The enlargement of the Roman Empire possessions
between the rise to power of Justinian (red, 527) and his and Belisarius’s
death (orange, 565). Belisarius contributed immensely to the expansion of the
empire.
Belisarius Goes West: The War in Italy Again (544–48)
The historian Procopius felt that when bubonic plague struck
the capital at Constantinople, “nearly the entire human race came close to
being wiped out.” Soon the emperor fell sick, just as his commanders were
concluding the latest round of the ongoing Persian wars with Chosroes through a
mixture of bribes and adroit leadership. The generals at the front naturally
assumed that the sixty-year-old Justinian would die, like most of the elderly
who caught the plague. Therefore they met to discuss a successor, perhaps most
logically Belisarius himself, or at least to exercise veto power over any
would-be emperor back at Constantinople.
The immediate problem for Belisarius was multifold:
Justinian was ill, but not yet fatally so. Although the plague was usually
equivalent to a death sentence, it might not necessarily prove true in the case
of Justinian, given the careful treatment accorded the emperor. To entertain
the offer of a supreme political post—or even a prominent veto in the imperial
succession—would raise the old issue of Belisarius’ loyalty in the fashion of
the former Gothic request for the general to take over as a new western
emperor, or the even earlier rumors from Africa that Belisarius had wanted to
set himself up as an independent proconsul at newly acquired Carthage. Too many
stories kept circulating that Belisarius sought high political as well as
military office.
This was a dangerous game—well aside from the fact that the
life of Justinian was still in doubt and the generals were still in the east
far from the latest-breaking developments at Constantinople. Should Byzantium’s
greatest general support the ascension of the empress Theodora, or a nephew who
was Justinian’s closest blood relative, or at least the official “court” order
of succession—or allow his fellow generals in the field to float his own name?
If Belisarius declined a subsequent offer of the emperorship and stayed loyal,
as was his inclination, he still might be in danger, whether from a surviving
Justinian who had heard disturbing reports of a seditious general, or from a
widowed Theodora, who would resent his lack of support for her wishes, or from
any new emperor and his clique, regardless of whether friendly or hostile to
Justinian’s supporters.
In the end, Belisarius did not join with the would-be
plotters. Yet he still was summoned to Constantinople under a cloud of distrust
as the emperor rallied and recovered. A confident Theodora took over the
inquisition, and most of the wavering generals suffered the consequences.
Belisarius was relieved of command and had his wealth confiscated. He could
neither finish the Persian war nor head back west to stabilize the renewed
Gothic conflict in Italy. Instead, for more than two years he was persona non
grata in Constantinople, ostracized, impoverished, and under constant
suspicion. All Belisarius could do was to wait for the emperor to regain his
full strength and, with a clearer head, intervene on his behalf—or hope that
his wife, Antonia, might win over his apparent archenemy, Theodora.
Meanwhile back in Italy, during the four years of
Belisarius’ absence, the Byzantine commanders had flagrantly violated two
cardinal rules of the general’s philosophy of command: fair treatment of the
locals, and honesty in all matters financial—especially concerning the division
of booty and prompt payment of imperial soldiers’ salaries. The results of poor
Byzantine leadership were new offensives by a fresh and far more capable Gothic
king, Totila. The Goth wisely played on both native Italian dissatisfaction and
dissension within Byzantine ranks, posing as a national liberator who would
throw off the renewed chains of Roman oppression. At least five Byzantine
generals of different factions and ethnicities—Bessas the Goth, Constantinus,
John the so-called Glutton, John, the nephew of Vitalius, and Vitalius—in the
absence of Belisarius had forfeited much of what Belisarius had won by 540.
While the divided command squabbled, plundered the Italians, and stayed safely
ensconced in the major cities, the gifted Goth Totila was busy reclaiming much
of Byzantine-held Italian countryside from the Po River to Naples.
A sick emperor, court intrigue, a Persian war, the virtual
ostracism of Belisarius, and perhaps more than three hundred thousand dead from
the plague at Constantinople—all of that ensured neither oversight of nor
material support for the incompetent generals in Italy. If Justinian had
unwisely and prematurely recalled Belisarius from Italy in spring 540, now,
four years later and recovering from the plague, the emperor understood that
whatever his own suspicions of the general’s popular magnetism, he badly needed
Belisarius to restore Italy.
So in spring 544, Belisarius, now forty, was once again
returned to favor with the imperial court and ordered to Italy. But this time
he departed with even less financial backing than in the past. Indeed, the
general left not as before with a supreme command, but with the title of comes
sacri stabuli (“commander of the royal stable”) and a tiny force. His former
secretary, the future historian Procopius, also did not accompany him and
perhaps began to change his opinion of his erstwhile hero, given the perennial
suspicion that seemed to surround Belisarius. Nonetheless, Belisarius made his
way to Italy by land. He was relying in large part on what was left of his own
money to hire imperial soldiers on the way westward. The generals in Italy
concluded that the newly arriving Belisarius had not regained the emperor’s
complete confidence. More likely, they assumed that each of their Byzantine
armies was still on its own, and so looked to the other to take risks against
the Goths without much hope of help from a plague-ridden Constantinople.
Along with the general Vitalius, Belisarius passed through
Thrace and arrived in Dalmatia by May 544. There he headquartered on the
Adriatic coast at Salonia. The two generals together had mustered little more
than four thousand troops, smaller than a single traditional Roman legion.
Nonetheless, Belisarius marched northward up through Croatia to descend into
Ravenna in an attempt to keep the Italian cities on the Adriatic from either
defecting to, or being besieged by, Totila’s growing Gothic forces. Given that
Belisarius had few troops, little imperial money, and no apparent power to
unite the disparate Byzantine armies, he could do little more in the ensuing
year than to try to keep the local cities around Ravenna free from the Goths.
Then, as Totila prepared to retake Rome, Belisarius sailed
eastward back to Dalmatia—hoping to raise more imperial troops and win a direct
appeal to Justinian for money and supplies. Finally, he took his small fleet on
a circuitous route to reach Rome by sea, in hopes of supplying the city’s
defenders from the nearby Roman harbor at Portus. Justinian had still sent no
aid, rightly worried about a new war with Persia and the drastic loss of
manpower after the recent plague.
Rome fell to Totila in December 546. Byzantine commanders,
stationed throughout the Italian peninsula, had squabbled over its defense and
were not willing to join Belisarius to save the ancient capital. After
destroying much of the municipal walls, Totila then threatened to level the entire
imperial city for its past anti-Gothic sympathies. He was dissuaded in part by
messages from Belisarius, who was still nearby at Portus and who warned Totila
that such nihilism would ensure revenge from both Goths and Byzantines.
Eventually, when Totila headed northward to Ravenna,
Belisarius retook Rome. It was lightly defended—indeed, nearly empty, its
defenses once more in disrepair. Belisarius’ paltry number of troops was hardly
able to man an adequate defense of the wall. Nonetheless, by May 547,
Belisarius was inside the ancient capital and repairing the fortifications.
This was the third year of his second Italian command, and yet Belisarius was
right back where he had started—in a war that had gone on for twelve years
after the Byzantines’ once dramatic landing in southern Italy, coming after the
brilliant victory over the Vandals in Africa.
The Goths under Totila returned and attempted to retake the
city a second time from the Byzantines. Most of the Gothic chieftains were
angry that Totila earlier had neither destroyed the city nor made adequate
preparations to defend it from Belisarius’ meager forces. This second Gothic
siege failed. Totila was forced to head south to confront John, the nephew of
Vitalianus, who was liberating Italian cities in Campania. The Byzantine
generals may have been infighting and working at cross purposes, and their
ranks depleted by plague, but when one found success, another rival often took
the initiative. The result was that the war was not quite lost. Instead, the
fighting reached an impasse for most of the subsequent two years, 547–48, as
neither Goth nor Byzantine could drive the other out of Italy.
Sometime in 548 Belisarius was once more recalled to
Constantinople and replaced by the emperor’s nephew Germanus. He arrived home
in early 549 after five years of mostly inconsequential fighting. The war would
eventually be won by Narses, an imperial insider and gifted general—at least
until the invasion of the Lombards of 568 that would in time end the Byzantines’
efforts at reconstituting the old Roman empire in the west. For the next five
hundred years, Byzantium would cling to a few coastal enclaves in the south, as
Italy was plagued by near-constant war between independent fiefdoms. Why
Belisarius was recalled yet a second time from Italy—other than the serial and
long-standing suspicions of the emperor Justinian—is not quite known. Our
ancient sources offer a variety of possible causes. His well-connected wife,
Antonia, had left Italy in 548 to lobby the court for more resources for her
husband to finish the Italian campaign. But on the death of her ally, the
empress Theodora, and the ascension of the emperor’s favorite nephew, Germanus,
Antonia may have sensed a power shift, and so instead lobbied Justinian to
bring back her husband. Clearly with the demise of Theodora there was at last
some chance that the earlier friendship between the two Latin-speaking
northerners, Justinian and Belisarius, might be renewed.
In addition, there was always the recurrent threat from the
east. The court at Constantinople may in a crisis have contemplated sending an
experienced general to protect the border with Persia. Or perhaps Justinian
thought he either needed a senior adviser at home, given the loss of his
confidante Theodora, or wanted Belisarius where he could keep a close eye on
him. In any case, Belisarius returned to Constantinople in late spring 549 to
rewards, acclaim—and no further imperial service abroad.
With few resources and constant internal dissension, Belisarius
had not only managed to delay Totila’s onslaught, but also somehow to recapture
Rome. His presence alone had saved Italy for the Byzantines, who would have
otherwise been thrown out by 544. But after his departure, the Byzantines’
position again deteriorated, and the dream of a unified Italy under Byzantium’s
control was for all practical purposes lost. Gone were the days of his first
Italian tenure, when both the Goths and Italians were awed by his well-trained
forces, his own personal support from the emperor, and his unbroken record of
military success. Neither had any desire to welcome back the Byzantines. It
would require a new commitment in resources and manpower—and a new supreme
commander—to retake the peninsula.
Once the plague abated somewhat, a recovered Justinian in
fact would send more troops under the capable Narses. An elderly eunuch from
the court was considered a far safer conqueror of Italy than the most beloved
general in the empire at the height of his powers.
“This, too, I can bear—I still am Belisarius” (548–59)
The resilience of Belisarius was legendary, as Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow wrote of his sufferings in his poem “Belisarius.” Now in
his midforties, the general was given various honorific titles such as supreme
military commander and theater commander for the east. These were positions of
neither political nor military power, but each was necessary to assuage public
concern over the fate of the most popular and famous Byzantine general. While
some have suggested that the emperor once again wanted a recalled Belisarius
nearby for advice, it seems more likely that Justinian—enfeebled by age,
widowerhood, and disease—wished no repeat of the general’s successful tenure in
either the east or west, especially in hopes that his charismatic nephew
Germanus might perhaps unite Rome following his death. Wars were either
imminent or ongoing in Italy, Spain, and Mesopotamia—logical after a series of
imperial and religious controversies and foiled coups. In short, there were
simply too many opportunities for a dynamic rival to use against the Byzantine
court.
As Narses fought successfully in the west, and other
generals were deployed eastward, Belisarius vanished from the historical record
for almost a decade—akin to the exile of Themistocles amid the triumphs of his
Athenian rivals in the postwar ascendency of fifth-century Athens, or the
retirement of General Matthew Ridgway and his subsequent three decades of
relative quiet following his salvation of Korea. A widowered Justinian was
childless, in his late sixties, and, with the untimely death of Germanus in
550, now without an heir.
Then suddenly in 559, the general, aging and rusty from
inaction, reemerges in contemporary sources. Ten years after his recall from
Italy, and in the most peculiar circumstances—but in accord with his lifelong
military skill and the suspicion that his success always garnered at the
Byzantine court—Belisarius took the field for the last time. The plague had
passed, but for years after, it had severely reduced Byzantine military
manpower and curtailed Constantinople’s availability to field an adequate home
guard. The Nika riots had long reminded the emperor of the dangers of cutting
the vast Byzantine civil service to pay for defense. Two decades of war in Africa,
Italy, Mesopotamia, and Spain had drained the treasury—almost as much as had
Justinian’s grand plan to remake Constantinople into the greatest architectural
wonder of the ancient world.
The result was that the Byzantine military was a shadow of
its former self, scattered throughout the Mediterranean world and spread
woefully thin in the east. An aged, lonely emperor had allowed the military to
fall below two hundred thousand troops at precisely the time it was asked to
protect a vast increase in imperial territory and manpower reserves were at
their lowest. The theory of Byzantine defense apparently had been complete
reliance on the massive walls of Constantinople—as well as attacking enemies
far from home. Few emperors worried about an enemy assault on the capital
itself.
But that was precisely what happened in 559, when a
detachment of Huns under the chieftain Zabergan split off from its main forces
and crossed the Danube. With only seven thousand plunderers, he attempted a
lightning-quick strike at Constantinople, convinced that the vast empire, after
the plague, was hollow at its core. When the Huns reached the outlying villages
near the walls of the city itself, Justinian went into a panic. He belatedly
realized that all of his generals and armies were far too distant to recall. In
desperation, the emperor called on Belisarius. The white-haired general was
well over fifty and had not been in battle for years. The historian Agathias
reports that as Belisarius “was putting on his breastplate and helmet, and
equipped himself with his entire uniform from his youthful days, the memory of
his earlier exploits returned and filled him with zeal.” Yet Belisarius
retained only three hundred or so of his veteran guardsmen, mostly deployed in
largely ceremonial service and for his own protection. Nonetheless, Belisarius
quickly took up the call and made arrangements to save the city—ignoring the
irony that the emperor’s best general was at home only because Justinian had
foolishly recalled him from the distant Italian front.
At the village of Chettus, he organized a citizen defense
force, spearheaded by his own three hundred veterans, and rustics eager to save
their farms. The motley home guard beat back with heavy losses Zabergan and two
thousand of his raiders. Constantinople was spared. The Huns withdrew toward
the Danube. Belisarius’ vastly outnumbered forces had once more bailed out his
aged emperor through the tactical brilliance and personal magnetism of their
commander. But the contrast between Justinian’s panic and Belisarius’ fortitude
only furthered their final estrangement.
Following his repulse of Zabergan, Belisarius was given
little credit for his eleventh-hour heroics, and he was not allowed to pursue
and finish off the enemy for good. Again, the elderly Justinian feared that to
do so would swell grassroots calls for Belisarius to succeed him. The historian
Agathias once again cites “envy and jealousy.” But it got even worse than that.
In 562, members of Belisarius’ circle were accused of formally plotting against
Justinian. By the end of the year, their captain was himself charged with
treason, put under house arrest, his office and finances taken away—the third
time that the emperor’s jealousy had brought Belisarius into mortal danger.
It took another six months to establish either that the
general was innocent of conspiracy, or that it was too dangerous to convict
such a popular hero. At last Justinian restored his general’s rank and
privileges, but Belisarius was snubbed by the royal court. He would die within
two years, in 565. Stories that he was blinded by the emperor and shamed by
being forced to beg outside the Lausus Palace near the Hippodrome in
Constantinople were probably mythical embellishments of his real enough
humiliation. The end of Belisarius came just eight months before the emperor
Justinian himself would pass away. Belisarius’ widow, Antonia, eventually
retired to a convent in her eighties—without anyone left to intrigue against or
for.
What had the old savior general accomplished in his some
three decades of incessant fighting on behalf of Justinian’s vision of a new
united Rome? And had it all been worth it?
“The Name of Belisarius Can Never Die” (530–65)
Most of Belisarius’ victories were to be overturned within a
century. The Lombards invaded Northern Italy in 568, and only small regions in
the south were saved by Constantinople. The Visigoths in Spain—a theater that
Belisarius never campaigned in—rebounded. By 631, they had expelled the
Byzantine outposts from the Iberian Peninsula. Most of Egypt and much of North
Africa fell to Islamic armies by 711—at least in part because of the general
impoverishment brought on by the destruction of the Roman and subsequent Vandal
empires. Almost immediately after their successes, the Muslims then moved into
Visigothic Spain.
Yet Byzantium itself—eventually to be surrounded on nearly
all sides by Muslim enemies, and in growing rivalry with western Roman
Catholicism—was to survive until 1453, nine hundred years after the death of
Belisarius. The extension of Byzantine power under Justinian and Belisarius in
some sense provided a critical buffer: When Islam spread from the Middle East,
at least initially, it pressed at the periphery of the Byzantine Empire rather
than at its core in Constantinople and northern Asia Minor.
The outbreak of bubonic plague in the early 540s that may
have caused the deaths of a quarter or more of the empire’s urban populations
rendered Byzantium too weak to consolidate the victories of Belisarius in the
west. It is one of the great “what ifs” of history whether Constantinople might
have re-created a sustainable Mediterranean-wide empire without the epidemic.
Along with the conquered provinces in North Africa,
Byzantine conquests in Spain, Italy, and Sicily could have restored Roman
prosperity and revenue, reunited populations, and offered successful resistance
to the Lombards. Never had such an opportunity been thrown away as when
Justinian pulled his support from Belisarius in the early 540s. The sixth
century was supposedly a time when charismatic autocratic tribal leaders like
Gelimer, Vittigis, and Totila overshadowed faceless incompetent Byzantine court
insiders. In contrast, Belisarius himself was a magnetic throwback to an
earlier age of Roman republican saviors—but unlike his adversaries, loyal to
his civilian superiors. One of the great wonders of Roman history in the east
is the remarkable fealty of Belisarius to his emperor, for all the rumors to
the contrary. The history of decline in the west was often attributable to
renegade generals marching on Rome—a fact perhaps well appreciated by
Belisarius, who came and left home only when ordered by his emperor.
Any final assessment of Belisarius’ military genius—aside
from the Jekyll/Hyde portrait offered by the historian Procopius—rests on four
key considerations. First, his forces were almost always outnumbered, often
polygot and multicultural, and in many cases mercenary. He usually was sent out
to conquer entire provinces with armies smaller than twenty thousand men—and
after the plague with even fewer forces. The great distances at which he
operated from Constantinople, and the frequency with which he was forced to
transport his armies by sea, almost always ensured that his armies were
outnumbered by the enemy and plagued by logistics. Only a diplomat could have
united such disparate contingents and found strength rather than sedition
within such diversity. Despite stereotypes of mercenary disorder, in almost all
of Belisarius’ campaigns his own troops proved the most disciplined among
friend and foe alike.
Second, Belisarius almost never fought with unquestioned
political support. He served as either a rival to Justinian’s other favorite
generals or under direct suspicion of the emperor himself. Almost every
campaign required two paradoxical considerations: defeat might mean death or
political exile, but victory could bring even a worse fate, through trial and
execution on suspicion of imperial ambition.
Third, nearly all his wars involved counterinsurgency.
Success hinged on his own ability to convince native Arabs, Africans, Germanic
peoples, and Italians that they had more to gain from Byzantine rule and
prosperity than under the tribalism of their own ethnic leaders—not an easy
task when so many of Justinian’s lieutenants saw provincial assignments as a
mechanism solely for personal enrichment. In general, the task before
Belisarius was to persuade neutral populations at peace in the east, Italy, and
North Africa to join his own Byzantine forces—on the basis of some vague
ancient notion of Roman commonality. Nostalgia about Rome was one thing, but in
reality, invading Byzantine generals often ensured nonstop ravaging, random
killing, and depredation for locals caught between warring armies. Belisarius’
insight was that by offering security and humane treatment to indigenous
populations, they became force multipliers in the struggles of Byzantium.
Fourth, Belisarius operated in a vast landscape of diverse
weather, topography, and culture in which what brought victory in one area
would not necessarily do so in another. His success from Mesopotamia to
Carthage, from the River Po to the edge of the Sahara, came from flexibility of
strategy and tactics while keeping his core military assumptions unchanged.
That meant winning over the hearts and minds of the populace, maintaining high
army morale by keeping soldiers well paid and fed, and assuring the court at
Constantinople that defeat was his own while victory was the emperor’s alone.
As general, Belisarius stressed the importance of
interaction between officers and the rank and file. The duty of the commanders
of Byzantium was to find the proper strategy of attack that fit their own
meager resources, the particular distant landscape, and the size of the mostly
superior enemy forces. Foresight was the key; as he reminded his outnumbered
and green troops at the beginning of his second campaign against the Persians,
“War tends to go well through good planning more than anything else.”
How, then, did Belisarius establish a blueprint for
Byzantine defensive strategy for nearly a millennium? His greatest achievement
was establishing a strategy similar to what B. H. Liddell Hart once called
“tactical defense,” or the ability to conquer territory without confronting the
enemy solely through serial Western-style head-to-head slugfests. Rather, in
Persia, Africa, and Italy, whether in sieges, raids, or decisive battles,
Belisarius so positioned his forces that the enemy was almost always more
likely to lose men than was his own army, whether it won or lost the engagement
at hand. In Belisarius’ view, the survival of the army, not particular
victories on any given day, would win a campaign and prove critical to the
security of the empire.
Not only did allied provincials—Arabs, Armenians, Goths,
Herulians, Huns, Moors, Vandals—provide critical manpower, but they brought
needed diverse weapons and tactics, especially mounted archers, to the
Byzantine military’s inventory of forces. When Belisarius came west, neither
the Vandals nor the Goths were prepared to deal with his mobile archers, who
became force multipliers of Byzantium’s chronically small armies. While
Belisarius was charged with making offensive war—in North Africa, Sicily, and
Italy—he often fought conservatively. That is, after acquiring a city or a base
of operations, he began to win over the population and invest it with
responsibility for its own defense against the inevitable counterassault.
In nearly all his greatest victories, Belisarius was able to
craft some sort of stratagem that mitigated his enemies’ numerical advantages.
For example, in Sicily he took Palermo by putting archers high on the masts of
his ships to shoot down and panic the Gothic garrison. His troops captured a
nearly invincible Naples by burrowing along the course of a long-abandoned
aqueduct and taking the city from the inside. His defense of Rome against the
besieging army of the Goth Vittigis involved not just brilliant tactics, but
became a veritable “catalog of sixth-century military machinery.” Whether it
was prepping the battlefield at Dara with trenches or increasing the
percentages of heavily armored horse archers in his army, Belisarius constantly
sought to adopt, improvise, and invent to make up for what he lacked in
manpower.
In the end, what are we to make of these victories over a
rogue’s gallery of brilliant ruthless foes—Chosroes the Persian, the Vandal
Gelimer, Vittigis and Totila the Goths, and Zabergan the Hun—from well beyond
the corners of the Mediterranean world? Belisarius usually lost small and won
big. The victories at Dara, Ad Decimum, and Tricameron proved decisive; his
losses at Tanurin, Callinicum, and at Rome neither ruined his army nor lost his
war.
A thirty-year career (529–59) saw the Last of the Romans
fighting to save the beleaguered eastern empire in Mesopotamia against the
Persians, only to return home to rescue his emperor Justinian from the Nika
riots in the Hippodrome. Then he left for North Africa and in months destroyed
the century-long Vandal Empire whose ravages had so dominated the last thoughts
of Saint Augustine. After that he sailed for Sicily, and for a time reclaimed
the idea of a Roman Italy from the Mediterranean to the Po—only to go eastward
again to meet the Persians, and then back again to a collapsing Italy, and then
back to Constantinople to internal exile, trials, and humiliation, only while
in forced retirement to save the city from a raid of Huns—and earn a final rebuke.
Remember the backdrop of Belisarius’ frenetic campaigning.
Byzantine power was collapsing. Chaos spread throughout the moribund Western
Empire. A raging bubonic plague killed three hundred thousand in Constantinople
and perhaps a million in the empire at large. A terrible earthquake collapsed
the dome of Hagia Sophia. The onetime court supporter of Belisarius, the
historian Procopius, turned on the general and would go on to smear him in his
Secret History, as the emperor Justinian and his often lethal wife, Theodora,
alternately rewarded, recalled, punished, ruined, incarcerated, and reprieved
the old general. And throughout, Belisarius’ conniving older wife, Antonia, a
court intimate of Theodora, both tried to protect her spouse and at other times
seemed as much against him as for him.
The historian Procopius best summed up Belisarius’ qualities
that had led to victory in Libya and Italy: “In the dangers of war, he was
constant without taking undue risks, while daring with cool calculation—both
ready to strike quickly his enemies and yet cautious as well, depending on the
needs of each particular situation. In these desperate conditions, he revealed
a spirit that was full of confidence and not susceptible to panic. While during
more favorable circumstances, Belisarius proved neither vain nor prone to
softness. Moreover, no man ever saw Belisarius drunk.” In the ancient
assessment, Belisarius won because, like a Pericles, he understood that he had
to encourage his rank and file when depressed and calm down the army when it
was frenzied and overconfident in victory.
It has long been a habit to deprecate the achievement of
Byzantium. “Byzantine,” after all, became an English adjective meaning “overly
complex to the point of being unworkable.” Yet the classical roots of Western
civilization survived in the eastern empire, while they were almost lost in the
western. By the time of Constantinople’s collapse in the fifteenth century, the
west was resurgent and had been enriched by a continuous rediscovery of its
classical heritage, often only through the agency of the stewards of Byzantium.
Rome—as the legendary catastrophes of Crassus and Antony
attest—rarely enjoyed success on its far eastern frontier, where by contrast an
outnumbered Belisarius kept the empire’s border safe. Of course, Alexander,
Caesar, and Napoleon ranged as widely as did Belisarius over the Mediterranean
world and the east, but all three did so as authoritarian heads of state—both
as general and emperor. Belisarius trekked across the ancient world as a
general in service to his emperor and the Byzantine state. Prior great captains
of antiquity fought for power, riches, land, and glory; Belisarius fought to
reclaim old land that had once been Roman. We can argue over the moral nature
of Belisarius’ Byzantium—as we can over the nineteenth-century British Empire
for which captains like Wellington crisscrossed Europe and India—but the quest
of Belisarius was not for new colonies or new conquered peoples, but for the
return of what others had taken. Justinian’s dream of reconstituting a
Mediterranean empire, reuniting Rome and Byzantium, was finally in vain. But
that effort yielded a military blueprint for preserving Roman rule in the east
for another millennium—thanks largely to his savior general, Flavius
Belisarius.
That Belisarius fell afoul of his superiors may be a testament to, not a contradiction of, his achievement. Edward Gibbon, no romantic and no admirer of Byzantium, perhaps best summed up the character of Belisarius that explains much of his military success and lasting legacy: “The spectator and historian of his exploits has observed that amidst the perils of war he was daring without rashness, that in the deepest distress he was animated by real or apparent hope, but that he was modest and humble in the most prosperous fortune.”
Field of Glory II: Age of Belisarius
