The Crown of the West
BELISARIUS FIRED OFF an angry letter to Constantinople, holding Narses responsible for the debacle in Milan. Justinian agreed and recalled Narses from his command. Belisarius now had a free hand to conduct the war as he saw fit.
By late 540, Belisarius had knocked out the remaining Gothic strongholds one by one, and his men were at the walls of Ravenna. Vitiges lost hope and agreed to enter into surrender negotiations. Belisarius was on the verge of total victory when two senators arrived from Constantinople with orders from Justinian. The Persians, they said, were making preparations for war, and he was needed at once in the east. Belisarius was instructed to make peace quickly, on terms favourable to the Goths, leaving them with half their treasure and all territories north of the River Po.
Belisarius was floored by the letter. He must have thought Justinian was trying to make him insane with frustration. Why surrender so much now, when he was close to bringing the whole of Italy back into the fold? Vitiges, on the other hand, thought it all sounded too good to be true. He said he would only put his name to the deal if Belisarius, whom he respected, did so as well. But Belisarius flatly refused. He told the senators he would not sign the agreement without an explicit order from Justinian.
For a few days no one knew what to do. Then Vitiges came to Belisarius privately and put an extraordinary offer to him: how would the general like to be the emperor of a revived western Roman empire, with the army of the Goths at his disposal?
Belisarius thought for a moment, and said that he would.
BELISARIUS MADE ARRANGEMENTS with his own men, and then sent private assurances to Vitiges that he would indeed accept the crown of the west, and would do no harm to the Goths once he had entered the city. The gates of Ravenna were flung open, and Belisarius marched in peacefully with his army, bringing with them much-needed grain supplies. Procopius observed the entry of the Roman army into Ravenna, and wondered how it was that such a small imperial force could have subdued a much larger barbarian force. He concluded that God’s hand was at work here, as it was with all things.
Belisarius took possession of the palace and the Gothic treasury, but keeping to his agreement with Vitiges, he left private fortunes intact. No houses were looted, the people of Ravenna were left unharmed, and Vitiges was treated as an honoured prisoner.
After five brutal years, Italy had been won back for the Roman empire, but at a catastrophic cost to its inhabitants: the cities of the ancient heartland were wrecked, its fields and crops destroyed. War and famine had left the landscape strewn with bones.
IT WAS SOME TIME before Vitiges realised he’d been duped. Belisarius had no intention of betraying Justinian and setting himself up as emperor of the west. Instead Belisarius returned to Constantinople with Vitiges, the treasure of the Goths and the glad news that the whole of Italy had been reincorporated into the Roman empire. What further proof of his loyalty could he offer Justinian than his refusal of the crown of Italy?
Belisarius was now even more wildly popular in the capital. People camped outside his house and followed him around the city, hoping to catch a glimpse of his famous figure. He was, Procopius records, ‘tall and remarkably handsome’, but without a touch of arrogance in his dealings with the common people.
This time, however, there was no triumph in the Hippodrome and the general received a frosty welcome from his emperor, who was furious with him for disregarding his orders to return immediately to the Persian front. In truth, Vitiges and the Goths were just a sideshow; the only power in the world that could truly threaten the existence of Justinian’s empire was Persia. And even if Belisarius had proved his loyalty by renouncing the title of ‘emperor’ of the west, it was certainly unwelcome news – to both Justinian and Theodora – that Belisarius had been considered worthy of it in the first place. Only seven years had passed since a howling mob had set up Hypatius as a rival emperor in the Hippodrome. Hypatius had also once been a friend to Justinian.
And what exactly had Belisarius, for all his labours, ‘won’ for the empire anyway? Italy was a starving wasteland, Rome a ruined city, Milan burnt to the ground, and his duplicity with the Goths guaranteed they would pick up their swords again before too long. Meanwhile in the east, the Persians were ready to make their move.
IN 540 KHUSRAU’S ARMIES attacked Roman outposts in Mesopotamia and Syria. The Eternal Peace had lasted nine years. The Persians bypassed Dara this time, and swung south to take Sura, and then Aleppo, which was burnt to the ground when it refused to pay a ransom.
By June, Khusrau was at the walls of Antioch, the empire’s rich but thinly defended third city. The terrified Roman garrison was allowed to leave unmolested, but the citizens of Antioch bravely resolved to take up the city’s defence. The Persians prevailed through the weight of numbers, and Khusrau extracted a terrible revenge for their defiance: Antioch was sacked and burnt, and the survivors were taken into slavery. Khusrau, well pleased with his victory, walked down to the shores of the Mediterranean, took a swim, then turned back for home with wagons of gold and slaves trailing behind him. He built a new town near Ctesiphon to house his new Antiochian slaves, and gave it the ridiculous name of ‘Weh Antiok Khusrau’, or ‘Khusrau’s Town That Is Better Than Antioch’.
Justinian was offered a humiliating new treaty: a down payment of five thousand pounds of gold, with an additional five hundred payable to the Persians every year to follow. The emperor had no choice but to accept. Even so, the next year Khusrau was tempted to break his treaty agreement again, attacking the Black Sea town of Lazica.
Justinian retaliated by sending Belisarius into Mesopotamia, where he defeated a Persian army near Nisibis, but he was unable to take the city and was recalled back home.
The great general seemed distracted. According to Procopius, his lassitude was brought on by the discovery that his wife Antonina had been conducting a secret love affair with their adopted son.
ANTONINA HAD BECOME Theodora’s closest friend and co-conspirator. The two women had already engineered the dismissal of John of Cappadocia, whom they considered a mutual enemy. When Belisarius discovered his wife and their adopted son Theodosius had become lovers, he suspected the empress had had a hand in the matter. The on-again, off-again liaison sickened and depressed Belisarius, but Antonina connived with Theodora to force him to tolerate the affair. It seems likely that Theodora intended to undermine Belisarius’s prestige by making a cuckold out of him.
Procopius records sympathetically that Belisarius was so brokenhearted by his humiliation, ‘he failed even to remember the time when he was a man; sweating, dizzy and trembling, he counted himself lost; devoured by slavish fears and mortal worry, he was completely emasculated’. The treacherous Theodosius, however, died soon after of dysentery and Belisarius’s spirits slowly recovered.
In 542 Justinian sent Belisarius back to the east to launch a counterattack against the Persians. The general swiftly took the Persian fort of Sisaurana, and sent out his Arab allies, the Ghassanids, to harass Persian settlements along the Tigris River. But the conflict ended indecisively when a strange sickness broke out in both camps, causing them to retreat in confusion.
Pestis
During those times there was a plague that came close to wiping out the whole of mankind. Now for all the calamities that fall upon us from the heavens it might be possible for some bold man to venture a theory regarding their causes . . . But about this calamity there is no way to find any justification, to give a rational account, or even to cope with it mentally, except by referring it to God.
Procopius, The Wars of Justinian, 2.22.1
AS THE GLORIOUS decade of the 530s came to a close, three ominous portents were observed within Justinian’s realm. Procopius records that in 536 the sky dimmed for the better part of a year, during which, he wrote, ‘the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon’.* A year later a comet shaped like a swordfish appeared in the skies for forty days and nights. At sea, there w
ere troubling reports of ghostly bronze ships, seen gliding swiftly across the waters of the eastern Mediterranean, piloted by headless men in black, clutching staffs of burning bronze.
The first report of a deadly plague came in 541 from Pelusium, an Egyptian town near Suez. The outbreak travelled from village to village along the Nile and in September it reached the great port of Alexandria, the empire’s second city.
Sailors and dockworkers were the first to feel the sickness, starting with flu-like symptoms: a headache, weariness, fever and vomiting. Hideous, bulbous swellings would appear on the upper thighs and around the genital area, as well as in the armpits and around the neck, accompanied by terrible, agonising pain. Often the fingertips and toes would blacken from gangrene. Sometimes the swelllings would erupt in an explosion of pus. Some sufferers would sink into a coma and die. Others would experience convulsions and madness. Many died vomiting blood, the result of internal haemorrhaging.
THE PATHOGEN RESPONSIBLE for this misery was Yersinia pestis, a rod-shaped bacterium that went about its deadly work under several layers of concealment, as a parasite within a parasite within a pest. The lethal microbe is ingested into the gut of a flea from an infected animal. The flea then attaches itself to the fur of a black rat, bites down into the rat’s flesh and begins to draw up blood. But the bacterium blocks the entry of blood into the flea’s gut, and the blood is regurgitated back into the wound, along with the bacteria, and the rat is infected. Starved for food, the flea becomes frantic with hunger and bites into any mammal it can find nearby, including humans. And in the Roman world, rats were always found near humans, feeding on their grain and refuse.
Once it enters the human bloodstream, Y. pestis is carried to the body’s lymphatic system, causing painful swellings or buboes (hence ‘bubonic plague’). Sometimes the bacteria would lodge in the lungs instead, forcing the victim to cough and project a spray of minute, bloody droplets onto others.
Flea infected with Yersinia pestis.
public domain/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
Carried within the hold of ships, the infected, rat-borne fleas were ferried across the Mediterranean. Merchant ships that sailed out to sea with apparently healthy crews were ravaged by the plague, leaving unmanned, corpse-laden vessels bobbing around the Mediterranean. Ships that made it to foreign ports unwittingly let loose their infected cargo into the grain stores along the wharves, and from there into the greater city. In this way the pathogen moved across the eastern Mediterranean. There would be a brief distant warning of its impending arrival, then the disaster would engulf the port, the city and the towns beyond.
THE PESTILENCE ARRIVED in Constantinople in 542. Within ten days the city was utterly transformed. There was a terrifying absence of moral logic to the plague. It struck down rich and poor, virtuous and wicked alike. Procopius records the death rate in the city leapt to five thousand a day, and then to ten – probably a wild guess, but it says something of the staggering scale of the epidemic. Hospitals were quickly overwhelmed. Doctors were helpless to explain the plague’s origins, let alone how to treat it.
Family members struggled desperately to care for the sick. Inevitably, they too fell ill and died: ‘houses large and small, beautiful and desirable . . . suddenly became tombs for their inhabitants, and . . . not one of them escaped who might remove their corpses out from within the house’.
The sudden onset of the plague created eerie and ghastly scenes. John of Ephesus reports of ‘bridal chambers where the brides were adorned (in finery), but all of a sudden, there were just lifeless and fearsome corpses’. Workplaces fell silent: ‘It might happen that a person was sitting at work on his craft,’ wrote John of Ephesus, ‘holding his tools in his hands and working, and he would totter to the side and his soul would escape . . . The entire city then came to a standstill as if it had perished’. Outside the city, entire villages perished together, leaving fields unharvested and cattle to wander across the countryside.
At first, families were able to bury their dead, but as the mortality rate soared, every tomb was filled. The prefect of the city ordered workers to tear the roofs off the towers of the fortress of Galata, on the far side of the Golden Horn, and had the dead dumped inside. That too was quickly filled to capacity, generating a rank stench that caught the breeze and pervaded the city. Then there were not enough people left to dig burial pits and so the bodies were left to rot in the streets.
The daily round of death and infection elicited acts of great tenderness, even from hardened criminals. The Blues and Greens suspended their hostilities to help each other bury their dead. Before venturing outside, people took care to attach an identifying tag to their wrists, in case they fell down in the street. Food production came to a halt, and so the pestilence was followed by famine.
An epidemic caused by a pathogen as lethal to humans as Y. pestis usually runs its course quickly if it kills the host too rapidly for that person to circulate and transmit the disease. The really successful pathogens behave like the common cold, leaving their hosts well enough to go out and sneeze in crowded places. But the true target of Y. pestis was not a human, but a rat. The human megadeaths were just collateral damage; if anything, the corpses helped things along by providing more food for the rats. But the rats and other animals were also suffering from the plague. With such an indiscriminate killer, who could possibly understand the meaning of it all?
AFTER MONTHS OF RAGING HELL, the rat and human population of Constantinople crashed so hard that the progress of the disease halted. By August 542 the plague was mostly spent, but not vanquished. Constantinople would suffer recurrences of the plague in 558, 573 and 599. Those who survived were often marked for life with an ugly scar, a shuffling gait or a thickened tongue.
The population of Constantinople in early 542 was estimated at half a million people. Within the space of four months, it seems the city lost between 50,000 and 200,000 people, almost half of its citizens, to plague and starvation.
THE PLAGUE OF JUSTINIAN, as it came to be known, fell so quickly and violently it could only be interpreted as a punishment from God upon the whole world. John of Ephesus saw the epidemic as a mighty winepress of God’s wrath, trampling people like fine grapes. The traumatised survivors sat in their silent, empty houses, homes once filled with busy people and noisy children, wondering if their sins had in some way contributed to this terrible tribulation.
Today we know the plague was the work of an invisibly small germ going about its business with no thought of the welfare of its host in mind, but the Romans of Constantinople could always see an extra element of causation in any event, good or bad. If the science of microbiology had been known to them, their likely response would have been, ‘But who placed the germ in the flea? Whose hand guided the rat?’
Today we have more science at hand to explain why things happened as they did, but we are not inherently wiser nor any less superstitious. They were just as we are – bewildered people living through tumultuous times, trying to make sense of the world with limited information.
AT THE HEIGHT of the epidemic, Justinian too fell gravely ill and took to his bed, leaving Theodora in charge. The imperial couple had produced no children, so Theodora set her mind to work on who would succeed her husband if he failed to recover. As she was contemplating her next move, news of the emperor’s illness reached Belisarius and the senior army command in the east. By now, wary of Theodora’s intrigues, they agreed they would not recognise any new emperor chosen in Constantinople without their consent.
When she heard of this agreement, Theodora pushed back hard; she recalled Belisarius to Constantinople, and stripped him of his wealth and his personal guard, leaving the command of the eastern front in disarray. Khusrau, however, could do little to take advantage of the chaos, as the plague was also coursing through the Persian lands, creating similar scenes of devastation in Ctesiphon and other Persian cities.
Justinian recovered to rise from his sickbed
and assess the damage to his capital and empire. His dream of a restoration of Roman supremacy was in tatters. The death of so many soldiers and taxpayers had devastated his armies and shrivelled imperial revenue. Despite the setbacks, he returned to his desk and authorised emergency austerity measures: road maintenance and postal services were cut, and he was obliged to turn a blind eye to the sale of governorships. The sudden absence of manpower sent wages soaring, a problem Justinian typically tried to solve through an edict, which failed to have any effect. He was forced to suspend soldiers’ pay, a dangerous move that led his army in Italy to extort money from the locals, who were already being squeezed hard by the emperor’s predatory tax collectors. Landowners who couldn’t pay were compelled to sell themselves into slavery. Justinian’s ‘Romans’ were becoming deeply hated among the people they had come to save from ‘barbarian’ rule.
A new, revolutionary Gothic leader named Totila harnessed the discontent in Italy and rallied a new army to his cause. Totila called for the liberation of slaves, the redistribution of land and an end to imperial taxes. Before long, large numbers of imperial troops were defecting to his side. By the end of the plague year of 542, Totila was in control of Naples and most of the Italian countryside. Justinian’s hapless commanders in Italy drafted a letter informing the emperor that the situation was hopeless and that Italy would have to be abandoned.
But cash-strapped and undermanned as he was, Justinian simply could not cut his losses and accept a contraction of the borders he had fought so hard to extend. And so the emperor turned unabashedly, once again, to his miracle worker, Belisarius. The general was sent to Ravenna, with a tiny force of unpaid, unhappy troops. He doggedly tried to break Totila’s siege on Rome, but a discontented soldier inside the city opened the gates and the Goths rushed in. The population of the once-teeming imperial city had, by now, plummeted to fewer than a thousand souls. The remaining inhabitants were sent away unharmed while the walls, the palaces and the arsenals were pulled apart. ‘For a few weeks,’ wrote one historian, ‘Rome was a deserted city, given up to the wolf and the owl.’
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