A few pockets of resistance remained. The garrison at Cumae held out for a few months longer and — thanks largely to belated Frankish support - one or two cities north of the Po remained at least technically in Gothic hands for longer still; not for another nine years was Narses able to send his master the keys of Verona. But it was that desperate battle beneath Vesuvius that marked, for all practical purposes, the defeat of the Goths in Italy. Justinian's grandest ambition was realized 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 middle eighties; nor, surely, any more persuasive argument in favour of castration. Almost unbelievably, however, just as that 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 who was older still. His name was Liberius, and he is recorded as having been Praetorian Prefect of Italy sixty years before, in Theodoric's day; at the time of which we are speaking, therefore, he cannot possibly have been less than eighty-five.
Compared with the reconquest of Italy the Spanish campaign was never more than a side-show, and its story can be quickly told. By now Spain was firmly in the hands of the Visigoths, who had first arrived there in the early fifth century and who in 418 had made a pact with Rome by the terms of which they agreed to recognize the sovereignty of the Empire. The position was thus very much the same as it had been in Italy under Theodoric, with a Roman land-owning 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 im-perceptibility. For them and their Visigothic masters, the first warning of the approaching storm came with Belisarius's recovery of Vandal North Africa 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 wnile ne was at 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.
Then, in 551, Theodis's second successor, King Agila, found himself faced with two simultaneous rebellions: one by the Romans of Cordova and one, larger and far more serious, by his own kinsman, Athanagild. He fought back with courage and determination, and it was not long before Athanagild appealed to the Emperor for help.1 Here was precisely the opportunity Justinian had been waiting for. Despite the exigences of the Italian campaign and his chronic shortage of manpower, he ordered that a small force - perhaps one or two thousand at the most - should be detached from Narses's army and sent under Liberius to Spain for the support of Athanagild and the protection of the Roman insurgents. Landing on the south-east coast, they met with little resistance: the Visigothic army was already hopelessly divided between those who were loyal to Agila and those who had thrown in their lot with the rebellion. Before long Liberius effectively controlled the whole area south of a line drawn from Valencia to Cadiz, including Cordova. In 555 Agila was murdered by his own troops and Athanagild assumed the throne without opposition.
Had the new King agreed to rule as an imperial vassal, all would have been well; such, however, had never been his intention and he soon made it clear to Liberius that he expected him and his army to withdraw as soon as they conveniently could. The old man - who was clearly every bit as good a diplomat as he was a general - agreed in principle, but gradually persuaded Athanagild to negotiate; and finally an agreement was reached between them according to which the Empire kept much of the territory it had conquered. But its soldiers were few, and its lines of communication dangerously long; and Justinian was obliged to acknowledge that a good seven-eighths of the peninsula lay beyond his power. On the other hand, he retained the Balearic Islands which, together with Corsica and Sardinia (reconquered respectively by Belisarius and Narses) gave him a firm base in the western Mediterranean, and he could boast that the Empire now once again extended from the Black Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. The expedition may not have been a complete success; but it was certainly not a failure.
1 The Visigoths, like almost all the barbarian tribes, were devout Arians; according to Bishop Isidore of Seville, however, Athanagild was secretly a Catholic - in other words, an orthodox Christian. If he is right, Justinian would doubtless have been even more eager to go to his assistance.
When the army of Narses drove the Goths out of Rome for the last time, Pope Vigilius was not present to preside over the services of thanksgiving. He was still in Constantinople, ever more inextricably enmeshed in the dispute over the Three Chapters. The hostility aroused by his Judicature had compelled him to revoke the offending document in 5 50; and though in August of that year he had secretly sworn to Justinian a written oath that he would continue to use all his influence on his behalf, his efforts to regain the control - and, more difficult still, the respect - of the Western Churches had inevitably led him further and further away from the Emperor's own position. Relations between the two became still more strained the following year, when Justinian published a second edict, in the form of a long treatise in which he set forth - as if he himself were a one-man Ecumenical Council - his own interpretation of the basic tenets of Christianity, ending up with yet another violent condemnation of the Chapters. Prompted, no doubt, by many of the Western churchmen in the city, Vigilius protested that the edict went against the principles of Chalcedon and called upon the Emperor to withdraw it. Justinian, predictably, refused; whereupon the Pope summoned a meeting in his palace of all the bishops from both East and West who were present in the city. This assembly pronounced unanimously against the edict, solemnly forbidding any cleric to say mass in any church in which it was exhibited. When, a few days later, two prelates ignored this decree they were immediately excommunicated - as was (for the third time) the Patriarch himself.
On hearing the news, Justinian flew into a towering fury; and the Pope, suspecting that he was no longer safe from arrest, sought refuge in the Church of St Peter and St Paul, which the Emperor had recently built next to the Palace of Hormisdas.1 Scarcely had he reached it, however, when there arrived the Praetor of the People, who commanded the city police, with a company of the imperial guard. According to a party of Italian churchmen, who were eye-witnesses of what took place and who subsequently described it in detail to the Frankish ambassadors,2 they burst into the church with swords drawn and bows ready-strung and made straight for the Pope. He, seeing them, made a dash for the high altar; meanwhile the various priests and deacons surrounding him
This was a Constantinian building looking out on to the Marmara immediately to the south of St Sophia. It took its name from one of its first residents, a fugitive Persian who became one of the chief advisers to the Emperor Constantius.
Their letter will be found in Migne, Patrologia Latino, Vol. 69, Cols. 11 j-19.
remonstrated with the Praetor, and a scuffle ensued during which several of them were injured, though not seriously. The soldiers then seized hold of the Pope himself, who was by this time clinging tightly to the columns supporting the altar, and tried to drag him - some by the legs, some by the hair and others by the beard - forcibly away. But the more they pulled, the tighter he clung - until at last the columns themselves came loose and the altar crashed to the ground, narrowly missing his head.
By this time a considerable crowd, attracted by the commotion, had begun to protest vehemently against such treatment being accorded to the Vicar of Christ; the soldiers, too, were manifestly unhappy, and the Praetor wisely decided to withdraw, leaving a triumphant though badly shaken Vigilius to survey the damage. The next day there arrived a high-powered delegation, led by Belisarius, to express the Emperor's regrets for what had occurred and to give the Pope a formal assurance that he could return to his residence in the capital without fear of violence or apprehension.
The Pope returned at once, but soon found that he was being kept under so close a surveillance as to amount to something approaching house arrest. He realized, too, that if he were to break the present deadlock and maintain the prestige that he had striven so hard to recover among the Western Churches, he must once again take decisive action. Two nights before Christmas, in the late evening of 23 December 551, he squeezed his considerable bulk through a small window of the palace and took a boat across the Bosphorus to Chalcedon, where he made straight for the Church of St Euphemia. It was a clever move, and also a symbolic one in that he was deliberately associating himself with the scene of the Great Council of 451, distancing himself from the Emperor who was questioning its authority and taking refuge from him in the very building in which its sessions had been held exactly a century before. Once again a delegation under Belisarius came to plead with him, but this time he stood firm; and when a detachment of soldiers called a few days later they were content to arrest some of his priests, but made no attempt to lay hands on the Pope himself. Vigilius meanwhile composed a long letter to Justinian known as his Encyclica, in which he answered accusations made by the Emperor by giving his own account of the controversy as he saw it and once again proposing negotiations. In a less conciliatory mood, he also published his sentences of excommunication on the Patriarch and the two bishops who had incurred his wrath the previous August.
Negotiations were resumed in the spring, and in June Justinian decided on a major tactical concession: the Patriarch and other excommunicated bishops were dispatched to St Euphemia to apologize and humble themselves before Vigilius, after which the Pope returned to his palace. It was also agreed to annul all recent statements on both sides covering the Three Chapters, including the Emperor's edict. To the papal supporters it must have seemed like victory: if recent statements were annulled it was hardly likely that any more would be made, and with any luck the whole issue might now be allowed to fade back into the obscurity it deserved. But Justinian was not yet beaten. He now decreed a new Ecumenical Council to pronounce upon the matter once and for all, and invited Vigilius to preside.
In theory an Ecumenical Council of the Church was a convocation of bishops from every corner of Christendom. When all were gathered together it was believed that the Holy Spirit would descend on them, giving a sort of infallibility to their pronouncements. Their judgement was supreme, their decisions final. In practice, however, attendance was inevitably selective. If therefore the Church was split on any given issue, the outcome of the Council's deliberations would depend less on divine intervention than on the number of bishops from each side able to attend; and both Emperor and Pope knew full well that bishops were considerably thicker on the ground in the East than they were in the West, and that - particularly if the meetings were held in Constantinople - the Easterners would thus command a substantial majority. Vigilius accordingly suggested that the question should be put to a small committee composed of an equal number of representatives from both East and West, but Justinian refused; and after various other possibilities had been put forward and similarly rejected the Pope decided that his only chance lay in boycotting the assembly altogether. In consequence, when the Fifth Ecumenical Council eventually met in St Sophia on 5 May 553, under the presidency of Eutychius, Mennas's successor as Patriarch - of the 168 bishops present only eleven were from the West, and nine of these were African. Justinian too had elected to stay away since, he explained, he did not wish to influence the assembly; but his letter to the delegates, read aloud at the opening session, reminded them that they had already anathematized the Three Chapters. No one present could have had any doubt as to what was expected of him.
For over a week the deliberations continued; then, on 14 May, after repeated invitations to attend, the Pope produced what he described as a Constitutum, signed by himself and nineteen other Western churchmen. It was to some degree a compromise, in that it allowed that there were indeed certain grave errors in the writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia; but, it pointed out, the other two writers accused had been pronounced 'orthodox fathers' at Chalcedon. In any case, it was not proper to anathematize the dead. The present agitation over the Three Chapters was therefore unfounded and unnecessary, and itself to be condemned. Vigilius concluded by forbidding - 'by the authority of the Apostolic See, over which by the Grace of God we preside' - any ecclesiastic to venture any further opinion on the matter.
It was not till 25 May that the Pope formally sent a copy of his paper to the Palace. He cannot have expected it to be well received; neither, however, had he reckoned with the changed situation in Italy. Totila was dead; the Goths were defeated; no longer was it necessary to woo the Roman citizens in Italy for their support. Justinian had had more than enough of Vigilius, and now at last he could afford to treat him as he deserved. He made no reply to the Constitutum; instead, he sent one of his secretaries to the Council with a packet containing three documents. The first was the text of the Pope's secret declaration of June 547, anathematizing the Three Chapters; the second was his written oath of August 5 50, swearing to do everything in his power to bring about their condemnation; and the third was a decree that his name should be forthwith struck from the diptychs. This was tantamount to a sentence of excommunication on the Pope himself - though Justinian stressed that in repudiating Vigilius personally he was not severing communion with Rome.1 At its seventh session on 26 May the Council formally endorsed the Emperor's decree and condemned the Pope in its turn, 'until he should repent his errors'; and at its eighth and last, on 2 June, echoing the Emperor's second edict almost verbatim, it anathematized a whole series of heretics including Theodore and Theodoret. (Ibas escaped, on the grounds that the offending letter attributed to him had in fact been written by someone else.)
For Vigilius, it was the end of the road. Banished to an island in the Marmara, he was told that until he accepted the findings of the Council he would never be permitted to return to Rome. Not for another six months - by which time he was suffering agonies from kidney-stones -did he capitulate; but when at last he did so his surrender was absolute. In a letter to the Patriarch of 8 December he admitted all his previous errors, and two months later - almost certainly at Justinian's insistence -
1 Non sedem sed sedentem, 'not the scat but the sitter'.
he addressed to the Western Churches a second Constitutum in which he formally condemned the Three Chapters and all who dared uphold them; as for himself, 'whatever is brought forward or anywhere discovered in my name in their defence is hereby nullified'. He could not say more. By now too ill to travel, he remained another year in Constantinople and only then, during a brief respite from the pain, started for home. But the effort was too great. On the way, his condition suddenly grew worse. He was obliged to interrupt his journey at Syracuse; and there, broken alike in body and spirit, he died.
It is an almost universal characteristic among autocrats that they cling compulsively to power, to the detriment alike of their subjects and their reputation. If death had come to Justinian at the same time as it came to Pope Vigilius, he would have been genuinely mourned. By the re-conquest of Italy he had restored to his Empire its former frontiers and had made the Mediterranean once again a Roman lake; by the Council of Constantinople he had brought at least a semblance of unity to the Christian Church. His work was done, all his dominions at peace. He was seventy-three years old, his beloved Theodora was dead and it was time for him to follow her to the grave. But death did not come; indeed, it delayed its coming for another ten years. And the Empire suffered.
All through that last, unhappy decade of his life Justinian persistently refused to delegate his authority, while it became clearer and clearer to those around him that he no longer possessed either the ability or the appetite to wield it properly himself. 'The old man no longer cared for anything,' wrote a contemporary, 'his spirit was already in heaven.' Money - always a problem - was shorter than ever; but whereas in the old days the Emperor would have take
n steps himself to find at least part of what he needed, now he left it to his ministers to do the best they could. The defence of the frontier had always been one of his primary concerns: he had raised literally hundreds of walls and ramparts, of castles and strongholds, from the Euphrates to the Guadalquivir. But by 5 5 5 he had allowed the imperial army, which had once numbered 645,000 men, to shrink to a mere 150,000, while the great frontier fortresses stood desolate and abandoned. War, money, defence, even conquest - all these things had begun to bore him. Nowadays he cared only for religion, for the state of the Church - his Church - and for the endless theological disputations in which, true Byzantine that he was, he found both stimulus and relaxation.
Hostile neighbours were to be bought rather than fought, even though the exchequer had no funds with which to buy them. Thus the payment in 5 56 to the Great King of 30,000 gold solidi obtained a fifty-year peace treaty with Persia - well worth it, from Justinian's point of view, for the renunciation of all Persian claims on Lazica and for the opportunity for him to stand down his army along the seemingly endless eastern frontier. Unfortunately, protection money has always been a poor guarantee for the future; he who starts to pay it usually finds it very hard to stop. Sometimes, too, such methods proved impracticable. Only three years afterwards, in 559, meeting little resistance from the Danubian defences or from the long inner chain of forts that Justinian had erected behind them, a Hunnish tribe known as the Kotrigurs swarmed deep into imperial territory, striking southward into Thessaly and advancing eastward through Thrace to within twenty miles of the capital.
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