Meanwhile, by an extraordinary concatenation of intrigue and misfortune, Belisarius had been utterly disgraced and the command of the Eastern armies had been taken from him. But in the moment of danger it suited the ends of the Empress Theodora to restore him to favour; he was created Count of the Sacred Stable and was informed that he would be permitted to fight Totila and the Goths in Italy on condition that he would ask for no funds from the imperial treasury. It was with the greatest difficulty that he succeeded in raising a force of volunteers in Thrace, with whom he crossed over to Ravenna, intending to march at once towards Rome. But everywhere he found the Goths opposed to him, the imperial troops were defeated on the shores of the Adriatic, and after fortifying the little city of Pesaro, Belisarius took refuge in Ravenna, whence he sent a desperate appeal to Justinian. After a long time help came, indeed, but the relieving armies were commanded by generals who secretly hated Belisarius. Meanwhile, in 545, Totila had begun the siege of Rome, which was commanded by Bessas, the most corrupt of the governors under whom Italy had suffered. His defence is a record of inactivity, and Belisarius, checked at every turn, was unable to relieve him. The city had not been previously provisioned, as it had been for the former siege, and was driven to the last extremity of famine. Dogs and mice were eaten and were regarded as luxuries, and the dead bodies of horses and mules were sought for with avidity. The people plucked the nettles which grew about the walls, as they still do, and boiled them for food, and when all else failed they began to devour each other.
The citizens sent an embassy to the Gothic king and chose as their representative the deacon, Pelagius, who was made Pope nine years later. Totila treated him with profound respect, but before he had spoken refused to grant three requests which he expected the churchman to make. He declined beforehand to pardon Sicily for having gone over to the emperor and having supplied Rome with corn, to leave the walls of Rome standing, and lastly, to surrender the slaves who had fled to him from their Roman owners. Pelagius, disappointed by Totila’s tone, refused to ask anything else; he returned into the city and the frightful state of siege continued. The inhuman Bessas at last sold to the non-combatants a permission to escape if they could, and most of those who attempted it perished by famine or the sword.
Meanwhile, after much hesitation, Belisarius and the Byzantine leaders sailed from Durazzo, and Belisarius reached the mouth of the Tiber, while one of the leaders inflicted a defeat upon the Goths near Reggio. With consummate skill Belisarius made his preparations, seized Portus, and would perhaps have relieved Rome but for the foolish blunder of a colleague, who attacked Ostia at the wrong moment, failed, and was taken prisoner. Belisarius lost his presence of mind, retreated immediately, and soon fell ill of a fever. Thereupon certain Isaurian soldiers in Rome betrayed the Asinarian Gate to the Goths, and the whole Gothic army marched in without striking a blow, while the evil Bessas fled with his army, and in such haste that he left his ill-gotten treasure behind him. The Goths were again masters, but in spite of his previous threat Totila did not destroy Rome, being moved to moderation by a letter from Belisarius, who asked the barbarian king whether he would not rather be remembered in future ages as the preserver of the greatest city in the world, than as its destroyer. He had already torn down one-third of the walls, but he now desisted from further destruction, evacuated the defenceless city, and withdrew his army to the Alban hills. These things happened at the end of the year 546. Six weeks later Belisarius reoccupied Rome, and repaired the walls in a fortnight with such materials as he could collect from the ruins. Totila, enraged at learning that the city was again a stronghold, returned to attack it and was thrice repulsed. He fell back upon Tivoli, with his discontented army, and rebuilt the citadel he had before destroyed.
The stupendous conflict for the possession of Rome was not even now at an end, and though Totila longed to be revenged upon the south for its adherence to the imperial cause, he only succeeded in taking the little fortress of Rossano, near the site of ancient Sybaris, in spite of the efforts made by Belisarius to relieve it. The Byzantine general was rendered almost powerless by Justinian’s refusal to supply him with funds and men, and in the following year, 549, he returned to Constantinople. He had not arrived there before Perugia, which had been besieged for three years by a detachment of Totila’s troops, surrendered at last, and the king at once proceeded to besiege Rome again. Garrisoned now by picked troops, it might have resisted long; but the soldiers had already mutinied, in the previous year, because their pay was in arrears, and the promises made to win back their loyalty had probably not been fulfilled: from the walls the men could see the rich dress and accoutrements of those whom Totila had rewarded for betraying the city the first time; they hesitated, discussed among themselves, and decided the fate of Rome to their advantage. The gate of Saint Paul was opened to Totila in the night, and once more he entered without striking a blow. In the short fight that followed most of the loyal garrison were slain, but a few hundreds took refuge in the Mausoleum of Hadrian and were starved at last to an honourable surrender. Instead of destroying the city, Totila now set about rebuilding it, repopulating it, and stocking it with provisions; and he sent an embassy to Justinian to propose a peace. Justinian would not even receive the ambassadors; though the north of Italy was now practically in the hands of the Goths, Rome was theirs, and Totila was able to turn southwards at last, to satisfy his desire for vengeance upon Sicily.
In the beginning of 550 Reggio was forced to surrender. Totila had already crossed the straits, and for nearly two years he ravaged Sicily without mercy, and collected together a vast amount of plunder. Procopius dismisses Totila’s deeds during this time with a single short sentence, saying that the Goths then devastated almost all Sicily without opposition; but it is not hard to imagine the horrors that attended his long stay in the country. Dahn, Holm, and Hodgkin have extolled the character of the Gothic king, praising his generosity towards his enemies when he was the victor, his steadfast purpose and courage in adversity, his dignified bearing, his gentleness to the women of the vanquished, and the admirable control which he exercised over his savage soldiers even in moments when they could hardly have been blamed for some excess. But neither these historians nor those from whom they have derived their information have concealed the fact that Totila, like Theodoric, was subject to fits of anger, under the influence of which he sometimes exhibited barbarous cruelty; that he more than once caused a prisoner to be horribly mutilated, cutting off his hands, his nose, his ears, and even tearing out his tongue. It is true that these occasions were rare, and the provocation was often great; but he was a hot-tempered man who felt he had a right to act barbarously when his anger was just, and who remembered injuries long and resentfully. He had never forgiven Sicily for the help it had rendered Rome against him, he had expressly refused to pardon the Sicilians when Pelagius came to him as ambassador, and, now that Rome was his once more, now that he had regained possession of all Italy, and that Belisarius had been recalled, he gave the rein to his fury and turned his wild soldiers loose upon the peaceable islanders. It is clear that he had no intention of holding Sicily; he understood too well that with the small army at his command it would have been absolutely impossible to extend his power permanently so far. Had he intended to annex the island, he would certainly not have passed by Messina without reducing it to submission. His object was to exact compensation for an injury, and at the same time to make it impossible for the Sicilians to help the emperor as they had helped him before. So far as we are able to judge, he set to work with the deliberate purpose of so crippling the island’s resources as to make its recovery within a few years almost an impossibility. We read of no redeeming acts of mercy on his part during this time; we do not hear that he offered the islanders the alternative of serving under his standard; it is not stated, as it is so often in the accounts of his other campaigns, that he spared women and children and abstained from useless bloodshed: Procopius briefly says that Totila laid waste the
island, and we know that his raid upon it lasted nearly two years. He had ships at his command which he must have loaded again and again during that period with the rich spoils of the south, transferring the movable wealth of the island to the strong points he held in Italy; he took not only the corn, the gold, and the silver, but he carried off the herds, the flocks, and the horses in a wholesale spoliation, the like of which Sicily had probably never suffered before. It must have been a reign of terror. He garrisoned the stronger towns, such as Syracuse, Palermo, and Lilybaeum. Some of the cities in which there were imperial troops had indeed resisted him, and there can be no doubt that the Sicilians did what they could to defend themselves in the hope of speedy assistance from Constantinople; but all resistance was useless. That he maintained some kind of method in his mode of plundering is evident from the fact that he had created a quaestor or treasurer in the person of Spinus, a Roman, who was destined to liberate the island at last from the presence of the insatiable Goths. It appears that a Roman force was still in the neighbourhood of Catania, of which the walls had been destroyed, and that this Spinus, who chanced to be within the city, fell into the hands of the imperialists. Totila, being most anxious to set him free, offered to give in exchange for him a noble Roman lady whom he held captive, but the Romans objected that a woman was not an equivalent for so distinguished a personage as a quaestor. In fear of his life Spinus promised the Romans that he would persuade Totila to evacuate Sicily with the whole Gothic army. The Romans required him to bind himself by an oath, and they sent him to the Goths, keeping his wife as a hostage. As soon as he came into Totila’s presence, Spinus began to assure him that the Goths were making a great mistake in remaining in the island after having completely plundering it, merely in the hope of taking a few small places that held out against them; and he said that he had just heard that a large imperial force was already in Dalmatia, that it would proceed thence immediately to Liguria, and that it would be an easy matter for the enemy to make a descent upon the Goths there, and to carry off their wives and children and all their possessions. It would be better, he said, to oppose this plan by wintering in that region, and, moreover, if Totila conquered the imperialists there, it would not be hard for him to invade Sicily again.
Whether the Gothic king was only weary of plunder and irregular warfare, or whether, as Procopius says, he was really moved by the argument, which was sound enough, it is hard to determine; he did, however, leave Sicily almost immediately, after placing garrisons in four of the strongest points. Having loaded a number of vessels with booty, he embarked his troops, apparently from Catania, and crossed the straits again to Italy, leaving destruction and famine behind him. This was in 551.
He never returned. The man who was destined to drive the whole Gothic army to final ruin was already on his way to the Italian shore, well provided with all that he could need, with men and abundant money. He was the old Narses, once the favourite groom of the bedchamber, who had become grand chamberlain, and whose beardless, wrinkled face and sexless looks masked the mind of a great statesman and the heart of a fearless soldier. The young and great-limbed Goth horseman smiled at the thought of being opposed to an aged eunuch, a small wizened creature of seventy-five years; but Totila’s own days were numbered, and in less than two years the terrible remnant of humanity destroyed him and his successor and all their armies, and drove the handful of survivors out of Italy forever.
The end of the long struggle was short and quick. On hearing that Narses was appointed, Totila pressed the siege of Ancona, which had lasted long, and in Rome he made frantic efforts to increase his popularity by recalling the Roman senators and hastening the rebuilding of the city. At the moment when Ancona was about to fall an imperial fleet appeared a few miles to the northward, engaged the Gothic ships, destroyed most of them, and forced the Goths to burn the rest. Masters of the sea, the imperialists seized Sicily again under Artabanes the Armenian. In the north the Franks took advantage of Totila’s defeat to lay their hands on all they could think, but were as ready as the Goths to oppose the imperial army. Meanwhile the main body of Narses’ army arrived, a host made up of all the varied elements controlled by the Eastern Empire, comprising many Lombards and many Huns and thousands of warriors from minor tribes, but all perfectly controlled by the genius of the general, and all thirsting for Gothic blood and Italian spoil. They outflanked and outfought their opponents, and marched southwards through the Apennines by the Flaminian Way.
There Totila met them and came to his end. Many have described the great battle, telling how the imperial army spread out to the right and left, and caught and crushed the Gothic cavalry when it made its great charge upon the centre. The incidents of that day, the duels of chiefs, the wild advances, the furious fighting round the little hill that was the key of the field, the splendid riding of Totila and his obscure death, all these things are more like the tale of a Homeric battle fought in an earlier world than the romantic encounters of chivalry to which some writers have compared them. Indeed, the battle of the Apennines was almost the last of those that belong to ancient days.
One more such contest was to be fought, and was to be the very end of the Gothic episode; but before it came Narses had accomplished the greater part of his work in Italy. He took Rome with ease, after what could not be called a siege; many of the Gothic fortresses surrendered, and, though the Goths had elected their bravest warrior, Teias, to be king, he soon saw that nothing was left to him but to die for the cause that was already reduced to the last extremity. In the reign of Justinian Rome had been five times taken, and the keys of the city were now sent to him again, while Narses drove the remnant of the Goths steadily southwards.
The hunted army encamped at last by the bay of Naples, at the foot of the volcano and on the side towards Castellamare,º set out the little stream of the Sarno, and the remains of their fleet brought them provisions. Narses encamped on the bank of the river and waited, for the Goths had fortified the bridge and he had no ships. He knew also what despairing men could do, and he would not attack them until he was sure that the struggle would be short and final, or until they attacked him; and meanwhile he corrupted the commander of their ships. When these had been betrayed into his hands, the Goths retired a little way further inland, to an eminence now called Monte Lettere.
All authors who have described this final battle have, as is usual in accounts of the Gothic war, taken their material from Procopius. It may interest the reader, therefore, to read a literal translation of his own account, remembering that he was a contemporary and a soldier, as well as an historian, and that although he was not present at this fight, he knew the ground well, and received his information from an eye-witness, probably from Narses himself.
“At last,” he says, “a Goth betrayed to the Romans all the enemy’s fleet, and innumerable ships arrived from Sicily and from other parts of the Empire. At the same time Narses disheartened the barbarians by placing wooden towers on the river bank. Fearing these engines, and suffering from lack of provisions, they took refuge on a hill near by, which the Romans call, in Latin, ‘Milk Hill.’ The Roman army could not follow them to that point, as the inequality of the ground was against them. But the barbarians did not cease to regret that they had ascended thither, when their want had so greatly increased that they no longer had food for themselves or their horses. Thinking, therefore, that it was better to die in battle than to perish by hunger, they attacked the Romans, when the latter anticipated nothing of the sort, and suddenly made an unexpected charge. The Romans repelled the assault as well as they could, considering the time and circumstances, their line not being marshalled according to their generals, nor in classes, nor by numbers, and they being neither separated from each other in ordered ranks, nor able to hear the commands given in the battle; but as chance decided, so they opposed the enemy with all their might. And first the Goths dismounted, left their horses, and stood on foot, turning their faces to the enemy, so that their line was in a high posit
ion. Then, when the Romans saw this, they also sent away their horses, and ranged themselves in a similar order of battle.
“I shall here,” continues Procopius, “describe this memorable battle, in which Teias, by his splendid behaviour, proved himself equal, in warlike bravery, to any of the heroes, while the despair of their present situation imparted courage to the Goths; and the Romans, seeing them to be desperate, fought with all their strength, ashamed to yield to inferior numbers; and each fell upon those nearest, most furiously, while those on the one side sought death, and those on the other desired praise for their constancy. The fight began in the morning; Teias, protected by a shield, and brandishing his spear, stood out with a few others before the line. When the Romans recognized him, they thought that if he fell the combat would thereupon be broken off, and all who dared united against him, of whom there was a great number. All thrust at him with their spears, and some hurled them, while he, receiving their darts upon the shield with which he covered himself, in a sudden rush slew many in their midst. Seeing his shield full of the shafts that stuck in it, he passed it to one of the men armed with shields, and seized another. When he had spent a third part of the day thus fighting, it happened that he was hardly able to move the shield, in which twelve darts were planted, nor to repel the assailants with it. Then he earnestly called to one of the shield-armed men, not moving even one finger’s breadth from the spot, not drawing back his foot, nor suffering the enemy to advance. On the contrary, he neither turned round, nor set his back against his shield, nor bent to one side, but as if he were cleaving to the soil, he stood fast in his tracks, dealing death to the enemy with his right hand, parrying the attack with his left, and loudly asking for the armour-bearer by name. The latter, having brought a fresh shield, quickly exchanged it for the other, that was heavy with darts. In that instant of time the king’s breast was exposed; as fortune would have it, he was pierced through by a javelin, and immediately breathed his last. The Romans set his head upon a spear, and raising it on high, carried it about, exhibiting it to both armies, that the Romans might go forward more boldly, but that the Goths should give up all hope and lay down their arms. Yet even then the Goths would not give over fighting, but persisted until night, though they knew that their king was already dead. When darkness separated the combatants, both armies spent the night in arms, where they were. On the morrow they rose together at dawn, and having drawn up their ranks in the same way, fought on until night, each determined not to yield to the other, nor to turn their backs, nor to break ground, though many had been slain on both sides; and they persisted in action, wild with bitter hatred for each other. The Goths saw that they must united for the end; the Romans would not give way to them. At last, the barbarians, sending some of their nobles, made it known to Narses that they understood that they were fighting against God; that they felt His adverse power, and perceived the real nature of the matter, deducing their conjectures from the things which had happened; that they were willing to desist from fighting, not, however, on condition of serving the emperor, but that they might go and live according to their own laws, with other barbarians. They asked that the Romans should neither molest their departure, nor trouble themselves to show kindness, but that each should receive, by way of provision for the journey, the money which he had previously deposited in the Italian military stations. As Narses was deliberating about the matter, John, the grandson of Vitalian, induced him to accede to the request, and to desist from fighting with men who wished to die, and not to make trial of a daring born of the despair of life, fatal alike to those whom it animated and to their opposers. ‘For,’ said he, ‘men possessed of prudence and moderation think that victory is enough; but a vainglorious eagerness leads surely to ruin.’ Embracing this opinion, Narses consented to an agreement by which the surviving barbarians were immediately to evacuate all Italy, taking their possessions with them, and were on no account to wage war further against the Romans. Meanwhile, a thousand Goths had left their camp, and they reached the city of Ticinum and the region beyond the Po, some following Indulph, who has been mentioned already, and some under other leaders; the rest ratified the compact by taking oath. And so the Romans took Cumae and all the other strong places, and this was the end of the eighteenth year of this Gothic war, of which Procopius wrote the history.”
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1430
