no opposition; for the Goths were very thinly scattered through Southern
Italy, and had not even enough men to garrison the Lucanian and Calabrian
fortresses. Naples was taken by surprise, the Imperialists finding their
way within the walls by crawling up a disused aqueduct. After this
important conquest, Belisarius made for Rome, though his forces were
reduced to a mere handful by the necessity of leaving garrisons in his
late conquests. King Witiges made no effort to obstruct his approach. He
had received news that the Franks were threatening an evasion of Northern
Italy, and went north to oppose an imaginary danger in the Alps, when he
should have been defending the line of the Tiber. Having staved off the
danger of a Frankish war by ceding Provence to King Theuderic, Witiges
turned back, only to learn that Rome was now in the hands of the enemy.
The troops of Leudaris, the Gothic general, who had been left with 4,000
men to defend the city, had been struck with panic at the approach of
Belisarius, and were cowardly and idiotic enough to evacuate it without
striking a blow. Five thousand men had sufficed to seize the ancient
capital of the world! [December, 536.]
Next spring King Witiges came down with the main army of the Goths—more
than 100,000 strong—and laid siege to Rome. The defence of the town by
Belisarius and his very inadequate garrison forms the most interesting
episode in the Italian war. For more than a year the Ostrogoths lay before
its walls, essaying every device to force an entry. They tried open storm;
they endeavoured to bribe traitors within the city; they strove to creep
along the bed of a disused aqueduct, as Belisarius had done a year before
at Naples. All was in vain, though the besiegers outnumbered the garrison
twenty-fold, and exposed their lives with the same recklessness that their
ancestors had shown in the invasion of the empire a hundred years back.
The scene best remembered in the siege was the simultaneous assault on
five points in the wall, on the 21st of March, 537. Three of the attacks
were beaten back with ease; but near the Prænestine Gate, at the
south-east of the city, one storming party actually forced its way within
the walls, and had to be beaten out by sheer hard fighting; and at the
mausoleum of Hadrian, on the north-west, another spirited combat took
place. Hadrian’s tomb—a great quadrangular structure of white marble, 300
feet square and 85 feet high—was surmounted by one of the most magnificent
collections of statuary in ancient Rome, including four great equestrian
statues of emperors at its corners. The Goths, with their ladders, swarmed
at the foot of the tomb in such numbers, that the arrows and darts of the
defenders were insufficient to beat them back. Then, as a last resource,
the Imperialists tore down the scores of statues which adorned the
mausoleum, and crushed the mass of assailants beneath a rain of marble
fragments. Two famous antiques, that form the pride of modern
galleries—the “Dancing Faun” at Florence, and the “Barberini Faun” at
Munich—were found, a thousand years later, buried in the ditch of the tomb
of Hadrian, and must have been among the missiles employed against the
Goths. The rough usage which they then received proved the means of
preserving them for the admiration of the modern world.
A year and nine days after he had formed the siege of Rome, the unlucky
Witiges had to abandon it. His army, reduced by sword and famine, had
given up all hope of success, and news had just arrived that the
Imperialists had launched a new army against Ravenna, the Gothic capital.
Belisarius, indeed, had just received a reinforcement of 6,000 or 7,000
men, and had wisely sent a considerable force, under an officer named
John, to fall on the Adriatic coast.
The scene of the war was now transported further to the north; but its
character still remained the same. The Romans gained territory, the Goths
lost it. Firmly fixed at Ancona and Rimini and Osimo, Belisarius gradually
forced his way nearer to Ravenna, and, in A.D. 540 laid siege to it.
Witiges, blockaded by Belisarius in his capital, made no such skilful
defence as did his rival at Rome three years before. To add to his
troubles, the Franks came down into Northern Italy, and threatened to
conquer the valley of the Po, the last Gothic stronghold. Witiges then
made proposals for submission; but Belisarius refused to grant any terms
other than unconditional surrender, though his master Justinian was ready
to acknowledge Witiges as vassal-king in Trans-Padane Italy. Famine drove
Ravenna to open its gates, and the Goths, enraged at their imbecile king,
and struck with admiration for the courage and generosity of Belisarius,
offered to make their conqueror Emperor of the West. The loyal general
refused; but bade the Goths disperse each to his home, and dwell peaceably
for the future as subjects of the empire. [May, 540 A.D.] He himself,
taking the great Gothic treasure-hoard from the palace of Theodoric, and
the captive Witiges, sailed for Constantinople, and laid his trophies at
his master’s feet.
Italy now seemed even as Africa; only Pavia and Verona were still held by
Gothic garrisons, and when he sailed home, Belisarius deemed his work so
nearly done, that his lieutenants would suffice to crush out the last
embers of the strife. He himself was required in the East, for a new
Persian war with Chosroësroës, son of Kobad, was on the eve of breaking
out. But things were not destined to end so. At the last moment the Goths
found a king and a hero to rescue them, and the conquest of Italy was
destined to be deferred for twelve years more. Two ephemeral rulers
reigned for a few months at Pavia, and came to bloody ends; but their
successor was Baduila,(11) the noblest character of the sixth century—“the
first knight of the Middle Ages,” as he has been called. When the generals
of Justinian marched against him, to finish the war by the capture of
Verona and Pavia, he won over them the first victory that the Goths had
obtained since their enemies landed in Italy. This was followed by two
more successes; the scattered armies of Witiges rallied round the banner
of the new king, and at once the cities of Central and Southern Italy
began to fall back into Gothic hands, with the same rapidity with which
they had yielded to Belisarius. The fact was, that the war had been a
cruel strain on the Italians, and that the imperial governors, and still
more their fiscal agents, or “logothetes,” had become unbearably
oppressive. Italy had lived through the fit of enthusiasm with which it
had received the armies of Justinian, and was now regretting the days of
Theodoric as a long-lost golden age. Most of its cities were soon in
Baduila’s hands; the Imperialists retained only the districts round Rome,
Naples, Otranto, and Ravenna. Of Naples they were soon deprived. [B.C.
543.] Baduila invested it, and ere long constrained it to surrender. He
treated the inhabitants with a kindness and consideration which no Roman
general, except Belisarius, had ever displayed. A speech which he
delivered to his generals soon after this success deserves a record, as
showing the character of the man. A Gothic warrior had been convicted of
violating the daughter of a Roman. Baduila condemned him to death. His
officers came round him to plead for the soldier’s life. He answered them
that they must choose that day whether they preferred to save one man’s
life or the life of the Gothic race. At the beginning of the war, as they
knew well, the Goths had brave soldiers, famous generals, countless
treasure, horses, weapons, and all the forts of Italy. And yet under
Theodahat—a man who loved gold better than justice—they had so angered God
by their unrighteous lives, that all the troubles of the last ten years
had come upon them. Now God seemed to have avenged Himself on them enough.
He had begun a new course with them, and they must begin a new course with
Him, and justice was the only path. As for the present criminal being a
valiant hero, let them know that the unjust man and the ravisher was never
brave in fight; but that, according to a man’s life, such was his luck in
battle.
Such was the justice of Baduila; and it seemed as if his dream was about
to come true, and that the regenerate Goths would win back all that they
had lost. Ere long he was at the gates of Rome, prepared to essay, with
15,000 men, what Witiges had failed to do with 100,000. Lest all his
Italian conquests should be lost, Justinian was obliged to send back
Belisarius, for no one else could hold back the Goths. But Belisarius was
ill-supplied with men; he had fallen into disfavour at Court, and the
imperial ministers stinted him of troops and money. Unable to relieve
Rome, he had to wait at Portus, by the mouth of the Tiber, watching for a
chance to enter the city. That chance he never got. The famine-stricken
Romans, angry with the cruel and avaricious Bessas, who commanded the
garrison, began to long for the victory of their enemy; and one night some
traitors opened the Asinarian Gate, and let in Baduila and his Goths. The
King thought that his troubles were over; he assembled his chiefs, and
bade them observe how, in the time of Witiges, 7,000 Greeks had conquered,
and robbed of kingdom and liberty, 100,000 well-armed Goths. But now that
they were few, poor, and wretched, the Goths had conquered more than
20,000 of the enemy. And why? Because of old they looked to anything
rather than justice: they had sinned against each other and the Romans.
Therefore they must choose henceforth, and be just men and have God with
them, or unjust and have God against them.
Baduila had determined to do that which no general since Hannibal had
contemplated: he would destroy Rome, and with it all the traditions of the
world-empire of the ancient city—to him they seemed but snares, tending to
corrupt the mind of the Goths. The people he sent away unharmed—they were
but a few thousand left after the horrors of the famine during the siege.
But he broke down the walls, and dismantled the palaces and arsenals. For
a few weeks Rome was a deserted city, given up to the wolf and the owl
[A.D. 550].
For eleven unquiet years, Baduila, the brave and just, ruled Italy,
holding his own against Belisarius, till the great general was called home
by some wretched court intrigue. But presently Justinian gathered another
army, more numerous than any that Belisarius had led, and sent it to
Italy, under the command of the eunuch Narses. It was a strange choice
that made the chamberlain into a general; but it succeeded. Narses marched
round the head of the Adriatic, and invaded Italy from the north. Baduila
went forth to meet him at Tagina, in the Apennines. For a long day the
Ostrogothic knights rode again and again into the Imperialist ranks; but
all their furious charges failed. At evening they reeled back broken, and
their king received a mortal wound in the flight [A.D. 553].
With the death of Baduila, it was all up with the Goths; their hero’s
knightly courage and kingly righteousness had not sufficed to save them
from the same doom which had overtaken the Vandals. The broken army made
one last stand in Campania, under a chief named Teia; but he was slain in
battle at Nuceria, and then the Goths surrendered. They told Narses that
the hand of God was against them; they would quit Italy, and go back to
dwell in the north, in the land of their fathers. So the poor remnant of
the conquering Ostrogoths marched off, crossed the Po and the Alps, and
passed away into oblivion in the northern darkness. The scheme of
Justinian was complete. Italy was his; but an Italy so wasted and
depopulated, that the traces of the ancient Roman rule had almost
vanished. “The land,” says a contemporary chronicler, “was reduced to
primeval solitude”—war and famine had swept it bare.
[Illustration]
Details Of St. Sophia.
It is strange to find that the Emperor was not tired out by waging this
desperate war with the Goths; the moment it ended he began to essay
another western conquest. There was civil war in Spain, and, taking
advantage of it, Liberius, governor of Africa, landed in Andalusia, and
rapidly took the great towns of the south of the peninsula—Cordova,
Cartagena, Malaga, and Cadiz. The factious Visigoths then dropped their
strife, united in arms under King Athangild, and checked the further
progress of the imperial arms. But a long slip of the lost territory was
not recovered by them. Justinian and his successors, down to A.D. 623,
reigned over the greater part of the sea-coast of Southern Spain.
VIII. THE END OF JUSTINIAN’S REIGN.
The slackness with which the generals of Justinian prosecuted the Gothic
war in the period between the triumph of Belisarius at Ravenna in A.D.
540, and the final conquest of Italy in A.D. 553, is mainly to be
explained by the fact that, just at the moment of the fall of Ravenna, the
empire became involved in a new struggle with its great Eastern neighbour.
Chosroës of Persia was seriously alarmed at the African and Italian
conquests of Justinian, and remembered that he too, as well as the Vandals
and Goths, was in possession of provinces that had formerly been Roman,
and might one day be reclaimed by the Emperor. He determined to strike
before Justinian had got free from his Italian war, and while the flower
of the Roman army was still in the West. Using as his pretext for war some
petty quarrels between two tribes of Arabs, subject respectively to Persia
and the empire, he declared war in the spring of A.D. 540. Justinian, as
the king had hoped, was caught unprepared: the army of the Euphrates was
so weak that it never dared face the Persians in the field, and the
opening of the war was fraught with such a disaster to the empire as had
not been known since the battle of Adrianople, more than a hundred and
sixty years before. Avoiding the fortresses of Mesopotamia, Chosroës, who
led his army in person, burst into Northern Syria. His main object was to
strike a blow at Antioch, the metropolis of the East, a rich city that had
not seen an enemy for nearly three centuries, and was reckoned safe from
all attacks owing to its distance from the frontier. Antioch had a strong
garrison of 6,000 men and the “Blues” and “Greens” of its circus factions
had taken arms to support the regular troops. But the commander was
incompetent, and the fortifications had been somewhat neglected of late.
After a sharp struggle, Chosroës took the town by assault; the garrison
cut its way out, and many of the inhabitants escaped with it, but the city
was sacked from cellar to garret and thousands of captives were dragged
away by the Persians. Chosroës planted them by the Euphrates—as
Nebuchadnezzar had done of old with the Jews—and built for them a city
which he called Chosroantiocheia, blending his own name with that of their
ancient abode.
This horrible disaster to the second city of the Roman East roused all
Justinian’s energy; neglecting the Italian war, he sent all his disposable
troops to the Euphrates frontier, and named Belisarius himself as the
chief commander. After this, Chosroës won no such successes as had
distinguished his first campaign. Having commenced an attack on the Roman
border fortresses in Colchis, far to the north, he was drawn home by the
news that Belisarius had invaded Assyria and was besieging Nisibis. On the
approach of the king the imperial general retired, but his manœuvre had
cost the Persian the fruits of a whole summer’s preparation, and the year
A.D. 541 ended without serious fighting. In the next spring very similar
operations followed: Belisarius defended the line of the Euphrates with
success, and the invaders retired after having reduced one single
Mesopotamian fortress. The war lingered for two years more, till Chosroës,
disgusted at the ill-success of all his efforts since his first success at
Antioch, and more especially humiliated by a bloody repulse from the walls
of Edessa, consented to treat for peace [A.D. 545]. He gave up his
conquests—which were of small importance—but regarded the honours of the
war as being his own, because Justinian consented to pay him 2,000 lbs. of
gold [£108,000] on the ratification of the treaty. One curious clause was
inserted in the document—though hostilities ceased everywhere else, the
rights of the two monarchs to the suzerainty of the kingdom of Lazica, on
the Colchian frontier, hard by the Black Sea, were left undefined. For no
less than seven years a sort of by-war was maintained in this small
district, while peace prevailed on all other points of the Perso-Roman
frontier. It was not till A.D. 556, after both parties had wasted much
treasure and many men on the unprofitable contest, that Chosroës resigned
the attempt to hold the small and rugged mountain kingdom of the Lazi, and
resigned it to Justinian on the promise of an annual grant of £18,000 as
compensation money.
But although Justinian had brought his second Persian war to a not
unsuccessful end, the empire had come badly out of the struggle, and was
by 556 falling into a condition of incipient disorder and decay. This was
partly caused by the reckless financial expedients of the Emperor, who
taxed the provinces with unexampled rigour while forced to maintain at
once a Persian and an Italian war.
The main part of the damage, however, was wrought by other than human
means. In A.D. 542 there broke out in the empire a plague such as had not
been known for three hundred years—the last similar visitation had fallen
in the reign of Trebonianus Gallus, far back in the third century. This
pestilence was one of the epoch-making events in the history of the
empire, as great a landmark as the Black Death in the history of England.
The details which Procopius gives us concerning its progress and results
leave no doubt that it operated more powerfully than any other factor in
that weakening of the empire which is noticeable in the second half of the
sixth century. When it reached Constantinople, 5,000 persons a day are
said to have fallen victims to it. All customary occupations ceased in the
city, and the market-place was empty save for corpse-bearers. In many
houses not a single soul remained alive, and the government had to take
special measures for the burial of neglected corpses. “The disease,” says
the chronicler, “did not attack any particular race or class of men, nor
prevail in any particular region, nor confine itself to any period of the
year. Summer or winter, North or South, Greek or Arabian, washed or
unwashed—of such distinctions the plague took no account. A man might
climb to the hill-top, and it was there; he might retire to the depths of
a cavern, and it was there also.” The only marked characteristic of its
ravages that the chronicler could find was that, “whether by chance or
providential design, it strictly spared the most wicked.”(12)
Justinian himself fell ill of the plague: he recovered, but was never his
old self again. Though he persevered inflexibly to his last day in his
scheme for the reconquest of the empire, yet he seems to have declined in
energy, and more especially to have lost that power of organization, which
had been his most marked characteristic. The chroniclers complain that he
had grown less hopeful and less masterful. “After achieving so much in the
days of his vigour, when he entered into the last stage of his life he
seemed to weary of his labours, and preferred to create discord among his
foes or to mollify them with gifts, instead of trusting to his arms and
facing the dangers of war. So he allowed his troops to decline in numbers,
because he did not expect to require their services. And his ministers,
who collected his taxes and maintained his armies were affected with the
same indifference.”(13)
One feature of the Emperor’s later years was that he took more and more
interest in theological disputes, even to the neglect of State business.
The Church question of the day was the dispute on Monophysitism, the
heresy which denied the existence both of a human and a divine nature in
Our Lord. Justinian was not a monophysite himself, but wished to unify the
sect with the main body of the Church by edicts of comprehension, which
forbade the discussion of the subject, and spent much trouble in coercing
prelates orthodox and heretical into a reconciliation which had no chance
of permanent success. His chief difficulty was with the bishops of Rome.
He forced Pope Vigilius to come to Constantinople, and kept him under
constraint for many months, till he signed all that was required of him
[A.D. 554]. The only result was to win Vigilius the reputation of a
heretic, and to cause a growing estrangement between East and West.
The gloom of Justinian’s later years was even more marked after the death
of his wife; Theodora died in A.D. 548, six years after the great plague,
and it may be that her loss was no less a cause of the diminished energy
of his later years than was his enfeebled health. Her bold and adventurous
spirit must have buoyed him up in many of the more difficult enterprises
of the first half of his reign. After her death, Justinian seems to have
trusted no one: his destined successor, Justinus, son of his sister, was
kept in the background, and no great minister seems to have possessed his
confidence. Even Belisarius, the first and most loyal soldier of the
empire, does not appear to have been trusted: in the second Gothic war the
Emperor stinted him of troops and hampered him with colleagues. At last he
was recalled [A.D. 549] and sent into private life, from which he was only
recalled on the occurrence of a sudden military crisis in A.D. 558.
This crisis was a striking example of the mismanagement of Justinian’s
later years. A nomad horde from the South Russian steppes, the Cotrigur
Huns, had crossed the frozen Danube at mid-winter, when hostilities were
least expected, and thrown themselves on the Thracian provinces. The
empire had 150,000 men under arms at the moment, but they were all
dispersed abroad, many in Italy, others in Africa, others in Spain, others
in Colchis, some in the Thebaid, and a few on the Mesopotamian frontier.
There was such a dearth of men to defend the home provinces that the
barbarians rode unhindered over the whole country side from the Danube to
the Propontis plundering and burning. One body, only 7,000 strong, came up
to within a few miles of the city gates, and inspired such fear that the
Constantinopolitans began to send their money and church-plate over to
Asia. Justinian then summoned Belisarius from his retirement, and placed
him in command of what troops there were available—a single regiment of
300 veterans from Italy, and the “Scholarian guards,” a body of local
troops 3,500 strong, raised in the city and entrusted with the charge of
its gates, which inspired little confidence as its members were allowed to
practice their trades and avocations and only called out in rotation for
occasional service. With this undisciplined force, which had never seen
war, at his back, Belisarius contrived to beat off the Huns. He led them
to pursue him back to a carefully prepared position, where the only point
that could be attacked was covered with woods and hedges on either side.
The untrustworthy “Scholarians” were placed on the flanks, where they
could not be seriously molested, while the 300 Italian veterans covered
the one vulnerable point. The Huns attacked, were shot down from the woods
and beaten off in front, and fled leaving 400 men on the field, while the
Romans only lost a few wounded and not a single soldier slain. Thus the
last military exploit of Belisarius preserved the suburbs of the imperial
city itself from molestation; after defending Old Rome in his prime, he
saved New Rome in his old age.
Even this last service did not prevent Justinian from viewing his great
servant with suspicion. Four years later an obscure conspiracy against his
life was discovered, and one of the conspirators named Belisarius as being
privy to the plot. The old emperor affected to believe the accusation,
sequestrated the general’s property, and kept him under surveillance for
eight months. Belisarius was then acquitted and restored to favour: he
lived two years longer, and died in March, 565.(14) The ungrateful master
whom he had served so well followed him to the grave nine months later.
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