He was to do so, quietly and efficiently, for the next thirty-three years, and the extraordinary mausoleum which he built for himself–and which still stands in the northeastern suburbs of Ravenna–perfectly symbolises, in its half-classical, half-barbaric architectural strength, a colossus who himself bestrode two civilisations. No other Germanic ruler, setting up his throne on the ruins of the Western Empire, possessed a fraction of Theodoric’s statesmanship and political vision. When he died, on 30 August 526, Italy lost the greatest of her early medieval rulers, unequalled until the days of Charlemagne.
The scene is now set for the appearance of perhaps the greatest of all the Byzantine Emperors–and Empresses–after Constantine himself. Justinian was born in 482 in a small Thracian village. He came from humble stock, and was already thirty-six when in 518 his uncle Justin, a rough, barely literate soldier who had somehow risen to command one of the crack palace regiments, succeeded the eighty-seven-year-old Emperor Anastasius on the throne of Constantinople. Precisely how he managed to do so remains unknown; there was almost certainly a coup of some kind, and it is more than likely that his nephew had a hand in it.
Justinian must have come to Constantinople as a child; he would not otherwise have been known as a man of wide education and culture, of a kind that he could not possibly have acquired outside the capital. His uncle was consequently only too happy to defer to Justinian’s infinitely superior intelligence and to allow him, as his éminence grise, effectively to govern the Empire. He had been doing so with consummate ability for two or three years when he met his future wife, Theodora. She was not, to put it mildly, an ideal match. Her father had been a bear-keeper at the Hippodrome, her mother a performer in the circus, and she herself had done little to improve her acceptability into polite society. The descriptions of her depravity given by her contemporary Procopius in his Secret History can–one hopes–be taken with more than a pinch of salt;42 but there can be little doubt that at least in her youth, as our grandparents would have put it, she was no better than she should have been.
By the time she caught the eye of Justinian, however, she was in her middle thirties–beautiful and intelligent as ever, but with all the wisdom and maturity that had been so noticeably absent in earlier years. Such obstacles to the marriage as presented themselves were quickly overcome, and in 525 the Patriarch43 declared Justinian and Theodora man and wife. Only two years later, on the death of Justin, they found themselves the sole and supreme rulers of the Roman Empire. The plural is important. Theodora was to be no Empress Consort. At her husband’s insistence she was to reign at his side, taking decisions in his name and participating in the highest affairs of state. Her future appearances on the public stage were to be very different from those of the past.
Justinian is probably best remembered today for the sublime monument he left behind him: the third Church of St Sophia–the first two having been destroyed by fire–which he built in five years between 532 and 537.44 Almost as astonishing was his complete recodification of Roman law: removing all contradictions, ensuring that there was nothing incompatible with Christian doctrine, substituting clarity and concision for confusion and chaos. For our purposes, however, his greatest achievement was his recovery of the Empire of the West. To him it was clear that a Roman Empire without Rome was an absurdity, and he was fortunate in having as his instrument the most brilliant general in all Byzantine history, a Romanised Thracian like himself named Belisarius.
The first territory to be singled out for reconquest was the Vandal kingdom in North Africa. Belisarius was given his orders, and on or about Midsummer Day 533 the expedition set sail: 5,000 cavalry and 10,000 infantry–at least half of them barbarian mercenaries, mostly Huns–travelling in 500 transports, escorted by ninety-two dromons.45 The Vandal king Gelimer and his men put up a spirited resistance, but the Hun cavalry–hideous, savage and implacable–was too much for them. In two separate battles, that cavalry charged; on both occasions the Vandals turned and fled; and on Sunday, 15 September 533, Belisarius made his formal entry into Carthage. Gelimer himself did not surrender at once. For three months in the depths of winter he wandered in the mountains; in January 534, knowing that he was surrounded, he sent a request for a sponge, a loaf of bread and a lyre, his messenger explaining that he needed the first for a sore eye, and the second to satisfy a craving for real bread after weeks of unleavened peasant dough. As for the third, it appeared that he had devoted his time in hiding to the composition of a dirge bewailing his recent misfortunes, and was eager to try it out. Not until March did he give himself up.
Now it was the turn of Ostrogothic Italy. With an army surprisingly reduced in size–some 7,500 men altogether, though once again containing a large contingent of Huns–Belisarius sailed straight to Sicily, which he took without a struggle. Then, in the late spring of 536, he crossed the Straits of Messina and pressed onward up the peninsula, meeting no resistance until he reached Naples–which, on its eventual surrender, paid a heavy price for its heroism. The murder, rapine and pillage which followed was appalling even by the standards of the time, the pagan Huns in particular having no compunction in burning down the churches in which their intended victims had taken refuge. The news soon spread to Rome, where Pope Silverius hastily invited Belisarius to occupy the city, and on 9 December 536 the Byzantine army marched in through the Porta Asinaria near St John Lateran, while the Goths hurried out through the Porta Flaminia.
But if Silverius had hoped to spare Rome yet another siege, he was disappointed. Belisarius himself knew perfectly well that the Goths would be back and immediately began defence preparations; it was just as well that he did, because in March 537 the Gothic army took up its positions around the walls. The ensuing siege–which began with the cutting of all the aqueducts, thus dealing Rome a blow from which it was not to recover for a thousand years–lasted for a year and nine days. It might well have continued even longer had not substantial reinforcements arrived just in time from Constantinople. Even then the struggle was not over. The Goths refused absolutely to give in, and for another three years the peninsula was to be fought over, ravaged and laid waste from one end to the other.
The end came in a manner which, in the minds of many, reflects little credit on Belisarius. He had slowly closed in on Ravenna–now the Gothic capital, just as it had been the Byzantine one–and by the spring of 540 he had the city surrounded, by his army on land and by the imperial fleet at sea. One night a secret emissary arrived from the Gothic court with an extraordinary proposal: they would deliver up the crown to Belisarius on the understanding that he should proclaim himself Emperor of the West. Many an imperial general would have seized such an opportunity; the bulk of his army would probably have supported him, and with the Goths at his back he would have been more than capable of dealing with any punitive expedition from Constantinople. Belisarius’s loyalty never wavered, but he suddenly saw a means of bringing the war to a quick and victorious end. He immediately signified that the offer had been accepted, and the imperial army marched into the city.
As the chief Gothic nobles were carried off into captivity they must have reflected bitterly on the perfidy of the general who had betrayed them. Belisarius, on the other hand, was unmoved. The Goths’ proposal had been in itself perfidious; were they not all of them rebels against the imperial authority? War was war, and by occupying Ravenna as he had done he had saved untold bloodshed on both sides. In May 540 he took ship for the Bosphorus feeling, we may be sure, nothing but satisfaction with a job well done. After his recovery of North Africa the Emperor had awarded him a splendid Triumph; what might he not expect this time, having delivered the whole Italian peninsula, including Ravenna and even Rome itself, into Justinian’s hands?
Alas, there was no feeling of victory in the air when he returned to Constantinople. Neither Justinian nor his subjects were in any mood for celebration. In June 540, only a few weeks after the fall of Ravenna, the troops of the Persian King Chosroes had invaded the Empire a
nd destroyed Antioch, massacring most of its inhabitants and sending the rest into slavery. The general’s presence was urgently required–not in the Hippodrome but on the eastern front.
Fortunately it turned out that Chosroes had been out for plunder rather than conquest; in return for 5,000 pounds of gold and the promise of another 500 each succeeding year he turned happily back to Persia. Even so, Belisarius never received his reward. He was unlucky enough to fall foul of the Empress Theodora, and in 542, while Justinian–stricken by plague–lay between life and death, she relieved the general of his eastern command, disbanded his magnificent household and confiscated all his accumulated treasure. In the following year, when the Emperor was sufficiently recovered to reassert his authority, Belisarius was pardoned and restored to favour, up to a point; but it was a sadder and wiser man–though he was still under forty–who returned in May 544 to Italy.
He found all his work there undone. Justinian had obviously been informed of the Goths’ offer of the throne to Belisarius, and was terrified lest any of the Commander’s successors should succumb to the same temptation. Accordingly he had entrusted Italy to no less than five subordinate generals, giving no single one of them authority over the rest; left to themselves, they had simply divided up the territory between them and settled down to plunder it. Within weeks the demoralisation of the Byzantine army in Italy was complete, and the way was clear for the rise of by far the most attractive–and, after Theodoric, the greatest–of all the Gothic rulers. His name, according to the evidence of every one of his coins, was Baduila, but even in his lifetime he seems to have been universally known as Totila, and it is thus that he has gone down in history.
On Totila’s accession to the Gothic throne in 541 he was still in his early twenties, but wise before his time. He never forgot that the majority of his subjects were not Goths, but Italians. In the days of Theodoric and his successors, relations between Italian and Goth had been close and cordial; since the victories of Belisarius, however, the Italian aristocracy had thrown in its lot with the Empire. It was therefore to the humbler echelons of Italian society–the middle class, the urban proletariat and the peasantry–that the young ruler made his appeal. He promised them an end to Byzantine oppression. The slaves would be liberated, the great estates broken up, the land redistributed; no longer would their taxes be used to maintain a huge and corrupt court, to build vast palaces a thousand miles away or to pay protection money to distant barbarian tribes of whom no Italian had ever heard. He struck an immediate chord. Within three years virtually the entire peninsula was under his control, and in January 544 the Byzantine generals in their various redoubts simply gave up. Respectfully they informed the Emperor that they could no longer defend the imperial cause in Italy. It was their letter, almost certainly, that decided Justinian to send back Belisarius.
Belisarius did what he could. Almost at once, however, he saw several defections by imperial troops–many of whom had received no pay for well over a year–and realised that it was no longer just the Goths who were actively hostile to the Empire; it was the vast majority of the population. With the forces at his command he might just succeed in maintaining an imperial presence in Italy, but he could not hope to reconquer the whole peninsula. In May 545 he wrote personally to the Emperor:
Sire, you must be plainly told that the greatest part of your army has enlisted and is now serving under the enemy’s standards. If the mere sending of Belisarius to Italy were all that were necessary, your preparations for war would be perfect; but if you would overcome your enemies you must do something more than this, for a general is nothing without his officers. First and foremost you must send me my own guards, both cavalry and foot-soldiers; secondly, a large number of Huns and other barbarians; and thirdly, the money with which they may all be paid.
But from Constantinople there came no response. The following year, after yet another long siege, Totila captured Rome. Immediately he sent ambassadors to the Emperor offering peace on the basis of the old dispensation as it had been under Theodoric, but Justinian refused to listen. To have done so would have meant writing off ten years’ campaigning, and admitting the defeat not only of his armies but of his most cherished ambitions. Nor, on the other hand, would he give his general the support he needed.46 And so the situation in Italy deteriorated into a stalemate, and early in 549 Belisarius, frustrated and disillusioned, was ordered home.
He found the Emperor deeply depressed. Theodora had died of cancer some months before; her husband was to mourn her for the rest of his life. He also had a major theological crisis on his hands–of the kind that arose in Byzantium with distressing frequency–and while he was still determined on the reconquest of Italy he was for the moment incapable of giving the matter the attention it deserved. Not until 551 did news from the peninsula finally sting him into action. Totila had staged a full-scale revival of the traditional Games in the Circus Maximus, and had personally presided over them from the imperial box. Meanwhile his fleet was ravaging both Italy and Sicily, and had recently returned to Rome loaded to the gunwales with plunder. This double insult was too much. At last Justinian decided on an all-out effort. Whether he offered Belisarius command of a third expedition is uncertain; such an offer is nowhere recorded, but would probably anyway have been refused. Belisarius had had enough. The Emperor’s choice was his own first cousin, Germanus, but Germanus died of a fever before even setting sail. His second was even more surprising: a septuagenarian Armenian eunuch called Narses.
Narses was no soldier. Most of his life had been spent in the Palace, where he had risen to be commander of the imperial bodyguard, but this was more a domestic appointment than a military one. Justinian had, however, sent him to Italy in 538, ostensibly in command of a body of troops to swell the Byzantine army during the Goths’ siege of Rome but in fact to keep an eye on Belisarius, whose youth, brilliance and unconcealed ambition were already making the Emperor uneasy. There Narses had shown himself to be a superb organiser, strong-willed and determined; thirteen years later he had lost none of his energy or his decisiveness. He also knew his Emperor better than any man alive, and easily persuaded him to make available a far greater army than he had intended for Germanus: at least 35,000 men, most of them barbarians but also including a number of Persians captured during the recent war with Chosroes.
Not until the early summer of 552 did Narses begin his march into Italy. Still lacking the ships to transport his army, he was obliged to take the land route, advancing round the head of the Adriatic to Ravenna, where he provided what was left of the local troops with their long overdue arrears of pay. He then headed south across the Apennines and down the Via Flaminia towards Rome, Totila marching northward up the same road to block his path. They met near the little village of Taginae, for what was to prove the decisive encounter of the entire war. The Gothic army was progressively outflanked and out-fought and finally, as the sun was sinking, took flight. Totila himself, mortally wounded, fled with the rest but died a few hours later.
For the Goths all hope was now lost, but they did not surrender. Unanimously they acclaimed Teia, one of the bravest of Totila’s generals, as his successor and continued the struggle. Narses meanwhile pursued his journey south, city after city opening its gates to the conquerors. Rome itself fell after a brief siege–changing hands for the fifth time since the beginning of Justinian’s reign–but still the old eunuch marched on. Totila, he had learned, had deposited vast reserves of treasure and bullion at Cumae on the Bay of Naples; Narses was determined to lay his hands on it before it was spirited away. Teia was equally determined to stop him, and at the end of October, in the Sarno valley just a mile or two from the already long-forgotten Pompeii, the two armies met for the last time. Teia was felled by a well-aimed javelin, but even after his head had been impaled on a lance and raised aloft for all to see, there was to be no retreat: his men battled on until the evening of the following day. By the terms of the subsequent treaty, the Goths undertook to leave Ital
y and to engage in no further warfare against the Empire. Justinian’s grandest ambition was realised at last.
History offers few examples of a campaign as swift and decisive as that of Narses being successfully concluded by a general in his mid-seventies–nor, surely, any more persuasive argument in favour of castration. Almost unbelievably, however, just as the ancient Armenian was marching his men into Italy in the spring of 552, another, smaller Byzantine expeditionary force had landed in Spain under the command of a general older still. His name was Liberius, and he is recorded as having been Praetorian Prefect of Italy sixty years before, in the days of Theodoric. At the time of which we are speaking, therefore, he cannot possibly have been less than eighty-five.
By now Spain was firmly in the hands of the Visigoths, who had first arrived there–in the wake of several other barbarian tribes–in 416, and who in 418 had made a pact with Rome by the terms of which they agreed to recognise the sovereignty of the Empire. The position was thus very much the same as it had been in Italy under Theodoric, with a Roman landowning aristocracy living comfortably on its estates, perfectly satisfied with the status quo and doubtless grateful that the immense distance separating them from Constantinople reduced imperial interference to the point of imperceptibility. For them and their Visigothic masters, the first warning of the approaching storm came with Belisarius’s recovery of North Africa from the Vandals in 533, and his eviction of a Visigothic garrison from the port of Septem (now Ceuta) the following year. An attempt by the Visigothic king Theodis to seize it back in 547 ended in disaster; his protests that the Romans had cheated by attacking on a Sunday while he was in church did not alter the fact that his army had been annihilated, and he himself met his death shortly afterwards at the hands of an assassin.
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