The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (32 page)

The reason for the Emperor's disastrous decision is not far to seek: he had clearly been informed of the Goths' offer of the throne to Belisarius - a fear that the latter might change his mind and accept it must almost certainly have been a factor in his recall - and he was terrified lest any successor might succumb to the same temptation. So compelling was this fear that for over two years he was to watch the situation in Italy steadily deteriorate before naming a Praetorian Prefect, and was then to pick on a feckless nonentity whom he knew to be incapable of rebelling against him but who unfortunately proved equally incapable of anything else. It was another two years before he reluctantly brought himself to return to Belisarius - not only the most inspired but also the most unswervingly loyal of all his generals - the command that he should never have lost.

King Hildebad meanwhile had not lasted long, having in May
541
been beheaded at dinner by one of his guards, Velas, whose bride-to-be he had unthinkingly bestowed on another.
1
His successor Eraric attempted to come to terms with Justinian and after only five months was murdered in his turn; and so the way was clear for the young man who was to prove himself the greatest, as well as the most attractive, of

1 'So when he had stretched out his hand to the food as he lay reclining upon his couch, Velas suddenly smote him on the neck with his sword. And so, while the food was still grasped in the man's fingers, his head was severed and fell upon the table, and filled all those present with great consternation and amazement.' So Procopius,
History
of
the Wars,
VII, i, 47-9.

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 to his subjects as Totila, and it is thus that he has gone down to history.

Totila was Hildebad's nephew; the date of his birth is not known, but he can hardly have been out of his middle twenties. He too had been secretly negotiating with the imperial generals, who were probably not unduly alarmed at the news of his elevation; once in the seat of power, however, he declared an out-and-out war against them, galvanizing the Goths as none of his predecessors could have hoped to do. Nor did he limit his attentions to his own people. He never forgot that the vast majority of his subjects were not Goths but Italians; their support too was vital if he were ever to expel the Byzantines from Italian soil. In Theodoric's day, and under his immediate successors, relations between Italian and Goth had been cordial - particularly among the governing classes, since the Gothic rulers needed Roman administrative and financial skills for the smooth running of their kingdom. Since Belisarius's victories, however, the Italian aristocracy had thrown in its lot with the Empire; and so it was to the humbler echelons of society - the middle class, the urban proletariat and the peasants — that young Totila now appealed.

And they responded, as he knew they would. They no longer felt any natural loyalty to the Empire which, though it still called itself Roman, was by now almost entirely Greek; furthermore, they were already suffering appallingly from Byzantine rapacity. That of the various generals had been bad enough; more recently, however, they had been forced to submit to the attentions of Justinian's own tax-gatherers, a new class of high officials whom he called Logothetes. The reputation of these men can best be indicated by the nickname given to their chief, a certain Alexander, who was universally known as
Psalidon,
'the Scissors', for his notorious ability to clip round gold coins, retaining the clippings for himself. He and his subordinates were paid by results, the imperial treasury allowing them a commission of one-twelfth on all that they collected; and they bled the country white.

Totila's call promised an end to oppression. The slaves would be liberated, the great estates broken up, the land redistributed among the tenant farmers and the peasants; no longer would Italian taxes be used to maintain a vapid and corrupt court, to build vast palaces a thousand miles away that none of the contributors would ever see, or to pay protection money to barbarian tribes beyond the remotest frontiers of the Empire. It was hardly surprising that the people listened to him -and followed.

So indeed did many of the imperial soldiery, for they too were feeling the Scissors' edge. Within months of his accession Totila was strong enough to drive back one imperial army of
12,000
men from the gates of Verona, and to annihilate another in pitched battle outside Faventia (Faenza). In the spring of
542
came yet another victory, in the Mugello valley some fifteen miles north of Florence, in which he completely routed the army of John, nephew of Vitalian, the ablest of all Justinian's generals in the peninsula. Now the whole of the centre and the south lay open to him. On he went; and by the late summer of the same year he had effectively subjugated all Italy apart from Ravenna, Rome, Florence and a few fortified coastal cities. Chief among these was Naples; and it was to Naples, defended as it was by a largely Isaurian garrison of
1,000
men, that he now laid siege.

It is significant, if hardly surprising, that not one of the imperial generals in Italy should have made any attempt to relieve the city. Now, and only now, did Justinian steel himself to appoint a Praetorian Prefect with supreme powers in the province; but this man, Maximin, delayed till the end of the year on the coast of Epirus and, having finally landed at Syracuse, refused absolutely to leave it. By this time one naval relief expedition, launched on his own initiative by an old colleague of Belisarius, had been destroyed by Totila; a second, dispatched in January
543
by Maximin - who took care, however, not to join it himself - was overtaken by a sudden storm and dashed against the rocks.

Meanwhile the Gothic blockade of the city was total; and in May the Neapolitans were starved into surrender. Totila's terms were characteristically generous: the soldiers of the Byzantine garrison were allowed to leave in peace with all their possessions, and even had ships put at their disposal to take them wherever they liked. They chose Rome, and when contrary winds made the sea journey impossible they were given horses and beasts of burden and sent on their way with an escort. Typical too was the consideration shown by the young King to the Neapolitans themselves. Well understanding the danger of giving too much food too quickly to starving men, he first sealed off the city and then had a relatively small amount of food distributed to each household; the next day the ration was increased, and so on succeeding days until the people had once again returned to their normal diet.

The fall of Naples - for the second time in seven years - dealt a further blow to Byzantine morale. For the rest of the year Totila continued to mop up pockets of resistance and to consolidate his hold on the peninsula, and by January
544
the Greek generals in their various redoubts decided that they had had enough. A letter to Justinian was drafted by Constantian in Ravenna - Maximin, if he was around at all, seems to have been universally ignored - and signed by his fellow-commanders, declaring that they could no longer defend the imperial cause in Italy; it was this letter, almost certainly, that decided the Emperor to send back Belisarius. Meanwhile, in the hope that he might be able to gain control of the city without bloodshed, Totila addressed a passionate appeal to the Senate in Rome, an extract from which, condensed and somewhat freely translated, will be found at the head of this chapter.

It received no answer. John, who was commanding in Rome, forbade the Senate to send a reply - much as they would probably have liked to do so. Totila then tried a direct appeal to the Romans. He arranged for a number of copies to be made of a shortened version of his letter and smuggled in under cover of darkness; and the populace awoke one morning to find these posted up in prominent places all over the city, assuring them that the Gothic King wished only to bring them freedom, and that he promised to respect the lives and property of all those Romans who were prepared to give him their support. John, now seriously alarmed, persuaded himself that the Arian clergy had been responsible for the propagation of the letter and went so far as to expel them wholesale; but the true culprits were never identified.

Nor, however, was there a spontaneous uprising by the people of Rome that Totila may have hoped for: if he wished to occupy the city he could do so only by force. By now he was far away to the south, besieging the little Apulian port of Hydruntum (Otranto) which he feared might be used as a bridgehead for a Byzantine relief expedition; but its resistance proved fiercer than he had expected; leaving a small force beneath the walls to continue the siege, in the early summer of
544
he set off at once with the bulk of his army on the long march up the peninsula to Rome.

He might, conceivably, have been one degree less confident had he known that, while he was marching, Beiisarius was already on his way to Italy. The next round of the long contest between Greek and Goth could not be much longer delayed.

From the moment he left Constantinople, Belisarius had known that he would have to fight his second Italian campaign with, effectively, one hand tied behind his back. Justinian had entrusted him with the re-conquest of the peninsula, but had given him only a handful of inexperienced troops, little authority and no money at all. It was even rumoured that the Emperor had extracted a promise from his general not to request funds from the imperial treasury, but to provide both the men and the necessary equipment at his own expense. In former days Belisarius would probably have accepted such charges willingly enough; with a private fortune greater than that of any other citizen of the Empire outside the imperial family he would hardly have noticed them, and a few victories would soon have replenished his coffers. But now, with much of his wealth expropriated by the Empress and fully conscious that in the existing situation there might be no victories at all, he was powerless; and the few extra soldiers that he had managed to recruit on his way to Italy were not such as to inspire any greater confidence in the future.

He did his best. Within a year of his arrival in the summer of
544,
he had relieved Otranto and Osimo and rebuilt the defences of Pesaro, which subsequently withstood a determined attack by Totila. During this time, however, he had also seen several defections by imperial troops, many of whom had received no pay for well over a year, and had understood all too clearly how radically the situation had changed in the four years that he had been away. It was no longer just the Goths who were actively hostile to the Empire; it was virtually the whole population. With the forces at his command he might just succeed in maintaining an imperial presence in Italy; but he could never reconquer it.

Such were the considerations in his mind when he wrote in May
545
to Justinian, telling him of his desperate need of men, horses, arms and money:

A man who has not a sufficient supply of these cannot, I believe, wage war. It is true that after laborious searches in Thrace and Illyria I was able to collect some soldiers there; but they are few in number, wretched in quality, have no weapons worth speaking of and are altogether inexperienced in fighting. As for the soldiers whom I found here, they are discontented and discouraged, demoralised by frequent defeats, and at first sign of a foe are so bent on flight that they slip at once from their horses and hurl their arms to the ground. To find money in Italy for the war is impossible, since the country has been largely reconquered by the enemy. Thus we cannot give the soldiers their long overdue arrears of pay, and this knowledge of our indebtedness makes it hard for us to speak freely to them.

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, money with which they may all be paid.

Belisarius entrusted this letter to John, whom he naturally expected to return as soon as possible with whatever military and financial help the Emperor might have been persuaded to provide. John, however, delayed for several months in Constantinople; it was not until late autumn that he returned, to find Belisarius awaiting him impatiently in Dyrrachium. The latter's irritation at the delay can hardly have been diminished by the news that his subordinate had taken advantage of his stay in the capital to woo and marry the daughter of Germanus, the Emperor's first cousin; henceforth, with his new imperial connections, he would be more insufferable than ever. On the other hand he had brought with him a considerable army, a mixed force of Romans and barbarians under the joint command of himself and an Armenian general named Isaac. They all crossed at once to Italy, landing there not a moment too soon: almost simultaneously, the army of Totila reached Rome and laid siege to the city.

To the Byzantines, the prospects looked bleak. Totila controlled all the territory between Rome and the sea, while his fleet was already drawn up at the mouth of the Tiber. Moreover the commander of the imperial garrison, Bessas, was of Gothic origin and uncertain loyalty. He had made no effort to lay in emergency food supplies; provisions were already found to be short when the siege began, and as it progressed he showed himself less interested in defending the city than in lining his own pocket by selling off what little was left to the highest bidder. As famine took hold, the saintly deacon Pelagius - Pope Vigilius being, for reasons shortly to be explained, under imperial arrest in Sicily - attempted negotiations with Totila, but they came to nothing. Belisarius saw at once that the only hope lay in sailing quickly to the mouth of the Tiber, running the gauntlet of the Gothic fleet, then landing his men and falling on the besieging army from behind; but John, though technically his junior, once again refused to obey. The first priority, he insisted, must be to recapture the south; only then could the army advance northwards to Rome. The result of this disagreement was probably the worst expedient of all: a division of the limited forces available, with each commander pursuing his own plan of action.