Justinian’s Legacy : The Last War of Roman Italy

This thematic collection of essays seeks to explore the impact of Justinian's campaigns against the Ostrogothic Kingdom (535-553 AD) on the social and material contours of late Roman Italy. The nearly two decades of conflict between Goths and Byzantines provoked the collapse of the stable Romano-Ostrogothic polity that had prevailed for a half-century after the fall of the western Empire. In the postwar period, Italy became an unstable extension of the Eastern empire, a peripheral province governed and defended by agents of the distant court in Constantinople, who were unable to prevent further invasions and the political fragmentation of the peninsula. While Justinian’s war against the Goths has long been viewed as a pivotal moment in Italian history, many questions remain about how and to what extent the conflict and the advent of the new Byzantine regime upset existing structures and provoked ruptures with the past in social, administrative, economic, topographical, and environmental terms.