Belisarius in the center, pointing; two members of his
bucellarii bodyguard stand behind him. The figure on the right appears to be a
chieftain or high-status member of his Hun auxillaries; though many of his
bucellarii were Huns and this may be one of these.
In his new style of provincial warfare, Belisarius felt he
could make up for the chronic shortage of troops through audacity and winning
over the local population—anticipating modern notions of counterinsurgency
warfare in which an outnumbered invader must enlist local adherents to a shared
cause. So-called barbarian forces, as Belisarius knew, were led by magnetic
tribal leaders. When these charismatic strongmen were targeted and fell in
battle, their armies usually dissipated. The key was not to use his signature
heavy cavalry in reckless fashion in unplanned pursuits, but to hit the enemy
hard and quickly through focused and concentrated jabs, destroying its morale
before it could use greater numbers to outflank and surround the smaller
expeditionary Byzantine forces. In contrast, either alienating the locals or in
static fashion preparing for a large set battle was a prescription for
disaster.
The Mediterranean world was stunned at the fall of Carthage.
Belisarius had landed in North Africa in June 533. Less than seven months
later, his army had destroyed the century-old Vandal kingdom in Africa,
captured the usurper king Gelimer, either killed, enslaved, or recruited into
his army most of the Vandal population, established a new Byzantine province
that might provide a base for future conquests in the west—and sent waves of
terror through the Gothic hierarchy in Italy that it might be next in line in
Justinian’s apparent plan to pick off vulnerable provinces of the old Western
Roman Empire. Byzantium was supposed to have followed the fate of Rome as a
shrinking, corrupt populace gave way before hardier, growing, and more warlike
tribes on its borders. Instead, Belisarius had somehow reversed the course of
Mediterranean history and found a way for a small force of relatively affluent
westerners to mold a successful expeditionary army of invasion against European
tribesmen. As the general put it to his men before facing the Vandals, “Not by
the number of men, and not by the measure of one’s body, but by the valor of
the soul, war is decided.”
Belisarius returned to Constantinople with the entire
treasury of the Vandals—reputedly one of the largest hoards in the ancient
world, the aggregate stash from some one hundred years of plunder in the
western Mediterranean, much of it to be used to pay for the new church of Hagia
Sophia. Those Vandals not scattered throughout North Africa were brought back
with Belisarius to the capital and forcibly integrated into Justinian’s armies.
The Vandal people quite literally had ceased to exist as an identifiable tribe
and so disappeared from history.
The stunning achievement energized Justinian, at about the
same time as the monumental church of Hagia Sophia was rising and as his
historic reorganization and compilation of Roman law—the Pandects or Digest—was
at last issued at Constantinople. Anything, it seemed—military, religious,
legal—was possible for Justinian and his newly ascendant Rome.
There would be occasional provincial uprisings and tribal
revolts in Roman-reoccupied North Africa. The indigenous Moors, as well as what
was left of the old Roman landowning elite, would grow to like their new
Byzantine overseers no more than they had the Germanic invaders. Yet Byzantine
power in North Africa would remain for more than a century—until the Islamic
advances of the seventh and eight centuries swept westward from Egypt and
incorporated the Maghreb into the growing Muslim caliphate.
Belisarius Goes North: The War in Italy Against the Goths
(535–40)
After a year of adulation and a consulship in
Constantinople, Belisarius headed again out west for the most important
campaign of the emperor’s intention to restore as much of the old Mediterranean
empire as his resources would allow. His orders this time were to reclaim Italy
and Sicily, and to ensure that the Moors did not overwhelm the newly reclaimed
Roman provinces in North Africa.
Unfortunately, Belisarius would have less than half of the
forces that had set out for Africa—in part because the emperor was deluded by
the easy victory over the Vandals into believing Gothic Italy was equally
vulnerable. In part, Justinian was also cautious because of the war closer to
home against the Goths in Dalmatia. And in part, the emperor wished to
guarantee that no one of his growing stable of generals was given too many
resources that might at some future date threaten his power. He was still
shaken, after all, from the Nika riots, when he had come within hours of losing
both his throne and his life.
The so-called Gothic Wars in the Italian peninsula, in their
various phases, were to last for nearly twenty years (534–54). The conflict
would ultimately result in the near-complete annexation of Italy under Byzantine
rule—and for a brief moment the near-recreation of the old Mediterranean Roman
Empire. And yet the fighting would prove so exhausting to both invaded and
invader that within little over a decade after the final peace (568), the
Lombards would invade an impoverished Italy and undo most of the work of
Justinian’s generals there, just as Byzantine North Africa would later fall to
the Islamic tribes.
The first phase of the war to restore Ostrogoth Italy to
Roman rule would last five years (535–40). As in the Vandal war, the fighting
began when Justinian intervened in a dynastic dispute—in this case, the murder
of the friendly Gothic queen Amalasuntha—and sent Belisarius with 7,500 troops
to remove the usurper Theodahad. Waged under the Byzantine propaganda of
freeing long-lost kindred Italians from the “slavery” of the barbarian Goths,
the war proved lengthy, complex, and costly.
The campaign again underscored the genius of Belisarius in
using extremely small forces to overwhelm the Goths and eventually take control
of most of Italy and its seven million or so inhabitants. Until Belisarius’
invasion, the Ostrogoths, like the Vandals, had terrorized Roman society for
more than two hundred years since their initial incursions across the Rhine and
Danube during the fourth century. The very distance that once had made
Constantinople and the eastern empire more secure from the fifth-century
barbarian invasions—originating from the northern side of the Rhine and western
Danube—unfortunately ensured that it was increasingly difficult to resupply
Byzantine troops fighting in far-off Italy.
Throughout the former western provinces there arose a
certain mystique around the Goths—namely, that Germanic purity and hardiness
had overwhelmed Roman decadence and frailty. Many Italians expected that
subsequent Roman attempts to assert authority from distant Constantinople would
surely prove no match against an innate Germanic ferocity. But whereas Italians
may have been awed by the notion of Gothic invincibility, Belisarius was not.
He saw instead traditional “barbarian” weakness of the sort his veterans had
dealt with in the east and in Africa: an absence of unified command, reliance
on mercurial tribal leaders, spotty logistics, lack of reliable sea power and
naval support, and vulnerability to heavy armored Roman cavalry, especially the
mounted archers that had proved so advantageous in the eastern wars against the
Persians.
Belisarius landed in Sicily late in 535 and quickly won over
the island’s population. By December, his paltry Byzantine forces had mopped up
the remaining Gothic holdouts on the island without much of a struggle. The
terrified Goths at that point might have immediately ceded much of southern
Italy to the popular invader. But another Byzantine army in Dalmatia across the
Adriatic—under the commanders Mundus and his son Mauricius—was unexpectedly
overwhelmed. Both generals perished. As a result, the Goths were given newfound
optimism in resisting Belisarius, and were freed from worry of a relief invasion
from the north by a second Roman army. Then, just as he prepared to invade
Italy, Belisarius got wind of a revolt back in North Africa. He quickly
returned to Carthage to put down a mutiny by a renegade Byzantine general,
Stotzas. The latter had rallied garrison troops angry over the lack of promised
pay, disputes over booty, and religious sympathies for Arianism.
Stotzas had a popular agenda of setting up a rogue Byzantine
independent state in North Africa, and he somehow had managed to recruit some
nine thousand Moors and Vandal holdouts to his cause. He was hoping to declare
himself a king of Africa while Belisarius was bogged down in Italy. Yet with
just two thousand loyal troops, Belisarius did not hesitate nor delegate, but
on his own initiative landed at Carthage, galvanized friendly troops, saved the
city, routed Stotzas, restored the province, and left the mop-up to the
emperor’s nephew Germanus. It was a little-remarked-on victory, but once again
demonstrative of how the mere name of Belisarius was able to awe local
populations and instill loyalty and morale in his own troops—and terror in his
enemies. He quickly sailed back to Sicily to resume planning for the invasion
of Italy, leaving Africa secure but in wretched shape after nonstop fighting between
indigenous Moors, Vandals, and Byzantines.
By late spring 536, Belisarius had landed on the Italian
peninsula and taken the southern city of Rhegium. He went quickly northward to
the stronghold at Naples and stormed the city after a costly siege,
characterized by savagery on both sides. Now the road to Rome was open, and
Belisarius lost no time in heading farther north. Meanwhile, a new Byzantine
general in Dalmatia, Constantinianus, had retaken the offensive, routed the
Goths, and threatened to enter Italy from the north or by sea from the east.
At this point, the usurper Theodahad was murdered. A new,
more charismatic strongman, Vittigis, emerged to rally the Goths. Still, most
of the native Italian population began to favor Belisarius and the Byzantine
promise of a new united empire, perhaps in hopes that well over a half century
of Gothic tribalism was coming to an end with a return of Roman rule under an
enlightened western, Latin-speaking general, fueled by eastern money. On
December 9, 536, Belisarius entered Rome. In just a year he had annexed much of
North Africa and retaken Sicily and half of Italy. Byzantine power had advanced
from its new bases in the Mediterranean, more than three hundred miles to the
north, and caused widespread dissension among the Gothic ranks. All this
Belisarius accomplished with an army not much larger than two traditional Roman
legions, and largely within the strategic directives and limitations
established by a distant and suspicious Justinian. With the Vandal fortune,
Belisarius had probably paid for the cost of his operations through booty
rather than imperial outlays. For a moment both Constantinople and Rome were
again united under one emperor.
Rome may not have been the center of Gothic power. Yet the
city was still relatively unchanged physically from its majestic days of Roman
imperial power, and it remained home to some six hundred thousand inhabitants
of various ethnicities and languages. Today the fifth-century “Fall of Rome” is
a catchphrase for the end of days, but we rarely recall that after just sixty
years of Gothic rule, the Roman general Belisarius in fact recaptured it from
the proverbial barbarians, on the promise of an end to the Arian heresy and a
return to a Roman grandeur of the old emperors.
Belisarius quickly moved to secure the surrounding
countryside outside Rome and ready the city’s defenses for the expected
counterattacks. He was responsible for defending the ancient capital with a
minuscule command more akin to the urban police than a national army. Vittigis
arrived to besiege the city four months later. From March 537 to March 538, the
Byzantines were surrounded by various Gothic armies. The vastly outnumbered
Belisarius was in nonstop action. He enrolled the citizenry into his defense
forces and restored the old Aurelian ramparts. The Byzantines sent out constant
sallies, and on occasion won and lost pitched battles before the city walls.
Belisarius—in what would be a recurring scenario—desperately entreated
Constantinople to send reinforcements, given that the enemy outside the walls
may have numbered at various times over a hundred thousand besiegers. Yet he
got no reply. Justinian did not regularly communicate with his generals, much
less did he articulate to them any grand strategy of reclaiming the Roman
west—either out of distrust or his own confusion over what his ultimate
strategic aims actually were.
Finally, as spring 538 approached, the Goth besiegers began
to tire, especially as additional Byzantine forces appeared by sea. The result
was that the enemy finally gave up and retired in March. After his brilliant
defense of Rome, Belisarius then prepared to move farther northward with the
new Byzantine reinforcements to complete the conquest of the northern Italian
peninsula. But while Justinian had sent troops and more supplies, the emperor
had established no clear central command authority in Italy—perhaps by intent
rather than laxity.
As soon as Belisarius and rival generals focused on
capturing Ravenna to end Gothic rule south of the Po River, disputes broke out
as to how best to use limited resources to complete the conquest. Belisarius,
the newly arrived eunuch general Narses, and John, the nephew of the general
Vitalianus, bickered endlessly. They could not agree to unify Byzantine
strength and storm the remaining northern Italian cities, most of which were
far better fortified than the southern towns. And the farther northward the Byzantines
went, the longer their supply lines grew from the Mediterranean—and the closer
they came to the traditional centers of Germanic power and influence. Unity
among the various small armies of the Byzantines was needed more than ever—at a
time when many commanders wished to hunker down and loot their newfound
provinces rather than risk stretching northward in an effort to reestablish a
western province for Constantinople. Again, the problem lay back home with an
emperor who had never quite decided whether he had the resources to restore in
systematic fashion the old Roman Empire or merely would take what territories
he could when a favorable occasion arose. Was the west to be part of a New
Rome—or merely fragmented buffer states to offer security and loot for
Constantinople? The answer seemed to depend on whether Justinian’s armies were
stalemated or on the move defeating their enemies.
The result of a distracted and divided command was that
Milan was retaken by the Goths, mostly razed, and its Roman citizenry
massacred, while the Byzantine relief forces were left squabbling. Finally,
Narses, the Armenian eunuch general, was recalled. That move at last left
Belisarius with overall nominal command. The final subjugation of northern
Italy went ahead with the capture of the Gothic strongholds at Auximum (modern
Osimo) and Faesulae (Fiesole).
By May 540, Belisarius—now with loyal subordinate
commanders, reinforcements, and control of the Adriatic—at last stormed
Ravenna, the Gothic capital, and captured Vittigis. All of Italy south of the
Po River was in Roman hands. Then Belisarius himself was recalled to
Constantinople, ordered to bring back the captured Gothic king and his Italian
treasury—and, most important, to address rumors that he had considered setting
himself up as a conquering strongman independent of Constantinople.
Nonetheless, in a mere seven years, Belisarius had conquered
western North Africa, Sicily, and most of Italy, almost doubling the
geographical extent of the Byzantine Empire—and creating as many new problems
as old ones solved. In the endeavor, the treasury at Constantinople was close
to being depleted. The conquered lands were largely devastated and hardly able
to become immediate productive sources of new taxation. Scarce imperial garrison
troops were scattered from Carthage to Ravenna, more than a thousand miles from
the capital. The old Vandal treasury waned as Justinian continued with his vast
building projects. Indeed, to run this new expanded empire from the Atlantic to
the Euphrates, Rome, not a distant Constantinople, as in the past would seem to
be the more ideally situated capital. Belisarius himself had incurred jealousy
and hatred from his rival generals, many of them increasingly well connected at
Constantinople and eager to feed rumors to a paranoid Justinian.
The conquered Goths had predicated much of their surrender
on the assurance that the godlike Belisarius, as a sort of sympathetic
proconsul, would stay on and guarantee Gothic interests. Yet he apparently
either was disingenuous in his negotiations or realized only afterward that he
could never honor such a promise. If such a proconsulship under Belisarius
might have brought a chance of lasting peace to Italy, it also would have
ensured the general’s own demise at the court of Justinian. Meanwhile,
Constantinople’s opportunistic eastern enemies had broken the peace to strike
on the frontier while Justinian was distracted in the west.
As Belisarius was recalled home in 540, what, in fact, had
the Byzantines accomplished in the west? Clearly, Africa and Italy had cost
more than these new acquisitions might in the near future earn. To the north of
Italy, Franks and Lombards were eager to capitalize on the demonstrable
weakness of their traditional rival Goths, who, as they had acculturated to
life in Italy, sometimes had proven to be as much a bulwark against the other,
fiercer northern Germanic tribes as they had been incorrigible enemies of Roman
civilization. Most importantly, a destructive precedent had been ratified in
which the more Belisarius won land and power for the emperor, the more
Justinian sent out rival generals to undercut his own general’s success. The
more he added to the empire, the more costs the strapped empire incurred. If it
were to be a choice—and it often was unfortunately seen at Constantinople in
just those Manichean terms—between Byzantine conquest and an exalted
Belisarius, Justinian usually clipped the wings of his most successful general
and accepted the resulting negative effects on his wars.
But all that said, for a brief moment, most of the old Roman
Empire—with notable exceptions in Gaul, Britain, and most of Spain—was reunited
under a central authority for a last moment in history. The chief remaining
rival heresy to Catholicism—Arianism among the Vandals and Goths—was on the
wane. A new religious and political unity looked as if it were on the horizon.
Belisarius had proven himself able both to defeat and to appeal to Moors,
Vandals, and Goths as a fair proconsul rather than a vengeful conqueror, while
managing to hold territory with relatively small numbers of troops. Had
Justinian in 540 continued to place his trust in the young Belisarius’
abilities, the Byzantines might have institutionalized the lost provinces
within their imperial administration and the new unified empire might have
endured.
Unlike Belisarius’ return home after the destruction of the
Vandal kingdom in Africa, when he arrived at Constantinople with the defeated
Vittigis in tow, Belisarius was given no more public triumphs, despite
unmatched victories in Italy. Byzantium’s greatest general was still only
thirty-six. He had been at war nearly nonstop for Justinian for the last
fourteen years. Belisarius was a popular icon and already achieving mythic
status among the populace at Constantinople—as famous for his military exploits
as he was for his legendary character and personal habits. In an age of
gratuitous cruelty and barbarism, Belisarius was noted, by the standards of his
times, for his clemency, honesty, and lenient treatment of the conquered. Such
mythmaking spread in the streets of Constantinople attesting to Belisarius the
saintly conqueror, who personally attended his wounded, replaced the lost
equipment of his soldiers at his own expense, and treated as sacrosanct the
property of the residents whose land he marched through and fought on. His
martial excellence had ensured everything from the funding to finish off Hagia
Sophia to the recapture of Rome.
Whether or not Belisarius’ legendary avoidance of alcohol,
womanizing, and bribery likewise was true, it mattered little. The people
seemed to have accepted all his virtues as gospel. When their general came home
from the furthest borders of the empire, he brought peace, greater power—and
plenty of plunder. But by 540 Justinian had two problems: a new outbreak of war
to the east with the Persians, and a mature general more beloved and powerful
than the emperor himself. The solution to both was to send Belisarius to the
east to save yet another seemingly lost war.
Belisarius Goes East Again: War Again Against the
Persians (540–41)
The “Eternal Peace” between the Byzantines and Persia in
fact lasted just seven years. The uneasy truce was broken when the Persian king
Chosroes once more crossed the Euphrates and began storming Byzantine-held
cities on his way to Antioch on the Mediterranean. He had rightly assumed that
the past six-year-long drain on Constantinople from warring in the west was an
opportunity for some easy plundering of Byzantine territory that might earn
even more lucrative bribes from Justinian to keep his eastern frontier quiet.
More important, the Persians, in general, considered that they had been fooled
into signing an armistice that freed up the Byzantines to profit in Africa,
Sicily, and Italy. Newly acquired western treasure and manpower, Chosroes
feared, might be redirected by Justinian toward the old conflict in the east.
The Persian invasion once more reminded Constantinople of
the dilemma that Byzantium and its generals faced in their quest to restore
much of the ancient Roman Empire. Surrounded on all sides by enemies, Byzantium
usually had two strategic defense choices. One, it had only enough strength to
muster in a single theater to conduct a truly decisive war. Thus the successive
acquisitions in Africa and Italy only invited Persian opportunism on the
eastern border once Byzantine resources were focused elsewhere. In contrast,
the second alternative of defending all of Byzantium’s borders at once, without
offensive operations designed at destroying permanently any one threat, also
meant that its growing number of belligerents was never really defeated.
Therefore, enemies usually were manipulated into uneasy armistices through
bribery, dynastic marriages, and occasional regional fighting—all biding their
time until they sensed a general weakness at the core.
After storming or forcing the surrender of the
Byzantine-controlled cities on both sides of the Euphrates—Apamea, Beroea,
Chalcis, Edessa, Hieropolis, and Sura—Chosroes finally accepted Justinian’s
offers of money to return to Persia. But on his long way back home from the
rich and historic city of Antioch, which he had stormed and pillaged, Chosroes
decided to grab in addition the key Byzantine border citadel at Dara. Once
there, he broke off his siege only after receiving another thousand pounds of
silver. The more the Persians threatened Byzantine cities, the more money they
received to desist—and the hungrier they were for the next easy payoff.
Justinian saw that bribes, supplied both from his own
treasury and new plunder from the west, were only stopgap solutions, and that
he needed to send out Belisarius to restore the border—almost a decade and a
half after he went east on his first command. Justinian this way might kill two
birds with one stone: removing a popular rival to the emperor at home while
ensuring inspired military leadership abroad. Arriving from Lebanon, Belisarius
reached Dara in June 540. There he prepared to enter Persian territory to teach
Chosroes a belated lesson. Unfortunately, Belisarius quickly learned that
Byzantine commanders far to the north on the eastern shores of the Black Sea
had so maltreated local populations that Chosroes, while in Greek-held Lazica,
had presented himself as a Persian liberator of indigenous peoples from
supposed Byzantine oppression. There was again a sense in the east that
spiraling Byzantine taxation fueled operations far to the west rather than
being invested in security closer to home.
Yet whereas the Persians sensed Byzantine division and
uncertainty, Belisarius saw an opportunity: While Chosroes was in the north
picking off Byzantine border towns, the Persian southern flank was for a moment
poorly guarded. After an inconsequential battle outside the stronghold of Nisibis
and a failed siege, Belisarius pressed further onward, down the southern bank
of the Tigris to Sauranon. The Persian garrison there surrendered. And
Belisarius now sent a raiding party across the Tigris to plunder formerly
untouched Persian territory. In just a few months, once beleaguered Byzantine
forces had now, if only symbolically, entered the territory of the Persian
aggressor. But as the year ended, Belisarius retreated back across the border
before Chosroes returned from the north. Lurid rumors had also reached the
general that Antonia, newly arrived at the front from Constantinople, had
conducted an open affair with their adopted son, Theodosius, in Belisarius’
absence.
To top it off, a new and deadly type of bubonic plague was
sweeping through the empire’s eastern provinces and fell especially hard upon
the army. The malady, brought on by the bacillus-carrying rat flea, would do
more than any enemy to weaken the power of Byzantium at just the time its
wealth and power were taxed as never before by Justinian’s apparent vision of a
new united Rome. Indeed, perhaps a million Byzantine subjects would eventually
fall to the disease, paralyzing military operations in the fashion that the
great Athenian plague of 430–429 B.C. had essentially ended the Athenian dream
of winning the Archidamian War against Sparta.
Justinian’s reign was to be marked forever by a dividing
line not of its own making: expansion before the outbreak of the plague, and
then desperate consolidation and occasional retrenchment after hundreds of
thousands had taken sick and died. In some sense, the efforts of Belisarius in
realizing Justinian’s plans simply ended when the plague struck. Disease
succeeded in curbing Byzantine power where Persians, Vandals, and Goths had
failed.
Belisarius returned to Constantinople to criticism that his
successful Persian invasion had been prematurely terminated due to his own
personal crises, and that his absence would only encourage another enemy
attack. Few acknowledged that the Persians, after two years of warring, were at
least sometimes on the defensive, much less that the plague-stricken empire no
longer had adequate resources simultaneously to restore the old western Roman
provinces and keep Persia on its side of the eastern border.
In the spring of the third year of the war, 542, Chosroes
once again crossed the Euphrates with his largest army yet, then headed to the
northwest through modern Syria. A weary Belisarius again set out from
Constantinople and occupied Europum to block his advance. He then entertained
some Persian ambassadors, selected his largest and most fit soldiers to stage
ostentatious marches, and in general convinced the visiting officials that they
were in mortal danger of having their king cut off and surrounded deep in
Byzantine territory by his own near-superhuman troops. After further
negotiations and some hit-and-run fighting, Chosroes withdrew and the
three-year renewed Persian war ended quietly without much loss of Byzantine
territory.
Belisarius was widely praised in his third major eastern
campaign for chasing the Persians out without committing to a major battle or
incurring much loss—especially at a time when the plague was killing Byzantine
men far more than were Persian soldiers. He finally departed for Constantinople
at year’s end, despite news that thousands were dying each week in the
plague-infected capital.
In his two-year war, Belisarius had chased the Persians out
of Byzantine lands. He had killed more of the enemy than he had lost, while
conserving imperial resources for yet another flare-up in the west. Belisarius’
trademark tactics had proven successful throughout the empire. He was the sole
Byzantine general, who, by quick advances and deliberate fighting on favorable
terrain, could defeat or outsmart all sorts of numerically superior enemies.
His outreach to local populations ensured indigenous support anywhere he
campaigned and meant that he could push back the enemy at little cost while
neither exceeding nor failing to meet his emperor’s goals.
