Barbarian settlements in Italy

This piece focuses on the Goths and Lombards, the two predominant barbarian groups which settled in the Italian territory during the Early Middle Ages.

Immigrants in Italy

In the Roman Empire, major cities had been as cosmopolitan as many of the metropolises of our modern globalised society. In studies of skeletons found buried on the outskirts of Rome, the strontium and oxygen present in the dental enamel of first molars (formed in the first three years of life) has verified the presence of many immigrants. At the site of the 2nd-4th century village of Vagnari in southern Italy (Puglia), a combination of oxygen isotopes and DNA analysis has documented the presence of a woman of East Asian descent, whose grave and burial goods, similar to those of her neighbours, did not mark her out as a ‘foreigner’.

_{Grave and burial goods from Vagnari}

Immigrants were often traders and entrepreneurs who came from other provinces and many, especially in late antiquity, were soldiers or slaves who were often sought out for their specialized skills.

How and where did new immigrant populations settle on the Italian peninsula?

_{Gothic settlement of Domagnano}

King Theodoric

_{The palace of King Theodoric in Ravenna}

The new palace was endowed with a church named for the Saviour and later renamed for Saint Martin (today called Sant’Apollinare Nuovo). As the Goths followed a variant of the Christian religion called Arianism, they also constructed a new cathedral with a baptistery to the north of the palace, as well as many other churches in the city and its suburbs. Theodoric, as self-titled head of the Empire in the West, also improved infrastructure such as the city walls and water channels of Ravenna and other Italian cities such as Rome, Verona, and Pavia, even building a palace in each of the latter two.

Public property in Lombard settlements

_{King Autari sends ambassadors to Childebert, King of the Franks to ask the hand of his sister Ingarde. Frescoes of the Teodolinda Chapel of the Duomo of Monza}

_{Fara in Abruzzo}