Count Belisarius Retakes Rome
On December 9, 536 AD, Byzantine Count Belisarius entered Rome through
the Asinarian Gate at the head of 5,000 troops. At the same time, 4,000
Ostrogoths left the city through the Flaminian Gate and headed north to
Ravenna, the capital of their Italian kingdom. For the first time since 476,
when the Germanic king, Odoacer, had deposed the last Western Roman emperor and
crowned himself ‘King of the Romans,’ the city of Rome was once more part of
the Roman empire–albeit an empire whose capital had shifted east to
Constantinople.
Belisarius had taken the city back as part of Emperor Justinian’s grand
plan to recover the western provinces from their barbarian rulers. The plan was
ambitious, but it was meant to be carried out with an almost ridiculously small
expeditionary force. The 5,000 soldiers that General Belisarius led included
Hunnish and Moorish auxiliaries, and they were expected to defend circuit walls
12 miles in diameter against an enemy who would soon be back–and who would
outnumber them at least 10-to-1.
The Roman empire had been permanently divided by Theodoric the Great in
the 5th century, making official what had been in the offing for 100 years
since Constantine the Great had established his capital of Constantinople on
the Golden Horn, where he was closer to the troubled frontier along the Danube
River. The capital of the west had been moved to Milan and then to Ravenna,
which, being surrounded by swamps, was easier to defend and also closer to the
eastern empire. In effect, the Roman empire had been split into two states.
Only the eastern half was to survive as a political entity, for another 1,000
years, but in a form quite different from that in the west. The Eastern Romans,
or Byzantines, spoke Greek and were Orthodox Christians, but they rightly saw
themselves as the direct political descendants of the Western Roman state. By
536, Justinian had ruled for 18 years and regarded himself as the successor of
Augustus, Marcus Aurelius and Constantine. As such, he meant to retake the
west.
The Rome that Belisarius entered reflected the general decline of the
western empire. Though still the largest city in the west, its population had
shrunk, people drove cattle through the forums, and buildings destroyed by the
Visigoths and Vandals in the last century had not been repaired.
The armies sent by the emperor Justinian against the Persians, Vandals,
Franks and Goths differed radically from the Roman armies of centuries past.
The army with which Rome had conquered Europe, the Middle East and North Africa
was made up of heavy infantrymen who cast javelins and then rushed in to fight
with pilum, sword and shield. They were supported on the flanks by small
numbers of cavalrymen recruited from provincials more adept with the horse than
the typical Roman. Centuries of warfare against mounted enemies such as the
Goths, Huns and Persians, however, had changed the makeup of the Roman army. By
the 6th century ad, the army consisted primarily of a cavalry force of armored
lancers, or cabalarii, wearing body armor and capable of handling a bow from
horseback. Garrison duties and defensive positions were held by two types of
infantry: lightly armed archers and heavily armed soldiers in mail jackets who
fought with sword, ax and spear.
Organizationally, the Roman army had not been divided into legions for a
century. Now it was divided into squadrons called banda, a Greek word taken
from German and formerly used to designate German allied troops. While many of
the soldiers in the Byzantine army were subjects of the empire whether they
were Greeks, Thracians, Armenians or Isaurians, many others were mercenaries
who swore allegiance only to their commander. This practice was a holdover from
hiring entire companies of barbarians, called foederati, to serve under a
chief, a measure adopted by the Emperor Theodosius in the late 4th century.
This tactic had spread so that by the 6th century, native generals had small
private armies. Belisarius himself had a regiment of 7,000 of these household troops.
Because such soldiers had their commander’s interests at heart, a successful
general could become a potential threat to the government’s stability or even a
contender for the throne.
A contemporary description of a late-Roman cavalryman was given by
Procopius of Caesarea, Belisarius’ personal secretary, who accompanied him on
his campaigns and was present during the siege of Rome: ‘[Our] archers are
mounted on horses, which they manage with admirable skill; their head and
shoulders are protected by a casque or buckler; they wear greaves of iron on
their legs and their bodies are guarded by a coat of mail. On their right side
hangs a quiver, a sword on their left, and their hand is accustomed to wield a
lance or javelin in closer combat. Their bows are strong and weighty; they
shoot in every possible direction, advancing, retreating, to the front, to the
rear, or to either flank; and as they are taught to draw the bowstring not to
the breast, but to the right ear, firm indeed must be the armor that can resist
the rapid violence of their shaft.’
The successors of the old legions were highly organized, and their
generals were well-trained in both tactics and strategy. The typical Byzantine
general adapted his actions to meet his foes–whether Goth, Persian or, later,
Arab–such as using horse archers against lancers, or lancers against horse
archers where they could be trapped and ridden down. In that respect, at least,
the new Romans resembled the earlier legionaries who fought according to plan
and understood their enemy before engaging.
One critical difference between ancient Rome and Justinian’s
Constantinople, however, was in regard to discipline. The mercenaries and
foreign auxiliaries were as highly trained as the Roman infantry of old but
were more prone to disobedience. Since the most important part of the army was
the cavalry, however, which naturally operated more loosely than infantry and
depended more upon individual initiative, that vice was not as significant as
it would have been to infantry fighting in close formation.
The equipment of the new Roman army had changed with a view to meeting
the challenges of war with barbarians who had themselves changed over the
centuries. The Roman legion had adopted chain mail and the gallic helmet from
the Celts and the gladius, or short sword, so deadly in close combat, from the
Iberians and Ibero-Celts whom they had fought in the Punic Wars.
For Belisarius’ small army, the struggle for Rome required tactics that
involved horsemen striking swiftly from walled cities much as the knights of a
later age would do. The campaign would amount to a series of sieges against and
sorties from fortified places rather than being fought in the field as early
Roman wars had been.
The man Justinian chose to lead the expedition, Count Belisarius, was
about 30 years old and fresh from a stunning victory over the Vandals in North
Africa. Coming from a Thracian family, Belisarius had served in the corps of
bodyguards of Emperor Justin, Justinian’s uncle and predecessor, before
distinguishing himself as a general.
Before he could advance on Rome, Belisarius first had to take Naples to
the south, which he invested in the summer of 536. After failing to persuade
the populace to submit peacefully, he subjected the city to a month-long siege.
Naples was so stubbornly defended that Belisarius began to despair of taking
the place–until a curious foot soldier discovered that a destroyed aqueduct
could be used as a tunnel past the city walls. Soldiers made their way along
the aqueduct into the heart of the city, climbed down by means of an
overhanging olive tree, made their way quietly through the streets to a tower
in the wall and, after surprising and killing its defenders, held the position
while their comrades roped together their scaling ladders–which their
carpenters had made too short–and ascended the wall.
Fighting continued all morning, the fiercest opposition allegedly coming
from Naples’ Jewish population, who expected to face persecution under an
intolerant Christian regime. In consequence, when resistance broke down, the
angry Isaurian troops swept through the city slaughtering civilians. Belisarius
had hoped to avoid such a massacre, but it did help him to avoid further
bloodshed for some time thereafter. As word of Naples’ fate spread, several
other Italian towns opened their gates to the Byzantines, and Pope Silverius
sent word to Belisarius that he would be welcomed in Rome.
Belisarius’ unexpected progress alarmed the Ostrogoths, most of whom
blamed it on the vacillating leadership of their king, Theodatus, a corpulent
Goth who had become Romanized and more interested in riches and comfort than in
defending his realm. Sensing trouble, Theodatus tried to flee but was attacked
and killed by his own people on the road to Ravenna, after which the Ostrogoths
elected a warrior named Vittigis as their new king.
Vittigis fully realized the Byzantine threat but pulled his troops north
to first settle a dispute with the neighboring Franks before dealing with the
invader. In doing so he left the Gothic garrison of Rome to its fate. The
Ostrogoths had treated the Romans fairly well, but the populace was unwilling
to risk incurring the wrath of the imperial soldiers by resisting them as
Naples had done. When it became clear to the garrison that the Roman populace
would open the gates to the Byzantines, the Goths prepared to abandon the city.
Only their commander, Leuderis, felt honor-bound not to leave his post and
awaited Belisarius. Upon securing the city, Belisarius sent Leuderis to
Constantinople with the keys to the city gates.
Criticized for allowing the city to fall into Byzantine hands without a
fight, Vittigis pointed out that Rome had never before successfully withstood a
siege. Recent history had borne him out. Alaric and his Visigoths had first
taken the city in 410, and the shock of that conquest caused Augustine of Hippo
to write The City of God as a consolation to Christians everywhere, suggesting
that whatever might happen to Rome, the kingdom of heaven, at least, was
inviolate. Alaric’s feat was repeated by the Vandals in 455.
Furthermore, while Byzantine descriptions of Vittigis’ army as numbering
150,000 are undoubtedly exaggerated, he could sustain a siege force of some
50,000 men at a time against Belisarius’ 5,000 soldiers, 2,000 of whom the
imperial general had had to leave to garrison other towns he had taken on the
way to Rome. He had hardly enough soldiers to man the walls. If Rome had fallen
easily to Belisarius, Vittigis was confident that he would retake it with even
greater ease.
The Romans themselves shared Vittigis’ view and became dismayed when
they realized that the Byzantines meant to withstand a siege. Thus Belisarius
faced not only a Gothic military threat but also tepid support from the Romans
themselves, who in adversity might turn against him. He quickly wrote to
Justinian requesting reinforcements.
Vittigis, by contrast, had no problem marshaling his forces, which soon
began to move south from Ravenna, ready to lay siege to Rome for a year, if
necessary. Belisarius did not wait for their arrival before preparing to defend
the city. There were more gates than he could hope to guard successfully, and
there was always the danger that the townsmen might open the gates to the Goths
as they had done for him, so he walled up several of the gates.
Rome was too large for the Goths to encircle. Instead, upon arriving at
Rome on March 2, 537, they established a series of six camps facing several of
the main gates. The camps were located across from those parts of the city to
the east of the Tiber River. The Tiber formed part of Rome’s western defenses,
and a wall ran down to the water. Spanning the river stood the Mulvian Bridge,
where, 140 years before, the armies of the contending emperors Constantine and
Maxentius had fought, and after which the winner Constantine had established
Christianity as the state religion. Belisarius saw something more than
historical significance in the bridge. Because of the topography, he reckoned
that the Goths would need at least an additional 20 days to build another bridge
to move their troops across the river. Without a camp there, the city would not
be completely ringed by the Goths. Belisarius also wanted a clear avenue of
entry for the reinforcements he had requested.
Accordingly, he fortified the Mulvian Bridge with a tower and set a
small garrison of mercenaries to defend it. Belisarius must have thought that a
small force positioned in a fortification could hold off a large number
indefinitely, especially since they could be reinforced by nearby troops and
the Goths could attack only from the narrow front of the bridge’s roadway. But
these barbarian mercenaries proved untrustworthy. Shortly after Vittigis’ huge
force arrived, the garrison force became terrified and deserted to the enemy,
handing over control of the fortified bridge. The next morning Belisarius went
on a reconnaissance into the area with 1,000 horsemen, completely unaware that
he no longer held the bridge. A large body of Gothic cavalry surprised him and
engaged him at close quarters. The deserters from the bridge recognized the
general mounted on a white-faced bay and exhorted everyone to attack him with a
view to ending the campaign on the spot. But Belisarius, fighting sword in
hand, and his men engaged the Goths in a bloody fight in which they killed
1,000. The Goths broke and fled to their camp, pursued by the Byzantines.
Reinforced there, the Goths compelled Belisarius to conduct a fighting retreat
back to the city, where, to his anger, he found the gates closed to him. In
fact, Belisarius was already falsely rumored to be dead and the Romans, failing
to recognize him in the dark, feared the Goths would follow the fugitives into
the city and take the town if they opened the gates.
As Belisarius and his men gathered beneath the walls, an ever greater
number of Goths converged on them to finish the fight. At that point, the
general conceived a plan both simple and daring–he ordered a charge. The Goths,
surprised and supposing that he was being reinforced by fresh troops coming
from another gate, withdrew. Instead of pursuing them, Belisarius turned back
to the city and was finally admitted. Despite hours of close combat, the
general had not been touched by a single weapon.
Belisarius realized that Rome would soon be completely surrounded and
there would be no easy path for reinforcements. He was right; the Goths
established a seventh camp in the Vatican Field and prepared for an assault.
Meanwhile, Belisarius had flanges built onto the left sides of the battlements
to shield the defenders, installed catapults on the city walls and ordered a
ditch, or fosse, dug beneath the walls. He also drafted townsmen into brigades
to defend the walls and interspersed them among his own soldiers to enforce
discipline. He thus spread his thin forces farther and involved the Romans in
the defense of their own city. He had a chain drawn across the Tiber to prevent
the Goths from entering on boats and fortified the tomb of the Emperor Hadrian.
The tomb, a fortress known today as the Castel’ Sant’Angelo, jutted out a bit
from the city walls at that time to form an unintended bastion.
It took the Goths 18 days to prepare their attack. They constructed four
siege towers to the height of the city walls, each of which contained a
battering ram. The Goths also prepared fascines to toss into the fosse to allow
the towers to be drawn over the ditch and to the wall by oxen. Other soldiers
stood by with scaling ladders to strike at other places along the walls.
On March 21 the Goths began to bring the siege towers forward while the
defenders watched in alarm. Belisarius, however, remained cheerful as he
surveyed the attacker, then took up his bow and killed a Gothic officer at a
great distance. His men hailed him, and he repeated the remarkable feat.
Belisarius then commanded the men to shoot–not at the men, but at the oxen
pulling the siege towers. The animals died in a hail of arrows, and the towers
came to a halt without reaching the walls.
Meanwhile, some Goths had broken into the vivarium, an enclosure on the
eastern side of the city made by joining two low walls at a right angle against
the exterior of the city wall. Romans had penned wild animals there before
sending them to the amphitheater for combats with gladiators, but the sport had
long been outlawed, and the walls were crumbling. At the same time the Goths
launched an assault on Hadrian’s tomb. The Byzantine soldiers placed there were
in extreme peril because the rectangular shape of the monument’s base jutted
out from the city wall and allowed the Goths to get somewhat behind the
defenders. The defenders shot back at the attackers until they ran out of
arrows. Then, in desperation, they broke up the statues at the tomb into chunks
of rock and tossed them upon the Goths. By doing so, they managed to hold their
position.
Meanwhile, Belisarius sent troops out of the city to enter the gate of
the vivarium and attack the Goths there from the rear. In hard fighting the
Byzantines drove them out. Sallies from various city gates then drove off the
Goths in disorder and resulted in their siege engines’ being burned to the
ground. The Goths admitted to losing 30,000 dead, with an equal number wounded.
After that, the city and its besiegers settled down to a war of waiting.
This was interrupted by occasional sorties by Byzantine cavalry, which involved
essentially the same tactical feat: A troop of horsemen would leave the city by
one of the gates, provoking a number of Goths to attack them. The Byzantine
horse archers would then shoot their assailants from a distance with their
powerful bows. When the Goths retreated in the face of that missile onslaught,
the Byzantines would charge the unprotected Gothic infantry with their lances.
While the Goths had both armored lancers and foot archers, they never combined
the two methods of fighting into a single system as the Byzantines had done,
and so the Byzantines’ strategem routinely succeeded.
The cumulative successes of those forays had an unwonted effect upon the
Roman populace. Dreaming no doubt of their earlier glory, they wished to join
the Byzantine soldiers in a grand attack against the Goths. Belisarius
explicitly opposed the idea, because the citizens had neither the training nor
fighting experience and did not even have enough armor. Still the Romans
insisted, and he reluctantly agreed.
The sortie, as Belisarius had feared, was a fiasco. Sallying from a
number of gates, the regular Byzantine cavalry acquitted itself well and
successfully engaged the Goths. The townsmen-cum-foot-soldiers fought as
spearmen and were arranged in a phalanx outside of the Flaminian Gate to the
north of the city. They were held in reserve until Belisarius was content that
they could engage the enemy with the least amount of danger to themselves. They
then marched forward against the demoralized Goths and drove them from the
Field of Nero into the surrounding hills. At that point, however, the Romans,
being mostly an undisciplined rabble, broke ranks and began to loot a Gothic
camp, only to be attacked by Goths who could see they were in disarray. The
Roman foot soldiers were driven back in flight to the walls of Rome, only to
find the populace, again fearful of the pursuing Goths, refusing to open the
gates. The Byzantine cavalry intervened and extricated them. Any gain that
might have come from the fight was lost.
As the siege dragged on, the Goths destroyed the aqueducts that powered
the flour mills. Belisarius countered that by setting the mills in boats on the
Tiber within the city walls and suspending the mill wheels in the flowing
water. Knowing there would be a shortage of food, he dismissed from the city
all those he thought unnecessary to its defense.
The siege settled into a more complete blockade when the Goths took the
port of Rome a few miles from the city itself, where the Tiber flows into the
Mediterranean Sea. That impeded Belisarius’ already limited efforts to bring
food and supplies into the city. As hunger set in, the populace at first
pressed for a decisive battle to resolve the siege but later vacillated when
Belisarius assured the people that reinforcements were on the way. None
arrived, however, despite his request to Emperor Justinian. Belisarius knew the
people were fickle, so he changed the locks on the city gates and rotated the
watches over them so the Goths could not strike up friendships–and deals–with
the guards. At night, Belisarius’ Moorish auxiliaries, accompanied by dogs,
patrolled the trench outside the walls. The wisdom of his prudence was proved
when a letter was intercepted from Pope Silverius to Vittigis, offering to
betray the city. Belisarius had Silverius clothed as a monk and shipped east
into exile while a new pope was elected.
The Goths made overtures for peace, and Belisarius agreed to a truce to
allow the Goths to send representatives to Emperor Justinian in Constantinople.
In the meantime a small number of reinforcements–3,000 Isaurian infantry and
800 Thracian cavalry–finally reached Rome along with supplies that came up the
Tiber during the truce.
At that point the struggle took another turn as Belisarius decided to go
on the offensive. He instructed one of his subordinate officers, John, who bore
the Latin nickname Sanguinarius, or ‘Bloody,’ to move north into Tuscany. He
told John to observe the truce but to raid whenever he found the Goths had
violated it–which, as he had expected, they did. Bloody John led a troop of
2,000 horsemen and encountered little resistance because most of the male Goths
of military age were involved in the siege of Rome. Thus he swept across the
north in accordance with Belisarius’ orders not to engage enemy troops of any
size or to try to take any fortified places. After an encouraging number of
successes, however, he advanced against the Gothic capital of Ravenna.
When news of John’s raid reached Vittigis at Rome, he decided to make a
last effort to take the city, starting with an unsuccessful attempt to slip
soldiers into Rome through an aqueduct as Belisarius had done at Naples, only
to be foiled by an attentive guard. He then tried to use agents in the city to
intoxicate the guards at the Asinarian Gate, but one of them betrayed the plan
to Belisarius. A final assault with scaling ladders at the Pincian Gate also
failed.
At that point, the siege of Rome ended not with a bang but with a
whimper. By early 538, the Goths had plundered farms throughout the surrounding
countryside and were suffering from hunger and plague. On March 12, Vittigis
and his dispirited men burned their camps and withdrew toward Ravenna.
Belisarius made a last sally and attacked an enemy band crossing the Mulvian
Bridge. The Byzantines killed a few of the enemy soldiers but the retreating
Goths’ greatest loss came as many of them panicked and fell from the bridge.
For a year and nine days, a small Byzantine army had held Rome against
disproportionate numerical odds. It was a remarkable victory for Belisarius,
but its significance was limited. Vittigis drove Bloody John’s small force into
Rimini, but Belisarius, joined by another Byzantine army commanded by the
Armenian eunuch general Narses, compelled the Goths to withdraw to their
capital of Ravenna. In late 539, the Goths offered to support Belisarius as
emperor of the west, which he pretended to accept until Ravenna surrendered–at
which point he sent Vittigis to Constantinople as a prisoner. Justinian learned
of the Goths’ offer, and although Belisarius had not accepted it, he began to
doubt the general’s loyalty. In 541, he recalled Belisarius to Constantintople–at
which point the Ostrogoths, under the leadership of Ildibad and, after his
death, Vittigis’ nephew Totila, retook most of what the Byzantines had gained.
In 544, Justinian sent Belisarius–again with an inadequate force of 4,000
troops–back to Italy, where Totila took Rome in the following year, only to
lose it to Belisarius soon afterward. Belisarius successfully withstood a
second siege by Totila in 546, but in 549 the jealous Justinian recalled him to
Constantinople once more.
The Gothic War dragged on for years, during which Italy subsequently was
ravaged by another campaign against the Franks, who invaded from the north to
take advantage of the weakened Ostrogoths. In the end, the effort was just too
great for Byzantine resources, even though they had destroyed the Ostrogothic
kingdom. To defeat the enemy was one thing, to hold the territory quite
another. Over time Byzantine control persisted in southern Italy and in Sicily.
Other Byzantine enclaves in the west were Sardinia, Corsica and southern Spain,
and the Frankish kingdom of Gaul nominally recognized Justinian as its
overlord. Whatever the long-term effects of the campaign, however, the defense
of Rome remains an amazing feat and an example of what a small, determined and
organized force can do against overwhelming odds.
