With the fall of Ravenna, and the
captivity of King Witigis, it seemed as if the chapter
of Ostrogothic dominion in Italy was ended. In
fact, however, the war was prolonged for a further
period of thirteen years, a time glorious for the
Goths, disgraceful for the Empire, full of lamentation
and woe for the unhappy country which was to be the
prize of victory.
The departure of Belisarius, summoned
to the East by his master in order to conduct another
Persian war, left the newly won provinces on an in
cline sloping downwards to anarchy. Of all the
generals who remained behind, brave and capable men
as some of them were, there was none who possessed
the unquestioned ascendancy of Belisarius, either in
genius or character. Each thought himself as
good as the others: there was no subordination,
no hearty co-operation towards a common end, but instead
of these necessary conditions of success there was
an eager emulation in the race towards wealth, and
in this ignoble contest the unhappy “Roman”,
the Italian landholder, for whose sake, nominally,
the Gothic war was undertaken, found himself pillaged
and trampled upon as he had never been by the most
brutal of the barbarians.
Nor were the military officers the
only offenders. A swarm of civil servants flew
westwards from Byzantium and lighted on the unhappy
country. Their duty was to extort money by any
and all means for their master, their pleasure to
accumulate fortunes for themselves; but whether the
logothete plundered for the Emperor or for himself,
the Italian tax-payer equally had the life-blood sucked
from his veins. Even the soldiers by whom the
marvellous victories of the last five years had been
won, found themselves at the mercy of this hateful
bureaucracy; arrears of pay left undischarged, fines
inflicted, everything done to force upon their embittered
souls the reflection that they had served a mean and
ungrateful master.
Of all these oppressors of Italy none
was more justly abhorred than Alexander the Logothete.
This man, who was placed at the head of the financial
administration, and who seems by virtue of that position
to have been practically supreme in all but military
operations, had been lifted from a very humble sphere
to eminence, from poverty to boundless wealth, but
the one justification which he could always offer for
his self-advancement was this, that no one else had
been so successful as he in filling the coffers of
his master. The soldiers were, by his proceedings
against them, reduced to a poor, miserable, and despised
remnant. The Roman inhabitants of Italy, especially
the nobles, found that he hunted up with wonderful
keenness and assiduity, and enforced with relentless
sternness all the claimsand they were probably
not a fewwhich the easy-tempered Gothic
kings had suffered to lapse. In their simplicity
these nobles may have imagined that they could plead
that they were serving the Emperor by withholding contributions
from the barbarian. Not so, however. Theodoric,
now that his dynasty had been overthrown, became again
a legitimate ruler, and Justinian as his heir would
exact to the uttermost his unclaimed rights. The
nature of the grasping logothete was well-known in
his own country, and the Byzantines, using the old
Greek weapon of satire against an unpopular ruler,
called him “Alexander the Scissors”, declaring
that there was no one so clever as he in clipping
the gold coins of the currency without impairing their
roundness.
The result of all these oppressions
and this misgovernment was to raise up in a marvellous
manner the Gothic standard from the dust into which
it had fallen. When Belisarius left Italy, only
one city still remained to the Goths, the strong city
of Ticinum, which is now known as Pavia, and which,
from its magnificent position at the angle of the Ticino
and the Po, was often in the early Middle Ages the
last stronghold to be surrendered in Northwestern
Italy. Here had the Goths chosen one of their
nobles, Ildibad, for their king, but the new king had
but one thousand soldiers under him, and his might
well seem a desperate cause. Before the end of
540, however, the departure of Belisarius, the wrangling
among his successors, the oppressions of Alexander
the Logothete, the disaffection of the ruined soldiery
had completely changed the face of affairs. An
army of considerable size, consisting in great measure
of deserters from the Imperial standard, obeyed the
orders of Ildibad; he won a great pitched battle near
Treviso over Vitalius, the best of the Imperial generals,
and the whole of Italy north of the Po again owned
the sway of the Gothic king.
Internal feuds delayed for a little
time the revival of the strength of the barbarians.
There was strife between Ildibad and the family of
the deposed Witigis, and this strife led to Ildibad’s
assassination and to the election of an utterly incapable
successor, Eraric the Rugian. But in the autumn
of 541 all these domestic discords were at an end;
Eraric had been slain, and the nephew of Ildibad was
the universally recognised king of the Ostrogoths.
This man, who was destined to reign for eleven years,
twice to stand as conqueror within the walls of Rome,
to bring back almost the whole of Italy under the
dominion of his people, to be in a scarcely lower
degree than Theodoric himself the hero and champion
of the Ostrogothic race, was the young and gallant
Totila.
With true statesmanlike instinct the
new king perceived that the cause of the past failure
of the Goths lay in the alienated affections of the
people of Italy. The greater misgovernment of
the Emperor’s servants, the coldly calculating
rapacity of Alexander the Scissors, and the arrogant
injustice of the generals, terrible only to the weak,
had given him a chance of winning back the love of
the Italian people and of restoring that happy state
of things which prevailed after the downfall of Odovacar,
when all classes, nobles and peasants, Goths and Romans,
joined in welcoming Theodoric as their king. Totila
therefore kept a strong hand upon his soldiers, sternly
repressed all plundering and outrage, and insisted
on the peasants being paid for all the stores which
the army needed on its march. One day a Roman
inhabitant of Calabria came before him to complain
of one of the king’s life-guardsmen who had
committed an outrage upon his daughter. The guardsman,
not denying the charge, was at once put in ward.
Then the most influential nobles assembled at the
king’s tent, and besought him not to punish a
brave and capable soldier for such an offence.
Totila replied that he mourned as much as they could
do over the necessity of taking away the life of one
of his countrymen, but that the common good, the safety
of the nation, required this sacrifice. At the
outset of the war they had all the wealth of Italy
and countless brave hearts at their disposal, but
all these advantages had availed them nothing because
they had an unjust king, Theodahad, at their head.
Now the Divine favour on their righteous cause seemed
to be giving them the victory, but only by a continuance
in righteous deeds could they hope to secure it.
With these words he won over even the interceding
Goths to his opinion. The guardsman was sentenced
to death, and his goods were confiscated for the benefit
of the maiden whom he had wronged.
At the same time that Totila showed
himself thus gentle and just towards the Roman inhabitants,
he skilfully conducted the war so as to wound the
Empire in its tenderest partfinance.
Justinian’s aim, in Italy as in Africa, was
to make the newly annexed territory pay its own expenses
and hand over a good balance to the Imperial treasury.
It was for this purpose that the logothetes had been
let loose upon Italythat the provincials
had been maddened by the extortions of the tax-gatherer,
that the soldiers had been driven to mutiny and defection.
Now with his loyal and well disciplined troops, Totila
moved over the country from the Alps to Calabria,
quietly collecting the taxes claimed by the Emperor
and the rents due to the refugee landlords, and in
this way, without oppressing the people, weakened
the Imperial government and put himself in a position
to pay liberally for the commissariat of his army.
Thus the difficulties of the Imperial treasury increased.
Justinian became more and more unwilling to loosen
his purse-strings for the sake of a province which
showed an ever-dwindling return. The pay of the
soldiers got more and more hopelessly into arrear.
They deserted in increasing numbers to the standard
of the brave and generous young king of the Goths.
Hence, it came to pass, that in the spring of 544,
when Totila had been only for two and a half years
king, he had gained two pitched battles by land and
one by sea, had taken Naples and Beneventum, could
march freely from one end of Italy to the other, and
in fact, with the exception of Ravenna, Rome, and
a few other strongholds, had won back from the Empire
the whole of that Italy which had been acquired with
so much toil and so much bloodshed.
There was, of course, bitter disappointment
in the council-chamber of Justinian at this issue
of an enterprise which had seemed at first so successful.
There was but one sentence on all men’s lips“Only
Belisarius can recover Italy”, and it was uttered
so loudly and so universally, that the Emperor could
not but hear it. But Justinian, ever since the
offer of the Western throne to Belisarius, seems to
have looked upon him with jealousy as a possible rival,
and (what was even more fatal to his interests at
court), the Empress Theodora had come to regard him
with dislike and suspicion, partly because of a domestic
quarrel in which she had taken the part of his wife
Antonina against him, and partly because when Justinian
was lying plague-stricken and apparently at the point
of death, Belisarius had discussed the question of
the succession to the throne in a manner which the
Empress considered hostile to her interests.
For these reasons the great general had been for some
years in disgrace. A large part of his property
was taken away from him, and some of it was handed
over to Antonina, with whom he had been ordered to
reconcile himself on the most humbling terms:
his great military household, containing many men
of servile origin, whom he had trained to such deeds
of valour that it was a common saying, “One
household alone has destroyed the kingdom of Theodoric”,
was broken up, and those brave men who would willingly
have died for their chief, were portioned out by lot
among the other generals and the eunuchs of the palace.
Still, in deference to the unanimous
opinion of his counsellors, Justinian decided once
more to avail himself of the services of Belisarius
for the reconquest of Italy. But his unquenched
jealousy of his great general’s fame, and the
almost bankrupt condition of the Imperial exchequer
converged to the same point, and caused Justinian,
while entrusting Belisarius with the command, to couple
with it the monstrous stipulation that he was not
to ask for any money for the war. And this, though
it was clear to all men that the want of money and
the consequent desertion of the Imperial standard
by whole companies of grumbling barbarians, had been
one main cause of the amazing success of Totila.
Thus crippled by his master, and having his own spirit
broken by Imperial ingratitude and domestic unhappiness,
Belisarius, in the whole course of his second command
in Italy, which lasted for five years(544-549)
did nothing, or I should rather say only one thing,
worthy of his former reputation. This is the judgment
which his former friend and admirer, Procopius, passes
on this period of his life. “Thus then”,
(in 549) “Belisarius departed to Byzantium without
glory, having been for five years in Italy, but having
never been strong enough to make a regular march by
land in all that time, but having flitted about from
one fortress on the coast to another, and so left the
enemy free to capture Rome and almost every other
place which they attacked”.
Notwithstanding this harsh sentence,
it was in connection with the siege of Rome that the
old Belisarius, the man of infinite resource and courageous
dexterity, once more revealed himself, and while we
gladly let all the other events of these five tedious
years glide into oblivion, it is worth while devoting
a few pages to the Second and Third Gothic sieges
of Rome.
Totila had quite determined not to
repeat the mistake of Witigis, by dashing his army
to pieces against the walls of Rome, but, for all that,
he could not feel his recovery of Italy to be complete
so long as the Eternal City defied his power.
He therefore slowly tightened his grasp on the City,
capturing one town after another in its neighbourhood
and watching the roads to prevent convoys of provisions
from entering it. He was on good terms with the
peasants of the surrounding country, paid liberally
for all the provisions required by his army (far smaller
than that of Witigis), and kept his soldiers in good
heart and in high health, while the unhappy citizens
were seeing the great enemyFamineslowly
approach nearer and nearer to their homes.
Within the City there was now no such
provident and resourceful general as Belisarius.
Bessas, the commandant, himself an Ostrogoth of Moesia
by birth, was a brave man, but coarse, selfish, and
unfeeling. Intent only on filling his own coffers
by selling the corn which he had stored up in his
warehouses at a famine-price to the citizens, he was
not touched by the increasing misery around him, and
made no effectual attempt to break the net which Totila
had drawn round Rome. Belisarius himself, “flitting
from point to point of the coast”, had come to
Portus eighteen miles from Rome, at the mouth
of the Tiber. It was no want of good-will on his
part that prevented him from bringing his provision-ships
up the river to the help of the famished City, but
about four miles above Portus Totila had placed
a strong boom of timber, protected in front by an iron
chain and guarded by two towers, one at each end of
the bridge which was above the boom. Belisarius
made his preparations for destroying the boom:
a floating tower as high as the bridge placed on two
barges, a large vessel filled with “Greek fire”
at the top of the tower, soldiers below to hew the
boom in pieces and sever the chain, a long train of
merchantmen behind laden with provisions for the hungry
Romans, and manned by archers who poured a deadly
volley of arrows on the defenders of the bridge.
All went well with his design up to a certain point.
The chain was severed, the Goths fell fast under the
arrows from the ships, the vessel of “Greek
fire” was hurled upon one of the forts, which
was soon wrapped in flames. With might and main
the Imperial soldiers began to hack at the boom, and
it seemed as if in a few minutes the corn-laden vessels
would be sailing up the Tiber, bringing glad relief
to the starving citizens. But just at that moment
a horseman galloped up to Belisarius with the unwelcome
tidings“Isaac is taken prisoner”.
Isaac the Armenian was Belisarius’ second in
command, whom he had left at Portus in charge
of his stores, his munitions of war, and most important
of all, the now reconciled Antonina. In spite
of Belisarius’ strict injunction to act solely
on the defensive, Isaac, watching from afar the successful
movements of his chief, had sallied forth to attack
the Gothic garrison at Ostia on the opposite bank
of the river. His defeat and consequent capture
were events of little moment in themselves, but all-important
as arresting the victorious career of Belisarius.
For to the anxious soul of the general the capture
of Isaac seemed to mean the capture of Portus,
the cutting off of his army from their base of operations,
the captivity of his beloved Antonina. He gave
the signal for retreat; the attempt to provision Rome
had failed; the Imperial army returned to Portus.
When he found what it was that had really happened,
and by what a combination of folly and ill luck he
had been prevented from winning a splendid victory,
his annoyance was so great that combined with the
unwholesome air of the Campagna it threw him into a
fever which brought him near to death and prevented
him for some months from taking any part in the war.
Meanwhile dire famine bore sway in
the beleaguered city. Wheat was sold for L22
a quarter, and the greater part of the citizens were
thankful to live on coarse bread made of bran, which
was doled out to them by Bessas at a quarter of the
price of wheat. Before long even this bran became
a luxury beyond their power to purchase. Dogs
and mice provided them with their only meals of flesh,
but the staple article of food was nettles. With
blackened skin and drawn faces, mere ghosts of their
former selves, the once proud and prosperous citizens
of Rome wandered about the waste places where these
nettles grew, and often one of them would be found
dead with hunger, his strength having suddenly failed
him while attempting to gather his wretched meal.
At length this misery was suddenly
ended. Some Isaurian soldiers who were guarding
the Asinarian Gate in the south-east of the City made
overtures to the Gothic soldiers for the betrayal of
their post. These Isaurians were probably part
of the former garrison of Naples whom Totila had treated
with great generosity after the surrender of that
city. They remembered the kindness then shown
them; they were weary of the siege, and disgusted
with the selfish avarice of their generals, and they
soon came to terms with the besiegers. Four of
the bravest Goths being hoisted over the walls at
night by the friendly Isaurians, ran round to the
Asinarian Gate, battered its bolts and bars to pieces,
and let in their waiting comrades. Unopposed,
the Gothic army marched in, unresisting, the
Imperial troops marched out by the Flaminian Gate.
The play was precisely the same that had been enacted
ten years before when Belisarius won the city from
Leudaris, but with the parts reversed. What Witigis
with his one hundred and fifty thousand Goths had
failed to accomplish, an army of not more than a tenth
of that number had accomplished under Totila.
Bessas and the other generals fled headlong with the
rest of the crowd that pressed out of the Flaminian
Gate, and the treasure, accumulated with such brutal
disregard of human suffering, fell into the hands
of the besiegers.
At first murder and plunder raged
unchecked through the streets of the City, the exasperation
which had been caused by the events of the long siege
having made every Gothic heart bitter against Rome
and Romans. But after sixty citizens had been
slain, Totila, who had gone to St. Peter’s to
offer up his prayers and thanksgivings, listened to
the intercession of the deacon Pelagius and commanded
that slaughter should cease. But there were only
five hundred citizens left in Rome to receive the
benefit of the amnesty, so great had been the depopulation
of the City by war and famine.
And now had come a fateful moment
in the history of Roma AEterna. A conqueror stood
within her walls, not in mere joyousness of heart like
Alaric, pleased with the exploit of bringing to her
knees the mistress of the world, not intent on vulgar
plans of plunder like Gaiseric, but nourishing a deep
and deadly hatred against that false and ungrateful
City, and, by the ghosts of a hundred and fifty thousand
of his countrymen who had died before her untaken
walls, beckoned on a memorable revenge. Totila
would spare, as he had promised, the lives of the
trembling citizens, but he had determined that Rome
herself should perish. The walls should be dismantled,
the public buildings burned to the ground, and sheep
should graze again over the seven hills of the City
as they had grazed thirteen hundred years before, when
Romulus and Remus were suckled by the wolf. From
this purpose, however, he was moved by the intercession
of Belisarius, who, from his couch of fever, wrote
a spirit-stirring letter to Totila, pleading for Rome,
greatest and most glorious of all cities that the
sun looked down upon, the work not of one king nor
one century, but of long ages and many generations
of noble men. Belisarius concluded with an appeal
to the Gothic king to consider what should be his
own eternal record in history, whether he would rather
be remembered as the preserver or the destroyer of
the greatest city in the world.
This appeal, made by one hero to another,
was successful. Totila was still bent on preventing
the City from ever again becoming a stronghold of
the enemy, and therefore determined to lay one-third
of the walls level with the ground, but he assured
the messengers of Belisarius that he would leave the
great monuments of Rome untouched. Having accomplished
the needed demolition of her defences, he marched forth
with his army from the desolate and sepulchral City
and took up a position in the Alban Mountains, which
are seen by the dwellers in Rome far off on their
south-eastern horizon.
When Totila withdrew Rome was left,
we are told, absolutely devoid of inhabitants.
The Senators he kept in his camp as hostages, and all
the less influential citizens with their wives and
children were sent away to the confines of Campania.
For forty days or more the great City which had been
for so long the heart of the human universe, the city
which, with the million-fold tide of life throbbing
in her veins, had most vividly prefigured the London
of our own day, remained “waste and without
inhabitants”, as desolate as Anderida in Kent
had been left half a century before by her savage
Saxon conquerors.
And then came another changeone
of the most marvellous in the history of that City
whose whole life has been a marvel. While Totila
abode in his camp on the Alban Hills, Belisarius,
rising from the bed to which fever had for so many
weeks chained him, made a visit to Rome, accompanied
by a thousand soldiers, that he might see with his
own eyes into what depth of calamity she had fallen.
At first, it would seem, mere curiosity led him to
the ruined City, but when he was there, gazing on
Totila’s work of devastation, a brilliant thought
flashed through his brain. After all the demolitions
of Totila, the ruin was not irretrievable. By
repairing the rents in the walls, Rome might yet be
made defensible. He would re-occupy it, and the
Goths should find that they had all their work to
do over again. The idea seemed at first to his
counsellors like the suggestion of delirium, but as
it rapidly took shape under his hands, it was recognised
as being indeed a masterstroke of well-calculated
audacity. Leaving a small body of men to guard
his base of operations at Portus, he moved every
available man to Rome, crowded them up to the gaps
made by Totila, bade them build anyhow, with any sort
of materialmortar was out of the question;
it must be mere dry walling that they could accomplish,only
let them preserve some semblance of an upright wall,
and crown the summit of it with a rampart of stakes.
The deep fosse below fortunately remained as it was,
not filled up. So in five and twenty days the
circuit of the walls was completed, truly in a most
slovenly style of building, the marks of which we
can see even to this day, but Rome was once again a
“fenced city”. As soon as Totila
heard the unwelcome tidings, he marched with his whole
army to Rome, hoping to take the City, as his soldiers
said, “at the first shout”. But he
had Belisarius to deal with, not Bessas. There
had not yet been time even to make new gates for the
City instead of those which Totila had destroyed,
but Belisarius planted all his bravest soldiers in
the void places where the gates should be, and guarded
the approach by caltrops (somewhat like those wherewith
Bruce defended his line at Bannockburn), so as to
make a charge of Gothic cavalry impossible. Three
long days of hard-fought battle were spent round the
fateful City. In each the Goths, whatever temporary
advantages they might gain, were finally repulsed,
and at length Totila, who was not going to repeat
the error of Witigis, marched away from the too well-known
scene, amid the bitter reproaches of the Gothic nobles,
who before had praised him like a god for all his
valour and dexterity in war, but now, on the morrow
of his first great blunder, loudly upbraided him for
his imprudence, adding the obvious and easy piece of
Epimethean criticism, “that the City ought either
to have been utterly destroyed, or else occupied with
a sufficient force”. Meanwhile Belisarius
at his leisure completed the repair of the walls,
hung the massive gates on their hinges, had keys made
to fit their locks, and sent the duplicate keys to
Justinian. The Roman Empire once again had Rome.
And yet this re-occupation of the
Eternal City, brilliant and striking achievement as
it was, had little influence on the course of the war.
Rome was now like a great stone left in an alluvial
plain showing where the river had once flowed, but
the currents of commerce, of politics, of war, flowed
now in other channels. Belisarius, leaving a garrison
in Rome, had to betake himself once more to that desultory
warfare, flitting round the coast from one naval fortress
to another, in which the earlier years of his second
command had been passed; and at length, early in 549,
only two years after his re-occupation of Rome, he
obtained as a great favour, through the intercession
of Antonina, permission to resign his command and
return to Constantinople. It was on this occasion
that Procopius passed that harsh judgment as to the
inglorious character of these later operations of his
in Italy, which was quoted on a previous page.
I will briefly summarise the subsequent
events in the life of the old hero:
Once more, ten years after the return
of Belisarius (in 559), his services were claimed
by Justinian in order to repel a horde of savage Huns
who had penetrated within eighteen miles of Constantinople.
The work was brilliantly done, with much of the old
ingenuity and fertility of resource which had marked
his first campaign in Italy, and then Belisarius relapsed
into inactivity. He was again accused (562),
probably without justice, of abetting a conspiracy
against the Emperor, was disgraced and imprisoned
in his own palace. After seven months he was
restored to the Imperial favour, the falsity of the
accusation against him having probably become apparent.
He died in 565, in about the sixtieth year of his
age, and only a few months before his jealous master.
He had more than once had to endure the withdrawal
of that master’s confidence, and some portions
of his vast wealth were on two occasions taken from
him. But this is all that can be truly said as
to the reverses of fortune undergone by the conqueror
of the Vandals and the Goths. The stories of
his blindness and of his beggary, of his holding forth
a wooden bowl and whining out “Date obolum
Belisario”, rest on no good foundation,
and either arise from a confusion between Belisarius
and another disgraced minister of Justinian, or else
are simply due to the myth-making industry of the
Middle Ages.