cultural

Jordanes Composes the Getica

Date

551

Part of

cultural

In 551 at Constantinople, Jordanes wrote the Getica, a Gothic history that framed Rome’s wars with Goths for a Byzantine audience. A foreign memory, edited in the imperial capital, shaped how victors remembered the vanquished [5][10].

What Happened

Amid wars and rebuilding, books kept appearing. In 551, Jordanes, likely a Gothic notary turned historian, wrote the Getica in or near Constantinople. He compressed Cassiodorus’s lost work and oral traditions into a narrative that traced Gothic origins and their long collision with Rome. It was a sympathetic summary written within the empire’s walls, under its laws, and in the shadow of its dome [5][10].

The Getica offered the capital a mirror: the enemy as seen by one who shared their tongue. Jordanes wrote of migrations, kings, and battles, placing Gothic fortunes alongside Roman cycles. The text traveled quickly, read by those who administered newly won Italian territories. In Ravenna and Rome, officials could hold a solidus of Justinian in one hand and the Getica in the other, reading the people they now governed in a voice that did not spit only contempt [5].

The work also reveals Byzantine cultural posture: confident enough to host alternative memories, eager to organize them within its own narrative. Jordanes wrote for minds shaped by Justinian’s laws and Hagia Sophia’s sermons; he framed barbarians with categories those minds understood. When he described Totila and other Gothic figures, he did so in a key intelligible to those who had read Procopius’s accounts of the same war [1][10].

In the city, the clatter of scribes copied the text; the blue of the Bosporus gleamed under scribal windows. The empire, even as it fought, curated. And curation is a form of rule: it set the terms by which future generations would remember foes and justify the costs paid to defeat them.

Why This Matters

Getica’s impact lies in memory management. By summarizing Gothic history within Constantinople’s intellectual orbit, it gave administrators and readers a framework to understand a conquered people. Understanding can be governance; it softens edges and supplies narratives for sermons and edicts [5][10].

Under our themes, this touches “Capital as Instrument of Power.” The capital processed not only taxes and troops but also stories. The same machinery that codified law and struck coin also curated histories that domesticated the past for imperial use [12][14].

As part of the larger arc, Jordanes’s work sits amid events—the Gothic War’s end, Justinian’s later years—where consolidation required not just forts and mints but legitimacy. If your subjects can be imagined inside your story, they are easier to rule. The Getica helped write them in.