In 493, after years of war and blockade, Theodoric the Great entered Ravenna as the dominant ruler of Italy. His rival Odoacer, who had ruled since the deposition of the western emperor Romulus Augustulus in 476, agreed to share power with him. The arrangement did not last. According to Procopius, Theodoric invited Odoacer to a banquet and killed him, bringing the struggle for Italy to a violent end.
Yet the kingdom that emerged from that bloodshed was not simply a Gothic military occupation of Roman territory. Theodoric ruled a population that remained overwhelmingly Roman in language, law, culture, and religious allegiance. Roman senators still sat in Rome. Roman administrators continued to manage taxation and government. Bishops presided over old Christian communities. The pope remained one of the most important religious figures in the West.
The ruler above them, however, belonged to a Gothic Christian tradition that the Nicene Church regarded as heretical.
The Ostrogothic Kingdom therefore became one of the most unusual religious experiments of late antiquity. For more than half a century, followers of competing forms of Christianity lived under the same government. A Gothic king associated with what contemporaries called Arian Christianity ruled a largely Nicene Christian population while also governing Jewish communities and maintaining the surviving institutions of Roman civil life.
The story of the Ostrogoths is consequently more than the story of the fall of Rome or the migrations of Germanic peoples. It is also the story of Christianity after the Roman Empire in the West, when religious identity, political loyalty, ethnicity, law, and imperial ambition no longer fit neatly together.
Christianity Comes to the Goths
Christianity had reached Gothic communities long before Theodoric appeared in Italy. Roman prisoners, merchants, missionaries, soldiers, and communities along the Danube carried Christian ideas across the imperial frontier during the third and fourth centuries. By the fourth century there were already Gothic Christians, and their religious history became inseparable from the career of the bishop Wulfila, often rendered Ulfilas.
Wulfila became famous for preaching among the Goths and for translating much of the Bible into Gothic. His disciple Auxentius remembered him as a bishop and missionary who led a community of Gothic Christians across the Danube during a period of persecution. The surviving account is strongly partisan, but it remains one of the most important documents for understanding the formation of Gothic Christianity.
The theology associated with Wulfila differed from the Nicene formula that ultimately became dominant within imperial Christianity. His surviving creed distinguished the Father from the Son in a manner rejected by Nicene theologians. For that reason Gothic Christianity is traditionally called Arian, although modern historians often prefer the more precise term Homoian for the particular theological tradition that became widespread among the Goths.
Jordanes, writing in the sixth century, offered a much more openly hostile explanation. He claimed that the emperor Valens, himself opposed by Nicene Christians, sent teachers of his own theology to the Goths and that this teaching then spread from the Visigoths to the Ostrogoths and Gepids. Jordanes described the doctrine as a corruption of the Christian faith, language that reflected his own religious position as much as the fourth-century events he was describing.
Whatever the precise path of conversion, by the time the Ostrogoths became a major political power, Christianity had become firmly established among them.
One of the most remarkable surviving products of this religious culture is the Codex Argenteus, the Silver Bible. The manuscript contains portions of the Gospels in Gothic and preserves the language created for the Gothic biblical tradition associated with Wulfila. The surviving manuscript was probably produced in the early sixth century, quite possibly in Ostrogothic Italy, although its exact place of production cannot be established with certainty. It stands as physical evidence that Gothic Christianity possessed its own literary and scriptural culture rather than existing merely as a crude imitation of Roman Christianity.
From the Danube to Italy
The Ostrogoths who eventually entered Italy had spent generations moving through a world shaped by Hunnic power and Roman diplomacy.
Jordanes describes the Ostrogoths as remaining under Hunnic domination after the separation of the Gothic peoples. Following the collapse of Attila’s empire in the middle of the fifth century, Gothic groups became increasingly important in the Balkans. The Amal dynasty, from which Theodoric descended, emerged as one of the leading Gothic royal families.
Theodoric himself became deeply familiar with Roman political culture. As a young man he spent years at Constantinople, and during his later career he alternated between service to and conflict with the eastern imperial government. Emperor Zeno eventually found a solution that served both imperial and Gothic interests.
Italy had been ruled since 476 by Odoacer. Zeno encouraged Theodoric to move west and confront him.
Procopius later wrote that Zeno advised Theodoric to attack Odoacer and rule Italy rather than continue causing trouble in the Balkans. Theodoric accepted. His followers did not travel as a small raiding force. Families, possessions, warriors, and dependents moved with the army, making the campaign a migration as well as a war.
After several years of fighting, Odoacer withdrew behind the defenses of Ravenna. The city finally surrendered in 493. Odoacer’s death soon afterward left Theodoric without a serious rival.
Italy now belonged to a Gothic king.
King of Goths and Ruler of Romans
Theodoric’s government did not attempt to erase Rome. Instead, it depended upon Rome.
This is one of the most important points for understanding the Ostrogothic Kingdom. Theodoric did not abolish Roman government and replace it with an entirely Germanic state. Roman law, taxation, offices, senatorial traditions, municipal government, and bureaucratic practices continued to operate. Roman aristocrats served the king. Among the most important was Cassiodorus, whose Variae preserves hundreds of letters and governmental documents produced under Theodoric and his successors.
Cassiodorus provides an extraordinary picture of a government obsessed with order, law, taxation, roads, public buildings, grain supplies, appointments, diplomacy, and the maintenance of what it repeatedly called civilitas. His collection is therefore one of the most valuable surviving windows into any post-Roman kingdom.
Procopius, despite writing from the eastern Roman side during the later Gothic War, offered striking praise of Theodoric’s government. He noted that Theodoric never assumed the title of Roman emperor, but judged that in practice he displayed qualities expected of one. He credited him with protecting Italy, preserving law, and winning the affection of both Goths and Italians.
Modern historians have consequently challenged the older image of Ostrogothic Italy as simply a barbarian interruption between Roman and Byzantine rule. Jonathan Arnold has emphasized how strongly Theodoric’s government could present itself as a restoration of Roman order, while Hans-Ulrich Wiemer’s more recent study places Theodoric simultaneously within Gothic kingship and the surviving Roman political world.
Religion presented the greatest obvious divide within that system.
Arian Kings in a Nicene Christian Italy
Theodoric and many Goths belonged to the Homoian Christian tradition commonly called Arianism, while the great majority of Italy’s Roman Christian population belonged to the Nicene Church.
The theological difference centered especially upon the relationship between the Father and the Son. The Nicene tradition affirmed the full divinity of the Son and his shared divine substance with the Father. The Gothic tradition inherited from the fourth-century Homoian movement rejected that formulation and emphasized a hierarchy within the Trinity.
These disagreements were not minor theological details to the people involved. Bishops, emperors, theologians, and ordinary believers had fought over them for generations.
Yet the political division between Goth and Roman should not be made too neat. Religion did not automatically determine political loyalty. Modern scholarship on Ostrogothic Italy has shown that Catholics did not form a single political bloc waiting for Constantinople to liberate them, just as not every person associated with Gothic government can simply be classified according to ethnic or theological labels. Religious, political, and social identities overlapped in complicated ways.
For most of his reign Theodoric appears to have understood that peace depended upon preventing theological disagreement from destroying political cooperation.
He did not attempt to force the Roman population to adopt Gothic Christianity. Catholic bishops remained in office. Catholic churches continued to function. Popes were elected in Rome. At the same time, the Goths maintained their own churches, clergy, and religious institutions.
Two Christian communities therefore occupied the same kingdom while disagreeing profoundly about the nature of Christ.
Ravenna and the Christianity of the Gothic Court
Nowhere is that divided Christian world more visible than Ravenna.
The city had already served as a western imperial capital before Theodoric established his court there. Under the Ostrogoths it became the political and religious center of Gothic Italy, filled with monuments that joined Roman architecture, Christian symbolism, royal representation, and Gothic patronage.
The Arian Baptistery survives as one of the clearest physical witnesses to the religious community supported by Theodoric’s government. Its dome contains a mosaic of the baptism of Christ surrounded by apostles. UNESCO identifies the building as a monument from the height of Gothic rule whose decoration preserves elements connected with Arian Christianity.
Nearby stood Theodoric’s palace church, now known as Sant’Apollinare Nuovo. Built around the beginning of the sixth century, the basilica originally belonged to the religious landscape of the Ostrogothic court. Its mosaics joined Christian imagery with the visual world of the king and his capital.
After the Byzantine reconquest, the building was rededicated and portions of its decoration were altered. Some original figures associated with Theodoric’s court disappeared from the walls, while new processions of martyrs became part of the surviving mosaic program. The transformation turned the church itself into a record of religious and political regime change.
Theodoric also commissioned the massive stone mausoleum that still stands outside Ravenna’s historic center. Unlike the glittering churches for which Ravenna is famous, the mausoleum is severe and monumental, crowned by an enormous single stone roof.
Together these buildings make Ravenna one of the rare places where the religious politics of the Ostrogothic kingdom can still be read directly from architecture.
Theodoric and the Roman Church
The relationship between Theodoric and the Catholic hierarchy was complicated even before the final years of his reign.
One of the greatest ecclesiastical conflicts of the period was the Laurentian Schism, which began with the disputed papal election of 498. Rival groups elected Symmachus and Laurentius as bishop of Rome, and the dispute drew Roman aristocrats, clergy, bishops, and eventually Theodoric into the controversy.
The fact that a Gothic Arian king could be asked to intervene in a dispute over the Catholic papacy reveals how unusual late antique politics had become. Theodoric’s theological beliefs did not prevent Catholic leaders from recognizing his political authority.
The papacy itself was not yet the centralized institution it would later become. Roman aristocratic families, bishops, eastern emperors, church councils, and rival clerical factions all competed for influence. Theodoric had to govern within that environment while trying to keep religious conflict from becoming political rebellion.
For much of his reign he succeeded.
The broader relationship between Rome and Constantinople also improved. In 519, during the reign of the eastern emperor Justin I and the pontificate of Hormisdas, the Acacian Schism between the churches of Rome and Constantinople formally ended.
Ironically, that reconciliation eventually made Theodoric’s own religious position more vulnerable. A united Nicene world was potentially more threatening to an Arian Gothic dynasty than a divided one.
Jews Under Theodoric
Theodoric’s religious policy extended beyond the conflict between Arian and Nicene Christians.
Jewish communities continued to live in Italian cities under Ostrogothic rule, and letters preserved by Cassiodorus provide unusually direct evidence for the king’s approach toward them.
A letter concerning the Jews of Genoa permitted repairs to an existing synagogue within the limits imposed by Roman law. The letter made the king’s theological disapproval obvious, but it also contained one of the most striking statements attributed to Theodoric’s government: “no one is forced to believe against his will.”
Another letter protected the property rights of the Jewish community at Milan and instructed churchmen not to interfere unlawfully with the synagogue. Again, the document treated Judaism as religious error, not as an equal theological alternative, but insisted that civil justice still applied.
The distinction is important. Theodoric was not advocating modern religious liberty. His laws remained rooted in the inherited religious assumptions and restrictions of the late Roman world. Yet his government repeatedly treated public order and law as more important than allowing religious mobs or clergy to settle disputes through violence.
The Anonymus Valesianus records a particularly revealing incident at Ravenna. After Christians burned synagogues, Theodoric ordered compensation and reconstruction at the expense of those responsible. The anonymous author, hostile to the king during the later portion of his reign, presented the decision as evidence of Theodoric’s deterioration rather than as an act of justice.
The episode exposes the problem facing historians. The same action could appear to the royal government as the enforcement of law and to a hostile Christian author as proof that a heretical king favored Jews over Christians.
Boethius and the Darkening of Theodoric’s Final Years
The final years of Theodoric’s reign were far more troubled.
One of the most famous victims was Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, a Roman senator, philosopher, theologian, and government official. Boethius belonged firmly to the Nicene intellectual tradition and wrote theological works dealing with the Trinity and Christology.
Accused of involvement in treasonous correspondence with Constantinople, Boethius was imprisoned and eventually executed. His father-in-law Symmachus was also killed.
While imprisoned, Boethius composed the Consolation of Philosophy, one of the most influential works transmitted from late antiquity into medieval Europe. Its existence gives the closing years of the Ostrogothic kingdom an extraordinary irony. One of the foundational philosophical texts of medieval Latin Christianity emerged from the prison of an Arian Gothic king who had spent most of his reign trying to preserve Roman political culture.
Procopius, who otherwise praised Theodoric, treated the deaths of Boethius and Symmachus as a terrible stain upon the king’s record.
Religious tensions were also increasing beyond Italy.
Emperor Justin I began taking stronger measures against heretical communities in the eastern empire. According to the Liber Pontificalis, Theodoric responded by sending Pope John I to Constantinople to seek relief for Arians affected by imperial religious policy.
The mission placed the pope in an almost impossible position. He was a Nicene bishop being ordered by an Arian king to intercede with a Nicene emperor on behalf of people his own church regarded as heretics.
John received an elaborate welcome in Constantinople, but Theodoric was dissatisfied when the delegation returned. The pope was imprisoned at Ravenna and died in 526. The Liber Pontificalis remembered his treatment as persecution and placed responsibility upon Theodoric.
Theodoric himself died later that year.
The religious settlement that had survived for more than three decades did not collapse immediately, but the political authority holding it together was gone.
Amalasuintha and the Struggle Over the Gothic Future
Theodoric’s grandson Athalaric succeeded him as a child, with Theodoric’s daughter Amalasuintha effectively ruling as regent.
Procopius depicts Amalasuintha as highly educated, politically capable, and deeply sympathetic to Roman culture. He tells a revealing story about her attempt to educate Athalaric in the Roman manner. Gothic nobles objected, arguing that a future warrior king should learn courage and arms rather than fear the discipline of schoolmasters.
Whether the speeches Procopius gives these men are exact or literary constructions, the episode captures a real problem. The Ostrogothic monarchy had built its success by combining Roman government with Gothic military power, but it remained uncertain how far those identities could merge.
Athalaric died in 534.
Amalasuintha then associated her cousin Theodahad with the throne. The arrangement failed catastrophically. She was imprisoned on an island in Lake Bolsena and murdered in 535.
Procopius reports that her death angered both Goths and Italians and gave Justinian a powerful justification for intervention.
The eastern emperor was already pursuing something larger.
He intended to restore Roman rule in the West.
Justinian and the Gothic War
Emperor Justinian had already destroyed the Vandal kingdom in North Africa when the crisis in Italy gave him an opportunity to move against the Ostrogoths.
In 535 his general Belisarius invaded.
The war that followed lasted, with interruptions, for nearly two decades and devastated much of Italy. It was not merely a religious war, but religion formed part of its political language.
Procopius preserves a letter in which Justinian appealed to the Franks to support his campaign partly because they shared what he presented as the orthodox faith against the Arian Goths. The statement shows how theological identity could be used to turn an imperial war of conquest into a struggle that could also be described as the defense of true Christianity.
The reality was more complicated. Italian Catholics did not behave as a single pro-Byzantine faction, and political loyalties shifted repeatedly as armies moved across the peninsula. Cities negotiated for survival. Senators calculated risks. Bishops protected their communities. Goths, Romans, imperial soldiers, and local populations sometimes cooperated and sometimes turned upon one another.
Belisarius captured Ravenna in 540, and the Gothic king Witigis was taken east. The Ostrogothic kingdom appeared to be finished.
It was not.
Totila and the Last Ostrogothic Kingdom
The Goths eventually rallied under Totila, one of the most capable rulers of the later kingdom.
From 541 onward, Totila recovered much of Italy and transformed what had looked like a defeated Gothic remnant into a serious military power again. Rome itself changed hands repeatedly during the conflict.
Procopius’s later books of the Gothic War provide the fullest narrative of these campaigns, though his account must be read with the same caution as every other major source for the period. He wrote within the eastern Roman world and knew important figures connected with Justinian’s armies. The surviving Gothic version of events is far thinner.
The resurgence ended when Justinian entrusted the final campaign to Narses.
Totila was defeated and killed at the Battle of Taginae, also called Busta Gallorum, in 552. The Goths chose Teia as king and continued resistance until another defeat near Mons Lactarius.
Organized Ostrogothic royal power disappeared.
In 554 Justinian’s Pragmatic Sanction helped establish the legal framework for imperial government in the recovered Italian territories. The kingdom created by Theodoric was formally gone.
Christianity After the Ostrogoths
Military defeat also transformed the religious landscape of Italy.
Churches once connected with the Gothic Christian community came under Nicene control. Sant’Apollinare Nuovo was altered and rededicated. Ravenna became one of the great showcases of Justinianic Christianity, most famously in the mosaics of San Vitale, where Justinian appears haloed beside soldiers, officials, and clergy.
The contrast is striking.
Only decades earlier, Ravenna had been the capital of a Gothic Christian kingdom whose ruler never called himself Roman emperor but governed through Roman institutions. Now the city displayed an eastern Roman emperor who had never personally visited Ravenna but whose mosaic proclaimed his political and religious authority over it.
The Arian institutions of the Ostrogothic state faded, but their physical traces survived.
The Arian Baptistery survived.
Theodoric’s palace church survived.
His mausoleum survived.
The Gothic biblical tradition survived in manuscripts.
Cassiodorus’s letters survived.
Boethius’s writings survived.
Jordanes preserved a Gothic history at the very moment when independent Gothic rule in Italy was disappearing.
The victors ended the kingdom, but they did not erase it.
The Ostrogoths in Religious History
The religious importance of the Ostrogoths lies partly in their refusal to fit a simple story.
They were Christians, but their Christianity was condemned as heresy by the tradition that ultimately dominated western Europe.
They ruled Rome without becoming Roman emperors.
Their kings supported Arian churches while permitting Catholic bishops and popes to continue operating.
Their government protected Jewish property in some disputes even while its official language rejected Jewish belief.
Roman senators served Gothic kings. Catholic theologians worked in an Arian kingdom. Gothic rulers used Roman law. Byzantine emperors presented conquest as restoration. Churches changed hands and mosaics were altered when one Christian regime replaced another.
Even the word “Arian” can conceal as much as it reveals. The Gothic faith had developed through the complicated theological struggles of the fourth century and is often more accurately connected to the Homoian tradition than directly to Arius himself. Likewise, “Goth” and “Roman” did not automatically tell a historian what language a person spoke, which ruler he supported, how he lived, or even exactly what he believed.
That complexity is why the surviving sources must be compared carefully. Cassiodorus served the Ostrogothic monarchy. Ennodius praised Theodoric. Jordanes tried to preserve Gothic history as the kingdom was collapsing. Procopius wrote from the world of Justinian’s reconquest. Papal sources remembered conflicts from the perspective of the Roman Church. Archaeology, coins, papyri, churches, inscriptions, and manuscripts preserve evidence that none of those writers could fully control.
For a brief period after the disappearance of the western imperial throne, Theodoric’s kingdom showed that Roman government, Gothic military power, Nicene Christianity, Homoian Christianity, Jewish communities, classical education, and Germanic kingship could exist inside the same political structure.
That structure did not endure. The death of Theodoric, succession struggles, religious tension, and Justinian’s determination to recover Italy eventually destroyed it.
Its ruins, however, became part of medieval Europe.
The Ostrogoths therefore belong not only to the history of the so-called barbarian kingdoms. They belong to the history of Christianity itself, at the moment when the religion of the Roman Empire became the competing religions of a post-Roman world.
Sources & Further Reading
Cassiodorus. The Variae: The Complete Translation. Translated by M. Shane Bjornlie. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-variae/hardcover
Jordanes. The Gothic History of Jordanes. Translated by Charles Christopher Mierow. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1915. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/jordanes-historygoths.asp
Procopius. History of the Wars: The Gothic War. Books 5–8. Translated by H. B. Dewing. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919–1928. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Procopius/Wars/5A*.html
Anonymus Valesianus. “The History of King Theodoric.” In Ammianus Marcellinus, vol. 3, translated by John C. Rolfe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Excerpta_Valesiana/2*.html
Ennodius, Magnus Felix. Magni Felicis Ennodii Opera. Edited by Friedrich Vogel. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi 7. Berlin: Weidmann, 1885. https://www.mgh.de/en/digital-mgh/openmgh/mgh-editions-in-openmgh
Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Translated by H. R. James. London: Elliot Stock, 1897. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14328
Boethius. The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy. Translated by H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973. https://www.loebclassics.com/view/LCL074/1973/volume.xml
Davis, Raymond, trans. The Book of Pontiffs (Liber Pontificalis): The Ancient Biographies of the First Ninety Roman Bishops to AD 715. 3rd ed. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010. https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.38238648
Marcellinus Comes. The Chronicle of Marcellinus: A Translation and Commentary. Translated by Brian Croke. Sydney: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1995. https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Chronicon_(Marcellinus)
Agathias. The Histories. Translated by Joseph D. Frendo. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975. https://beta.perseus.tufts.edu/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg4024.tlg001.1st1K-lat1:1/
Eugippius. The Life of Saint Severin. Translated by Ludwig Bieler. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1965. https://www.cuapress.org/9780813210551/the-life-of-saint-severin/
Auxentius of Durostorum. “Letter of Auxentius on Wulfila.” Translated by Jim Marchand. Georgetown University. https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/auxentius.html
Tjäder, Jan-Olof, ed. Die nichtliterarischen lateinischen Papyri Italiens aus der Zeit 445–700. 2 vols. Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1955–1982. https://ecsi.se/actarom-4-19/
Uppsala University Library. “Codex Argenteus.” Uppsala University. https://www.uu.se/en/library/visit-and-contact/exhibitions/codex-argenteus
UNESCO World Heritage Centre. “Early Christian Monuments of Ravenna.” UNESCO. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/788
American Numismatic Society. “Online Coins of Ostrogothic Italy.” American Numismatic Society. https://numismatics.org/coi/
Wiemer, Hans-Ulrich. Theoderic the Great: King of Goths, Ruler of Romans. Translated by John Noël Dillon. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300271850/theoderic-the-great/
Arnold, Jonathan J. Theoderic and the Roman Imperial Restoration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/theoderic-and-the-roman-imperial-restoration/C21444D67E726B88421233D431339D0E
Amory, Patrick. People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, 489–554. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/people-and-identity-in-ostrogothic-italy-489554/3F45ABADFCE9C318C6EF57464D5D29D2
Burns, Thomas S. A History of the Ostrogoths. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. https://iupress.org/9780253206008/a-history-of-the-ostrogoths/
Wolfram, Herwig. History of the Goths. Translated by Thomas J. Dunlap. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. https://www.ucpress.edu/books/history-of-the-goths/paper
Heather, Peter. Goths and Romans, 332–489. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. https://academic.oup.com/book/9992
Moorhead, John. Theoderic in Italy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/theoderic-in-italy-9780198147819
Arnold, Jonathan J., M. Shane Bjornlie, and Kristina Sessa, eds. A Companion to Ostrogothic Italy. Leiden: Brill, 2016. https://brill.com/display/title/28011
Deliyannis, Deborah Mauskopf. Ravenna in Late Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/ravenna-in-late-antiquity/
Lafferty, Sean D. W. Law and Society in the Age of Theoderic the Great: A Study of the Edictum Theoderici. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/law-and-society-in-the-age-of-theoderic-the-great/E23CBB540C760C39FE38C2EF3C6393D6
Sessa, Kristina. The Formation of Papal Authority in Late Antique Italy: Roman Bishops and the Domestic Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/formation-of-papal-authority-in-late-antique-italy/
Vitiello, Massimiliano. Theodahad: A Platonic King at the Collapse of Ostrogothic Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/j.ctt7zwc6j
Vitiello, Massimiliano. Amalasuintha: The Transformation of Queenship in the Post-Roman World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv16t6dq4
Bjornlie, M. Shane. Politics and Tradition Between Rome, Ravenna and Constantinople: A Study of Cassiodorus and the Variae, 527–554. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/politics-and-tradition-between-rome-ravenna-and-constantinople/