Witiges

Witiges or Vitiges (d. 540) was the king of the Ostrogoths from 536 to 540. He succeeded to the throne of Italy in the midst of the Gothic War, as Belisarius had quickly captured Sicily the previous year and was currently in southern Italy at the head of the forces of Justinian I, the Eastern Emperor. Witiges was the husband of Amalasuntha's only surviving child, Mathesuentha, a marriage designed to bolster his claim to kingship. The panegyric upon the wedding (in 536) was delivered by Cassiodorus, the praetorian prefect, and survives, a traditionally Roman form of rhetoric that set the Gothic dynasty in a flatteringly Roman light. Witiges had Theodahad murdered after the imprisonment and death of his mother-in-law. Justinian's general Belisarius took both Witiges and Mathesuentha as captives to Constantinople, and Witiges died there, without any children. After his death Mathesuentha married Germanus the patrician, a cousin of the Emperor, in a similar dynastic union.

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540: Events...

Ostrogoth: This article deals with the continental Ostrogoths. For information on the Ostrogoths that Jordanes placed in Scandinavia, see Ostrogothia, Scandza and Geats....

Gothic War: The Gothic War, 535–552, was the expression of Justinian's decision in 535 to reverse the course of events of the past century in the West and win back for the Eastern Roman Empire the provinces of Italy that had been lost, first to Odoacer and then to the Ostrogoth Theodoric the Great....