Our guide Danielle smiled. ‘That’s no angel,’ she said. ‘It’s Nike, the goddess of winged victory. You’ll notice she has the tunic of a Persian soldier impaled on her spear. Angels don’t normally do that sort of thing.’
When I asked why Nike happened to look so much like an angel, Danielle explained that when the empire was Christianised, it became fashionable for wealthy Romans to sponsor art that would depict them in the company of angels. ‘The artists and sculptors would ask, “What do angels look like?” and they would say “Well, you know, they’re beautiful, with wings and billowing robes.” The artists already had templates for Nike so they just went ahead and used those.’
THE IMAGE OF NIKE, concealed in the form of an angel, flourished in the post-Roman world, even as her name declined into obscurity. Then, in 1971, a classically educated salesman for a sports shoe company in Oregon had a dream of the goddess of winged victory. He came to work the next day and suggested the company change its name from Blue Ribbon Sports to Nike. The new brand was attached to a ‘swoosh’ logo and today her name sits at the masthead of a global enterprise with questionable labour practices, just as she once did for the Roman empire two thousand years ago.
Belisarius and the Vandals
AS THE MIRACULOUS FORM of the Hagia Sophia rose up to dominate the city skyline, Justinian received word that Kavadh was dead and had been succeeded by his son Khusrau. Justinian sent emissaries to Ctesiphon where they found the new Shahanshah amenable to some kind of settlement, and so a ‘Treaty of Eternal Peace’ was concluded between the Roman empire and Sassanid Persia. The two emperors agreed to recognise each other as equals, and pledged themselves to mutual assistance against raiding tribes of barbarians. The treaty left Khusrau free to deal with his internal problems, and gave Justinian a free hand to pursue his most cherished territorial ambition: the recovery of the lost lands of the west.
The Romans had been thrown out of North Africa by the Vandals, who had conquered Carthage in 439 and made it the seat of their new kingdom. Early in his reign, Justinian had begun a friendly correspondence with the Vandal king, Hilderic, who had Roman blood on his mother’s side and had accepted Orthodox Christianity. The emperor was coaxing Hilderic towards a voluntary re-entry into the empire, but in 531, Hilderic was overthrown by his cousin Gelimer. Justinian sent a letter of protest to Carthage. Gelimer replied by telling Justinian to mind his own business.
Justinian’s mind was now set on war. He brought Belisarius back from the eastern front and ordered him to take Carthage and bring the wayward province of North Africa back into the Roman fold. John of Cappadocia set out his objections: the campaign would involve a risky sea voyage; if the venture failed it would be a year before they found out about it; and even if they did succeed, it would be nearly impossible to hold Carthage, unless they also held Sicily.
Justinian was unmoved by John’s objections, and in June 533 watched from his balcony as Belisarius’s fleet of transports and warships sailed past the Bucoleon Palace on their way to North Africa. Also on deck was Belisarius’s wife, Antonina.
Antonina was, like her best friend Theodora, a daughter of the Hippodrome, brought up in a family of charioteers. She was older than Belisarius, and had several children from an earlier marriage. Like Theodora, she was street-smart, politically astute and closely bound to her talented husband. Belisarius relied on her advice and she accompanied him everywhere.
Also on board the flagship was Procopius, who liked Antonina no better than Theodora. Even so, he was obliged to credit her intelligence. As the invasion fleet crossed the Adriatic, the supplies of hardtack were found to be mouldy. The water supplies were spoilt too, and the jars cracked, except for those aboard Belisarius’s ship. Procopius records that Antonina had arranged for a bed of sand to be constructed below deck, and had buried the glass water bottles within it, keeping the jars unbroken and the water free of algae.
THE FLEET SAILED SOUTH-WEST and anchored in Sicily for supplies, where Belisarius received some welcome intelligence that the Vandal fleet had abandoned Carthage to quell an uprising in Sardinia. The city was, for the moment, wide open to attack. Belisarius gave the order to sail at once for the North African coast. He set his infantry and cavalry down on a beach 140 miles south of Carthage, then marched north. Gelimer could do nothing to stop the Roman advance and barely escaped in time. So quick was the victory that when Belisarius and Antonina entered Carthage, they sat down to a feast that had been prepared for Gelimer and hastily abandoned.
Gelimer sent an appeal to his brother Tzazo, who was with the Vandal fleet in Sardinia, and together they regrouped and launched a counterattack. Rather than face a siege, Belisarius led his men out of the city to confront the Vandal army. Gelimer had the greater numbers, but Belisarius’s troops were better trained and more disciplined, and the Goths reeled under the ferocity of the Roman attack. Tzazo was killed in the fighting and the Vandal king fled to the mountains. When he was eventually discovered by a detachment of Roman soldiers, he appeared to have lost his mind.
BELISARIUS WROTE to inform his emperor that North Africa was once again a Roman province. Justinian was overjoyed, and awarded Belisarius a Triumph, an honour not granted by an emperor to a commander for more than five centuries. Belisarius sailed back to Constantinople and was greeted as a hero. Centuries earlier, Julius Caesar had received the adulation of the crowd from a chariot; this time Belisarius simply marched with his soldiers into the Hippodrome on foot, followed by wagons of looted treasure, as the ecstatic crowd raised cheer after cheer.
Gelimer, as an honoured prisoner, was led into the Hippodrome in chains, but given a purple cloak to identify him to the crowd as the defeated barbarian king. As he saw Justinian sitting in glory upon his high throne in the kathisma, Gelimer was overheard to mutter, ‘Vanity, vanity, all is vanity’. He was stripped of his cloak and forced to prostrate himself before Justinian, who chose to be merciful. Gelimer was awarded lands in Galatia and permitted to live there in peace with his family.
Temple Menorah.
Creative Commons
Among the plundered goods seen in the Hippodrome that day was the menorah, the seven-branched Jewish candelabra that had been seized from the Temple of Jerusalem in 71 AD, and brought to Rome. The menorah had, in turn, been plundered by the Vandals during the sack of Rome in 455 and carried off to Carthage. The candelabra was recognised by Jewish rabbis who were among the cheering crowds in the Hippodrome that day. The next day the rabbis came to the Great Palace to plead for the menorah’s return, warning that the same bad luck that had brought down Rome and Carthage would fall upon Constantinople if the emperor did not return the menorah to where it belonged. Justinian agreed, and had the candelabra, along with other precious objects from the Temple, sent back to Jerusalem.
ALSO SITTING AMONG the cheering crowds that day, eyeing the chests of Vandal treasure circling the Hippodrome, were the ambassadors of Khusrau. In their diplomatic communications, Justinian and Khusrau had taken to referring to each other as ‘brothers’. Surely, the Persian ambassadors argued, brother emperors should share their plunder, particularly when such riches had only been made possible by the peace granted to the emperor by Khusrau. Justinian could not agree to such a division of the spoils, but he took care to send lavish gifts to the Shahanshah instead, which did nothing to satisfy Khusrau’s envy.
Belisarius and the Goths
THE RECONQUEST OF NORTH AFRICA opened the way for the recovery of the Italian peninsula. Both Italy and Sicily were under the control of another Germanic tribe, the Ostrogoths – or Eastern Goths – who had settled there in large numbers forty years earlier. Belisarius sailed from Constantinople with a force of 7500 men, with instructions to begin with Sicily. Procopius records that the general took the port of Palermo by an ingenious method: he sailed his ships close to the sea walls, then sent archers up high into the rigging, from where they fired down upon the garrison troops inside and then leapt down onto the battlements. The Goth
defenders panicked and surrendered the port. The rest of Sicily was taken with ease.
Belisarius now had a strategic base for an assault on the Italian mainland. He transported his army across the straits of Messina onto the toe of the Italian boot, and marched his men north towards Naples. The city’s walls were fiercely defended by Jews and Arian Christians, who had no desire to live under Orthodox rule. They held out for three weeks. Belisarius had a small force and no siege towers, so he cast about for another solution. One of his men followed a disused aqueduct, and found that it led into a narrow water culvert under the battlements. Belisarius sent a single file of four hundred men to crawl into it. They emerged, swords in hand, in the centre of the city, at the same time as another regiment attacked from outside the gates. The city surrendered.
Now the great prize of Rome itself lay before Belisarius. Vitiges, the king of the Ostrogoths, announced he would not defend it, and withdrew to consolidate his forces in Ravenna. Pope Silverius sent Belisarius a wary invitation to come north, and in December the imperial army marched into the Eternal City through the Porta Asinaria. ‘So it was,’ wrote Procopius with a sigh of satisfaction, ‘that Rome once again, after a period of sixty years, became subject to the Romans.’
Theodora wanted to replace Pope Silverius with a more compliant figure, and she sent strongly worded instructions to Belisarius to strip him of his papal office. But it was the empress’s friend Antonina who did the sacking.
Silverius was brought into the mausoleum of the Pincian Palace in Rome, where he saw Antonina reclining on a couch, with Belisarius sitting awkwardly at her feet.
‘Tell us, Lord Pope Silverius,’ she complained imperiously, ‘what we have done to you and to the Romans that you should wish to betray us into the hands of the Goths?’ As she spoke, a soldier stripped away Silverius’s papal vestments. He was taken away, put into a common monk’s robe and exiled to a craggy island in the Tyrrhenian Sea where he died of starvation.
BELISARIUS HAD NO TIME to enjoy his victory. He had only five thousand men, and he expected Vitiges to return in force before long. Preparations were set in train for a long siege. The Aurelian Walls were repaired and strengthened, but Belisarius’s numbers were so thin, he had to order the closure of several gates. Early in the new year, Vitiges arrived at the walls with fifty thousand Gothic troops, ten times Belisarius’s numbers. Citizens begged the general to surrender. Instead he appealed to Constantinople for troops and supplies; Justinian duly sent another sixteen hundred men to Italy.
It wasn’t nearly enough. Justinian, it seems, couldn’t let go of the notion that he could reconquer the west on the cheap, relying on Belisarius to keep pulling off unlikely victories. Vitiges surrounded the city, cutting off supply. Belisarius had no choice but to sit tight and wait for a change in fortune, or for Justinian to properly reinforce his small band of defenders.
Vitiges then ordered the destruction of Rome’s aqueducts. After centuries of continuous use, the city’s great fountains and baths dried up, and the mills used to grind flour came to a standstill. Belisarius responded to the flour shortage ingeniously, by mounting transportable mills onto the River Tiber, and so bread production could continue for the moment, but the destruction of the aqueducts would hobble Rome’s growth for another thousand years.
Vitiges tried another approach. He sent four tall siege towers trundling towards the ramparts, dragged by teams of oxen. When Belisarius was alerted to the danger, he ran up to the battlements and fired two arrow bolts, felling two Gothic soldiers on the towers. He handed the bow to one of his men and told them to do the same thing to the oxen. The attack was stalled and the siege towers had to be abandoned in the field.
Still Vitiges kept feeling for cracks in the city’s defences. A contingent of Goths attempted to climb the walls alongside the Mausoleum of Hadrian. Belisarius ordered his soldiers to rip out the ancient marble statues from the roof of the tomb and hurl them onto the invaders’ heads as they climbed up their ladders. The attack was thwarted, but the glory of Rome, which Belisarius had fought so hard to redeem for the empire, was slowly being dismantled.
Belisarius was forced into further improvisations, as the mood soured within the city and the hardships deepened. There were food shortages and rumours of cannibalism. At last, in November, five thousand imperial cavalry and infantry arrived from the east. Vitiges asked for a truce.
During the negotiations, Belisarius sent two thousand horsemen, led by a headstrong lieutenant named John, on a raiding mission into Tuscany. John was under strict instructions not to stray too far north and get himself stranded in enemy territory. John ignored this command and led his men as far as Rimini, just thirty-five miles south of the Gothic capital of Ravenna.
When word of this reached Vitiges, he broke off truce negotiations and lashed out with a final series of attacks on the walls of Rome. The last assault was at the legendary Milvian Bridge, where Belisarius hammered the half-starved, disease-ridden Goths into a retreat. The siege, which had lasted a year and nine days, was over, but the prize of Rome was wrecked.
Vitiges marched his demoralised men north, back towards Ravenna. Belisarius saw that John and his horsemen were about to be enveloped by the enemy, and sent a message to John, ordering him to withdraw at once.
Narses
IT WAS AT THIS MOMENT that things started to get away from Belisarius. John flatly refused to obey. Belisarius was furious. Vitiges, as expected, arrived at the walls of Rimini with a far larger force than John’s meagre detachment. Belisarius was pondering whether to send troops to rescue John, or simply leave him to die with his men as the price for his bad behaviour, when ten thousand imperial troops landed on the north Italian coast.
The new force was led by Narses the eunuch, one of Justinian’s most trusted advisors, last seen bribing the Blues in the Hippodrome. Narses was a shrewd political operator, gifted at palace intrigue, but with no military experience. He was close to Theodora, and it might have been her idea to send a reliable operator to keep an eye on the glamorous and popular general. Narses presented Belisarius with new, carefully worded orders from Justinian: ‘It is our wish that Belisarius alone shall lead the whole army as he sees fit, and he should be obeyed, as far as it is in the interest of our State.’ The second part of that sentence gave Narses a loophole big enough to drive a war elephant through. Reading between the lines, Belisarius could only infer that while he would continue to direct all military decisions, Narses was now empowered to veto him in the name of state policy.
With all this in the back of his mind, Belisarius held a war council to discuss the predicament of John and his two thousand troops pinned down in Rimini. Belisarius stated bluntly that it was his belief they should leave John and his men to face the consequences of their insubordination, that it was just too risky to send a relief force so deep into Gothic territory. One by one, his officers nodded in agreement. Then Narses, who was a friend to John, spoke up. He argued that if Rimini fell to the Goths, and John and his men were captured, the empire would lose a commander, an army and a city. The enemy still had the greater numbers across Italy. If the Goths retook Rimini, he said, it would raise their morale and put the whole Italian campaign in danger.
‘As for John,’ the eunuch said, turning to Belisarius, ‘if he has treated your orders with contempt, it will be within your power to deal with him as you like, once the city is relieved. But you should make sure that in punishing him for any mistakes he has made through ignorance, that you don’t punish the emperor and his subjects as well.’
It was an awkward moment. Belisarius backed down, and agreed they would relieve Rimini.
Belisarius buried his resentment and launched a brilliant attack on the Gothic camps outside Rimini from land and sea. Duped into thinking they were surrounded, Vitiges’s men trudged back to Ravenna. Belisarius’s tactics had won the day, but even Procopius had to concede that Narses had been right to insist on the rescue in the first place. Belisarius entered the cit
y and found John looking thin and pale. The rebellious captain did not apologise for his conduct, and pointedly offered his thanks for his rescue only to Narses.
BELISARIUS AND NARSES were now rival commanders competing for the loyalties of the imperial armies. The competition at first served the empire well, as the two separate forces conquered town after town across the north of the Italian peninsula. But then the split between the rival commands widened, and the city of Milan fell into the abyss.
Milan was the largest and richest city in northern Italy. Belisarius’s men had taken it from the Goths in 539 and maintained a small garrison there. Vitiges thought it might be vulnerable and appealed to the King of the Franks for aid, offering him a share of the spoils if he could send an army to help retake Milan. The commander of the beleaguered garrison inside the city smuggled out a plea for help. Belisarius at once sent an order to the nearest commander to relieve the garrison. But the commander in question happened to be John, who sniffed that he would only proceed with Narses’s authorisation.
Exasperated, Belisarius wrote to Narses, who agreed to give the order, but it was too late. The Franks had made the garrison an offer: if they surrendered, they would be allowed to leave the city unharmed. To the citizens, they promised nothing. The men of the imperial garrison, who had been reduced to eating dogs and rats, accepted the offer and staggered out the city gates, leaving the city wide open to the Frankish army. Every man in the city was slaughtered. Every woman and child was either butchered or taken into slavery, and the city was burnt to the ground.
If Milan had been lost to the Romans, it had been lost to the Goths as well. A brutal famine set in across the war-ravaged countryside. A desperate Vitiges now reached out over the heads of the Romans to Ctesiphon. He bribed two Ligurian priests to carry a letter to the Persians. The letter advised Khusrau that if he were thinking of making a move against the Romans, now would be an excellent time, while the bulk of Justinian’s forces were pinned down in Italy. Envious of Justinian’s recent successes, Khusrau accepted the message, and planned accordingly.
Ghost Empire Page 11
