Count Belisarius (65 page)

Narses objected: ‘But if I do as you advise, will not King Teudel, swallowing the bait, carry the trap away with him?'

Belisarius replied: ‘There is that danger, and I was therefore about to suggest that your spearmen should be dismounted cavalry, whose courage would be of a higher order.'

‘Good. And I must place my light cavalry forward on the flanks, I suppose?'

‘Yes. Keep them thrust well out, not near enough to invite attack, but near enough to act as a menace. Hold my Household Regiment, with your other heavy cavalry, in reserve.'

Narses asked: ‘But if Teudel attacks the foot-archers first?'

‘It would be against the Gothic code of kingly honour to do so. Mailed horseman disdains to attack leather-coated archer.'

Thus the famous Battle of Taginae was won already at the Brazen House at Constantinople, and by Belisarius, though Narses never acknowledged his indebtedness to him, nor did Belisarius ever seek to diminish from Narses' glory by recalling it. The battle, which King Teudel eagerly accepted, began with his lancers charging into the reentrant that Narses offered them and being raked with distant flanking fire from 8,000 long bows. The confusion caused by the uncontrollable kicking and plunging of a huge number of wounded horses and by the death or unhorsing of most of the chieftains, conspicuous by their armour and trappings, slackened the charge from a gallop to a trot, from a trot to a walk. When momentum is lost, charging cavalry are no match for courageous mail-clad spearmen, and their horses offer a most vulnerable target. Teudel's leading squadron could not break the line of spears; the squadrons behind could do nothing to assist them, and lost heavily from continuous arrow-fire. At last Teudel himself was wounded. The Goths wavered. The Roman spearmen then
opened their ranks and the Household Regiment swept through the gap; and it was to the war-cry ‘Belisarius' that the Gothic lancers were thrown back upon their own infantry, who became involved in the rout and scattered in all directions.

King Teudel was overtaken and killed a few miles from the battlefield. His blood-stained garments and his jewelled hat were dispatched as trophies of victory to the Emperor at Constantinople.

The dismantling of the fortifications of so many cities by the Goths proved their undoing: there was nothing to oppose Narses' progress. Rome was captured at the first assault by one of his generals. Then the Gothic fleet came over to him. Within two months, after a last engagement on the banks of the Sarno, in the neighbourhood of Mount Vesuvius, the war was won. The surviving Goths were broken in spirit; they agreed either to quit Italy or to submit to Justinian.

Shortly before this agreement was made a venerable institution came to a sudden end. For of the Roman Senators and their families, 300 persons whom Teudel had kept as hostages beyond the Po were butchered in revenge for his death; and the rest, hurrying from Sicily to Rome on news of its capture, were intercepted by the Goths near Vesuvius and likewise destroyed without mercy. The Order had not been revived, and never, I think, will be. Its only excuse for continuance during the last few hundred years had been its riches and its ancient traditions of culture. Justinian inherited the riches; the traditions could not be either recovered or established afresh. So much then for the Senatorial Order of the West, and for King Teudel, and for the Goths – whose name is now extinct in Italy, though there are still Visigothic Kings ruling in Spain.

The end of Bessas: he redeemed his loss of Rome by his success in Colchis, where he recaptured Petra, the capital, from the Persians; and died in honour at Constantinople, not long afterwards. But Petra was once more taken by the Persians. Then a strange coincidence – Dagistheus, the Roman commander at Petra, redeemed his loss of that city by his success in Italy; for it was he who recaptured Rome, lost by Bessas, for Narses.

Narses, who remained in Italy as Governor, won a second great battle on his own account, so that this time the credit goes to his own studies of the art of war. A huge army of Franks had marched down into Southern Italy. Narses surprised their main body at Casilinum in Campania when (as before in Belisarius's time) they had lost half
their numbers from dysentery. The Frankish army consisted wholly of infantry armed with sword, spear, and throwing-axe. Narses offered to oppose them with his own infantry; but, as the Franks charged in column, he enveloped their flanks with his squadrons and shot them to pieces at a hundred paces' distance, which was out of the range of their axes. The Franks dared not move forward for fear of being charged on either flank, nor did they dare to break column and attack the cavalry – their art of war demands that they keep close order on all occasions. They died together in a heap, and only five men of 30,000 succeeded in escaping. Narses, perhaps to avoid Justinian's jealousy, ascribed the credit for this victory entirely to the miraculous image of the Virgin that he carried with him, who warned him of all important events.

When Justinian heard of Taginae and Casilinum he praised God and was exceedingly happy. ‘Ah,' he is reported to have said, ‘why did we not think to send our valiant Narses to Italy long ago? Why did we recall him from the previous campaign, upon a jealous complaint of Count Belisarius? Many lives would have been saved and much treasure spared if we had only trusted to our Narses. We blame ourselves for displaying too great consideration for the feelings of Belisarius, a cowardly and stupid officer; but perhaps such excess of generosity is pardonable in a sovereign.'

Then he returned to his theological studies and, convinced that Italy was safe, that King Khosrou meditated no further mischief on the Eastern frontier, and that the barbarians to the North could be bribed or tricked into fighting one another, he neglected his armies and fortifications more than ever before.

Belisarius, as Commander of the Armies in the East and of the Imperial Guards, three times approached him, begging him to consider the danger to the Empire. After the third attempt an Imperial order came: ‘His Serenity forbids this subject to be raised again. God will defend His people who trust in Him, with a strong right hand.'

*

One day, in the autumn of the year of our Lord 558 – which was the year of Bloody John's death, in a hunting accident, after having obediently served with Narses in his Italian campaign, and the tenth year of our renewed residence in Constantinople – Belisarius was handed a message by the master of a Black Sea trading vessel. It was written in the shaking hand of an old man, on a dirty strip of parchment.

‘Most Illustrious Belisarius, who rescued my life from Cappadocian John fifty years and more ago, in an inn near Adrianople in Thrace, when you were only a little lad: the time has come to show that Simeon the burgess does not forget this debt of gratitude. The Bulgarian Huns carried me off as a slave long ago in a raid upon Thrace, but have treated me with indulgence because of my skill as a saddler. I have learned their barbarous language and am admitted to their councils, and I confess that I am now better situated in many ways than when I was the slave of rapacious tax-collectors. Only, I miss the good wine of Thrace and the warmth of my well-built house. Know, then, that this winter, if the Danube freezes again, as the weather prophets foretell, a Bulgarian horde will overrun Thrace. They boast that they will attack Constantinople itself and take such plunder as was never taken before since the world began. Zabergan leads them, a capable Cham. Twenty thousand men ride with him. Warn the Emperor. Farewell.'

Belisarius brought the letter to the Emperor's attention. Justinian asked: ‘Why this torn strip of parchment, reeking of the docks? Is this a proper document to show an Emperor?'

‘A dirty beggar, Your Majesty, who sees smoke curling from the upper windows of a great house, is privileged to come rushing into the hall with a warning cry of “Fire!” The inmates thank him for his timely warning and excuse his rags and rude address.'

Justinian said: ‘This, Illustrious Belisarius, is surely one of those military ruses for which you are justly famous? You wish to frighten us by a forgery into increasing our armies and rebuilding the fortifications of the city, knowing well that we have forbidden you to mention the matter directly. We are not deceived, but forgive you for your errors. See to it, my lord, that all disloyalty be banished from your heart. For in times of old there have been generals in this Court who urged upon their Emperors the raising of new armies, pretending an emergency, but planning to use them against the State. Search your heart, my lord, and if you find sin there, pluck it out with Christ's help, for He will grant you strength.'

Now, in the Square of Augustus, opposite the Senate House, Justinian had placed a colossal equestrian statue of himself; it stands upon a very lofty pedestal plated with the finest pale brass. He is shown there in armour of antique pattern and wearing a helmet with an immensely long plume. In his left hand is an orb surmounted by a cross. His
right hand is raised in a gesture which is intended to mean: ‘Begone, enemies!' But he carries no arms, not even a dagger, as if the gesture and the frown on his face were sufficient discouragement. And indeed in the latter part of his reign he treated his armies as if he had no further use for them. The fact was that Justinian, ambitious of greatness, had acted like the nameless rich man, mentioned in an anecdote by Jesus Christ, who began building a house for himself without first counting the cost, and so fell into debt and ridicule. Justinian's eye, it was said in the city, was the bully of his stomach: he wasted his substance on vain religious luxuries, neglecting his practical military needs.

All agreed that he should never, in the first place, have attempted the conquest and occupation of Africa and Italy with the meagre forces at his disposal. Despite the almost miraculous successes of Belisarius, the double task had proved too heavy for the Imperial armies to perform. True, they still held Carthage and Ravenna, but protracted campaigns had brought these prosperous and well-governed lands to almost complete ruin. Meanwhile, the Northern and Eastern frontiers were weakened by the absence of their garrisons and reserves, and many times breached by invasion, so that a general catastrophe had been only narrowly avoided. The price for the reconquest of the Western Empire was, in a word, its devastation, and the devastation also of Syria, Colchis, Roman Mesopotamia, Illyria, and Thrace: the revenues of which diminished pitiably. Justinian was now obliged to institute a policy of retrenchment; and characteristically began to apply it in the department of Imperial Defence, rather than in that of Ecclesiastical Endowment; hoping, by the foundation or embellishment of still more monasteries, nunneries, churches, to bribe the angelic hosts to assist him, as at other times he had bribed Franks, Slavs, and Huns with gifts of gold or military equipment. He publicly justified his superstitious confidence by the words spoken by Jesus to the Apostle Peter when he resisted the guards of the Jewish High Priest and cut off the ear of one of them: ‘Put up again thy sword into its place. For all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.' He was the more wedded to his pacifism in that he had no fears for his own safety: the soothsayers whom he secretly consulted had all assured him that he would meet a natural death at last in his own bed in the Sacred Apartments of the Palace.

On Christmas Day the Huns crossed the frozen Danube. When the
news reached the Court the Emperor ordered masses to be said in all the principal sanctuaries, and spent his whole night in vigil at St Irene's Church; but took no other action. The Huns divided into two bodies, the one to ravage Greece, the other under their Cham Zabergan himself to capture the city. They swept across Thrace unopposed. Being heathen, they felt no respect for churches or convents: they robbed and raped indiscriminately, sending back wagon-loads of treasure and droves of captives along the winter roads and across the Danube. The escorts of these convoys, savage horsemen, forced the pace with whips or the prick of swords; and any captive who fell and did not instantly rise was killed without mercy – even women overtaken with labour pains. The Huns, though in general well-behaved among themselves, count the whole world of Christians as their natural prey, and would think no more of spitting a baptized infant on a lance than they would of transfixing a fawn in the chase.

Zabergan pressed on. The long walls of Anastasius, built across the peninsula at thirty-two miles' distance from the city, were no obstacle to his horsemen: being ruinous in very many places, with no soldiers available to man the breaches, no catapults or other engines ready for use in the towers. On the Feast of the Three Kings, Zabergan camped by the banks of the river Athyras, twenty miles from the city, and panic suddenly overcame the Constantinopolitans. For the public squares were full of unhappy refugees from the villages, with grey faces and small bundles, shouting: ‘They come, the Huns come – like a furious herd of wild bulls destroying as they go! O God have mercy upon us!'

This cry spread through the streets: ‘God have mercy upon us!' Then every citizen asked his neighbour: ‘Where are the men of the Imperial Guard? Where are the city militia? Will no one restrain these Bulgarian devils from storming the inner walls and burning the city down, and destroying every one of us?'

Great crowds of them hired boats and fled across the Bosphorus into Asia Minor, 50,000 persons crossing in a single day.

The Emperor Justinian spent the greater part of these days kneeling in his private chapel. He repeated again and again: ‘The Lord is strong. He will deliver us.' The only step of a practical nature that he took was to order that all churches in the suburbs, and all his villas too, should be immediately stripped of their treasures, and these conveyed to the Imperial private port, to be loaded on barges.

At last he sent for Belisarius, and asked: ‘How is it Illustrious Belisarius, Count of our Stables and Commander of our Guards, that you have sent no soldiers to repel these heathen savages?'