Arthur Invictus
Authors: Paul Bannister
© Paul Bannister, 2013
Paul Bannister has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published 2013 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Arthur and Carausius: Legends and Links
Extract from
Sword of Rome: The Complete Campaigns
by Richard Foreman
Making the decision was surprisingly easy. Londinium, I ordered, would have to be abandoned to the badgers and foxes.
The
city was badly damaged after our losing battle with the Romans. Unburied dead, fire damage, polluted wells, a rampant rat population and general decay made it a prime spot for plague, and the city’s long decline meant that relatively few people had lived in it anyway. Now that it was largely uninhabitable, it was better to give the place back to nature and re-establish my capital elsewhere.
That
seemed like a priority. As Emperor of Britain, I had an opportunity to bring my kingdom back into order. My greatest enemies, the Romans had withdrawn from the island to deal with barbarians pouring across the eastern borders of their own empire. In the previous months in Britain, my troops had turned back a wave of Saxons, put down the Picts north of Hadrian’s Wall, and quieted the sea raiders from misty green Hibernia. I had a breathing space before the next tide of invaders began washing up on our shores.
It
was a relief. My father was a British jarl, a chieftain whom I saw killed by sea raiders when I was a boy. I had escaped the sack of my village, begun a new life in Belgica, joined the Roman army and eventually, when commander of their Narrow Sea fleet, had proclaimed myself emperor of Britain.
I
wanted to drive out our oppressive Roman masters and restore the old Britain, and I had the military force to do it. The first Roman attempts to retake the island had ended with my executing their junior emperor; their later attempt had almost succeeded but pressure elsewhere drew them away. Now I was picking up the pieces. I started on my long list of priorities by inspecting Londinium, where I had recently lost a great many good men to the armoured legions’ swords and spears.
The
fighting had been long and bitter. We had trapped and destroyed a Roman flotilla which sailed up the Thames, but we had been forced into a bitterly-fought rearguard action against the legions which had come ashore on our south-eastern coast. A brutal series of skirmishes and battles across the forefoot of Britain had not stopped them. They had overwhelmed us, forced us back across the southern Downs as they advanced to the Thames and had finally driven us out of a sacked and burning Londinium.
With
a small force, I had escaped, wounded, to an ancient hillfort stronghold on the edge of the south-western plains of Britain, but would not have been safe even there without the intervention of the sea god Manannan mac Lir. He sent a tidal wave to destroy a second Roman invasion fleet that ventured up the Severn Sea.
Even
so, Maximian’s land forces besieged and trapped me and my reduced force on the hillfort. We would eventually have been defeated and taken away in chains by my old enemy if he had not been called away by matters more urgent to Rome than merely taking back a rebel
colonia
.
Now,
he and his fellow Augustus Caesar were marshalling their legions on the Rhine and Danube rivers, readying for an epic struggle to turn back the hordes of Alemanni, Visigoths, Huns, Vandals and assorted other tribes who were making a near-irresistible migration westwards.
With
Maximian’s departure from Britain came a breathing space and my time of urgent decision. I had to consider how to defend my island empire against the overwhelming force the Romans could bring, for I knew they would surely come. I opted to start my reorganisation of forces by establishing my capital.
One
hobbling walk through the charred ruins of Londinium convinced me. Despite the survival of some of the fine Roman buildings of stone, brick and tile, the rest of the place was only fit to be levelled. Almost every timber edifice was fire-blackened and gutted, many of the brick structures were crumbling and dangerous, even the square-cut stone halls and public markets showed cracks caused by the conflagration. From my ruined waterfront palace to the burned-out shells of the military barracks, the place was uninhabitable.
Worse,
simply pulling down the ruined, unsafe structures and clearing away the rubble would not solve other problems. The stench told me that too many corpses were still under the collapsed buildings; the wells and the streams of the Fleet, Sherbourne and Walbrook were heavily polluted, and the place was likely infested with the ghosts of the slaughtered. Only a few temples had survived the Romans’ vindictive fury and firebrands.
It
would take too much time, too many resources and too many deaths from plague to restore the city, and anyway, it would all be in vain if I didn’t keep the Romans at bay. I sighed, and resolved to move my headquarters to the huge military camp at Chester. The civil administration could continue at Colchester, and I made a mental note to reinforce the garrison there, but the real capital, the military centre, had to move north and west. A lot of travel was in my future, I knew. Between the Painted Ones, as the Picts in the north were called, and invading Saxons in the south, I’d be moving almost constantly from end to end of the island to keep matters under control.
I
tugged my red wool officer’s cloak away from my shoulders and gestured a soldier to come closer. “Have the tribunes Cragus Grabelius and Quirinus Aelius come to my tent in a quarter hour,” I told him. I had much to discuss with them, most of it problems.
What
did work in my favour was that Rome was in crisis. Imperial over-reach, arrogance and greed had led the Romans into a disastrous decline. As the empire grew and grew, its need for funds, for slaves to work the mines and grow the crops, for the raw materials of metals, grain and cattle had increased alongside it. But after centuries of ever-growing demands from Rome, the empire’s provinces had found they could evade their masters’ burdensome tithes and taxes by trading directly with each other. They had eliminated the ever-greedier middlemen on the Tiber, and that alone had put the administration into financial straits.
In
Italia itself, the ultra-wealthy upper classes had turned tax evasion into an art form even while they were living lives of unimaginable luxury. Wealthy men had countless personal slaves who did everything from walk ahead of them on the streets to announce their master’s coming, to slaves who did nothing but guard their master’s sandals while he was in the public baths. Add to those the thousands of slaves who worked their owners’ vast holdings where they grew olives, grain, grapes or cattle, and it was easy to see how the empire needed tens of thousands of new slaves each year.
The
tax collectors could not touch the ultra-rich, so looked elsewhere, and loaded an increasing burden on producers like the farming and manufacturing classes, as well as making increasing demands on colonies whose resentful residents already faced heavy burdens from their absentee landlords. In Britain, this created a climate of bitter unrest which in turn led to my easy acceptance as a usurper emperor who also happened to be one of their own.
My
legions and the fleet I commanded had once been Rome’s, but I had earned the troops’ and sailors’ loyalty with gold, justice and some theatrics and they followed me in my rebellion against the empire. When Maximian, fearing me as a rival for the purple robe and oak leaf crown of emperor, had ordered me executed, I simply declared myself emperor of Britain and sailed the fleet away from Gaul to establish my stronghold in Britain. There I defeated the Roman governor and made promises to the population. I would return peace under the rule of law, I would govern with authority and mercy and I would restore the golden days of the Roman republic, a debt I owed to my murdered father.
It
was an easy choice for the people as I was by birthright a British prince, and in a matter of months I had united the squabbling tribes and set about fulfilling my promises.
Militarily,
I had been able to hold on for a decade by destroying the often-renewed Roman fleets with my experienced, pirate-hunting hardened sailors. The frustrated Romans had not been able to land their legions on my island kingdom while I commanded the waves of the Narrow Sea, but an eventual treachery had been my downfall and the legions came ashore.
My
troops had been unable to withstand the armoured legions, the Christian army I was promised had melted away and I had been obliged to retreat to an ancient earthwork hillfort in western Britain where I expected to die, sword in hand but Maximian, my own lifelong enemy had to withdraw before he could defeat my small army and capture me.
The
other good news was that during my decade as ruler of Britain, as the fourth century of the Christian era dawned, I had turned back the mighty waves of Saxon and Jutish invaders and had brought peace to the island. Privately, I qualified the thought with a ‘For now, at least.”
The arrival of the commanders Cragus and Quirinus at my wind-whipped campaign tent outside Londinium interrupted my mental train, and after some fine Rhenish wine sampled from green Roman glass that had somehow survived the sack of the city, I settled to recount the information I had from my well-paid spy network.
“Maximian
and Diocletian,” I said, naming the co-emperors who had divided authority over Rome’s vast holdings between them, “have their nuts in a vice.”
“The
Vandals will soon be in North Africa. They have already moved across Gaul and into Hispania and there they have cut off the grain and olive supplies. That will mean riots in Rome when the plebians start to go hungry. The mob might be kept happy right now with their weeks-long blood orgies of circuses and gladiators but when the free bread stops, even blue blood will be spilled, and the nobles will be well aware of that. You can bet that the Senate will already be pressuring the generals and the emperors to return their privileged world to normal.
“At
the Rhine, the Alemanni under the warlord Davsear are threatening Maximian’s grip on the frontier, and he has already deployed eight or nine of the empire’s 22 legions along the river, but if they get a hard winter, the tribes will be able simply to walk across the ice and he’ll be on the back foot there.
“Diocletian
has had to leave his palace on the Adriatic to take on the tribes from beyond the Danube who are threatening that frontier. I know there are Ostrogoths and Visigoths on the move, and word has just come in of a great defeat inflicted on the legions by tribes from the Steppes, horsemen called Huns. They seem to have swept through Pannonia and Noricum, and could by now be threatening Cisalpine Gaul, and that will have the legions on the move as Rome panics.”
Grabelius
looked thoughtful. He had once travelled across the Inland Sea and had visited Aegyptus. “If the Romans lose Alexandria to invaders, there will be riots in Rome,” he warned. “The place sends shiploads of grain, whole fleets of freighters to the city’s port at Ostia every week. If that supply is cut off, there will be a famine and the Senate will be thrown wholesale off the Tarpeian Rock.”
He
was right but I had no doubt, I said, that Diocletian the brilliant strategist and Maximian his brutal military commander could overpower the barbarians if they had to deal with them one tribe at a time. Even against huge odds, the almost invulnerably-armoured legions usually succeeded against untrained and unprotected hordes of bare-chested barbarians, however brave or drug-maddened those warriors were. The protected, metal-encased legionaries and their ability to sustain battle for hours at a time by recycling fresh troops up to the front ranks as they were fighting almost guaranteed their eventual success. Even the best hostiles were ground down eventually by the tactic, but untrained warriors were simply no match for it and succumbed quickly.
Once
in a while, I told my commanders, the Romans suffered a disaster, as at the Teutenburg Forest, when howling Germanic tribesmen of the Cherusci, Marsi and Chatti butchered 20,000 of Publius Quinctilius Varus’ men. The Germans ambushed three legions strung out in line of march, surrounded them and battered them into submission with missiles.
But
that defeat, which ended with the Roman officers who did not commit suicide being cooked alive so their bones could be used as talismans, came about because of Varus’ military incompetence. That, I warned, we could not rely upon being repeated. My strategy, I explained, was based on the belief that the Romans would not give up on recapturing Britain. We could sit and wait for Maximian to return after he had subdued the Germans, for return he would. We could meekly stand like cattle at an abattoir until he had dispatched his Frankish and Gallic enemies one at a time, then take our turn to face and fight him in Britain, and lose. Or, we could deliver the battle to him. If we could take a strong force to Gaul, join forces with others of Rome’s enemies and engage distracted Maximian on a second front, we could likely force him into a peace agreement if we did not defeat him entirely.
An
added virtue of invading Gaul to fight was that we could retake some of the territory I had once held in northern Belgica, especially including the citadel of Bononia directly across the Narrow Sea from Dover. With Bononia in our hands as a sea bridge from Dover, we could cheerfully cede huge swathes of territory to our allies for them to hold. This would form a buffer for us against any future Roman invasion of Britain, and we could easily resupply our Gallic allies by sea via Dover and Bononia.
“These
Gauls and others are not just ba-ba rabbles,” I told Grabelius and Quirinus, citing the way Romans disparagingly referred to foreigners whose language they could not understand as ‘babbling ba-ba-barians.’
“The
Huns may be the best horse archers in the world. They live and die on horseback. The Vandals, Alemanni, Goths and the other Germanic tribes have huge masses of crazed warriors. If they were deployed in a disciplined way against the legions they would be unstoppable.
“What
we can do is to bring our trained troops against the Roman ranks to break them, and then our new barbarian allies can over-run the legionaries. Varus had his forces butchered because he came up against a German who was trained in Roman military ways.” It was true. The Teuton Arminus had been handed to the Romans as a hostage tribute. He had time to learn how the legions fought, he went back to Germania and he used his knowledge for the Germans to direct the battle when the Romans were ambushed.
“If
we can use our disciplined troops at the spearhead of an attack, and if we can use our heavy cavalry to lead the massed Hun horsemen, we can break the Roman ranks and let the hordes through to butchery. We can destroy Maximian’s legions,” I promised.
Grabelius,
who daily grieved for the lost cavalry he had so painstakingly raised and trained, saluted me with his fist over his heart in the old way. “Yes,” he said simply.
Quirinus
thudded his fist to his chest, too. “Aye, lord,” he agreed. And there, in a wind-flapping canvas tent outside the reeking ruins of Londinium, we vowed vengeance on Maximian and planned his downfall.