The Fighter King (Paperback)

In 552, a Gothic king lay dying on an Italian battlefield, cut down while the empire he had spent a decade humiliating finally closed its trap. Ten years earlier, Baduila had inherited a shattered kingdom of fewer than five thousand fighters, a broken succession, and a starving population. What he built from that wreckage was extraordinary: victories that routed Byzantine armies twenty thousand strong, a revolution that freed slaves and tenant farmers from the estates of Rome's senatorial elite, and not one but three conquests of Rome itself. Michael De La Cour traces this astonishing decade in full - the tactical brilliance at Faventia and Mucellium, the brutal calculus of the Naples blockade, the coinage that quietly proclaimed a king Byzantine chroniclers tried to erase from memory, and the diplomatic humiliation that drove one final, fatal gamble against the Empire's most capable general. Drawing on Procopius, Gregory the Great, and the revisionist scholarship of Marco Cristini and Peter Heather, this is narrative history at its most vivid: a study of power, propaganda, and the fragile line between resurgence and ruin. Baduila's Italy did not survive him - but for one decade, he made an empire tremble.

Michael De La Cour first encountered the Ostrogothic collapse of Roman Italy while researching a family history that traced, however tenuously, back to Norman settlers in County Clare, and found himself unable to look away from the sixth century's forgotten drama. Now based on the west coast of Ireland, he has spent years reading Procopius against the grain and following the numismatic trail that modern scholars have used to recover Baduila's own name from beneath centuries of Byzantine propaganda. His writing favours the underdog kings and collapsing empires that mainstream popular history tends to pass over, and he brings the same patient, source-driven curiosity to each new subject. This is his latest work of narrative nonfiction exploring the twilight of the ancient Mediterranean world.