Flavius Theodericus of the Amal family (Theodoric the Great) was king of the Ostrogoths from 474 to 526 CE. From 493 CE, he also reigned over Italy. Because of the length of his reign and the importance of the kingdom he ruled, many extant sources bear witness to his life and his kingdom. The most important of these are Jordanes’ Getica, a historical work on the Goths written in the early 550s CE, and the Anonymus Valesianus II, an early 9th-century CE account of the events of Italy between 474 and 526 CE, which is based on 6th-ce…