Count Belisarius (51 page)

Justinian, when the news of the invasion reached him, had immediately sent his nephew Germanus – the one who had helped to put down the mutiny in Africa – to inspect the defences of Antioch. These were in good enough repair, but had one vulnerable point: a large broad rock, Orocasias, which stood close up against the walls at the highest point of the circuit. Just as Hadrian's mausoleum had been a standing threat to the walls of Rome until it had been incorporated in them as an outwork, so with this rock Orocasias. Germanus decided
that it must be fortified at once. The only alternative was to cut a broad, deep fosse to separate the wall from the rock (which stood only fifteen feet below the level of the battlements), and to raise the height of the wall. But the civic authorities of Antioch refused to do anything in the matter. They said that there was no time to complete any building or trenching before Khosrou arrived, and that to be interrupted in the work would be to reveal gratuitously the one weak part of the defences. If they found themselves unable to defend the city, they would try to buy Khosrou off; in fact, the Patriarch Ephraim wrote secretly to Khosrou, offering to collect any reasonable sum in ransom – he suggested 100,000 in gold. But Justinian now sent a circular letter to all governors of cities, forbidding them to pay ransom money under penalty of death. The Patriarch, afraid to face Khosrou empty-handed, fled northward into Cilicia, as a number of other rich citizens prudently did. Six thousand cavalry now arrived from the Lebanon to reinforce the garrison; their commanders closed the gates, so that flight became impossible.

King Khosrou's advance-guard soon appeared within sight of Antioch. His ambassador came under the walls and declared the Persian demands – they exactly corresponded with the Patriarch's offer. For 100,000 he would spare the city and pass on with his army.

The inhabitants of Antioch are a very disorderly, unserious sort of people. They treated the ambassador with no sort of respect – pelting him with filth and shooting arrows all about him. If Belisarius with only 5,000 trained men, they argued, could hold a much bigger city for a whole year against 150,000 Goths, why should not they with 9,000 hold Antioch against Khosrou's army of 50,000 Persians? Moreover, Belisarius had been given little help by the unwarlike Roman civilians, whereas in Antioch the Blues and Greens had formed a sort of local militia; their faction-fights, which were conducted in a more open and courageous fashion than at Constantinople, had given them soldierly enthusiasm. So it happened, after all, that 10,000 volunteers swelled the regular forces, and one-half of these at least wore chain-armour and carried weapons. Unfortunately, the rock Orocasias itself was not defended. It is my opinion that if 300 good men had climbed outside the fortifications and stationed themselves on its steep crest they could have warded off any attack. But a different plan was adopted: long wooden stages were slung from ropes between the towers at this point, so that the defenders could fight from two tiers – with
arrows and javelins from the staging above, with swords and spears from the battlements below.

On the morning following the refusal of his peace-terms King Khosrou sent part of his army down into the valley of the Orontes, to make assaults at various points of the city wall there while he went up the hill with a picked force against Orocasias. Those wooden stages were the undoing of Antioch. As the archers and javelin-men stationed on them were working hard to make the Persians keep their distance, with reinforcements continually rushing down from the towers to them, suddenly the ropes gave way – and planks and soldiers fell with a tremendous crash on top of the crowded parapet beneath. Hundreds were either killed or gravely injured; and horrible cries went up, which the Persians answered with yells of triumph.

The men in the adjoining towers, not knowing what had happened, imagined that the wall itself had collapsed and that the Persians were forcing an entrance. They deserted their posts and rushed downhill into the city; arrived at the gate which leads to the suburb of Daphne, they shouted that they had seen Boutzes in the distance coming to their relief with an army and must hurry out to join forces with him. Nobody believed this story, but there was an immediate rush of civilians to quit Antioch while a chance still offered, the Daphne gate being the only one against which the Persians were making no attack. Then the whole cavalry force withdrew from the fortifications and converged at a gallop on this single gate, riding down the civilians and clambering out over a barrier of dead and dying. Soon Antioch was deserted of all troops except a few regular infantry and the city militia. The militia-men who had survived the collapse of the staging abandoned the Orocasias wall as soon as they realized that their flanks were no longer protected by the regulars. They drew up at the bottom of the hill, resolved to defend the streets. The Persians scaled the walls with ladders and entered without difficulty.

The militia-men then gave a brisk display of street-fighting in the approved Hippodrome tradition, with cobblestones and rapiers and bludgeons. The Blues attacked with their war-cry ‘Down with the Greens!' and the Greens with their war-cry ‘Down with the Blues!', and the Persians were forced to give ground against them. But King Khosrou, posted in a captured tower, observed that this was only a rabble army, and sent a squadron of his Immortals charging up the street. The militia broke, and a massacre began in which immense
numbers of people of both sexes perished. Antioch was sacked, and in the Cathedral Khosrou found extraordinary stores of gold and silver, enough to pay for the whole campaign twice over. As a punishment for the street-fighting, he ordered the whole city to be burned down, with the exception of the Cathedral – for he said that he had no quarrel with the Patriarch. Even the suburbs were destroyed, more thoroughly even than by the earthquake of thirteen years previously. Half a million people were left homeless and starving. He assembled 100,000 of the younger and more active sort and comforted them thus: ‘I shall bring you back safely with me to my own country and build you a new city on the banks of the Euphrates, which is a finer river by far than your Orontes. You shall have baths and market-places and a public library and a hippodrome – everything that you could possibly desire!'

Then he marched to Seleucia, the port of Antioch, and bathed in the sea, in fulfilment of a vow that he had made to the Sun God; and then up the Orontes to Apamea, where he again enriched himself with church treasures. There the people opened their gates to him, so he did not burn the city, and even allowed them to keep their most priceless possession – a half-yard of wood sawn from the base of the True Cross. Age and rottenness had made this relic phosphorescent, so that it shone in the dark, which was held miraculous. The priests kept it in a golden chest studded with jewels. But Khosrou took the chest.

It was at Apamea that he ordered a chariot-race in his own honour. ‘Mark you,' he said, ‘the Green Colour must be given the precedence, since the Emperor Justinian and his Empress have, my ministers inform me, too long shown an unjust bias in favour of the Blue.' In Persia chariots are used only in parades and ceremonial processions; Khosrou therefore did not realize that the sport was competitive. The four chariots were released from the ‘prisons', the charioteers strove with cry and blow for the lead, and the First Blue soon gained the inner berth: he shot fifty paces ahead of the Second Blue, with the two Greens a long way behind. Khosrou grew very angry and, seeing in the Blue chariots an emblem of the Emperor, he cried out: ‘Stop the race, stop that Caesar! He has impertinently stolen the lead from my two chariots.' Persian soldiers rushed out into the arena and formed a barrier with lances. The Blue charioteers pulled up, for fear of impaling their horses, and the Green chariots were allowed to take the lead
and win. This was the foullest race ever seen in a hippodrome (and I could tell you of some pretty foul ones). The audience laughed uproariously, and Khosrou beamed at them, not realizing that the joke was against himself. ‘Stop that Caesar' became a catchword in racing circles all over the world. Khosrou was of a naturally irritable and sarcastic temper. For example, he would ridicule the misfortunes of the people whose cities he destroyed by pretending to weep and saying: ‘Alas, poor Christians, it was your misguided loyalty to our foolish, greedy cousin of Constantinople that brought you to this!' He was not altogether a bad man, however.

From Apamea he returned home, not by the way that he had come but by Edessa and Carrhae and Constantina and Daras. He accepted a mere 5,000 in gold as ransom-money from Edessa, though at first he had intended to storm it, because the Mages with him advised him against any such attempt. For his vanguard twice missed their road on their way there, and when at last they found it he suddenly began to suffer great pain from an abscess under a tooth in his lower jaw. The people of Edessa were not surprised to escape so slightly. They claim that Jesus Christ Himself once sent a letter to a citizen of Edessa who had invited Him to leave the foolish Galileans to their fate and come as an honoured guest to teach in Edessa. Jesus is supposed to have written: ‘I cannot come, because of the prophecies in the Scriptures, but all good fortune shall attend you as long as you live, and I shall protect your city from attack by the Persians for ever.' This does not read to me as a likely reply in the circumstances: there was no threat from Persia in Jesus's day. Nevertheless, the men of Edessa have inscribed it in gold letters on the city gate; and as a protective charm it has only once failed to work.

While King Khosrou was still close to Edessa an embassy arrived from Justinian, agreeing to the terms suggested as a price for the restoration of the Eternal Peace – namely, an annual payment of 400,000 in gold, besides what had already been taken in the course of the campaign. As an act of grace Khosrou now offered to sell all the captives that he was bringing back from Antioch at a bargain price to the people of Edessa — who are notoriously kind-hearted. They collected, in addition to the ransom money of 5,000 pieces, the equivalent of fully 50,000. This sum was made up in silver and small money, and even in cattle and sheep, the voluntary contributions of farmers. The very prostitutes held a meeting, at which it was decided that all jewels
whatsoever belonging to members of their guild should be added to the ransom money. Unfortunately, Boutzes arrived at this point, and announced that Edessa had disobeyed the Emperor in paying Khosrou the 5,000. He forbade any more to be paid, and informed Khosrou that the people of Edessa had reconsidered the matter and would not conclude the bargain. He was angry with Khosrou that the ransom-price for his own brother Coutzes, captured thirteen years previously, had been fixed at an impossible sum, so that Coutzes had died in prison. As an act of private justice, Boutzes kept all the money from Edessa for himself; and Khosrou carried the captives off with him.

This was early in July. The news now reached King Khosrou that Belisarius had returned to Constantinople. He hurried home, contenting himself with extorting small sums of protection money from Constantina and the other cities through which he passed. He refused money from Carrhae, on the ground that it was not a Christian city but continued true to the Old Gods. At Daras he made a demonstration; then, levying a further 5,000 pieces there, passed back across the Persian frontier, well pleased with himself. As for the captives, he built them their new Antioch by the Euphrates, and they were by no means disappointed with it: a great many of them renounced Christianity and returned to the worship of the Old Gods in the temples that he built for them. Symmachus, the Athenian philosopher, came here too and opened an academy for the study of the doctrine called neo-Platonism – a sort of Christianity not complicated by the story of Jesus Christ or by arguments as to His nature. At the Hippodrome of New Antioch the Green Colour was under King Khosrou's particular protection, and was given all the best horses.

But as soon as Justinian heard that Khosrou was back in Persia he tore up the new treaty.

This, then, was the shameful story that greeted us in July on our arrival at Constantinople from Ravenna: in the three months Khosrou had cost Justinian a sum that ran into I cannot say how many millions, and exposed both the weakness of his defences and the cowardice of his troops. Few officers of distinction had accompanied Belisarius and my mistress home, and no troops except the Household Regiment, which by enlistment of Goths, Moors, and Vandals had now swelled to 7,000 men. These were all bold, sturdy fellows; for if ever any outstanding courage was shown by any fighter, whether he belonged to enemy or allied forces, Belisarius was always quick to engage him and
turn him into a first-class soldier. At the defence of Rome the Household Regiment had so often borne the brunt of the Gothic attack that the Romans used to exclaim in wonder: ‘The Empire of Theoderich undermined by the household of a single man!'

With us came a large train of captives, headed by King Wittich and Queen Matasontha and the children of King Hildibald. We also brought all the public treasures of Ravenna. These consisted of some ten millions in gold and silver bars and coin; the ancient regalia of the Empire of the West; great quantities of miscellaneous gold and silver plate, including the treasures captured by Theoderich in his wars in France and the treasures of the Arian Church (which Justinian had ordered to be dissolved); and the Roman standards captured long ago at the Battle of Adrianople, together with the very diadem that the Emperor Valens had worn on that disastrous day.

Of the standards and the crown Belisarius said, as we were nearing home: ‘The defeat at Adrianople is avenged at last. Ah, if my Uncle Modestus had only lived to see me bring these back, what a classical banquet he would have spread for us!'

My mistress agreed: ‘Yes, and what a more than classical speech he would have delivered!'

Belisarius was, I think, contrasting in his mind the sort of welcome that his uncle would have given him with what might, in the worst case, be expected from Justinian because of this atmosphere of slander and suspicion at Court. It was not that Belisarius was ambitious of honours and tides: he was satisfied merely with the sense of a task well done. But being naturally warm-hearted he was easily chilled by ungenerosity in others. He was hoping, no doubt, for Justinian's sake as much as for his own, that all suspicions would vanish upon his return and the slanderers be confounded.