As it turned out, the war with the Goths was by no means over. Justinian,
perhaps afraid of the threat a mighty general could pose, failed to replace
Belisarius, and rivalry and corruption became endemic among the Byzantine
commanders left in Italy. They showed little inclination to attend to
the Gothic resistance that continued north of the Po, and with the coming
to power in 541 of King Totila (or Baduila, as his name was spelt on
coins) the Goths gained a leader of outstanding calibre. Totila’s attitude to
Justinian was expressed in his coinage, on which the portrait of the current
emperor was replaced by that of Anastasius, who had recognised the kingship
of Theoderic in 497; if Justinian challenged the Goths on the basis of
legitimacy, Totila was prepared to dispute his claim.
Before long war was raging again. In the spring of 542 the new Gothic
king defeated the imperial army at Faenza and captured its standards, before
proceeding to the south and taking Benevento, Cumae andNaples. Belisarius
was sent back to Ravenna in 544 to deal with the deteriorating situation,
but found himself powerless to stop the Gothic advance. Indeed, his conduct
of the war in this period displays an uncharacteristic passivity. This
may owe something to a severe outbreak of plague afflicting the empire at
the time, with its consequent impact on manpower resources. InDecember
545 Totila besieged Rome and twelve months later entered it. He immediately
visited St Peter’s to pray, an act calculated to suggest continuity
with Theoderic, who had himself made devotions at the basilica on his one
known visit to Rome, and, beyond him, with the emperors whose conduct
Theoderic had imitated. But the act was hollow. There were few people left
in the city, and Totila made no secret of his animosity towards the senate.
In fact, he planned to raze the walls of the city, but Belisarius wrote warning
him of the harsh judgement of posteritywere he to proceed with this course.
Perhaps Belisarius was able to play on the vanity of the Gothic king; in any
case, Totila behaved foolishly and abandoned Rome, taking members of
the senate as hostages. For forty days the city was home to neither man
nor beast, but by April 547 Belisarius had moved in and begun work on
restoring its defences. During the spring Totila tried to wrest control of the
city from him, but failed.
Nevertheless, the Goths were still masters of much of Italy, to the extent
that Belisarius tended to travel fromone place to another by ship rather than
overland, and when Justinian recalled his great general to Constantinople
a few years later Belisarius felt much more subdued than he had on
his returns in 534 and 540. In 549 an Ostrogothic fleet ravaged the coast
of Campania and Rome was again besieged; in the following January it
fell. Totila established a mint in the city, held races and, in the words
of a contemporary, lived there ‘like a father with his children’.23 With
Ravenna still in Byzantine hands, Rome came to hold a political significance
to which it had long been unaccustomed. Totila moved to Sicily
and ravaged it in 550, whereupon the Franks occupied parts of northern
Italy.
A full decade after Belisarius had seemed to bring the war to a successful
end, the situation in Italy was parlous, and Justinian decided to commit
resources on a scale never entrusted to Belisarius. An enormous army was
placed under the command of the patricius Germanus. He was an impressive
figure, for not only was he a cousin of Justinian but he had married
Matasuentha, the granddaughter of Theoderic and former wife ofWitigis,
a tie which allowed him to anticipate limited resistance from the Goths in
Italy. Indeed, the birth of a baby son to the couple allowed the historian
Jordanes to be hopeful of a future union of the families of Germanus and
Matasuentha.24 But Germanus died while preparations for the expedition
were still underway, and in 551 the general Narses was appointed to finish
the job.
The great army set off overland for Italy in April 552. Franks who had
settled in Venetia sought to deny it passage on the grounds that it included a
large contingent of Lombards, their traditional enemies. TheGoths tried to
make the road impassable, butNarses was able to make his way to Ravenna,
occupying it on 6 June 552. Totila marched out of Rome, and at the end
of June or beginning of July the two forces encountered each other at
Busta Gallorum, a site in the Apennines.25 Before the troops of both armies
Totila performed a stylish war dance on his charger, but the Goths were
heavily outnumbered, and the outcome of the battle was inevitable. The
Gothic cavalry could not withstand the enemy archers, and both cavalry
and infantry fled, Totila dying of a wound received in flight. Numerous
Gothic strongholds surrendered as Narses advanced on Rome, which his
enemies were no longer strong enough to defend effectively. The city was
easily captured and its keys despatched to Justinian. In their despair the
Goths put to death senators they found and 300 children they were holding
as hostages, but their cause was now hopeless, and the Franks refused to
intervene on their behalf. In October a Gothic force did battle with Narses
in the south of Italy at Mons Lactarius, near Nocera, but it was defeated,
and Narses gave the surviving Goths permission to return to ‘their own
land’. Some continued to resist on a local basis until the capture of Verona
in 562 or 563, but by the time Narses was recalled, probably not long after
the accession of the emperor Justin II (565–78), Italy seemed stable. The
Gothic war had lasted far longer than the Vandal war, but its outcome was
the same.
A puzzling feature of the Gothic war is the failure of the Visigoths
to become involved. For much of the war their king was an Ostrogoth,
Theudis (531–48), and at one stage his nephew, Ildibad, was prominent in
the resistance in Italy, but we have no reason to believe that help from the
Visigoths reached Italy.We do know, however, that around 544 a Visigothic
force was defeated at Septem, across the Straits of Gibraltar, which suggests
an attempted thrust from Spain into what was by then Byzantine Africa.
But in 552 a Byzantine force, purporting to answer an appeal for help
from a Visigothic rebel, set out for Spain and succeeded in gaining control
of a slice of its south-east coast around Cartagena and Malaga. The area
has a mountainous hinterland and looks across the sea to Africa, and the
defence of Africa may have been the true reason for Byzantine involvement
in Spain.26 In any case, this modest success was the culmination of an
extraordinary expansion of Byzantine power in the west. Within a few
decades Africa and Italy, together with the large islands of the western
Mediterranean, Dalmatia and part of Spain had been reintegrated into the
empire, so that the poet Agathias could legitimately claim that a traveller
could go as far as the sandy shore of Spain where the Pillars of Hercules lay
and still tread imperial territory.
World History
