gender reversal in the rhetoric of power. As the “male” character of the ruling unmarried couple, Amalasuintha would make final decisions; the coregent would follow her guidance and provide her with advice. This was Amalasuintha’s condition for Theodahad to rule.
Radical as this development must have seemed to the Gothic aristocracy, the co-regency was not without precedent in the Roman world. In fact, the idea drew from imperial models (though real husband-wife rulership was also exceptionally rare in the East). The biggest difference between Amalasuintha’s co-regency and Roman/Byzantine examples lay in her decision not to marry the new king: after all, Theodahad already had a wife. And for Amalasuintha, a marriage would jeopardize her position and relegate her to the same position as other queens of that generation, whose powers were much more limited in comparison to those of the Roman empresses.
Amalasuintha’s ingenious solution must have disappointed not only the Goths but also Justinian, who had his own plans for Italy. Justinian had been planning to bring both Amalasuintha and Theodahad, the only possible Amal heirs to the throne, to Constantinople, freeing the way for him to take control over Italy as part of his plan to reconquer the western Mediterranean. So Amalasuintha’s ingenious solution to her predicament ultimately sealed her fate. Not long after his election, Theodahad, supported by Amalasuintha’s old enemies, deposed his cousin and ultimately imprisoned her in one of his many Tuscan properties, on a little island-fortress in Lake Bolsena. It was there, in this lonely and isolated prison, that Amalasuintha was assassinated in early May 535.
Theodahad probably did not act alone. We might wonder if the imperial hand lay behind the murder. Procopius in his Secret History claimed that Theodora was involved in the conspiracy against Amalasuintha, whom she viewed as a rival. Certainly, if he had wished to, Justinian could have saved Amalasuintha. Our sources suggest that before he acted, Theodahad first came to an understanding with the emperor, who eventually recognized his position as king. But in carrying out this secret intrigue of the imperial couple, Theodahad had violated the protection that Justinian had officially granted to Amalasuintha a few years earlier, the commendatio. Theodahad may have thought he was carrying out the desires of the emperor and ensuring his own future as king; in fact his murder of his cousin gave Justinian a perfect pretext to invade Italy. As soon as Theodahad’s order to kill his cousin was carried out, Justinian’s legate made clear that a war with the empire was inevitable.
Amalasuintha shaped an important decade in the history of Italy, the years 526–535. She was an unconventional woman who tried to combine the traditional Gothic model of power with the imperial one. A few decades later, women began claiming a stronger role in the politics of Merovingian Gaul; and in Lombard Italy, Queen Theodelinda may have considered Amalasuintha’s example as she looked for models to support her own position as a ruling mother of a rex puer. Though Amalasuintha’s experiment failed, the legacy of the Gothic queen had an impact on the vision of female royalty in early medieval Italy.
The Sources
The lives and careers of the queens of the fifth and sixth centuries, even historically important figures like Clotilde, Brunhild, and Theodelinda, are not well attested in the sources. Amalasuintha is something of an exception. The sources for her life, while sparse, are abundant enough to allow comparisons both with queens from the post-Roman world and with Roman/Byzantine empresses. The sources are diverse, however, and their interpretation requires a multifaceted methodology. The most important source for Amalasuintha’s life at the palace and her ruling activity is the work of Procopius of Caesarea, particularly three sections of the Gothic War, a few passages from the Vandalic War, and one chapter of the Secret History. This material is complemented by some of the letters of the Roman courtier Cassiodorus, which are published in the collection of the Variae and date to the years between late 533 and 535. Gregory of Tours offers an unconventional sketch of a few episodes of Amalasuintha’s life, albeit in an account that is largely unreliable except for some details. Jordanes gives a short but interesting account of the main political events of Athalaric’s reign in both the Getica and the Romana, and Agnellus of Ravenna in his Book of Pontiffs of the Church of Ravenna refers to some of the events, probably drawing from the mid-sixth-century Chronicle of Maximianus and/or the Annals of Ravenna. A few more details are provided by Count Marcellinus and by the biographer of the Book of the Popes (Liber Pontificalis). But these last authors, while important for the understanding of the chronology of events and some juridical issues, do not help us place Amalasuintha in a broader historical context. The portrait of Amalasuintha rests therefore on Procopius and Cassiodorus, even if the narrative of the former does not always find support in the details provided by the latter. These two authors were both contemporaries of the queen, and they witnessed events from two opposite but complementary sides: the palace of Ravenna and the court of Justinian.
The works of both Cassiodorus and Procopius have become objects of new discussions in recent European and American scholarship, based on the goals of these authors. The Cassiodoran collection has been rightly interpreted not just in the traditional way, as a product of the palatine bureaucracy, but also as an expression of the social and cultural context to which Cassiodorus belonged. The Variae have been restudied as a literary product of the genre of epistolography and as an expression of the rhetorical mannerisms of a figure active in the political life of his age, following in the footsteps of Pliny and of Symmachus the orator. These authors served as important models for Cassiodorus’s letters and panegyrics.16 Cassiodorus published the documents at the very end of his political career, around 538–540. In selecting the letters, he had precise aims, including an apologetic one regarding his long career at the palace.17 The Variae also offer portraits of the Gothic rulers, and recently one contribution has gone so far as to consider them as evidence of a program of “Roman imperial restoration” started by Theoderic (though this view is entirely based on literature produced by the Roman elite at his court).18 It is likely that the Amals of Italy used imperial models to present themselves to their Roman subjects, as Amalasuintha would also do. Cassiodorus’s collection, however, was compiled at a time when the Gothic monarchy had lost the support of most Romans. Cassiodorus may have reworked some of the documents with self-aggrandizing elements or adjusted them to make the collection more uniform. The Variae remain his final message, his account of his palatine experience, the recollection of memories by a politician very close to the kings, who knew many state secrets.
The account by Procopius presents challenges of a different nature. His work has also recently been regarded with a more critical eye. Such scholars as Brodka and Kaldellis see in this author not only the Byzantine historian with Christian views but also the classicist in all his complexity. His plural aims, which are often concealed in cryptic passages of the narrative, are offered to the reader through such models as Thucydides and Plato; dialogues and letters often express his own moralizing vision. This reevaluation of Procopius is stimulating, because it leads us to consider the account of this historian of the Justinianic era from a new point of view. This perspective, however, does not discredit Procopius as a historical source, nor it should discourage us from analyzing the message that is concealed behind the narrative. In this, I concur with Greatrex’s view.19
In my recent monograph, Theodahad, I suggested a balanced way to deal with these sources in parallel when approaching Ostrogothic Italy. On the one hand, we need to separate the rhetorical component from the propaganda in the Cassiodoran letters, and highlight as much as possible the juridical elements and the political messages that these documents contain. On the other hand, Procopius’s account, whose propaganda is an expression of a different agenda, needs to be considered with the awareness of some limitations of the narrative. Dialogues and letters, which are embedded in the Histories according to the Thucydidean style of the author, need to be contextualized in the narrative, and the events can be better understood in parallel with the other sources, particularly when they find corroboration in the Cassiodoran documentation. For different reasons, and with different aims, Procopius and Cassiodorus have preserved motifs of the propaganda of the Gothic kingdom, including the portraits of the Gothic rulers. Especially where the two authors
