at seven as a hostage to Constantinople, where he spent a decade being educated and observing how the empire worked. He returned, succeeded his father, and spent years as a semi-independent commander in the Balkans, alternately serving and threatening the eastern empire. The emperor Zeno, seeking to remove him and to deal with Odoacer, who had deposed the last western emperor in 476, commissioned him to take Italy. He invaded in 489 with his whole people, won a series of campaigns, and besieged Odoacer in Ravenna for three years. A treaty was agreed to rule jointly; at the banquet celebrating it in 493 Theodoric killed Odoacer personally. He governed as an Arian Christian ruling a Catholic population, and made toleration the basis of his settlement. Goths and Romans kept separate legal systems and roles — Goths served in the army, Romans in the civil administration — and he used the existing senatorial class, employing Cassiodorus and Boethius. He wrote that religion cannot be commanded, since nobody can be forced to believe. He restored aqueducts, walls and public buildings, kept the grain supply and the games running, and Italy was more prosperous and orderly than at any point in the previous century. He built the mausoleum and churches at Ravenna, including Sant'Apollinare Nuovo. His last years were suspicious: he executed Boethius on a treason charge in 524. He died in 526.

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