15 Facts About Ostrogoths

The Ostrogoths themselves were more commonly referred to simply as Goths even in the 5th century, but before then they were referred to once, in a poem by Claudian which associates them with a group of Greuthungi, settled as a military unit in Phrygia.

Ostrogoths were one of several peoples referred to more generally as Goths.

Ostrogoths, not mentioned until later, are associated with the Greuthungi who lived further east.

Nature of the divisions of the Goths before the arrival of the Huns is uncertain, but throughout all their history the Ostrogoths are only mentioned by that name very rarely, and normally in very uncertain contexts.

Ostrogoths were first definitely mentioned more than one hundred years later than the Tervingi in 399, and this is the only certain mention of this name at all before the Amals created their kingdom of Italy.

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In 484 the Ostrogoths had been called the Valameriaci because they followed Theodoric, a descendant of Valamir.

Ostrogoths was adopted as a "son in arms", named as a friend of the emperor, and given the status of patricius and commander-in-chief.

Ostrogoths's childhood was spent at Constantinople as a diplomatic hostage, where he was carefully educated.

Ostrogoths saw the Pope as an authority not only in the church but over Rome itself.

Ostrogoths was at once king of the Goths and successor, though without any imperial titles, of the Western Roman emperors.

Atop this infighting, the Ostrogoths faced the doctrinal challenges incurred from their Arian Christianity, which both the aristocracy of Byzantium and the Papacy strongly opposed—so much that it brought them together.

In 535, he commissioned Belisarius to attack the Ostrogoths following the success he had in North Africa against the Vandals.

Ostrogoths made as if to accept the offer, rode to Ravenna to be crowned, and promptly arrested the leaders of the Goths and reclaimed their entire kingdom—no halfway settlements—for the Empire.

Frankish entry onto the geopolitical map of Europe bears into play: had the Ostrogoths attained more military success against the Byzantines on the battlefield by combining the strength of other Germanic tribes, this could have changed the direction of Frankish loyalty.

The implication was that these Ostrogoths were living there in the 6th century, during the lifetime of Jordanes or his source Cassiodorus—the same period when there was a powerful Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy.