The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (30 page)

capture other strategic points in Umbria, Tuscany and the Marches suggested that they would fight a hard battle. Immediately he set his men to the task of repairing and strengthening the Aurelian walls; meanwhile he requisitioned immense quantities of corn from the surrounding countryside and ordered additional shiploads from Sicily, until the huge public granaries of Rome were full to overflowing. Once the Goths arrived and surrounded the city he could not be sure of keeping open his supply lines to the port of Ostia; and the coming siege, he knew, might be a long one.

And so it was. After a fierce encounter near the Milvian Bridge in which the Byzantines, though righting with supreme courage, were unable to stem the Gothic advance, Vitiges and his men took up their positions around the city in the middle of March,
537.
They were to hold them for a year and nine days - an agonizing time for besiegers and besieged alike, at the very beginning of which the Goths cut all the aqueducts, thereby dealing Rome a blow from which it was not to recover for a thousand years. The history of the aqueducts stretched almost as far back into the past: it had been as early as
312
bc
that the Romans, no longer prepared to make do with the murky insufficiency of the Tiber, built the first of these magnificent conduits; over the eight centuries that followed they were to construct ten more, the better to supply not only their domestic needs but the innumerable fountains and public baths for which their city was famous. And those aqueducts provided something else as well: the hydraulic power which drove, among other things, the mills on which the people depended for their bread. It was, we read, Belisarius himself who now had the idea of mounting millstones on small boats, suspending water-wheels between them and then tethering them beneath the arches of a bridge where the current was strongest, thereby ensuring a regular supply of flour throughout the siege.

Meanwhile he had applied to Justinian for reinforcements, the first of which arrived before the end of April - some
1,600
Slavs and Huns, who broke through the blockade and for the first time made it possible to launch occasional sorties outside the walls. But the stalemate continued, and as summer drew on the sufferings increased on both sides - for those within the city, famine; for those outside, disease and pestilence. Only in November did the balance begin to shift in favour of the Byzantines, when
5,000
more men, both cavalry and infantry, arrived from the East under the command of John, nephew of that rebellious Vitalian who had given so much trouble to old Anastasius twenty years before.

Soon afterwards the Goths asked for a three-month truce, during which they offered peace proposals which Belisarius would have rejected out of hand had he not been obliged to transmit them to Constantinople for the Emperor's consideration. While awaiting a reply, he dispatched John with
2,000
horsemen on a punitive campaign along the eastern slopes of the Apennines. Leaving a trail of devastation behind him, John advanced rapidly up the peninsula, ignoring the fortified hill-towns of Urbino and Osimo but occupying the low-lying port of Rimini (then known as Ariminum) where he set up his advance headquarters.

The knowledge that the invaders were now in possession of an important city
200
miles in his rear and only thirty-three from Ravenna was enough to persuade Vitiges to raise the siege of Rome. Although there had been as yet no reply from Constantinople he was by now practically certain that his peace proposals had been rejected; he knew, too, that Belisarius had succeeded in bringing in fresh provisions during the early days of the truce and would therefore be able to hold out in Rome almost indefinitely. One early morning in the middle of March
538
his troops, sick, demoralized and dispirited, methodically set fire to their seven camps around the city and headed northwards along the Via Flaminia. But even now their humiliation was not over: Belisarius and his men came pouring out of the gates, fell on them from behind and, after yet another engagement at the Milvian Bridge, left several hundred more Goths dead on the river banks or drowned, weighed down by their armour, in the spring flood of the Tiber.

After this battle the surviving Goths were allowed to retreat in peace. A few days later, however, leaving only a small garrison in Rome, Belisarius himself set out to the north, occupying towns and mopping up isolated pockets of resistance as he went. Spoleto, Perugia and Narni had been taken by his advance parties even before the siege of Rome; to these he now added Ancona, together with a whole chain of strong-points linking those towns and Rome with the Adriatic. One thing only-worried him: the knowledge that John with his large force of cavalry was still dangerously exposed in Rimini. He therefore sent two of his trusted officers up the coast with orders to the general to withdraw and to rejoin him, with his men, in Ancona.

And John, who seems to have inherited his uncle's rebellious streak, flatly refused. He had ambitions of his own; besides, he was in secret communication with Queen Matasuntha, a pro-imperialist like her mother, who was by now longing to do down her detested husband in any way that she could. The two officers had no choice but to return and report this flagrant piece of insubordination; and hardly had they done so when the Gothic army appeared beneath the walls of Rimini. A few days later the siege began, and the prospects for those within looked grim indeed. Unlike Rome, which had been able to hold out thanks to its splendid walls and the immense quantity of provisions laid in by Belisarius before the arrival of the Goths, here was a small town in a dead-flat plain, ill-protected and poorly stocked with food. The fury of Belisarius when he heard the news can be imagined. The loss of John he could probably by now contemplate with equanimity; but his
2,000
horsemen were less easily spared. On the other hand any relief expedition would be fraught with difficulty and danger, particularly since Auximum (Osimo) was still held by the Goths. Was he, for the sake of a single regiment of cavalry, to put his entire army in jeopardy? Should not John, who was after all solely responsible for his own misfortunes, now be left to pay the price of his disobedience?

Belisarius was still considering his next move when fresh troops arrived from Constantinople, headed by the most powerful figure at the imperial court: the eunuch Narses, who has already made a brief appearance in this story when as commander of the imperial bodyguard he played a decisive part, with Belisarius and Mundus, in putting down the Nika revolt. Born some sixty years before in that part of eastern Armenia that had been transferred to Persia in the partition of
387,
he had risen steadily through the palace hierarchy to be
Praepositus Sacri Cubiculi
or Grand Chamberlain, a position which gave him the rank of
illustris
and made him an equal of the Praetorian Prefects and
Magistrum Militum
-
although, being constantly at the Emperor's side, he probably wielded more influence than any of them.

But he was no soldier. His life had been spent in the Palace, and even his command of the bodyguard was more of a domestic appointment than a military one. The question therefore arises, why he was given the leadership of the new expeditionary force; and to it there can be but one answer. Justinian was beginning to have his doubts about Belisarius. The general was too brilliant, too successful - and, being still only in his early thirties, too young. He was the stuff of which Emperors were made; worse, he was the stuff of men who made themselves Emperors. In short, he needed watching; and who better to watch him than Justinian's most intelligent and trusted confidant, a man whose age and condition alike debarred him from any imperial ambitions of his own? Even the eunuch's instructions from

Justinian gave a hint as to the real reason for his presence in Italy: he was to obey Belisarius in all things,
so far as seemed consistent with the public weal.
In other words, he must accept the general's orders in military matters, but could overrule him on all major decisions of state policy.

Within days of his arrival, Narses found himself taking part in a council of war summoned by Belisarius at Firmium - now Fermo - to discuss whether or not to mount an expedition to relieve Rimini. The majority of those present (who included, as always, Procopius) were hostile to John, on the grounds that 'he had been moved by insensate recklessness and a desire for large financial gain' - this last motive is not explained - 'to occupy the dangerous position in which he found himself; and that he had refused to allow his commander-in-chief to conduct the campaign according to his own ideas of strategy'. After all the junior commanders had had their say, Narses arose. Readily admitting his own lack of military experience, he pointed out that the Goths were deeply dispirited after the succession of reverses that they had suffered over the past two years. The capture of Rimini, however, and of so important a Byzantine force within its walls, would be hailed by them as a major victory, perhaps as the turning-point of the whole war. 'If,' he concluded, turning to Belisarius, 'John has treated your orders with contempt, it is in your power to deal with him as you like once the city is relieved. But see that in punishing him for the mistakes that he has made through ignorance you do not exact a penalty from the Emperor himself and from us his subjects.'
1

The suggestion that John had acted 'through ignorance' can perhaps best be explained by Procopius's statement that 'Narses loved him above all other men'; at any rate, the eunuch's counsels prevailed and Belisarius, who seems wisely to have kept silent so that he should not appear to be overruled, began to make his plans accordingly. A week or two later, by means of a brilliantly executed amphibious operation in which he contrived to suggest to the Goths outside Rimini that they themselves were surrounded - and by a far more numerous force than in fact existed - he put the entire besieging army to flight and entered the city just in time to save the defenders from starvation. His natural resentment of his new rival, however, cannot have been diminished when John, instead of apologizing for his conduct and expressing gratitude for his rescue, attributed it exclusively to Narses and refused absolutely to thank anyone else. Between the general and the eunuch the seeds of dissension had

1
Procopius,
History
of
the
Wars,
VI, xvi.

been sown; but neither could have imagined how bitter the harvest was to be.

Belisarius was a supreme strategist and, thanks to his immense physical courage, a superb commander in the field. As a general, however, there was one quality that he lacked: the ability to inspire the unquestioning loyalty of those under him. One of his chief lieutenants had already disobeyed his orders; now, after the relief of Rimini, a considerable portion of the army made it clear that, in the event of a split in the high command, they would follow Narses rather than himself. He knew that he was powerless to change matters, and it may have been as much to save his own face as for any other reason that he divided the army into two for the mopping-up operations that followed. At the start, the system worked well enough: the Byzantines took Urbino, Imola and Orvieto and re-annexed the province of Emilia. But now, suddenly and unexpectedly, there came disaster. The cause of it was the growing hostility between the two commanders; the place Mediolanum - better known to us as Milan.

The previous spring, at the time of the three-month truce during the siege of Rome, Archbishop Datius of Milan had appeared in the city and implored Belisarius to send troops to deliver his diocese from alien -and Arian - occupation; and the general had agreed. Why he did so is not altogether clear - it seems to have been just the same kind of mistake as that which had led John to occupy Rimini, dangerously over-extending his lines of communication and supply - but he had nevertheless dispatched
1,000
troops back with the archbishop to the north. They went by sea to Genoa, used the ships' boats to cross the Po, and decisively defeated a Gothic army beneath the walls of Pavia. To their disappointment they failed to take the city, but on their arrival at Milan the citizens immediately opened the gates. Bergamo, Como, Novara and several other towns gave them a similar welcome. Each, however, required a small garrison of imperial troops - which effectively reduced the force in Milan to some
300
men.

Now Milan was already the largest and most prosperous of all the cities of Italy, its population considerably greater than that of Rome itself; and its voluntary surrender came as a bitter blow to the Goths. Immediately he heard the news, Vitiges sent an army to recover it under his nephew Uraias. At the same time, and to the additional discomfiture of the Byzantine garrison, there arrived a body of some
10,000
Bur
gundians, sent by the Frankish King Theudibert. Thus, by the high

summer of
538,
the Milanese found themselves besieged by a far larger force than that which had threatened Rimini, and defended by so few soldiers that all able-bodied male citizens were obliged to take their turn on the ramparts. On this occasion - for which he may well have felt himself to be at least partially to blame - Belisarius unhesitatingly sent two of his best commanders to the relief of Milan, with an army which he believed to be similar in size to that of Uraias. These commanders, however, realized on reaching the Po that they would be hopelessly outnumbered, and refused to advance further without the support of John - who, probably through the influence of Narses, had escaped all punishment for his earlier disobedience - and Justin, who had succeeded Mundus as
magister militumper Illyricum.

Belisarius at once issued the necessary instructions, but John and Justin refused point-blank to obey them, claiming that they now took their orders from no one but Narses; and by the time the eunuch had confirmed the command it was too late. The garrison, who had already for some time been reduced to a diet of dogs and even mice, had had enough. Ignoring a stirring exhortation by their commander, Mundilas, they gratefully accepted the terms offered them by Uraias, who gave them his word that they would be allowed to leave the city unharmed.

And so they were; but the offer, as they well knew, did not extend to the people of Milan, who in the eyes of the Goths had betrayed the city. All the male citizens - whose numbers Procopius improbably estimates at
300,000
- were put to the sword, the women being reduced to slavery and presented to the Burgundians in gratitude for their alliance. As for Milan itself, not a house was left standing.

Milan fell in the first months of
5
39.
It was a catastrophe, but it had one useful consequence. On learning what had happened, Justinian recalled his chamberlain at once to Constantinople. The departure of Narses in its turn resulted in the withdrawal of the
2,000
wild Herulians who had accompanied him to Italy and who refused to serve under any other leader; but even this was a small price to pay for a single and undisputed command. No longer troubled by dissension within his ranks, Belisarius was able to concentrate on the capture of Auximum and Fiesole, the last two pockets of resistance south of Ravenna itself. The two towns would have fallen a good deal earlier than they did had it not been for the irruption of a huge Frankish army, this time under Theudibert himself, in the early summer. The Goths, to whom the Franks were bound by treaty, assumed that they had come as allies like the Burgundians in the previous year, opened the gates of Pavia to them and helped them to cross the Po; only then did they reveal themselves in their true colours, suddenly turning on their unsuspecting hosts and slaughtering them wholesale. As the surviving Goths fled towards Ravenna the Byzantines, similarly deceived, now also approached the Franks as new allies; but the barbarians, with a fine lack of discrimination, greeted them with a hail of flying axes - their favourite weapon - and put them in their turn to flight. For a moment it looked as though all Belisarius's careful work was to be undone; then, fortunately, dysentery struck the Frankish camp, accounting for as much as a third of Theudibert's men. The King gave the order to withdraw, and within days his savage, shambling host had dragged itself back across the Alps. The Byzantines, shaken but not seriously weakened, returned to their tasks, and by the end of the year the two stubbornly defended towns had given in.

It was now nearly four years since the imperial forces had first landed on Italian soil: four years during which the peninsula had been fought over, ravaged and laid waste from end to end. The farms had been burnt, the crops destroyed. The land had become a wilderness again, Italians and Goths alike suffering all the miseries of famine. Meanwhile Belisarius was gathering his strength for a final assault on Ravenna which, if successful, would put an end to the Ostrogothic Kingdom once and for all. For Vitiges, the situation was desperate.

One hope only was left to him. Some months before, he had received reports suggesting that Justinian was in difficulties on his eastern frontier, where the Persian King Chosroes I was threatening invasion; if the danger of this were such as to oblige the Emperor to throw his entire military strength against Persia, the cause of Gothic Italy might yet be saved. Vitiges had accordingly sent a letter to Chosroes by the hand of two secret agents, purporting to be a bishop and his chaplain travelling to the East on Church affairs. In it he pointed out to the Great King that the Roman Empire would be a far more redoubtable adversary if it had all the manpower and resources of Italy to draw on. If Chosroes were to strike at once, he would force the Byzantines to fight on both fronts simultaneously and immeasurably increase his own chances of success.

The two agents never returned to the West. Their Syrian interpreter, however, was caught as he tried to slip back across the frontier, brought to Constantinople and interrogated; and gradually the truth was revealed. For a long time Justinian had been worried by the worsening situation in Persia; now he grew seriously alarmed. It would be heartbreaking to have to call off the Italian campaign just as he was on the brink of
victory, and to renounce - perhaps for ever - his life's dream of reuniting all Christendom under his aegis. On the other hand he could not possibly afford to take any chances with Chosroes; if the Great King was truly bent on war, the imperial army must be ready for him. The choice was agonizing, but at last he made up his mind. He would have to come to terms with the Goths, in order to free the most brilliant of his generals for another period of service in the East.

By the time the Emperor's orders reached Italy, Belisarius had moved in on Ravenna. The city was already surrounded - to the landward side by his army, to the seaward by the imperial fleet, which had set up a virtually impenetrable blockade. Its surrender could only be a matter of time; all that was required was patience. Then, one day towards the end of
539,
ambassadors arrived from Constantinople empowered to sign a treaty with the Goths by the terms of which, in return for capitulation, they would be allowed to retain half their royal treasure and all Italy north of the Po. Belisarius was horror-stricken. This was betrayal indeed; but he could see no way of preventing the proposed agreement and was just about to accept the inevitable when, suddenly and unexpectedly, the Goths played straight into his hands. As astonished, presumably, as he was himself at their apparent good fortune, and perhaps fearing some sort of diplomatic trick, they made it clear that they would accept the treaty as valid only if it bore his own signature as well as those of the imperial plenipotentiaries.

Belisarius seized his chance. The proposed concessions, he thundered, were not only an insult to his soldiers, they were also unnecessary: total victory was imminent, for within a few weeks at the most the Goths could be made to surrender unconditionally. In such circumstances he refused absolutely to sign the treaty, and would agree to do so only on receipt of a personal command from the Emperor himself. For the moment there was stalemate. Then, one night, a secret emissary arrived from the Gothic court, bearing a new and extraordinary proposal: Vitiges would resign his throne and deliver up his crown to Belisarius, on the understanding that the latter should then proclaim himself Emperor of the West. Many an imperial general would have seized such an opportunity; the bulk of the 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. But Belisarius, whatever his long-term ambitions may have been, did not waver in his loyalty. In the words of Procopius, 'he hated the name of usurper with a perfect hatred', and it is unlikely that he gave the Goths' proposal a moment's serious consideration. On the other hand, he saw in it an ideal means of bringing the war to a quick and victorious end. All he had to do was to tell the Goths that he accepted their offer, and the gates of Ravenna would be opened to him.

First he sent away on foraging expeditions those commanders who had formerly allied themselves with Narses: he did not want them making trouble in advance, or claiming the credit afterwards. Then, summoning those on whose loyalty he could rely, he sought their approval for one last effort - an effort which promised to win back all Italy for the Empire and bring the whole Gothic nobility, with the royal treasure, captive to Constantinople. Once they had given their agreement - which they did without hesitation - no further preparations were necessary. Messengers sped to the Gothic court, with word that the great general looked favourably on their proposals and would formally invest himself with the diadem of the Western Empire after entering his capital. Duly the gates were flung open, and the imperial army marched in.

We do not know exactly when the Goths realized that they had been deceived. It may be that Belisarius never told them in so many words that he had no intention of setting himself up as a rival to Justinian, and that it was only gradually that there came upon them an understanding of the true state of affairs. As they watched the Roman soldiery loading their royal treasure on to the ships while Vitiges, Matasuntha and the chief nobles were all taken off into captivity, they must have reflected bitterly indeed on the perfidy of the general who had betrayed them. But there is no indication that Belisarius's conscience gave him any trouble. The Goths' proposal had been in itself perfidious; besides, were they not all of them rebels against the Emperor's lawful authority? War was war; and, by occupying Ravenna as he had done, he had saved untold bloodshed on both sides. One promise, in any case, he had kept to the letter: there had been no looting of private houses, no rapine and no killing. As he himself took ship for the Bosphorus in May
540
he felt no shame, only elation and pride. His Triumph after the capture of Carthage had been magnificent; how much more splendid might be his reward for returning the whole Italian peninsula, including Ravenna and even Rome itself, to the Empire?

Alas, he was disappointed. Perhaps he would have been doomed to disappointment in any event, for every victory that he won increased the Emperor's jealousy, together with his fears that one day his brilliant young general might take the law into his own hands and usurp the throne. But there was no feeling of victory in the air when he returned
to Constantinople, and 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 King Chosroes had invaded the Empire and captured Antioch, demolishing the city, massacring most of its inhabitants and sending the rest into slavery. The presence of Belisarius would be required, not at the Hippodrome but on the eastern front.

1
1

Totila the Goth

[540-49]

Surely in these evil days you must sometimes remember the benefits that you were wont to receive, not so very long ago, at the hands of Theodoric and Amalasuntha .
..
My Roman friends, only compare the memory of those rulers with what we now know of the conduct of the Greeks towards their subjects. Do not think that I speak with youthful presumption or barbarian arrogance when I tell you that we shall change all this and deliver Italy from her tyrants -and not through our valour alone, but in the sure belief that we are ministers of divine justice against these oppressors .
..

Totila, in his letter to the Roman Senate,
545
1

The Great King Chosroes I of Persia - known to his subjects as
An
ushirvan,
'of the Immortal Soul' - had occupied the throne since
531.
Of all the great Sassanian Kings, perhaps of all the Persian rulers throughout history, he was the most illustrious and is still the best remembered. As a statesman, he reformed and reorganized every branch of government and completely revised the fiscal system; as a general, he created the first standing army loyal to the King alone and pushed forward his frontiers till they extended from the Black Sea to the Yemen, from the Oxus River to the shores of the Mediterranean; as an intellectual, he had given - even before his accession - an enthusiastic welcome to those pagan Greek scientists and philosophers who had drifted to Persia after Justinian's closure of the School of Athens in
5 29.
He founded his country's great medical academy at Gondeshapur, codified the
Avi
sta
- the sacred book of Zoroastrianism - compiled the first collection of the myths and legends of his people and introduced from India the game of chess. He was, in short, a worthy match for Justinian, his adversary and rival for over thirty years.

1 Trans. Hodgkin. In fact, a fairly free translation when compared with the text given by Procopius
(Hist
ory of tbt Wars,
VII, ix,
7
-18); but at least an admirable precis, which faithfully preserves the tone of the original.