Why was Gregory of Tours wrong about Amalasuntha?

      Considering that he is an otherwise reliable source, it must be strange to see this passage on Theodoric's daughter that has no basis in fact except the part that she was murdered, possibly  by complicity with the empress Theodora, by her cousin, Theodat.  Why do I say Gregory of Tours is wrong?

       There are three other historians with first hand knowledge of the situation in Ravenna.  There is Cassiodorus, who was Theodoric's and then Amalasunth's secretary.  His History of the Goths did not survive but many of his letters did and they support much of what Jordanes put in his abbreviated version of the history.  Jordanes was writing at the court of Constantinople about fifteen years after Cassiodorus left Ravenna and moved to Constantinople.  Jordanes had contact with people who had first hand knowledge of the events in Ravenna, especially since Amalasuntha's daughter Mathesuntha had moved to Constantinople with her husband Germanus, nephew of the emperor, Justinian.

      The last historian was Procopius, who was the legal adviser to Justinian's general Belisarius, the man who was sent to Ravenna to punish Theodat.  It is not known if Procopius accompanied Belisarius on this campaign but he had accompanied him on others so it is possible that he was there also. 

     Gregory was born about five years after Amalasuntha died and he was a Frank not a Goth.  The Ostrogoths were Arians, on the wrong side of the Trinity debate to Gregory, but still Gregory does not give such an unflattering and erroneous portrait of other Ostrogoths.  There is no doubt that he is wrong.  Amalasuntha not only married a prince like her parents wanted her to but she had children, which Gregory denies.  She is also the niece of Clovis, whom Gregory approved of .  It is so strange. 

Beatles Song of the Week

Pro commodum Milvorum Papyraceus,

Spectaculum hodie nocte in petaurum erit,

Hendersoni toti illic erunt,

Recens Pablorum Fanquorum de nundino.

Quam spectaculum!

Super viros et equos et trochos et rebus,

Et ultime per cado de flamma vera!

Sic M.P mundum provocabit.

Amalasuntha, Daughter of the King

     Amalasuntha died around 534 AD, strangled in her bath according to Jordanes. Procopius agrees she was murdered.  You may ask who was Amalasuntha and why do we care.  I shall try to answer that.

     She was firstly the daughter of Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogoth King of Italy.  When Theodoric died, his throne passed on to Amalasuntha's son, Athalaric, a sickly lad of ten.  The kingdom had peace for eight years under his rule and the regency of his mother but it was not to last.  Athalaric died at the age of eighteen, leaving his mother alone to rule the kingdom.  His father Eutharic had died before Theodoric.   The Goths were not disposed to follow the rule of a woman even the daughter of Theodoric the Great so Amalasuntha asked her cousin Theohadad, who was the king of Tuscany, to be her co-ruler.  He immediately exiled her, seized her throne and, within a few days, Jordanes related, he had her strangled in her bath. 

     Procopius also had a few things to say about Amalasuntha since her father had been fostered at the court in Constantinople and the rule of Italy had been conferred on Theodoric and his family by the Byzantine emperor.  They were under his protection and, after the death of Amalasuntha and Athalaric, Mathesuentha moved to Constantinople with her second husband Germanus, the nephew of Justinian. 

     Procopius would never accuse the empress Theodora during his lifetime.  Far too risky.  He wrote about it in his Secret History that was not published until after his death.  He wrote that Amalasuntha was planning to move to Constantinople and Theodora sent a man to assassinate her before she could arrive and possibly become a rival for the emperor's affections.  Amalasuntha was still young and beautiful, a widow and the daughter of a king.  

     This could have been the case because Amalasuntha's mother was Audofleda, the sister of Clovis and the oft warring Merovingian kings were her cousins.  Yet they seemed to do nothing about her murder but Justinian, the emperor, took this opportunity to launch an invasion to reclaim Italy. 

     Faced with the large and well armed Byzantine army, the Goths deposed Theohadad and chose his armor bearer, Vitiges, as his replacement.  Theohadad then fled and was pursued and killed by Vitiges's men.  Vitiges then married the last surviving member of Theodoric's family, Amalasuntha's daughter Mathesuentha, and prepared to defend Italy against the Byzantines. 

     Where is Gregory of Tours account in all of this since it involves a member of the Merovingian clan?  He does write an account of Amalasuntha but it is slanderous and full of malice towards her.  Amalasuntha was a virtuous woman, whose mother died of old age before she did.  She married a prince willingly and had two children with him but Gregory says nothing about that.  He wrote that she was a wicked woman who ran off with a slave and murdered her mother and that Theodat (as he named him) was the avenger who did right to have her killed.  Gregory also wrote that Childebert, Lothar, and Theudebert did demand wergeld from Theodat for her death, not that they cared but that it was an opportunity for a cash grab. 

    One has to wonder why a good Christian man like Gregory would formulate such lies about Amalasuntha when it is a sin to do so.  I read one suggestion that it may have been because she was a member, like most Goths, of the Arian sect and if there is one thing Gregory clearly despises it is a heretic especially the Arians.  This story may have been just to discredit one more Arian since it is probably not a sin if you lie for the purpose of turning people towards the true faith. 

     Now for the second question, why do we care?  There are lines in Jordanes, sec. XLVIII, 

"For his son Beremud, as we have said before, at last grew to despise the race of the Ostrogoths because of the overlordship of the Huns, and so had followed the tribe of the Visigoths to the western country, and it was from him Veteric was descended.  Veteric also had a son Eutharic, who married Amalasuentha, the daughter of Theodoric, thus uniting again the stock of the Amali which had divided long ago."

If Tolkien was in part inspired by Jordanes, compare those lines with this line from Appendix A in Return of the King, " ... Arwen and Aragorn.  By the last the long-sundered branches of the Half-elven were reunited and their line was restored."  I had a thought that Eutharic might have been the historical Aragorn, he is a descendant of Theodoric the Visigoth who stood with the last might of Rome to repel Attila the Hun,  but nothing else about him fits.  But, if he were Aragorn, then Amalasuntha would be Arwen.  I guess they were just one more ingredient that went into the soup.   The search for Aragorn still goes on.

From Wikipedia:

"The Amali were one of the leading dynasties of the Goths, a Germanic people who confronted the Roman Empire in its declining years in the west.  They were also called the Amals, Amaler, or Amaling and were at one point considered highest in rank among Gothic fighters and royal dignity.  According to Gothic legend, the Amali were descended from an ancient hero whose deeds earned him the title of Amala or 'mighty'."  Beren One-Hand, anyone?

Beatles Song of the Week

Te amat, heia, heia, heia!

Te amat, heia, heia, heia!

Cogitas tuum amorem amissis,

Certe eam heri vidi,

Dicit te amat,

Et scis mallum non est.

Heia, te amat,

Et scis laetus sis. 

Dixit eam multum nocuis,

Paene eam mentum amissit,

Et nunc dicit ea scit,

Genus qui nocere non es,

Dicit te amat,

Et scis malum non est,

Dicit te amat,

Et scis laetus  sis.

Te amat, heia, heia, heia......

Lord of the Rings and the King of the Visigoths

     I was posting a comment on a blog about Harry Potter when one of the people said that they like HP because they could imagine someone like McGonagall walking down the road.  Real but hidden to us.  That person could not imagine Aragorn walking down that same street.

  You would not find him strolling along some city street today because he lived 1,500 years ago in the Heroic Age of Beowulf, Arthur, and Siegfried.  The more I read Old English literature, the more I see where J.R.R. Tolkien got his material from.

    Tolkien wrote an essay first published in 1964 called "On Fairy Stories".   In it he wrote this wonderful metaphor for story being a kind of soup.  

     "Speaking of the history of stories and especially of fairy-stories, we may say that the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been  been boiling, and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty." 

As we know, those of us who cook, the very best and most flavorful soups are made from the scraps in the kitchen and not something carefully planned out from a recipe book needing a trip to the grocery store. 

     "But if we speak of a Cauldron, we must not wholly forget the Cooks.  There are many things in the Cauldron but the Cooks do not dip the ladle quite blindly.  Their selection is important.  The gods are after all gods, and it is a matter of some moment what stories are told of them."  Indeed.

     When Tolkien was writing his stories of Midgaard/Middle Earth, he too was dipping in his ladle and choosing his bits, some were Scandinavian, some were Celtic, some were from history and some were from myth.  Many were from the Anglo-Saxons; it was after all where he made his living and reputation as a scholar.  In the few works that remain of the Anglo-Saxons, I may not have found Aragorn but I think I have found his ally Theoden in Theodoric I, King of the Visigoths.

     Gregory of Tours said little about him except that he was one of the few to heed the call and stand beside Aetius, Patrician of Rome, against the Scourge of God, Attila the Hun.  It is clear in many ways that the Numenorians are based on the Romans but it is difficult to say if Aetius's role in the battle mirrors Aragorn's or Denethor.  He was a steward of a sort in the fading of the empire but he fought on the field gloriously and survived. 

     Jordanes can tell us more.  He called Theodoric Theodorid.  So why not say he was Theoden's son Theodred?  Theodoric and Theoden died in the same way and were about the same age.  While Attila was advancing on the walled city of Orleans, burning and plundering after the manner of orcs, Aetius and Theodoric gathered together a last alliance of tribes, the last major battle of a united Roman empire.  They stopped his advance in the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, like the king of the Nazgul was stopped in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.

     The Visigoth king would not be outdone in courage by his men and rode ahead of them all.  He was thrown from his horse, like Theoden, and died trampled by the horses of his men rather than by his own horse.  His son, not a nephew, Thorismud pursued the enemy so far into the field that he wandered into Attila's camp on the way back and had to fight his way out, like Eomer's heedless rush at the enemy.

     When they found the body of Theodoric "where the dead lay thickest"(Jordanes), they bore his body away with songs in the sight of the enemy while the battle raged on around them, exactly like Theoden was carried from the field.  Unlike in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, this enemy, Attila, lived to flee and find his death later overexerting himself with a young bride but not before facing Thorismud in battle and being defeated by him. One cannot imagine the leader of the Nazgul dying in this way.

     There are other parallels.  The death of the Witch King of Angmar had been foretold in the North.  Attila, through fear of Aetius, consulted shamen to have them prophesize what the outcome of the battle would be.  He was told one of the leaders of the armies would die that day.  He risked the battle hoping it would be Aetius. 

     Attila had allies in the Ostrogoths, the Goths of the East, which is why the king of the Ostrogoths is at his court in the Nibelungenlied.  Since they come from the East, these could be compared to the Black Numenorians who fought against their kin from the West.  Visigoth simply means Goth of the West.

     One last similarity between the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains and the Battle of the Pelennor field is the presence of an army of the dead. While I must track down the original source to confirm this, in E.A. Thompson's book The Huns, he quotes a scholar, Damascius, who wrote that the fighting between the Roman alliance and the Huns was so severe that only the leaders and a few followers survived.  Jordanes gives the numbers of the dead as 165,000.  The battle raged so fiercely that those who were killed did not realize they were dead and went on fighting for three days.  The clash of their ghostly arms could be heard by the living. 

I do not yet know who Aragorn was but I will.  For he lived; more surely than did McGonagall, he lived. 

Beatles Song of the Week

Via Cyancitta Cristata

Illuc nebulam super Urbe Angelorum est,

Et mei amici viam suam perierant, 

Erimus in illo loco mox diximus,

Nunc in vicem ipsi perierant.

refrain:  Amabo, non este tardi,

Amabo, non este perquam tardi,

Amabo, non este tardi,

Aut sim dormiens.

Bene solum agit monstrare,

Et dixi eos ubi agere,

Vigiliam in viam rogare,

Est tot ibi convenire,

Nunc est ultra horam somnorum intellego,

Et vero agere amo,

Mox prima lux erit,

Hic in Via Cyancitta Cristata sedeo. 

Theodoric, AKA Dietrich von Bern

This is going to be the summer of Gregory for me.  I have not gotten past Book II yet and I have a new topic that will stretch on and on to Germanic legends and is hinted at in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.  To deal with this in full will require more than one installment since I prefer not to write long essays and risk boring you. That being said, I will press on with this week's topic: Theodoric I, King of the Ostrogoths.

Theodoric I

      There are two Theodorics in Gregory of Tours's history - the king of the Visigoths, and the king of the Ostrogoths, both of whom lived in the fifth century.  One of them, or perhaps it took parts of both, became in legend Dietrich Von Bern, the man who Kriemhild asks to avenge Siegfried by killing Hagen in The Song of the Nibelungs. 

     The Song of the Nibelungs is like Beowulf in which there is a powerful and noble warrior famed for his deeds as well as his dragon.   Like Beowulf, certain characters in the story were people who were confirmed to have existed like Attila the Hun, called Etzel in this story.  This is where the subject becomes larger than I can cover in one half page of writing - identifying and discussing the other people in the Nibelunglied who have a place in history and their mutation into the subjects of fable.  The Nibelungs are also known by another more recognizable name: Burgundians. 

     Details about the other Theodoric may have crept into the legend of Dietrich because it was he that fought Attila the Hun at the Battle of the Fields of Cataluanian, called that in Jordanes's history but named as the Fields of Moirey by Gregory.  This Theodoric died in the battle, which strongly calls to mind the death of Theoden in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.  He is notable for another reason and that is that he is the son and heir of Alaric, the Visigoth whose sacking of Rome in 410 A.D. heralded the beginning of the period we call the Middle Ages.

     The Ostrothic Theodoric had a daughter Araigna, who he married to Sigismund, the King of Burgundy. Araigna resembles in no way the name of Kriemhild but the father of the legendary Siegfried is called Siegmund.  Since there is no standard spelling for names and things; spelling varies a great deal depending on the writer at this time.  However the Nibelungenlied calls this Siegmund 'King of the Netherlands' and his son Siegfried is born in Xanten along the Rhine, now part of Germany.  To this I would add that Clovis's queen, Clotild, was a Burgundian princess and the history of the Merovinians may have been added to the soup.

     Gregory had little to say about either Theodoric.  To know more, you have to turn to Jordanes's The Origins and Deeds of the Goths, a book written around 551 A.D. probably in Constantinople.  It is a summary of a multi-volume work by the scholar Cassiodorus in the service and at the court of Dietrich.   The history written by Cassiodorus is lost and all that remains now is the summary written by Jordanes as a favor to a friend.

     If you wonder what happened to many of these books, look no further than the book burners at the Catholic Church.  "What has Ingeld to do with Christ?" was the famous pronouncement of Alcuin of York.  the Church burned many a book that they deemed was not suitably Christian in nature.  St. Patrick of Ireland himself destroyed 71 books!  I find it ironic that a man, whose life is so celebrated in Ireland, did so much to destroy its culture and heritage.  I cannot bring myself to drink green beer anymore since I read about this in a preface to a book by Peter Berresford Ellis.

I am stopping here but there clearly is more to say on the topic of both Theodorics.

Beatles Song of the Week

"Fuit viginti anni abhinc hodie,

Centurion Piper docuit symphoria ludere,

Agebant interior et exterior moris,

Sed sponsi sunt subrisum tollere.

Tunc licet ad vos tradere,

Actores sciebatis pro omnibus his annis, 

Centurion Piperi  Cordum Solitariorum Symphonia."