Witiges

Witiges or Vitiges (died 540) was King of the Ostrogoths in Italy from 536 to 540.

He succeeded to the throne of Italy in the early stages 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 Roman Emperor. Witiges was the husband of Amalasuntha's only surviving child, Matasuntha, 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 the patrician Germanus Justinus, a nephew of Justinian I by his sister Vigilantia.

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