Lost to the West (15 page)

Italy was clearly ripe for the picking, but first Belisarius had to conquer Sicily. This he did with his customary panache, sweeping through the island and overcoming the only Gothic resistance at Palermo by sailing his ships up to the city walls and having his men jump onto the battlements. The suddenness of Sicily’s collapse completely unnerved Theodahad, the Ostrogothic king. When an imperial ambassador was shown into his presence, the king tremblingly offered to turn over Italy on the spot. For a moment, it looked as if the ancient heartland of the empire would fall as quickly as Africa.

It might indeed have done so, but unfortunately for the inhabitants of the peninsula (and subsequent Western history), the Byzantine general invading Dalmatia chose this moment to bungle his advance and was killed in an inconclusive battle. Since the army didn’t have the authority to advance without its general, it withdrew to its winter quarters and refused to budge without further instructions. Suddenly, the Byzantine threat began to look less impressive, and Theodahad started to recover his nerve. Regretting his rash promises of surrender, he threw the imperial ambassadors into jail and prepared to resist, raising an army as fast as he could. The opportunity for a quick victory was lost forever, and Italy, still glowing in the sunset of the classical world, was plunged into the darkness of a ruinous war. The region would remain a bloodstained battlefield for centuries to come.

The entire Byzantine offensive momentum ground to a halt as even Belisarius, in Sicily, ran into delays. Just as he was about to cross into southern Italy, word reached him that a full-blown mutiny was sweeping across Africa. Months were lost while the general raced to put it down, and when he returned, it was to find his own men on the
verge of revolt. By the time he had calmed them, autumn had begun, and the campaigning season was over.

The delays annoyed Belisarius as much as his men, and early the next year, he crossed the Strait of Messina, determined to make up for lost time. Theodahad hadn’t bothered to build up the Gothic defenses, and virtually every city in the south fell in rapid succession. Each victory further reduced Ostrogothic morale, but it also required Belisarius to leave a garrison behind. By the time the general reached Naples, his forces were too small to take the nearly impregnable city by storm. There were more ways to enter a city than by frontal assault, however, and Belisarius’s resourceful mind soon found one.

One of his men had been climbing up the old aqueduct to see how it was constructed and discovered a small, unguarded channel that still went into the city walls. Unfortunately, it wasn’t large enough for an armored man, but Belisarius knew how to get around that. Noisily attacking another section of the wall, he used the clamor of battle to cover the sound of his workmen enlarging the hole. After the work was completed, Belisarius cheerfully retreated and waited till nightfall, then sent six hundred men through and launched an all-out attack. The guards were quickly overwhelmed, the gates thrown open, and, within a matter of hours, the most important Gothic city in the south was in his hands.

The fall of the city panicked the Goths into murdering their spineless king and abandoning Rome for the nearly impregnable Ravenna. Electing an energetic noble named Vitiges as their new monarch, they set to work improving their defenses in the new capital, leaving only four thousand men with the impossible task of manning and defending Rome’s sprawling and dilapidated walls. A few weeks later, Belisarius arrived.

The imperial army was preceded by its formidable reputation, and by the time the first of the Byzantines came within sight of Rome’s walls, the Gothic garrison had convinced itself that resistance was impossible. Thanks to careful negotiations beforehand by the great general, Pope Silverius had already invited Belisarius into the
city, and the Goths thought only of preserving their lives. As the Byzantines marched into Rome through the Asinarian Gate, the Gothic garrison hastily marched out the other end of the city along the old Flaminian Way.

For the first time in nearly six decades, the Roman Empire had control of its ancient capital. Its citizens proudly welcomed the restoration of their ancient glory and shouted, “No longer will the tombs of the Caesars be trampled by the savages of the North!”
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The keys of Rome were sent, together with a captured Gothic chieftain, to Constantinople, where they were displayed in their entire splendor before Justinian’s throne.

It had been a remarkable year, but Belisarius knew better than to believe that the war was ended. With only a handful of men, he had managed to conquer Sicily, southern Italy, and Rome. The Byzantine success, however, was mostly smoke and mirrors. The moment Vitiges realized that the fearsome Belisarius was holding Rome with only five thousand men, the entire conquest would be in danger of crumbling. The triumphant entry into Rome became a desperate race to repair the walls before Vitiges learned the truth.

When the master of Ravenna found out that he had lost nearly half his kingdom to so few, he was enraged, and within three months a massive Gothic army was drawn up before the gates of Rome. Within moments of their arrival, they almost caught Belisarius and ended the struggle before it began. After fortifying the Milvian Bridge with a tower, the general had ridden out to survey the enemy positions, secure in the belief that the Goths couldn’t cross the Tiber in time to endanger him. Unfortunately, the guards charged with defending the tower fled at the first sight of the enemy, and the Goths poured over the bridge unmolested. Belisarius found himself suddenly surrounded by their vanguard and cut off from the Flaminian Gate. Conspicuous on his bay horse, he flailed about trying to break free
while Roman deserters pointed out his position to the Goths. He fought with desperate courage, shouting encouragement to his men and spurring his horse forward. The Goths, surprised by the ferocity of his attack, fell back, and Belisarius was able to slip back inside the city with his men.

With his face covered with blood, dust, and sweat, and his voice hoarse from shouting, he was almost unrecognizable and had to remove his helmet to stop a rumor that he had been killed. After reassuring his men, the exhausted commander visited every post, personally infusing his troops with his infectious optimism. Only when he had convinced himself that nothing more could be done did he allow his wife to lead him away to get some much-needed sleep.

Unaware how close he had come to victory, Vitiges ordered the cutting of all ten aqueducts to Rome, which for more than a millennium had supplied public fountains, plumbing, and the hydraulic mills that made the city’s flour. Belisarius improvised by using the rivers that ran through the city to power the mills—ensuring a constant supply of flour and bread—and braced for the next attack. Vitiges had constructed huge towers to breach the Roman walls, and a few weeks later he put them into action. The fighting was desperate as the Goths attacked two sections of the wall simultaneously. Time and again they came within inches of overwhelming the defenders, but Belisarius seemed to be everywhere at once, firing arrows from the walls and hacking at the scaling ladders. By the end of the day, more than thirty thousand Goths were dead, and Vitiges’ towers lay in a smoking ruin. Looking out over the walls, however, it was hard to see a dent in the waves of enemy soldiers. Belisarius knew that he would be hard-pressed to defend further attacks of this kind and hastily wrote to Justinian asking for reinforcements.

This wasn’t the first time that the general had written requesting more men, and, at first, Justinian simply ignored him. Belisarius had humbled Africa with a mere handful of men, repeatedly performing miracles of improvisation to keep his campaigns going, and this caused the emperor to repeatedly underestimate the men and materials
needed to retake Italy. But there was something else, a dim flicker of uneasiness in his queen, a gnawing fear that things were not quite what they seemed. Theodora began to suspect that the constant calls for a larger army were merely a ruse. Surely these barbarian opponents could be vanquished with the troops available. Perhaps the general was preparing to turn the sword against the master. The emperor finally sent a few thousand reinforcements, but Theodora remained suspicious. This general would need careful watching.

The new men tipped the balance in favor of Belisarius, and the general soon felt secure enough to go on the offensive. In the medieval world, siege warfare was often worse on the invading army than on the besieged. Exposed to the elements, running short of food, and trying to avoid sickness in unsanitary conditions, Vitiges was fighting a losing battle, and he knew it. Even the land he was encamped on seemed exhausted. It had long ago turned to a sea of mud, and his men were forced to wander farther and farther away in search of food. This left them dangerously vulnerable to counterattack, and each successful raid dented their spirits.

The mood in the Gothic camp wasn’t improved when Vitiges got word that a Byzantine advance force had managed to slip out of Rome and capture the town of Rimini, only thirty-three miles from Ravenna. This entire struggle had been a vast exercise in futility for the Gothic king, and having his new capital in danger was the last straw Cursing the winds that brought such an enemy to Italy, the disgusted king gave the order to retreat. Not even then, however, were the Goths allowed to leave in peace. Somehow guessing the timing of the withdrawal, Belisarius came roaring out from behind his walls and inflicted a thoroughly humiliating rout on Vitiges’ panicked forces.

As the last Goth fled, he could perhaps have consoled himself with the fact that Italy hadn’t seen a man of Belisarius’s character since Hannibal had crossed the Alps more than seven hundred years before. With only a few thousand men, the Byzantine general had taken on a kingdom that numbered in the hundreds of thousands and managed to cripple its fighting ability within two years. In five years, with
scarcely more men, he had subdued Africa and Italy and bent them to the imperial will.

Given a proper army and a little trust, there was no telling what Belisarius would have been able to do. The conquests of Spain and Gaul were tantalizingly within his reach; perhaps the Western Empire itself could be revived. With the imperium thus restored, Europe would have been spared the ravages of the Dark Ages, or at least the intensity of their destruction.

Unfortunately for the empire, it was never to find out. The brilliance of the general’s success had planted seeds of jealousy and distrust in the mind of Theodora, and there they were about to bear a bitter harvest. Belisarius was too young, too talented, and far too popular to be trusted.

When Justinian received yet another letter asking for reinforcements, he sent seven thousand troops and a man named Narses to keep an eye on his brilliant general. Already in his mid-sixties, Narses was the perfect candidate for the job. Indisputably the most powerful figure at court, he was the same eunuch who had helped Belisarius put down the Nika revolt, and he could be implicitly trusted because his condition prevented him from gaining the throne himself.

The reinforcements were welcome enough, but as Justinian should have been able to foresee, the aging eunuch’s presence completely undercut Belisarius’s authority and nearly ruined the war effort. Generals who wanted to fast-track their careers quickly saw that Narses had the imperial favor; before long, the officers were hopelessly split between those loyal to Belisarius and those loyal to the eunuch. The only solution was to divide the already small force in half. While Narses kept the main Gothic army tied down, Belisarius left to mop up northern Italy.

Moving with his customary speed, Belisarius swept through the north, liberating Italian cities from the Gothic yoke. Most towns threw open their gates, eager to rid themselves of their heretical oppressors and rejoin the empire. The general was happy to accommodate them, but this led to the familiar problem of siphoning off his
manpower with garrisons as the victories piled up. By the time the archbishop of Milan begged for Byzantine aid in liberating his city. Belisarius could spare only three hundred men. Sending the soldiers under the command of a subordinate, Belisarius continued on while the archbishop of Milan opened the city gates and massacred the Gothic garrison.

The ease of Milan’s fall was gratifying to the Byzantines, but it provoked a furious response from the Gothic king. Milan was the crown jewel of Vitiges’ kingdom, easily the largest city in Italy, and the moment he heard the news of its capture, he sent an army thirty thousand strong to retake it.

Somehow the beleaguered defenders got word to Belisarius, and he ordered the two closest generals to relieve the city. Now, however, the dangers of dividing the command were disastrously illustrated. The generals charged with coming to the city’s rescue, perhaps fearing for their political careers, refused to move another inch without a countersignature from Narses; and while they dithered, Milan died. The desperate defenders had been reduced to eating dogs and mice; now, on the brink of starvation, they at last gave up and agreed to surrender to the Goths. The terms were horrendous. Milan was to be made an example of, a cautionary warning to the rest of Italy of what it meant to defy the Gothic sword. The women and children were rounded up and sold into slavery, the men were butchered on the spot, and the city was burned to the ground.

The shocking fate of one of the most beautiful cities in Italy was made far worse because it could have been easily prevented, but it at least convinced Justinian of the folly of undermining Belisarius’s authority, and Narses was hurriedly recalled. At last, Belisarius had an undisputed command, and he was determined to strike a quick blow to end the war. Vitiges’ forces still easily outnumbered his own, but by now the king was terrified of the general and refused to venture beyond the walls of Ravenna. If Belisarius could take the city with all of his enemies pinned inside, the war would be ended at a single stroke.

The news that the terrible Byzantine army was on the way threw
Vitiges into a panic, and he did the only thing he could think of to preserve his throne. A few weeks earlier, word had reached him that the Persian king Chosroes was threatening war on the Byzantine flank, and Vitiges now desperately wrote to the Persian monarch, hoping to enlist the aid of the empire’s traditional enemy. If only the Persians could be persuaded to invade the East, the threat would force Justinian to recall his fearsome general and save the cornered Gothic king. Although Vitiges’ messengers were caught and killed long before they came near Persia, luck was with the Goths. After eight years of struggle, Chosroes had finally established himself on the Persian throne and had no need for a Gothic invitation to invade. The Byzantine forces in the East had been noticeably thinned by the Italian campaign, and in any case he was quite sure that without Belisarius they would prove an easy match. Of course, there was the small matter of the “everlasting peace” with the empire that he had personally signed, but Chosroes wasn’t one to let an inconvenient piece of paper get in the way of glory and tribute. Sending raiders knifing into Syria, the Persian king mobilized his army, determined to take full advantage of the empire’s preoccupation with the West.