Ostrogoths

The Ostrogoths were a Germanic people from the Roman period, known for creating one of the two major Gothic kingdoms inside the Western Roman Empire during the 5th and 6th centuries. Their strength came from large Gothic communities that had been living in the Balkans since the 4th century. They became a major force under Theodoric the Great, who defeated Odoacer and set up the Ostrogothic Kingdom in Italy in 493.

Theodoric came from the Amal dynasty, which had risen to power in Pannonia after Attila’s Hunnic empire fell apart. With support from the Byzantine emperor Zeno, Theodoric invaded Italy and ruled from Ravenna. He kept Roman administration, law, and culture intact, governing Goths and Romans under separate but parallel systems. His rule was the peak of Ostrogothic power and stability in Italy.

After Theodoric died in 526, the kingdom weakened due to dynastic troubles. In 535, Emperor Justinian I started the Gothic War (535–554) to reclaim imperial control in the West. The Ostrogoths, revived under Totila, managed to regain much of Italy for a time, but Totila was killed at the Battle of Taginae in 552. The long war devastated the Italian peninsula, and the Ostrogothic state fell apart by 554. The survivors were absorbed into the Lombards, who founded their own kingdom in Italy by 568.

The Ostrogoths are linked to the earlier Greuthungi, mentioned by Roman writers like Ammianus Marcellinus, and later identified by the historian Jordanes with the 4th-century realm of Ermanaric. Ancient sources often just called them "Goths," but modern scholars distinguish them as one of the two main Gothic branches, alongside the Visigoths.

The Goths as a whole appear in Roman records from the 3rd century, living north of the Lower Danube and Black Sea. They competed for influence and Roman payments with older local groups like the Carpi and various Sarmatians, and supplied soldiers to the Roman army. Their Germanic language and material culture suggest origins from the Vistula river area (now Poland) and from Götaland and Gotland in present-day Sweden. By the 3rd century, the Goths already had subgroups with their own names—for instance, the Tervingi, who bordered the Roman Empire and the Carpathians, were mentioned separately at least once.

The Ostrogoths, not named until later, are tied to the Greuthungi, who lived further east. Ammianus reported that the Dniester River divided the Tervingi and Greuthungi, with Alans living east of the Greuthungi near the Don River.

In Italy, the Ostrogoths used a Gothic language that existed in both spoken and written forms. The best surviving evidence is Ulfilas’s translation of the Bible. Goths were a minority everywhere they lived in the Roman empire, and no Gothic language or distinct ethnicity has survived. However, the Gothic texts preserved by the Ostrogothic kingdom are the only Eastern Germanic language with continuous texts and the earliest significant remnants of any Germanic language.

The word "Ostrogoth" comes from a Germanic root *auster-, meaning "eastern." According to Wolfram’s proposal, it was originally a boastful tribal name meaning "Goths of the rising sun" or "Goths glorified by the rising sun." By the 6th century, Jordanes thought Visigoths and Ostrogoths simply meant western and eastern Goths.

The nature of Gothic divisions before the Huns is unclear. The Ostrogoths are rarely mentioned by that name and often in uncertain contexts. They are associated with the Greuthungi, but scholars disagree. Herwig Wolfram sees the two names as referring to the same people. Peter Heather argues that the Ostrogoths led by Theodoric to Italy resulted from complex processes of fragmentation and unification involving various groups—mostly but not only Gothic—and that better contemporary evidence contradicts Jordanes’s claim that Ostrogoths are just another name for Greuthungi. Some historians go further, questioning whether any single ethnicity, even Gothic, united the Ostrogoths before the Amal clan politically unified them.

One early but dubious mention of the Ostrogoths appears in the *Historia Augusta*, written centuries later and known for fabricated material. In the article for Emperor Claudius Gothicus (reigned 268–270), a garbled list of "Scythian" peoples supposedly conquered by him includes "austorgoti." Modern editors often correct this to "Austrogoti," but the work is unreliable, especially for contemporary terminology. The first record of a Gothic subgroup acting in its own name—the Tervingi—dates from 291. The Greuthungi, Vesi, and Ostrogothi are all attested no earlier than 388. The Ostrogoths were first definitely mentioned more than once only later.