[Footnote 2:  “Et Ravennam cum exercitu fugiens pervenit.”  Anon.  Valesii, 50.]

After Verona, Theodoric had received the submission of a part of Odoacer’s army under Tufa.  When he had possessed himself of Milan, he sent these renegades and certain nobles with their men from his own army, apparently under the leadership of Tufa, to besiege Ravenna.  They came down the Aemilian Way as far as Faventia (Faenza).  There no doubt a road left the great highway for the impregnable city of the marshes.  At Faventia, then, Theodoric expected to begin to blockade Ravenna.  In this he was mistaken.  Suddenly Tufa deserted his new master, was joined by Odoacer, who came to Faventia, and certain of the Ostrogothic nobles, if not all of them, were slaughtered.  The expedition was lost and not the expedition alone:  Milan was no longer safe.  Therefore Theodoric evacuated that city, always almost indefensible, and occupied Ticinum (Pavia), which was naturally defended by the Ticino and the Po.  There he established himself in winter quarters.

A new diversion from the west, a frustrated attack of Gundobald and his Burgundians, kept Theodoric busy for a year.  Meantime Odoacer appeared in the plain, retook and held all the country between Faventia and Cremona and even visited Milan, which he chastised.  Then in August 490 Theodoric met him on the Adda, and again Odoacer was defeated, and again he fled back to Ravenna.  All over Italy his cause tottered, was betrayed, or failed.  A general massacre of the confederate troops throughout the peninsula seems to have occurred.  And by the end of the year there remained to him but Ravenna, his fortress, and the two cities that it commanded, Cesena upon the Aemilian Way and Rimini in the midst of the narrow pass at the head of the Via Flaminia.  Theodoric himself began the siege of Ravenna.

This siege, the first that Ravenna had ever experienced, endured for near three years, from the autumn of 490 to the spring of 493. “Et mox” says a chronicle of the time, “subsecutus est eum patricius Theodoricus veniens in Pineta, et fixit fossatum, obsidiens Odoacrem clausum per trienum in Ravenna et factus est usque ad sex solidos modicus tritici...."[1] Theodoric established himself in a fortified camp in the Pineta with a view to preventing food or reinforcements arriving to his enemy from the sea.  Ravenna was closed upon all sides and before the end of the siege corn rose in the beleaguered city to famine price, some seventy-two shillings of our money per peck, and the inhabitants were forced to eat the skins of animals and all sorts of offal, and many died of hunger.

[Footnote 1:  Anon.  Valesii.]