The Emperor’s preparations for
the Gothic war were soon made, and in the summer of
535 two armies were sent forth from Constantinople,
one destined to act on the east and the other on the
west of the Adriatic. When we think of the mighty
armaments by means of which Pompey and Cæsar, or
even Licinius and Constantine, had contended for the
mastery of the Roman world, the forces entrusted to
the generals of Justinian seem strangely small.
We are not informed of the precise number of the army
sent to Dalmatia, but the whole tenor of the narrative
leads us to infer that it consisted of not more than
3,000 or 4,000 men. It fought with varying fortunes
but with ultimate success. Salona, the Dalmatian
capital, was taken by the Imperial army, wrested from
them by the Goths, retaken by the Imperialists.
The Imperial general, a brave old barbarian named
Mundus, fell dead by the side of his slaughtered
son; but another general took his place, and being
well supported by a naval expedition, succeeded, as
has been said, in reconquering Salona, drove out the
Gothic generals, and reincorporated Dalmatia with the
Empire. This province, which had for many generations
been treated almost as a part of Italy, was now for
four centuries to be for the most part a dependency
of Constantinople. The Dalmatian war was ended
by the middle of 536.
But it was of course to the Italian
expedition that the eyes of the spectators of the
great drama were most eagerly turned. Here Belisarius
commanded, peerless among the generals of his own age,
and not surpassed by many of preceding or following
ages. The force under his command consisted of
only 7,500 men, the greater part of whom were of barbarian
originHuns, Moors, Isaurians, Gepidse,
Heruli, but they were welded together by that instinct
of military discipline and that unbounded admiration
for their great commander and confidence in his success
which is the surest herald of victory. Not only
in nationality but in mode of fighting they were utterly
unlike the armies with which republican Rome had won
the sovereignty of the world. In those days it
might have been truly said to the inhabitant of the
seven-hilled city as Macaulay has imagined Capys saying
to Romulus:
“Thine, Roman | is the
pilum:
Roman | the sword is
thine.
The even trench, the
bristling mound,
The legion’s ordered
line”
but now, centuries of fighting with
barbarian foes, especially with the nimble squadrons
of Persia, had completely changed the character of
the Imperial tactics. It was to the deadly aim
of his Hippo-toxotai (mounted bowmen) that
Belisarius, in pondering over his victories, ascribed
his antonishing success. “He said that at
the beginning of his first great battle he had carefully
studied the characteristic differences of each army,
in order that he might prevent his little band from
being overborne by sheer force of numbers. The
chief difference which he noted was that almost all
the Roman (Imperialist) soldiers and their Hunnish
allies were good Hippo-toxotai, while the Goths
had none of them practised the art of shooting on
horseback. Their cavalry fought only with javelins
and swords, and their archers fought on foot covered
by the horsemen. Thus till the battle became a
hand-to-hand encounter the horsemen could make no
reply to the arrows discharged at them from a distance,
and were therefore easily thrown into disorder, while
the foot-soldiers, though able to reply to the enemy’s
archers, could not stand against the charges of his
horse". From this passage we can see what were
the means by which Belisarius won his great victories.
While the Goth, with his huge broadsword and great
javelin, chafing for a hand-to-hand encounter with
the foe, found himself mowed down by the arrows of
a distant enemy, the nimble barbarian who called himself
a Roman solder discharged his arrows at the cavalry,
dashed in impetuous onset against the infantry, wheeled
round, feigned flight, sent his arrows against the
too eagerly advancing horsemen, in fact, by Parthian
tactics won a Roman victory, or to use a more modern
illustration, the Hippo-toxotai were the “Mounted
Rifles” of the Imperial army.
The expedition under the command of
Belisarius made its first attack on the Gothic kingdom
in Sicily. Here the campaign was little more than
a triumphant progress. In reliance on its professions
of loyalty, Theodoric and his successors had left
the wealthy and prosperous island almost bare of Gothic
troops, and now the provincials, eager to form
once more a part of the Eternal Roman Empire, opened
the gates of city after city to the troops of Justinian;
only at Palermo was a stout resistance made by the
Gothic soldiers who garrisoned the city. The
walls were strong, and that part of them which bordered
on the harbour was thought to be so high and massive
as not to need the defence of soldiers. When
unobserved by the foe, Belisarius hoisted up his men,
seated in boats, to the yard-arms of his ships and
made them clamber out of the boats on to the unguarded
parapet. This daring manoeuvre gave him the complete
command of the Gothic position, and the garrison capitulated
without delay. So was the whole island of Sicily
won over to the realm of Justinian before the end
of 535, and Belisarius, Consul for the year, rode
through the streets of Syracuse on the last day of
his term of office, scattering his “donative”
to the shouting soldiers and citizens.
Operations in 536, the second year
of the war, were suspended for some months by a military
mutiny at Carthage, which called for the presence
of Belisarius in Africa. But the mutineers quailed
before the very name of their late commander.
Carthage was delivered from the siege wherewith they
were closely pressing it, a battle was won in the open
field, and the rebellion though not yet finally crushed
was sufficiently weakened for Belisarius to return
to Sicily in the late spring of 536. He crossed
the Straits of Messina, landed in Italy, was received
by the provincials of Bruttii and Lucania with
open arms, and met with no check to his progress till,
probably in the early days of June, he stood with his
army under the walls of the little town of Neapolis,
which in our own days is represented by a successor
ten times as large, the superbly situated city of
Naples. Here a strong Gothic garrison held the
place for Theodahad and prevented the surrender which
many of the citizens, especially those of the poorer
class, would gladly have made. An orator, who
was sent by the Neapolitans to plead their cause in
the general’s camp, vainly endeavoured to persuade
Belisarius to march forward to Rome, leaving the fate
of, Naples to be decided under the walls of the capital.
The Imperial general could not leave so strong a place
untaken in his rear, and though himself anxious enough
to meet Theodahad, commenced the siege of the city.
His land army was supported by the fleet which was
anchored in the harbour, yet the operations of the
siege languished, and after twenty days Belisarius
seemed to be no nearer winning the prize of war than
on the first day. But just then one of his soldiers,
a brave and active Isaurian mountaineer, reported that
he had found a means of entering the empty aqueduct
through which, till Belisarius severed the communication,
water had been supplied to the city. The passage
was narrow, and at one point the rock had to be filed
away to allow the soldiers to pass, but all this was
done without arousing the suspicions of the besieged,
and one night Belisarius sent six hundred soldiers,
headed by the Isaurian, into the aqueduct, having
arranged with them the precise portion of the walls
to which they were to rush as soon as they emerged
into the city. The daring attempt succeeded.
The soldiers found themselves in a large cavern with
a narrow opening at the top, on the brink of which
was a cottage. Some of the most active among
them swarmed up the sides of the cave, found the cottage
inhabited by one old woman who was easily frightened
into silence, and let down a stout leather thong which
they fastened to the stem of an olive-tree, and by
which all their comrades mounted. They rushed
to that part of the walls beneath which Belisarius
was standing, blew their trumpets, and assisted the
besiegers to ascend. The Gothic garrison were
taken prisoners and treated honourably by Belisarius.
The city suffered some of the usual horrors of a sack
from the wild Hunnish soldiers of the Empire, but
these were somewhat mitigated, and the citizens who
had been taken prisoners were restored to liberty,
in compliance with the earnest entreaties of Belisarius.
The fall of Neapolis, to whose assistance
no Gothic army had marched, and the unhindered conquest
of Southern Italy crowned the already towering edifice
of Theodahad’s unpopularity. It is not likely
that this selfish and unwarlike pedanta
“nithing”, as they probably called himhad
ever been aught but a most unwelcome necessity to the
lion-hearted Ostrogoths, and for all but the families
and friends of the three slain noblemen, the imprisonment
and the permitted murder of his benefactress must
have deepened dislike into horror. His dishonest
intrigues with Constantinople were known to many, intrigues
in which even after Amalasuentha’s death he
still offered himself and his crown for sale to the
Emperor, and the Emperor, notwithstanding his brave
words about a truceless war, seemed willing to pay
the caitiff his price. Some gleams of success
which shone upon the Gothic arms in Dalmatia towards
the end of 535 filled the feeble soul of Theodahad
with presumptuous hope, and he broke off with arrogant
faithlessness the negotiations which he had begun.
Still, with all the gallant men under him longing
to be employed, he struck not one blow for his crown
and country, but shut himself up in his palace, seeking
by the silliest auguries to ascertain the issue of
the war. The most notable of these vaticinations
was “the Augury of the Hogs”, which he
practised by the advice of a certain Jewish magician.
He shut up in separate pens three batches of hogs,
each batch consisting of ten. One batch was labelled
“Romans” (meaning the Latin-speaking inhabitants
of Italy), another “Goths”, and the third
“Soldiers of the Emperor”. They were
all left for a certain number of days without food,
and when the appointed day was come, and the pens
were opened, all the “Gothic” hogs but
two were found dead. The “Emperor’s
soldiers”, with very few exceptions, were living;
of the “Romans” half only were alive, and
all had lost their bristles. Ridiculous as the
manner of divination was, it furnished no inapt type
of the miseries which the Gothic war was to bring upon
all concerned in it, and not least upon that Latin
population which was still so keen to open its gates
to Belisarius.
But, as I have said, when Neapolis
had fallen, the brave Gothic warriors felt that they
had submitted too long to the rule of a dastard like
Theodahad. They met in arms, a nation-parliament,
on the plain of Regeta, about forty-three miles from
Rome in the direction of Terracina. Here there
was plenty of grass for the pasture of their horses,
and here, while the steeds grazed, the dismounted
riders could deliberate as to the fortunes of the
state. There was found to be an unanimous determination
that Iheodahad should be dethroned, and, instead of
him, they raised on the shield, Witigis, a man somewhat
past middle age, not of noble birth, who had distinguished
himself by his deeds of valour thirty years before
in the war of Sirmium. As soon as Theodahad heard
the tidings of his deposition, he sought to escape
with all speed to Ravenna. The new king ordered
a Goth named Optaris to pursue him and bring him back
alive or dead. Optaris had his own wrongs to avenge,
for he had lost a rich and beautiful bride through
Theodahad’s purchased interference on behalf
of another suitor. He followed him day and night,
came up with him while still on the road, “made
him lie down on the pavement, and cut his throat as
a priest cuts the throat of a victim". So did
Theodahad perish, one of the meanest insects that
ever crawled across the page of history.
Witigis, the new king of the Goths,
had personal courage and some experience of battles,
but he was no statesman and, as the event proved,
no general. By his advice, the Goths committed
the astounding blunder of abandoning Rome and concentrating
their forces for defence in the north of Italy.
It is true that a garrison of four thousand Goths was
left in the city under the command of the brave veteran
Leudaris, but, unsupported by any army in the field,
this body of men was too small to hold so vast a city
unless they were aided by the inhabitants. As
for Witigis, he marched northward to Ravenna with
the bulk of the Gothic army and there celebrated,
not a victory, but a marriage. The only remaining
scion of the race of Theodoric was a young girl named
Matasuentha, the sister of Athalaric. In some
vain hope of consolidating his dynasty, Witigis divorced
his wife and married this young princess. The
marriage was, as might have been expected, an unhappy
one. Matasuentha shared the Romanising tendencies
of her mother, and her spirit revolted against the
alleged reasons of state which gave her this elderly
and low-born barbarian for a husband. In the darkest
hour of the Gothic fortunes (540) Matasuentha was
suspected of opening secret negotiations with the
Imperial leaders, and even of seeking to aid the progress
of their arms by crime.
By the end of November, 536, Belisarius,
partly aided by the treachery of the Gothic general
who commanded in Samnium, had recovered for the Empire
all that part of the Italian peninsula which, till
lately, formed the Kingdom of Naples. Pope Silverius,
though he had sworn under duresse an oath of fealty
to King Witigis, sent messengers offering to surrender
the Eternal City, and the four thousand Goths, learning
what negotiations were going forward, came to the
conclusion that it was hopeless for them to attempt
to defend the City against such a general as Belisarius
and against the declared wish of the citizens.
They accordingly marched out of Rome by a northern
gate as Belisarius entered it on the south. The
brave old Leudaris, refusing to abandon his trust,
was taken prisoner, and sent, together with the keys
of the City, to Justinian, most undoubted evidences
of victory.
Belisarius took up his headquarters
in the Pincian Palace (on that hill at the north of
the City which is now the fashionable promenade of
the Roman aristocracy), and from thence commanded
a wide outlook over that part of the Campagna on which,
as he knew, a besieging army would shortly encamp.
He set to work with all speed to repair the walls of
the City, which had been first erected by Aurelian
and afterwards repaired by Honorius at dates respectively
260 and 130 years before the entry of Belisarius.
Time and barbarian sieges had wrought much havoc on
the line of defence, the work of repair had to be
done in haste, and to this day some archaeologists
think that it is possible to recognise the parts repaired
by Belisarius through the rough style of the work and
the heterogeneous nature of the materials employed
in it. All through the winter months his ships
were constantly arriving with cargoes of corn from
Sicily, which were safely stored away in the great
State-warehouses. These preparations were viewed
with dismay by the citizens, who had fondly imagined
that their troubles were over when the Gothic soldiers
marched forth by the Porta Flaminia; that any fighting
which might follow would take place on some distant
field, and that they would have nothing to do but
calmly to await the issue of the combat. This,
however, was by no means the general’s idea of
the right way of playing the game. He knew that
the Goths immensely outnumbered his forces; he knew
also that they were of old bad besiegers of cities,
the work of siege requiring a degree of patience and
scientific skill to which the barbarian nature could
not attain; and his plan was to wear them down by
compelling them to undertake a long and wearisome blockade
before he tried conclusions with them in the open field.
If the Roman clergy and people had known that this
was in his thoughts, they would probably not have
been so ready to welcome the eagles of the Emperor
into their city.
Some hint of the growing disaffection
of the Roman people was carried to Ravenna and quickened
the impatience of Witigis, who was now eager to retrieve
the blunder which he had committed in the evacuation
of Rome. He marched southward with a large army,
which is represented to us as consisting of 150,000
men, and in the early days of March he was already
at the other end of the Milvian Bridge, about
two miles from Rome. Belisarius had meant to
dispute the passage of the Tiber at this point.
The fort on the Tuscan side of the river was garrisoned,
and a large body of soldiers was encamped on the Roman
side; but when the garrison of the fort saw the vast
multitude of the enemy, who at sunset pitched their
tents upon the plain, they despaired of making a successful
resistance, and abandoning the fort under cover of
the night, skulked off into the country districts
of Latium. Thus one point of the game was thrown
away. Next morning the Goths finding their passage
unopposed, marched quietly over the bridge and fell
upon the Roman camp. A desperate battle followed,
in which Belisarius, exposing himself more than a
general should have done, did great deeds of valour.
He was mounted on a noble steed, dark roan, with a
white star on its forehead, which the barbarians,
from that mark on its brow, called “Balan”.
Some Imperial soldiers who had deserted to the enemy
knew the steed and his rider, and shouted to their
comrades to aim all their darts at Balan. So
the cry “Balan! Balan!” resounded
through the Gothic ranks, and though only imperfectly
understood by many of the utterers, had the effect
of concentrating the fight round Belisarius and the
dark-roan steed. The general was nobly protected
by the picked troops which formed his guard.
They fell by scores around him, but he himself, desperately
fighting, received never a wound, though a thousand
of the noblest Goths lay dead in the narrow space
of ground where this Homeric combat had been going
forward. The Imperialists not merely withstood
the Gothic onset, but drove their opponents back to
their camp, which had been already erected on the
Roman bank of the Tiber. Fresh troops, especially
of cavalry, issuing forth from thence turned the tide
of battle, and, overborne by irresistible numbers,
Belisarius and his soldiers were soon in full flight
towards Rome. When they arrived under the walls,
with the barbarians so close behind them that they
seemed to form one raging multitude, they found the
gates closed against them by the panic-stricken garrison.
Even Belisarius in vain shouted his orders to open
the gates; in his gory face and dust-stained figure
the defenders did not recognise their brilliant leader.
A halt was called, a desperate charge was made upon
the pursuing Goths, who were already beginning to
pour down into the fosse; they were pushed back some
distance, not far, but far enough to enable the Imperialists
to reform their ranks, to make the presence of the
general known to the defenders on the walls, to have
the gates opened, and in some sort of military order
to enter the city. Thus the sun set on Rome beleaguered,
the barbarians outside the City. Belisarius with
his gallant band of soldiers thinned but not disheartened
by the struggle, within its walls, and the citizens
“with
terror dumb,
Or whispering with white lips,
’The foe, they come, they come!”
Of the great Siege of Rome, which
began on that day, early in March, 537, and lasted
a year and nine days, till March, 538, a siege perhaps
the most memorable of all that “Roma AEterna”
has seen and has groaned under, as part of the penalty
of her undying greatness, it will be impossible here
to give even a meagre outline. The events of those
wonderful 374 days are chronicled almost with the graphic
minuteness of a Kinglake by a man whom we may call
the literary assessor of Belisarius, the rhetorician
Procopius of Caesarea. One or two incidents of
the siege may be briefly noticed here, and then we
must hasten onwards to its close.
Owing to the vast size of Rome not
even the host of the Goths was able to accomplish
a complete blockade of the City. They formed seven
camps six on the left and one on the right bank of
the Tiber, and they obstructed eight out of its four
teen gates; but while the east and south sides of
the City were thus pretty effectually blockaded, there
were large spaces in the western circuit by which it
was tolerably easy for Belisarius to receive reinforcements,
to bring in occasional convoys of provisions, and
to send away non-combatants who diminished his resisting
power. One of the hardest blows dealt by the barbarians
was their severance of the eleven great aqueducts
from which Rome received its water. This privation
of an element so essential to the health and comfort
of the Roman under the Empire (who resorted to the
bath as a modern Italian resorts to the cafe or the
music hall), was felt as a terrible blow by all classes,
and wrought a lasting change, and not a beneficial
one, in the habits of the citizens, and in the sanitary
condition of Rome. It also seemed likely to have
an injurious effect on the food supply of the City,
since the mills in which corn was ground for the daily
rations of the people were turned by water-power derived
from the Aqueduct of Trajan. Belisarius, however,
always fertile in resource, a man who, had he lived
in the nineteenth century, would assuredly have been
a great engineer, contrived to make Father Tiber grind
out the daily supply of flour for his Roman children.
He moored two barges in the narrowest part of the
stream, where the current was the strongest, put his
mill-stones on board of them, and hung a water-wheel
between them to turn his mills. These river water-mills
continued to be used on the Tiber all through the Middle
Ages, and even until they were superseded by the introduction
of steam.
The Goths did not resign themselves
to the slow languors of a blockade till they had made
one vigorous and confident attempt at a storm.
On the eighteenth day of the siege the terrified Romans
saw from their windows the mighty armament approaching
the City. A number of wooden towers as high as
the walls, mounted on wheels, and drawn by the stout
oxen of Etruria, moved menacingly forward amid the
triumphant shouts of the barbarians, each of whom
had a bundle of boughs and reeds under his arm ready
to be thrown into the fosse, and so prepare a level
surface upon which the terrible engines might approach
the walls. To resist this attack Belisarius had
prepared a large number of Balistae (gigantic
cross-bows worked by machinery and discharging a short
wedge-like bolt with such force as to break trees
or stones) had planted on the walls, great slings,
which the soldiers called Wild Asses (Onagri),
and had set in each gate the deadly machine known
as the Wolf, and which was a kind of double portcullis,
worked both from above and from below.
But though the Gothic host was approaching
with its threatening towers close to the walls, Belisarius
would not give the signal, and not a Balista,
nor a Wild Ass was allowed to hurl its missiles against
the foe. He only laughed aloud, and bade the
soldiers do nothing till he gave the word of command.
To the citizens this seemed an evil jest, and they
grumbled aloud at the impudence of the general who
chose this moment of terrible suspense for merriment.
But now when the Goths were close to the fosse, Belisarius
lifted his bow, singled out a mail-clad chief, and
sent an arrow through his neck, inflicting a deadly
wound. A great shout of triumph rose from the
Imperial soldiers as the proudly accoutred barbarian
rolled in the dust. Another shot, another Gothic
chief slain, and again a shout of triumph. Then
the signal to shoot was given to the soldiers, and
hundreds of bolts from Wild Ass and Balista
were hurtling through the air, aimed not at Gothic
soldiers, but at the luckless oxen that drew the ponderous
towers. The beasts being slain, it was impossible
for the Goths who were immediately under the walls
and exposed to a deadly discharge of arrows from the
battlements, to move their towers either backward
or forward, and there they remained mere laughing-stocks
in their huge immobility, till the end of the day,
when they with all the rest of the Gothic enginery
were given as a prey to the flames. Then men
understood the meaning of the laughter of Belisarius
as he watched the preparations of the barbarians and
derided their childish simplicity in supposing that
he would allow them calmly to move up their towers
till they touched his wall, without using his artillery
to cripple their advance.
Though the attack with the towers
had thus failed there was still fierce fighting to
be done on the south-east and north-west of the City.
At the Praenestine Gate (Porta Maggiore), that
noble structure which is formed out of the arcades
of the Aqueducts, there was a desperate onslaught of
the barbarians, which at one time seemed likely to
be successful, but a sudden sortie of Belisarius taking
them in their rear turned them to headlong flight.
In the opposite quarter the Aurelian Gate was commanded
by the mighty tomb-fortress then known as the Mausoleum
of Hadrian, and now, in its dismantled and degraded
state, as the Castle of Sant’Angelo. Here
the peculiar shape of the fortress prevented the defenders
from using their Balistae with proper effect
on the advancing foe, and when the besiegers were
close under the walls the bolts from the engines flew
over their heads. It seemed as if, after all,
by the Aurelian Gate the barbarians would enter Rome,
when, by a happy instinct, the garrison turned to
the marble statues which surrounded the tomb, wrenched
them from their bases, and rained down such a terrible
shower of legs and arms and heads of gods and goddesses
on their barbarian assailants that these soon fled
in utter confusion.
The whole result of this great day
of assault was to convince Witigis and his counsellors
that the City could not be taken in that manner, and
that the siege must be turned into a blockade.
A general sally which Belisarius ordered, against
his better judgment, in order to still the almost
mutinous clamours of his troops, and which took place
about the fiftieth day of the siege, proved almost
as disastrous for the Romans as the assault had done
for the Goths. It was manifest that this was not
a struggle which could be ended by a single blow on
either side. All the miseries of a long siege
must be endured both by attackers and attacked, and
the only question was on which side patience would
first give waywhether the Romans under
roofs, but short of provisions, or the Goths better
fed, but encamped on the deadly Campagna, would be
the first to succumb to hunger and disease.
Witigis had been in his day a brave
soldier, but he evidently knew nothing of the art
of war. He allowed Belisarius to disencumber himself
of many useless consumers of food by sending the women,
the children, and the slaves out of the City.
His attention was disturbed by feigned attacks, when
the reinforcements, which were tardily sent by Justinian,
and the convoys of provisions, which had been collected
by the wife of Belisarius, the martial Antonina, were
to be brought within the walls. And, lastly,
when at length, about the ninth month of the siege,
he proposed a truce and the reopening of negotiations
with Constantinople, he did not even insert in the
conditions of the truce any limit to the quantity
of supplies which under its cover the Imperialists
might introduce into the City. Thus he played
the game of his wily antagonist, and abandoned all
the advantagesand they were not manywhich
the nine months of blockade had won for him.
The parleyings which preceded this
truce have an especial interest for us, whose forefathers
were at this very time engaged in making England their
own. The Goths, after complaining that Justinian
had broken the solemn compact made between Zeno and
Theodoric as to the conquest of Italy from Odovacar,
went on to propose terms of compromise. “They
were willing”, they said, “for the sake
of peace to give up Sicily, that large and wealthy
island, so important to a ruler who had now become
master of Africa”. Belisarius answered with
sarcastic courtesy: “Such great benefits
should be repaid in kind. We will concede to the
Goths the possession of the whole island of Britain,
which is much larger than Sicily, and which was once
possessed by the Romans as Sicily was once possessed
by the Goths”. Of course that country, though
much larger than Sicily, was one the possession of
which was absolutely unimportant to the Emperor and
his general. “What mattered it”, they
might well say, “who owned that misty and poverty-stricken
island. The oysters of Rutupiae, some fine watch-dogs
from Caledonia, a little lead from the Malvern Hills,
and some cargoes of corn and woolthis was
all that the Empire had ever gained from her troublesome
conquest. Even in the world of mind Britain had
done nothing more than give birth to one second-rate
heretic. The curse of poverty and of barbarous
insignificance was upon her, and would remain upon
her till the end of time”.
The truce, as will be easily understood,
brought no alleviation to the sufferings of the Goths,
who were now almost more besieged than besiegers,
and who were dying by thousands in the unhealthy Campagna.
Before the end of March, 538, they broke up their encampment,
and marched, in sullen gloom, northwards to defend
Ravenna, which was already being threatened by the
operations of a lieutenant of Belisarius. The
150,000 men who had hastened to Rome, dreading lest
the Imperialists should escape before they could encompass
the City, were reduced to but a small portion of that
number, perhaps not many more than the 10,000 which,
after all his reinforcements had been received, seems
to have been the greatest number of actual soldiers
serving under Belisarius in the defence of Rome.
I pass rapidly over the events of
538 and 539. The Imperial generals pressed northwards
along the Flaminian Way. Urbino, Rimini, Osimo,
and other cities in this region were taken by them.
But the Goths fought hard, though they gave little
proof of strategic skill; and once, when they recaptured
the great city of Milan, it looked as though they might
almost be about to turn the tide of conquest.
Evidently they were far less demoralised by their
past prosperity than the Vandals. Perhaps also
the Roman population of Italy, who had met with far
gentler and more righteous treatment from the Ostrogoths
than their compeers in Africa had met with from the
Vandals, and who were now suffering the horrors of
famine, owing to the operations of the contending armies,
assisted the operations of the Byzantine invaders
less than the Roman provincials in Africa had
done. Whatever the cause, it was not till the
early months of 540, nearly five years after the beginning
of the war, that Belisarius and his army stood before
the walls and among the rivers of Ravenna, almost
the last stronghold of Witigis. Belisarius blockaded
the city, and his blockade was a far more stringent
one than that which Witigis had drawn around Rome.
Still there was the ancient and well-founded reputation
for impregnability of the great Adrian city, and, moreover,
just at this time the ambassadors, sent by Witigis
to Justinian, returned from Constantinople, bearing
the Emperor’s consent to a compromise.
Italy, south of the Po, was to revert to the Empire;
north of that river, the Goths were still to hold
it, and the royal treasure was to be equally divided
between the two states. Belisarius called a council
of war, and all his officers signed a written opinion
“that the proposals of the Emperor were excellent,
and that no better terms could be obtained from the
Barbarians”. This, however, was by no means
the secret thought of Belisarius, who had set his
heart on taking Witigis as a captive to Constantinople,
and laying the keys of Ravenna at his master’s
feet. A strange proposition which came from the
beleaguered city seemed to open the way to the accomplishment
of his purpose. The Gothic nobles suggested that
he, the great Captain, whose might in war they had
experienced, should become their leader, should mount
the throne of Theodoric, and should be crowned “King
of the Italians and Goths”, the change in the
order of the names indicating the subordinate position
which the humbled barbarians were willing to assume.
Belisarius seemed to acquiesce in the proposal (though
his secretary assures us that he never harboured a
thought of disloyalty to his master), and received
the oath of the Gothic envoys for the surrender of
the city, postponing his own coronation-oath to his
new subjects till he could swear it in the presence
of Witigis and all his nobles, for Witigis, too, was
a consenting, nay, an eager, party to the transaction.
Thus, by an act of dissimulation, which brought some
stain on his knightly honour (we are tempted to use
the language of chivalry in speaking of these events),
but which left no stain on his loyalty to the Emperor
of Rome, did Belisarius obtain possession of the impregnable
Ravenna. He marched in, he and his veterans,
into the famine-stricken city. When the Gothic
women saw the little dark men filing past them through
the streets, and contrasted them with their own long-limbed,
flaxen-haired giants, they spat in the faces of their
husbands, and said: “Are you men, to have
allowed yourselves to be beaten by such manikins as
these?”
Before the triumphal entry was finished
the Goths had no doubt discovered that they were duped.
No coronation oath was sworn. Belisarius, still
the humble servant of Justinianus Augustus, did not
allow himself to be raised on the shield and saluted
as King of the Italians and Goths. The Gothic
warriors were kindly treated, but dismissed to their
farms between the Apennines and the Adriatic.
Ravenna was again an Imperial city, and destined to
remain so for two centuries. Witigis, with his
wife and children, were carried captives to Constantinople
where, before many years were over, the dethroned monarch
died. His widow, Matasuentha, was soon remarried
to Germanus, the nephew of Justinian, and thus
the granddaughter of Theodoric obtained that position
as a great lady of Byzantium which was far more gratifying
to her taste than the rude royalty of Ravenna.
There is one more personage whose
subsequent fortunes must be briefly glanced at here.
Cassiodorus, the minister of Theodoric and Amalasuentha,
remained, as we regret to find, in the service of
Theodahad when sole king and composed his stilted sentences
at the bidding of Amalasuentha’s murderer.
Witigis also employed him to write his address to
his subjects on ascending the throne. He does
not seem to have taken any part in the siege of Rome,
and before the tide of war rolled back upon Ravenna,
he had withdrawn from public affairs. He retired
to his native town, Squillace, high up on the Calabrian
hills, and there founded a monastery and a hermitage
in the superintendence of which his happy years glided
on till he died, having nearly completed a century
of life. His was one of the first and greatest
of the literary monasteries which, by perpetuating
copies of the Scriptures, and the Greek and Roman
classics, have conferred so great a boon on posterity.
When Ceolfrid, the Abbot of Jarrow, would offer to
the Holy Father at Rome a most priceless gift, he
sent the far-famed Codex Amiatinus, a copy of the
Vulgate, made by a disciple of Cassiodorus, if not
by Cassiodorus himself.