compelled Pope John I to accompany some senators to Constantinople. According to the Anonymus Valesianus, the pope was sent to ask Justin to allow the Arians to profess their religion, while in the Book of the Popes we read that the king wanted the confiscated churches, including those in the East, to be restored to the Arians. When the emperor issued the law that deprived the mostly Gothic Arians of their religious freedom, he may have been motivated in part by a desire for retaliation for the affair of Albinus and Boethius. There were still many Gothic Arians who were living in the East, and Theoderic was concerned for their rights. The pope’s mission failed on this particular issue, however, and as soon as he returned, he and the other members of the embassy were put in prison. John I died a short time later.141 This series of events largely compromised the strong relationship that had stood between Theoderic, the Roman Senate, and the church for thirty years.
Cassiodorus had replaced Boethius as the master of the offices, and some of the letters of the Variae that he wrote during the years of his appointment, 523–526, shed a little light on these critical period at the palace of Ravenna. Prestigious appointments that were traditionally held by members of the Roman Senate were now granted instead to Boethius’s enemies; these were the people Theoderic kept closer in those years. Among the men whose careers especially benefited were two pairs of brothers, Opilio and Cyprianus, and Decoratus and Honoratus. They were appointed to key offices, such as quaestor of the palace and count of the Sacred Largesses, and Theoderic praised them for their merits and honored their friendship, which he held very dear.142 When promoting Honoratus to quaestor in late 524, Theoderic, addressing the Roman senators, memorialized Decoratus, the candidate’s brother who had preceded him in the office but had recently died. Among the deeds Theoderic recalled was Decoratus’s participation in a famous trial where he defended a patrician whose name is purposely not specified: was this perhaps Albinus or Boethius?143
Great eulogies were also made for the promotion of Cyprianus to the office of count of the Sacred Largesses that same year.144 On this occasion the king referenced the great trust he had in this collaborator, with whom he used to ride horses and share private conversations.145 In addition, Cyprianus had participated in several military operations, was able to speak Gothic, and had provided his sons with a military education and knowledge of the Gothic language.146 Courtiers like these molded themselves to the expectations of their rulers. An enormous social and cultural gap separated them from the members of the senatorial elite, such as Albinus, Boethius, and Symmachus. In fact, Cyprianus and his friends are the exact same courtiers whom Boethius blamed in the apologia of the Consolatio as improbi and flagitiosi, while accusing the king of having them rewarded for their crimes rather than punishing them.147 The growing relationships of Theoderic with these courtiers during the years 523–526 show that the king’s trust in the Roman Senate had reached its lowest point, and that only a few Roman families were now close to the court.
Theoderic’s distrust of the Senate and the Roman Church created immense internal problems inside the Gothic kingdom at the same time as the king’s external political relationships were crumbling and tensions with the empire increasing. Adding to this chaos were the extremely limited possibilities of finding an Amal adult male who could rule over the Goths in Italy. Theoderic did not consider handing his throne to Amalaric, his grandson who was the heir apparent to the Visigothic throne, and who by now was of age to rule. It had been Eutharic who, through his son Athalaric, was meant to reunify the Gothic people. Theoderic also had never even considered his adult nephew, the greedy Theodahad, as a potential tutor for Athalaric, much less as an heir and successor.
During these difficult, turbulent years, Amalasuintha was living in the palace at Ravenna. She was at the palace when embassy after embassy arrived, bringing bad news and a growing sense of isolation from the other kingdoms; she was a witness to Theoderic’s break with the senatorial class and the Roman clergy, and to the executions the king ordered. She must have experienced all the stress these situations provoked, and she must have been closely watching her father’s politics of succession.
Protecting the Heir
On his deathbed, Theoderic designated as heir to his throne his grandson Athalaric, who was at that time barely ten years old, if not even younger.148 In a way he was repeating the procedure followed in 474 by his own father, Theudimer, who, when his death was imminent, had called together his Goths to announce the succession of his son.149 At this time the Ostrogoths seem to have followed the principle of transmission of royal power to the oldest direct legitimate male descendant. But this did not preclude a possible claim by Theodahad, the son of Amalafrida and at that time the only adult male of the family. Although his father’s identity remains a mystery, his direct descent from Theudimer made him a good candidate. However, Theoderic had managed to keep him as far as possible from his palace and from his army.
As in the other kingdoms, patrilineal descent was desirable but not indispensable. Examples from the Vandal, Burgundian, Visigothic and Frankish kingdoms show the ways in which fifth- and sixth-century kings were experimenting with new political solutions in matters of succession. There were no established rules on this matter, and in each state things were handled differently.150 Pagan polygamy or polygyny, children from concubines, multiple sons: all these factors complicated legitimacy and succession, and very often there was more than one heir on the throne. This had happened, for example, in Gaul in 511 with the four descendants of Clovis, and recently in 524 at the death of Chlodomer. In the Frankish realm the succession was uneasy between brothers and their many children, and the kingdom was divided among heirs.151 In the Burgundian kingdom we know that Sigismund held the title of rex starting around 505, during the lifetime of his father Gundobad, and the Burgundians may have originally followed agnatic seniority.152
The Vandals, beginning with Geiseric, regularly used agnatic seniority. According to Procopius, this king on his deathbed hoped that the Hasdings, his family, would maintain their rule over the Vandals, and he gave specific directions. This is considered by Victor of Vita also as his constitutio or “testament”:153 “The royal power among them should always fall to that one who was the first in the years among all the male offspring descended from Geiseric himself.”154 Jordanes also tells us about Geiseric’s last will, and though his version is less reliable—suggesting as it does a pacific view of the Vandal court—it offers a portrait of the Vandal idea of right succession: “Before his death he summoned the band of his sons and ordained that there should be no strife among them because of desire for the kingdom, but that each should reign in his own rank and order as he survived the others; that is, the next younger should succeed his elder brother, and he in turn should be followed by his junior. By giving heed to this command they ruled their kingdom in happiness for the space of many years and were not disgraced by civil war, as is usual among other nations; one after the other receiving the kingdom and ruling the people in peace.”155 Despite Jordanes’s words, in matters of succession the Vandal kingdom had a history of violence going back at least a century. In 428 Geiseric had arranged to have the wife and two children of his half brother (Gunderic) murdered after his death, probably in order to avoid a regency of the children and their mother, and thus their future claims to the throne.156 This bloody legacy was transmitted to his descendants, despite Geiseric’s clear instructions for the succession (discussed above). The eldest of his three sons, Huneric, took power and eliminated his brother Theoderic, together with his children.157 Huneric badly mutilated his first wife, the daughter of the Visigothic king Theoderic, and sent her back to Gaul under the suspicion that she was conspiring against him.158 The reasons for such a monstrous act may have been political: later he married Eudocia, Valentinian III’s daughter, who bore him Hilderic, and this probably facilitated the legitimation of his rule over Africa. Later, in 523, as we have seen, Amalafrida was accused of conspiring against Hilderic and imprisoned; she was not given the chance to return to Italy or stay as queen mother (in a Cassiodoran letter addressed to the Vandal king, the Gothic rulers complained: “you did not tolerate that she, whom you had as former queen, lived as a private person [.] … [S]he should have been sent
