When Belisarius marched into Rome a decade later more religious trouble beckoned. Like Anastasius before him, Justinian supported a new, compromise doctrine, Theopaschism, which he hoped would heal his empire’s divisions. He needed a solution also for personal reasons. While, like the population of the Empire’s capital, Constantinople, Justinian was Dyophysite, his wife Theodora was pro-Monophysite. On Justinian’s orders, one of Belisarius’ first actions in Rome was to depose the pope, Silverius, who was a Gothic appointee and so was unlikely to cooperate with Justinian’s plans. Silverius was dispatched to the island of Palmaria where he promptly and conveniently died. He was replaced by Justinian’s candidate, a former papal legate to Constantinople, Vigilius, who could be relied upon to support Justinian’s Theopaschism. Whether Vigilius would last any longer than Silverius was soon doubtful, though. He had barely been installed when Witigis and his vast army of Ostrogoths appeared outside the city.
III
The Romans’ first loss was their comforts. Witigis invested the city, building seven large fortified camps around its northern side and cutting its aqueducts. Belisarius – who knew all about the dangers posed by aqueducts after his attack on Naples – then made matters more permanent by blocking the sections inside the city with tons of masonry. The city’s baths ceased to function and the Romans, who had enjoyed public bathing for more than six centuries, were forced to clean themselves and drink from the city’s springs and wells or from the Tiber. They were short of food and sleep, too, as Belisarius required them to do night guard duty on the walls.
Yet comfort was not the Romans’ greatest concern. Like Witigis, they had been struck by how tiny Belisarius’ army was. Its numbers had been modest when it first landed in Sicily and it had been depleted since then by Belisarius’ need to leave garrisons in the cities he captured. His forces in Rome totalled fewer than 5,000 men. As we saw, Procopius claims that Witigis’ Ostrogoths totalled 150,000, and though 25,000 to 30,000 is probably closer to the mark, his army still dwarfed that of Belisarius. The Romans began to regret inviting him into the city, complaining that they had never asked him to invade Italy. When Witigis heard of their grumbling he sent an envoy to demoralize them further. Having denounced them for their treachery he then reproached them for having, as Procopius tells us, ‘exchanged the power of the Goths for Greeks, who were not able to defend them, although they had never before seen an army of the Greek race come to Italy except actors of tragedy or mime and thieving sailors’.4
Interestingly, some Romans responded to their fears in the same way as their ancestors had done during Alaric’s first siege. They looked to the past. Long before, when Rome went to war, the doors to the Temple of Janus were opened. The temple, which was beside the Senate House in the main Forum, was still in a good state and Procopius, who saw it himself, describes it as a square, bronze building just large enough to contain a statue of Janus. As Witigis’ siege dragged on, some of the city’s inhabitants secretly visited the temple and tried to open its doors. They failed, as the hinges must have been too rusted, but it was evident the attempt had been made as the doors were no longer closed true. As Procopius tells us, ‘those who had attempted to do this escaped detection; and no investigation of the act was made, as was natural in a time of great confusion, since it did not become known to the commanders, nor did it reach the ears of the multitude, except of a very few’.5 Times had changed since Alaric’s day. Then some of the most powerful men in the city had flirted with paganism. Now it was only an unknown few, who were lucky to escape punishment.
Yet the Romans, like the Witigis, had underestimated Belisarius. If the Ostrogoths’ tactics and weapons had changed little since Alaric’s time, this was not true of the Eastern Roman Empire. In these cash-strapped days the Byzantines could not field the vast armies of earlier times but they had become adept at making the most of the little they had. Belisarius’ army had almost nothing in common with the heavy infantry legions of the old Roman Empire, and in many ways it was closer to a war band of Huns. For that matter, it contained Huns, along with Slavs, Germanic Heruli, Gepids and Lombards, and also the Isaurians, a tough people from the mountainous south of Asia Minor. All of these disparate elements had one thing in common: they were expert archers. So was Belisarius himself. In one of the first skirmishes of the siege he aimed an arrow at an ox that was pulling an Ostrogothic siege tower and killed it with one shot.
Belisarius took on the besiegers Hun-style, sending out small parties of mounted bowmen, who lured the Ostrogoths from their camps, showered them with arrows, inflicting high casualties, and then sped away having hardly lost a man. He also employed an array of ingenious machines. Ballistae fired large metal bolts with great force for long distances, and one impaled a gigantic Goth against a tree. Wild-asses – a form of catapult – hurled boulders. Wolves, which were portcullis-like frames with jagged points, were suspended above the battlements, and when enemies tried to scale the walls on ladders they were swung down, stabbing into attackers’ backs. The defenders also used anything that came to hand. When a force of Ostrogoths managed to reach the strongpoint of Hadrian’s Tomb unseen, by sneaking beneath the long portico built to keep pilgrims dry on their way to St Peter’s, the defenders beat them back by breaking up the huge statues on the tomb’s summit and hurling pieces on to their heads.
Belisarius was also helped by Witigis’ strategic errors. Most of all he failed to fully encircle the city, as his seven encampments contained Rome only from the north. He established just one fortress to the south, which was created by blocking up the arches of two intertwined aqueducts, and which reduced supplies to the city, but he failed to take Rome’s seaport, Portus. For a time the Romans were reduced to eating wild herbs, but then supplies were sneaked into the city several times, along with money and soldiers from the east. The Romans were even able to grind flour for their bread. When mills driven by the aqueducts ceased to function, Belisarius ingeniously built floating mills on the Tiber that were powered by the river’s current. As Witigis’ army slowly became depleted by hunger, disease, and skirmishes with archer cavalry, Belisarius’ force was strengthened by reinforcements. Eventually he was able to spare some troops, who slipped out of Rome and made their way to the Adriatic coast, where many of the Ostrogoths’ families lived, unprotected. Witigis panicked and in March 538, after a siege that had lasted almost exactly a year, his Ostrogoths burned their camps and marched away. Two years later, Witigis, deserted by his followers, surrendered to Belisarius in Ravenna. Only the Ostrogoths north of the river Po still held out. The war appeared to be all but over.
Yet celebrations proved premature. Having won, the Byzantines then threw away all their gains. The Empire’s other war, with Persia, went badly wrong and Belisarius was recalled to the east. The commanders he left behind in Italy proved fractious, sluggish and most of all grasping. Emperor Justinian, who was determined that Italians should pay for their liberation, sent an imperial fiscal agent or logothete named Alexander, who was nicknamed ‘Clippings’ from his habit of shaving off the edges of coins that passed through his hands. As well as squeezing all he could from Italy’s struggling population and seizing their property, Alexander drastically cut payments to the imperial army in Italy, which in turn encouraged soldiers and commanders – who needed no lessons in rapaciousness – to join in his extortion. Procopius writes that the Italians soon longed for barbarians.
Then, when Italians already had more than enough troubles, they were struck by an even greater catastrophe. Italy suffered an outbreak of the same bubonic plague that would rage across Europe eight centuries later as the Black Death. Procopius had left Italy with Belisarius by this time, so we have no descriptions of how Rome was affected, but he gives a vivid account of what happened in Constantinople, which, unlike Rome, was still a thriving, heavily populated city:
…at first the deaths were a little more than the normal, then the mortality rose still higher, and afterwards the tally of dead reached five th
ousand each day, and again it even came to ten thousand and still more than that. Now in the beginning each man attended to the burial of the dead of his own house, and these they threw even into the tombs of others, either escaping detection or using violence; but afterwards confusion and disorder everywhere became complete. For slaves remained destitute of masters, and men who in former times were very prosperous were deprived of the service of their domestics who were either sick or dead, and many houses became completely destitute of human inhabitants.6
If it was as lethal as the Black Death – which is highly likely, as it was the same disease – then between a third and half of the Italians would have succumbed.
With wars being lost on two fronts and his citizens dying by the tens of thousands, Emperor Justinian knew just what to do. He embarked on further religious interference. His last attempt to find a compromise between the Monophysites and Dyophysites having got nowhere, he now tried another, which involved the official condemnation of three Christian texts known as The Three Chapters. Unfortunately Pope Vigilius in Rome, though he had been installed by Justinian, refused to follow the new doctrine. On 22 November 545, Vigilius was in the midst of celebrating mass in the church of Santa Cecilia in Trans Tiberina when he was seized by a squad of imperial troops and marched to a ship waiting on the Tiber. Vigilius had a poor reputation in Rome at this time, as he was widely believed to have murdered both his secretary and his niece’s husband, and he was followed by a crowd of bemused Romans who, as the ship cast off – Vigilius still reciting the final blessings of his interrupted mass – threw stones and shouted that the plague should take him.
• • •
It was not Justinian’s religious interference, nor his rapacious tax-gathering, nor the plague that finally undid Byzantium’s hold on Italy. The Ostrogoths north of the river Po, who Belisarius’ lacklustre successors had never got round to subduing, chose a new leader who proved far more formidable than Witigis: Totila. For once we have a description, if brief, of his character: Procopius writes that he was ‘a man gifted with remarkable discretion, energetic in the extreme and held in high esteem by the Goths’. 7 Discreet, energetic Totila discovered an answer to his Ostrogoths’ tactical inferiority. He used surprise, catching out his enemies with ambushes that allowed his warriors to get past the showers of arrows and inflict damage close up. The Byzantines, struggling in their war against the Persians to their east, were unable to reinforce their Italian forces.
Totila was also politically shrewd and far more skilful at winning Italian hearts and minds than his opponents. After inflicting several crushing defeats on Belisarius’ successors in the north, he bypassed Rome and besieged Naples, and when the city surrendered, Totila treated its famished inhabitants with scrupulous concern. They were so weak that had they fled the city in panic, many would have died. Totila locked them inside the city and brought in supplies of food until they were strong enough to venture out. When one of his bodyguards raped a Neapolitan woman Totila insisted on having him executed, even though the man was very popular in the Ostrogothic army. He also left Italian farmers in peace, urging them to till their fields but to pay taxes to him rather than to the grasping imperial officials. Most were probably happy to do so.
Having taken Naples, Totila then turned his eyes on Rome, but he was careful not to repeat Witigis’ mistakes. First he captured a series of cities to the north, including nearby Tibur (Tivoli). Next he created an Ostrogothic navy of small, fast ships, which he based in Naples and the Aeolian Islands, ready to intercept convoys sent from the east. This blockade from a distance proved far more effective than Witigis’ incomplete siege. At the end of 545, seven years after Witigis had departed, Totila was finally ready to move on Rome itself. The Byzantine commander in the city, a Goth named Bessas, tried to replicate Belisarius’ tactics and sent out a force of mounted archers to harry the besiegers, only to be lured into one of Totila’s ambushes and suffer high casualties. It was the last time Bessas risked an attack.
As the siege began to bite and Romans grew hungry, help was sent from an unexpected source. Pope Vigilius, who we last saw sailing down the Tiber as a Roman mob hurled stones and abuse, was being held in Sicily to reconsider his religious scruples over condemning The Three Chapters. As chance would have it, Sicily was one of the few places in the region at this time that was peaceful enough to enjoy a relative abundance of food. Vigilius sent several grain ships to help out his Roman parishioners. The Romans, though, were out of luck. As the ships approached Portus they were spotted by some Ostrogoths, who slipped inside the harbour and hid. Imperial troops on the battlements tried to warn the vessels away by waving their cloaks but the crews misunderstood, thinking they were excited to see them, and sailed on. All were captured. If Totila could be kindly to ordinary Italians, he had no tolerance of those who opposed him. He had the ships’ crews killed and when a bishop was found aboard the convoy, Totila enquired about the man, concluded that he was an out and out liar and cut off both his hands.
An eighteenth-century engraving of Pope Vigilius, elected 536.
Even if Vigilius’ food had reached Rome, it is doubtful whether it would have reached many of the Romans. As Procopius tells us, the city’s commander, Bessas, saw the siege as a chance to make his fortune and he and his commanders:
… stored away a vast supply of grain for their own use within the walls of the city of Rome … they as well as the soldiers were constantly taking from the portion assigned for their own needs and selling it at a great price to such Romans as were rich, for the price of a bushel had reached seven gold pieces.8
When desperate Romans sent a deputation to Bessas complaining that he should either feed them, kill them or let them leave, Bessas and his officers replied that to feed them was impossible, to kill them would be unholy, and that to release them would be too dangerous. Poor Romans ate boiled nettles and the rich spent their gold on Bessas’ extortionate grain. When they ran out of gold they offered their valuables. Eventually, even the garrison ran out of food and everybody – aside from Bessas himself – was reduced to nettles.
But this food was insufficient for them, for it was utterly impossible to satisfy themselves with it, and consequently their flesh withered away almost entirely, while their colour, gradually turning to a livid hue, gave them a most ghostly appearance. And it happened to many that, even as they walked along chewing the nettles with their teeth, death came suddenly upon them and they fell to the ground. And now they were even beginning to eat each other’s dung. There were many, too, who because of the pressure of the famine, destroyed themselves with their own hands; for they could no longer find either dogs or mice or any dead animal of any kind on which to feed.9
After a father of five leapt to his death from one of the city’s bridges in front of his children, Bessas finally relented and allowed the Romans to leave the city, which a good number did, but by then they were so weakened that many died fleeing, while others were caught and killed by the besiegers.
Then, just when all seemed lost, there was new cause for hope. Belisarius landed with a new army at Portus. Justinian, parsimonious and mistrustful of his general, had given him only a meagre force but Belisarius was determined to do the best he could, and he devised an ingenious plan to relieve the city. Knowing that Totila had blocked the Tiber between Portus and Rome with a chain and two high wooden towers, Belisarius built a convoy of fortified riverboats, one of which had a wooden tower higher than those of the Goths, on top of which he placed a small rowing boat filled with pitch, sulphur, resin and other combustible materials. Leaving his wife – whom he brought with him on his campaigns – in Portus, and instructing the commander Isaac that he was not, under any circumstances, to risk venturing outside the city walls, Belisarius set out with his convoy.
He soon succeeded in raising the chain blocking the river, and in burning down one of the Goths’ towers with the incendiary rowing boat. Then, though, Isaac, hearing of Belisarius’ successes and determined
to share in his glory, sallied out from Portus and attacked the Gothic camp outside, only to fall into an ambush and be captured. When a garbled account of what had happened reached Belisarius, he was ‘thunderstruck at what he heard and without investigating in what manner he could have been captured, but thinking that both Portus and his wife were lost… he fell into a state of speechlessness, an experience which he had never had before’.10
Belisarius hurried back to Portus. When he realized his mistake and saw the opportunity that he had thrown away, he fell sick – probably from either plague or malaria – and almost died. Rome’s last chance had passed.
In Rome, Bessas, intent on his self-enrichment schemes, had neglected to make sure that the city was properly guarded. Officers failed to do night rounds of the walls and guards – of whom there were few now, as most Romans had died or left – dozed. Four Isaurians who were in charge of the Asinarian Gate next to San Giovanni in Laterano, saw a money-making opportunity of their own. They lowered ropes outside the wall, climbed down, made their way to Totila’s camp and offered to let him into the city. Totila agreed to reward them generously and a few nights later, on 17 December 546, as his army gathered nearby, the Isaurians led four Goths up the ropes on to the wall. Using axes, the Goths smashed the huge wooden bars that held the doors shut and the ironwork of the lock, and the gates swung open. After a year-long siege, Rome had again fallen not to assault or famine but through treachery:
… tumult and confusion, as was natural, fell upon the city, and most of the Roman soldiers were fleeing with their commanders through another gate, each one taking whatever course he found easy to follow, while only a few with the rest of the Romans were taking refuge in the sanctuaries. Among the patricians Decius and Basilius, in company with a few others (for horses happened to be at hand for them) succeeded in escaping with Bessas … Among the common people, however, it so fell out that only 500 men had been left in the whole city, and these with difficulty found refuge in the sanctuaries.11
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