Absolute Monarchs Read Online Free PDF

child-ruler Romulus Augustulus, was hardly noticed by most of his subjects and made little difference to their lives. For almost a century the Western Empire had been in a state of near chaos, dominated by one barbarian general after another. The most recent of these, a Scyrian 1 named Odoacer, had made no claim to sovereignty for himself; all he asked was the title of Patricius , in which rank he proposed to take over the governance of Italy in the name of the Emperor Zeno, then reigning in Constantinople.
    Zeno, however, had a better idea. Throughout his reign he had been plagued by Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, who were widely scattered in the lands to the north of the Black Sea. The main purpose of Theodoric’s early life was to find and secure a permanent home for his people. To this end he had spent the better part of twenty years fighting—sometimes for and sometimes against the empire—arguing, bargaining, cajoling, and threatening by turns. This constant vacillation between friendship and hostility was, in the long term, unprofitable to both parties, and sometime, probably toward the end of 487, it was agreed between Theodoric and Zeno that the former should lead his entire people into Italy, overthrow Odoacer, and rule the land as an Ostrogothic kingdom under imperial sovereignty. Early in 488 the great westward migration took place—men, women, and children, with their horses and their pack animals, their cattle and sheep, lumbering slowly across the plains of Central Europe in search of greener and more peaceful pastures.
    On their arrival in Italy Odoacer put up a fierce resistance; but Theodoric steadily wore him down before agreeing to what appeared to be remarkably generous terms: that the two of them should rule jointly from Ravenna, where they would share the royal palace. It was ostensibly to seal this agreement that on March 15, 493, Theodoric invited Odoacer, with his brother, his son, and his chief officers, to a banquet in his wing of the palace. As the Scyrian took his place in the seat of honor, Theodoric stepped forward and, with one tremendous stroke of his sword, clove the body of Odoacer from collarbone to thigh. The members of Odoacer’s suite were quickly dealt with by the surrounding guards, while his brother was shot down by arrows as he fled through the palace gardens. His wife was thrown into prison, where she later died of hunger; his son was first sent off to Gaul but later executed. Then, with the Scyrian line satisfactorily wiped out, Theodoric the Ostrogoth laid aside the skins and furs that were the traditional clothing of his race, robed himself in the imperial purple, and settled down to rule.
    After this unpromising beginning, his thirty-three years on the throne were prosperous and peaceful. One thing only made him unacceptable to emperor and pope alike—his uncompromising Arianism; unfortunately, the last years of his reign coincided with a campaign by the Emperor Justin I to stamp out the heresy once and for all. It was as a reaction to this that in 524 Theodoric imprisoned one of his chief advisers, the philosopher Boethius, whom he subsequently ordered to be garrotted, and that two years later he sent Pope John I at the head of a delegation to Constantinople to remonstrate. This journey, the first ever made by a pope to the Bosphorus, was a tremendous success from John’s point of view, since the emperor prostrated himself before him and accorded him a magnificent reception, at which the pope was most satisfactorily seated on a higher throne than the patriarch; from Theodoric’s, however, it was a failure, Justin having categorically refused to allow those Arians who had been forcibly converted to revert to their old heretical ways.
    There can be no doubt that Theodoric was a giant, and the extraordinary mausoleum which he built—and which still stands in the northeastern suburbs of Ravenna—perfectly symbolizes, in its half-classical, half-barbaric architectural