Justinian’s Wars

Chronological View

1. 1. 476

      The last emperor in the West is deposed

      Odoacer, a general of the barbarian troops serving in Italy, deposes the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus. He rules Italy as its king, in name under the emperor in Constantinople.

      Historians later took 476 as the end of the Roman Empire in the West. For the people of Italy little changed at once. The Senate still met in Rome, and Roman officials still ran the government and collected the taxes.

      Procopius, Wars 5.1.2–8 · Bury, vol. 1, p. 405 · Britannica, “Odoacer” · Britannica, “Romulus Augustulus”

   2. 489–493

      Theodoric takes Italy

      Emperor Zeno urges Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths in the Balkans, to go and take Italy from Odoacer. After three years besieging him in Ravenna, Theodoric agrees to share power with him, then kills him at a feast.

      Zeno had reasons of his own. Theodoric’s people had been fighting and bargaining inside the Empire for years, and sending them west took them away from Constantinople. Whether Zeno meant Theodoric to rule Italy for himself or for the emperor was argued over at the start of this war, and the Goths’ envoys made it the center of their case in 537.

      Procopius, Wars 5.1.9–25 · Bury, vol. 1, p. 422 · p. 426 · Britannica, “Theodoric”

   3. 493–526

      Theodoric’s Italy

      Theodoric rules Italy for thirty-three years. The Goths are its army, and the Romans keep its government, its laws and its Senate. Even Procopius, who served the emperor, wrote that Theodoric was “as truly an emperor as any.”

      The two peoples lived side by side with two churches. The Goths were Arian Christians, who held that the Son was created by the Father, and most Italians were Catholics, who held that the two are equal. Theodoric took the title of king, not emperor, and the emperor in Constantinople went on naming one of the year’s two consuls in Rome.

      Procopius’s verdict, from the opening of his history of this war, is that “in name Theoderic was a usurper, yet in fact he was as truly an emperor as any who have distinguished themselves in this office from the beginning.”

      Procopius, Wars 5.1.26–31 · Bury, vol. 1, p. 453 · Britannica, “Ostrogoth” · Britannica, “Arianism”

   4. 524–526

      A king’s last years of suspicion

      Late in his reign Theodoric has two leading senators, Boethius and his father-in-law Symmachus, put to death for treason, and Pope John I dies in his prison. Theodoric himself dies on August 30, 526.

      Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy while he waited to die, and it became one of the most read books of the Middle Ages. Procopius tells a story of the king’s remorse: served a fish’s head at dinner, Theodoric saw the face of Symmachus and took to his bed.

      Procopius, Wars 5.1.32–39 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 153 · p. 157 · Britannica, “Boethius”

   5. 526–534

      A queen rules for her son

      Theodoric’s grandson Athalaric becomes king at eight, and his mother Amalasuntha rules for him. Educated in Latin and Greek, she keeps on good terms with Justinian, the Eastern Roman emperor, and Gothic nobles turn against her for raising the boy like a Roman.

      In 533 she let Belisarius’s fleet, on its way to attack the Vandals in Africa, buy horses and supplies in Gothic Sicily. It helped the Empire win Africa, and Justinian later pointed to it as a debt the Goths owed.

      Threatened by three Gothic nobles, she had them killed. In case it went wrong she sent a ship with her treasure, 400 centenaria of gold, to wait at Epidamnus, across the Adriatic in the Empire, ready to take her to Justinian.

      Procopius, Wars 5.2.1–29 · Wars 3.14.5–6 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 159 · Letters of Cassiodorus, p. 452 · Britannica, “Amalasuntha”

   6. 533–534

      Belisarius conquers Vandal Africa

      Justinian sends his general Belisarius with about 15,000 men against the Vandal kingdom in Africa. Belisarius takes Carthage in September 533, and the last Vandal king surrenders in March 534. The ease of it made Italy look easy too.

      The war has a tab of its own in this volume, the Vandal War.

      Procopius, Wars 3.11.1–21 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 124

   7. 534

      A cousin shares the throne

      Athalaric dies young. Amalasuntha makes her cousin Theodahad, Theodoric’s nephew and the richest landowner in Tuscany, king beside her, on his oath to leave the governing to her. Within months he has her arrested.

      Theodahad was a scholar of Plato, unpopular, and had been made to give back land he had taken from his neighbors. Amalasuntha thought he would be grateful. He sided instead with the families of the nobles she had killed, and had her shut up in a fortress on an island in Lake Bolsena.

      She and Theodahad had each been writing secretly to Justinian, and the emperor’s envoy Peter was already on his way to Italy.

      Procopius, Wars 5.4.4–15 · Letters of Cassiodorus, p. 415 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 163 · Britannica, “Theodahad”

2. 535 Disputed

   Where this war starts

   Italy has been a Gothic kingdom for forty years. In the spring of 535 Amalasuntha is killed in her island prison, and the emperor’s envoy warns Theodahad there will be “war without truce.” Justinian, fresh from his victory in Africa, goes to war.

   The relatives of the nobles she had put to death went to the island and killed her, strangled in her bath, it was said. Procopius says the killing grieved “all the Italians and the Goths as well.” Theodahad told the envoy, Peter, that it had been done against his will, and went on honoring the killers.

   Procopius later told it differently. In his Secret History, a book he could not publish while Justinian and Theodora lived, he wrote that Theodora feared the queen would come to Constantinople and win the emperor’s ear, and that she bribed Peter to persuade Theodahad to have her killed. The historian J. B. Bury thought that version explains what the official one leaves out. Others doubt it, because the Secret History blames the empress for nearly everything.

   Procopius, Wars 5.4.25–31 · Wars 5.5.1 · Secret History 16.1–5 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 164 · p. 165 · Britannica, “Justinian I”

   Left column What the Empire did

   The Eastern Roman Empire

   Ruled from Constantinople by Justinian. Historians today call it the Byzantine Empire.

   Its people called themselves Romans, and their state the Roman Empire. It was the eastern half of the old empire, which had outlasted the western half by nearly sixty years when this war began. Byzantine is a name historians gave it long afterward.

   The cards on this side are the acts of the emperor Justinian, of his generals, Belisarius and then Narses, and of his armies and officials. The armies were drawn from many peoples: Thracians and Isaurians from inside the Empire, and Huns, Heruls, Lombards and others who fought for pay.

   The Italians were Romans too, and lived under both armies. A card on this side names who acted. It never means every Roman.

   Right column What the Goths did

   The Ostrogoths

   The Gothic kingdom of Italy, ruled from Ravenna

   The Ostrogoths, the eastern Goths, came to Italy under Theodoric in 489. By 535 they were its army and its ruling people, a small nation among the Italians they ruled, with a church of their own, the Arian one.

   The cards on this side are the acts of their kings, Theodahad, Vitiges, Ildibad, Eraric, Totila and Teias, and of their nobles and armies.

   No history written by a Goth survives. What the Goths said comes down through Roman writers: Procopius, who served the Empire’s general, and the letters a Roman, Cassiodorus, wrote for the Gothic court. A card names who acted. It never means every Goth.

3. 535 to 540 Belisarius’s war

   Sicily, Naples and Rome

   535 to 536. The Empire takes Sicily in a few months, and Naples after a siege, while the Gothic king tries to bargain his kingdom away.

4. Jun–Dec 535

   Belisarius takes Sicily

   Belisarius sails with about 7,500 men, under orders to say he is bound for Carthage, and takes Sicily in months. On December 31, the last day of his year as consul, he rides into Syracuse throwing gold coins to the crowd.

   Justinian sent the army in two parts. Mundus, his general in the Balkans, marched into Dalmatia, the Gothic province across the Adriatic, and took its capital, Salona. Belisarius had 4,000 regular troops and allies, 3,000 Isaurians from the mountains of Asia Minor, 200 Huns and 300 Moors, besides his own guards.

   Bury notes how easily Sicily fell: there were few Goths on the island, and its people were ready to trade rule from Ravenna for rule from Constantinople.

   Only Palermo held out, its Gothic garrison trusting its walls. Belisarius sailed his fleet into the harbor, where the masts stood higher than the battlements, and hoisted the ships’ boats full of archers to the mastheads. Shot at from above, the Goths surrendered.

   Procopius, Wars 5.5.1–19 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 171 · Britannica, “Belisarius” · Procopius, Wars 5.5.12–16

   535 Mundus takes Salona. In the summer of 535, the emperor’s general Mundus marches into Gothic Dalmatia and takes its capital, Salona, near modern Split.

   Procopius, Wars 5.5.2 · Wars 5.5.11

5. 535–536

   Theodahad offers to give up Italy, then backs out

   Frightened by the loss of Sicily, Theodahad secretly offers Justinian all of Italy in return for estates worth 1,200 pounds of gold a year. When his army wins a battle in Dalmatia, he takes the offer back and locks up the emperor’s envoys.

   His first offer was Sicily, a gold crown of 300 pounds every year and 3,000 Gothic soldiers whenever the emperor asked for them.

   Under the first agreement the emperor’s name would be acclaimed before the king’s at the games, and no statue of Theodahad would stand without one of Justinian beside it. Peter, the envoy, then talked him into the second, and both Theodahad and his wife swore to it.

   Their letters survive, written for them by Cassiodorus. Theodahad wrote to Justinian begging for peace, and his queen, Gudeliva, wrote to the empress Theodora asking her friendship. These letters are among the very few words from the Gothic court that come down to us in its own voice, though in a Roman’s Latin.

   Then a Gothic army killed Mundus and his son in Dalmatia, early in 536, and Theodahad lost his fear. Procopius is scornful of Theodahad from first to last, and no Gothic history survives to answer him.

   Procopius, Wars 5.6.1–27 · Wars 5.7.1–25 · Letters of Cassiodorus, p. 431 · p. 434 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 169 · p. 172

   early 536 Mundus is killed in Dalmatia. Gothic troops kill Mundus’s son in a skirmish near Salona. Mundus routs them but is killed in the pursuit, and the Romans leave Salona. Constantianus retakes Dalmatia for the Empire later in the year.

   Procopius, Wars 5.7.1–10 · Wars 5.7.26–36

   Feb–Apr 536 The pope goes to Constantinople to plead for peace. Theodahad sends Pope Agapetus to ask Justinian to call off the war. He fails at that, and dies in Constantinople on April 22, 536.

   Book of the Popes, p. 145 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 172

6. Nov 536 Disputed

   Naples is stormed through its aqueduct

   Belisarius crosses to the mainland and besieges Naples, which holds out for the Goths. After about twenty days, 400 of his men creep in at night along a dry aqueduct and open the walls. The city is sacked.

   On his way north, Theodahad’s own son-in-law, Ebrimuth, came over to Belisarius with all his men.

   An Isaurian soldier, curious to see how the aqueduct carried water into the city, crawled along it and found it led inside the walls. The channel narrowed at a rock, and the soldiers cut it wider in silence before the night attack.

   The two accounts of the sack differ. Procopius says the soldiers killed young and old and took women and children as slaves, until Belisarius gathered them and told them that God had given them the city and they should show mercy, and that they then freed the captives. The Book of the Popes, written by the Roman church, says he “spared none, neither priests nor servants of God nor consecrated virgins.”

   Procopius, Wars 5.8.1–5 · Wars 5.9.10–21 · Wars 5.10.1–36 · Book of the Popes, p. 147 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 174

7. Nov–Dec 536

   The Goths depose Theodahad and choose Vitiges

   Angry that Theodahad will not fight, the Gothic army meets at Regata and raises Vitiges, a soldier of no great family, on a shield as king. Theodahad flees toward Ravenna, and a Goth with a grudge against him catches him on the road and kills him.

   Vitiges announced it to the Goths in a letter Cassiodorus wrote for him, which still exists. “Not in the corner of a presence-chamber, but in wide-spreading plains I have been chosen King,” it says, and it promises a king who will rule as Theodoric’s successor should.

   To tie himself to Theodoric’s line he married Amalasuntha’s daughter, Matasuntha, “much against her will,” Procopius says. He also wrote to Justinian asking for peace, complaining that the Goths had been attacked “without our guilt.”

   The Book of the Popes dates his election to August, two months after the pope’s ordination in June. Bury rejects that, since every other source puts it after the fall of Naples.

   Procopius, Wars 5.11.1–9 · Wars 5.11.26–27 · Letters of Cassiodorus, p. 444 · p. 445 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 178 · p. 180 · Britannica, “Witigis”

   late 536 The Goths buy off the Franks. To keep the Franks out of the war, Vitiges carries out a deal Theodahad had made: the Franks get the Gothic lands in Gaul, around Provence, and 2,000 pounds of gold. They promise to help the Goths in secret, since they have already promised Justinian to help him.

   Procopius, Wars 5.13.14–28 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 203

8. Dec 9, 536

   Belisarius enters Rome

   Invited in by the pope and the people, Belisarius marches into Rome by the Asinarian Gate as the Gothic garrison marches out by the Flaminian. Procopius writes that the city “became subject to the Romans again after a space of sixty years.”

   Pope Silverius did most to persuade the Romans to open the gates, afraid that Rome would suffer what Naples had. Belisarius sent the Gothic commander and the city’s keys to Justinian, and set about repairing the walls.

   The Romans were not pleased for long. They pointed out that a city so large, on a plain and away from the sea, could never stand a siege, and he made them bring their food in from the country to store against one.

   The Book of the Popes gives the day as December 10. This is the first of the five times Rome changed hands in the war.

   Procopius, Wars 5.14.4–17 · Book of the Popes, p. 147 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 180

9. The year-long siege of Rome

   537 to 538. Vitiges brings the Gothic army to Rome and besieges it for a year, and fails.

10. Mar 537 – Mar 538 Disputed

    Vitiges besieges Rome for a year

    Vitiges marches on Rome with the main Gothic army and besieges Belisarius there for a year and nine days. The Goths cut all fourteen of the city’s aqueducts, and Belisarius keeps the grain mills turning on boats moored in the Tiber.

    Procopius says Vitiges brought 150,000 men. Belisarius had at most 5,000 when the siege began. Bury thought 150,000 impossible: the whole Ostrogothic people, women and children too, had perhaps hardly reached 100,000 when they came to Italy. He suggests it was an estimate of every Goth in Italy.

    On the eighteenth day the Goths attacked the walls with siege towers drawn by oxen, ladders and rams. At Hadrian’s tomb, which was part of the walls, the defenders broke up the marble statues on top and threw the pieces down on the attackers. The assault failed everywhere.

    For a year the two armies raided, skirmished and starved. The Book of the Popes says buildings burned, the Goths wrecked the churches and martyrs’ tombs outside the walls, and famine spread across Italy, so that in Liguria, by the archbishop of Milan’s report, women ate their own children. Its translator, writing in 1916, saw this siege as the start of Rome’s change from the splendid capital of the ancient world into the “scarred, crumbling, poverty-stricken, medieval city of the popes.”

    Procopius says the siege began at the start of March. The Book of the Popes says February 21.

    Procopius, Wars 5.16.11 · Wars 5.19.13–22 · Wars 5.22.1–23 · Wars 5.22.17 · Wars 6.10.13 · Book of the Popes, p. 148 · p. 149 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 182 · p. 195

11. Mar 537 Disputed

    Belisarius deposes the pope

    Accused of plotting to let the Goths into the city, Pope Silverius is summoned to Belisarius’s headquarters, stripped of his robes and sent into exile. A deacon who had come with the army, Vigilius, is made pope on March 29.

    Procopius says only that “a suspicion arose” that Silverius was treating with the Goths. The Book of the Popes tells a darker story. The empress Theodora wanted Silverius to restore a bishop of Constantinople whom the last pope had deposed as a heretic. When he refused, she sent orders to Belisarius to find a reason to depose him, and false witnesses came forward with letters in which Silverius offered to open the Asinarian Gate to the Goths.

    In its telling, Antonina, Belisarius’s wife, was lying on a couch with Belisarius “sitting at her feet” when the pope was brought in. She asked what they had done to him “that you should wish to betray us into the hands of the Goths,” and a subdeacon took the pallium from his neck and dressed him as a monk. He was sent to the island of Ponza, and died there.

    Bury accepted the church’s account, and put the deposition about the middle of March.

    Procopius, Wars 5.25.13 · Book of the Popes, p. 150 · p. 151 · p. 152 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 379 · Britannica, “Silverius” · Britannica, “Vigilius”

12. Dec 537

    The Goths make their case

    With his army sick and hungry, Vitiges sends envoys to Belisarius. They argue that the Goths took Italy from a usurper at the emperor’s own request, and ruled it lawfully. Belisarius answers that Theodoric was sent to win Italy for the emperor.

    The envoys’ words, as Procopius gives them: “the Goths did not obtain the land of Italy by wresting it from the Romans by force.” Odoacer had taken it, Zeno had sent Theodoric against him, and the Goths had ruled it as lawfully as any emperor. “Not one of the Italians has changed his belief, either willingly or unwillingly,” they said, and the Romans “have continued to hold all the offices of the state.”

    They offered to give up Sicily. Belisarius answered that the Goths were welcome to “the whole of Britain,” which was larger and had been Roman once too. They offered Campania and Naples, then a yearly payment, and he refused each one, saying he could only guard the land for its owner. In the end the two sides agreed a three-month truce while envoys went to Constantinople.

    This is the fullest statement of the Gothic case that survives, though it comes through a Roman historian who was in Belisarius’s service.

    Procopius, Wars 6.6.1–36 · Wars 6.7.12–13 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 188

13. Mar 538

    A raid on Rimini ends the siege

    During the truce, Belisarius’s cavalry commander John rides up the Adriatic coast and takes Rimini, a day’s march from the Gothic capital at Ravenna. Fearing for Ravenna, and out of food, the Goths burn their camps and leave Rome at the spring equinox.

    At Rimini, John received a secret message from Vitiges’s queen, Matasuntha, who hated the husband who had married her by force. She offered to marry John and betray Ravenna.

    Belisarius’s men attacked the Goths as they crossed the Milvian Bridge, and many drowned in the Tiber.

    Procopius, Wars 6.10.1–20 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 195

14. Milan and Ravenna

    538 to 540. The war moves north. Milan is destroyed, the Franks come and go, and Belisarius takes Ravenna by a trick.

15. 538–539

    Two generals and a divided army

    Justinian sends a second army under Narses, a eunuch of the palace, who soon quarrels with Belisarius over who commands. Together they save John at Rimini, but Narses’s officers will take orders only from him.

    Justinian wrote to the commanders that “we wish Belisarius alone to command the whole army,” but Narses’s party read the letter as leaving them free whenever Belisarius’s plans seemed against the empire’s interest.

    After Milan was lost, Justinian recalled Narses and made Belisarius commander of the whole war.

    Procopius, Wars 6.13.16–18 · Wars 6.18.1–29 · Wars 6.22.4 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 199 · p. 205

16. Mar 539 Disputed

    The Goths destroy Milan

    Milan, the richest city in Italy, had gone over to the Empire. Gothic troops and 10,000 Burgundians besiege it, and no relief comes. When it surrenders, the Goths raze the city, kill its men and give its women to the Burgundians as slaves.

    The Burgundians had been sent by Theudebert, king of the Franks, who said they had come of their own accord, since he had promised Justinian his help too. An imperial army sent to save the city camped on the far bank of the Po, afraid to cross.

    The archbishop of Milan, Datius, had asked Belisarius for troops in 537, and 1,000 men had taken the city in the spring of 538. The garrison commander tried to save the townspeople, but the Goths, Bury writes, were set on revenge against the Ligurians who had gone over to the Empire.

    Procopius says no fewer than 300,000 men were killed. Bury pointed out that if that were true, Milan would have been nearly as large as it was in 1923, when he wrote, a city of about 800,000.

    Procopius, Wars 6.12.26–41 · Wars 6.21.1–42 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 202 · p. 204 · p. 205 · Procopius, Wars 6.12.38–39

17. 539

    The Franks come into Italy

    Theudebert, king of the Franks, crosses the Alps with a huge army. At the Po he attacks both sides, the Goths who were expecting allies and the imperial troops. Dysentery soon spreads through his army, and he takes it home.

    Procopius puts his army at 100,000, nearly all on foot. Belisarius wrote to him that it was unworthy of a king to break his word, and the Franks, dying “for no good reason” in a deserted land, gave him no peace until he left.

    The Franks had taken money and land from the Goths and a promise of alliance from Justinian, and kept neither bargain. Their kings were starting to strike gold coins with their own faces, which only the emperor had done before.

    Procopius, Wars 6.25.1–24 · Wars 7.33.5 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 206

18. 539

    The Goths ask Persia to attack the Empire

    Vitiges sends two Italian priests, posing as envoys of their own, to Khosrow, king of Persia, urging him to strike the Empire while its best army is far away in Italy. The next spring Khosrow invades Roman Syria.

    Procopius says Vitiges’s letter moved Khosrow to break the peace. Bury thought the appeal “was hardly the chief motive” for Khosrow’s war, “but undoubtedly it produced its effect.” Either way, the Persian invasion was the main reason Justinian wanted the war in Italy ended quickly, and why he called Belisarius home.

    The war with Persia has a tab of its own in this volume.

    Procopius, Wars 6.22.17–21 · Wars 2.2.1–12 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 205 · p. 206

19. May–Nov 539

    Belisarius takes Osimo and Fiesole

    Before he can move on Ravenna, Belisarius has to take the Gothic strongholds behind him. He besieges Osimo for months, fouls its spring with dead animals and quicklime, and starves it into surrendering. Fiesole, outside Florence, gives up too.

    Procopius, Wars 6.23–27 · Wars 6.27.21 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 205

20. Winter 539 – 540

    Justinian offers to split Italy

    With the Goths shut up in Ravenna, two senators arrive from Constantinople with Justinian’s terms: Vitiges may keep the land north of the Po and half the royal treasure, and the rest goes to the emperor. The Goths accept at once. Belisarius refuses to sign.

    Bury thought Belisarius meant to finish what he had done to the Vandals, and bring the Gothic king to Constantinople as a captive. His refusal made the Goths suspect a trap, and the agreement was never carried out.

    Procopius, Wars 6.29.1–16 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 211

21. Spring 540

    The Goths offer Belisarius the crown, and he takes Ravenna

    Starving in Ravenna, the Gothic nobles secretly offer to make Belisarius emperor of the West. He lets them think he accepts, marches into the city, and takes Vitiges prisoner. Procopius watched the army go in.

    Belisarius had sworn to Justinian never to seize power. Procopius says he had “an extraordinary loathing for the name of tyrant,” and only pretended, to end the war. He swore to the Goths that no one would be harmed, and put off swearing to the kingship.

    Watching the army march in, Procopius thought that it was not men’s wisdom or strength that decided such things but “some divine power.”

    The Gothic women had been told the enemy were giants too many to count. When they saw how small the army was, Procopius says, they spat in their husbands’ faces.

    Procopius, Wars 6.29.17–41 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 212 · Procopius, Wars 6.29.34

22. 540

    Belisarius is called home with the Gothic king

    Officers slander Belisarius to Justinian as a would-be usurper, and with Persia invading, the emperor calls him home. He sails with Vitiges, Matasuntha and Theodoric’s treasure. North of the Po, the Goths who have not surrendered choose a new king.

    Justinian showed the treasure only to the senators, in private, and gave Belisarius no triumph this time. Vitiges lived on in Constantinople with the rank of patrician until he died about two years later.

    Procopius, Wars 6.30.1–30 · Wars 7.1.1–3 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 216

23. 540–541

    The emperor’s auditor turns Italy against him

    Justinian sends an auditor, Alexander, nicknamed “Snips” for clipping gold coins, to Ravenna. He makes Italians pay back what they had gained under the Gothic kings and cuts the soldiers’ pay, and both turn against the emperor.

    Procopius says that the Italians turned against Justinian, and that the soldiers, unwilling to risk their lives any longer, let the enemy grow stronger.

    Procopius, Wars 7.1.28–33 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 227 · Procopius, Wars 7.1.33

24. 540 to 549 Totila’s war

    Three kings in a year

    540 to 541. The Goths beyond the Po choose a king, murder him, choose another and murder him too, and then choose Totila.

25. 540–541

    Three kings in a year, then Totila

    The Goths beyond the Po make Ildibad king, and one of his own guards beheads him at dinner. A Rugian named Eraric rules for five months and is murdered. In the autumn of 541 the Goths choose Ildibad’s nephew, Totila, also called Baduila.

    Ildibad had his rival Uraias, Vitiges’s nephew, killed after a quarrel between their wives, and the murder turned many Goths against him.

    Totila was commanding the Goths at Treviso and had just agreed to surrender the town and himself to the Romans when the Goths’ offer of the crown reached him. He took the crown instead.

    Ildibad’s killer, a guard named Velas, struck while the king was reaching for his food, so that, Procopius says, “the food was still grasped in the man’s fingers” when his head fell on the table.

    Procopius, Wars 6.30.4–17 · Wars 7.1.37–49 · Wars 7.2.1–18 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 227 · Britannica, “Totila” · Procopius, Wars 7.1.37–42

26. Totila takes back the south

    541 to 544. With 5,000 men Totila routs the imperial armies and takes nearly everything south of Rome, while plague spreads across the Empire.

27. 542

    Totila routs the imperial armies

    With 5,000 men Totila beats a much larger imperial army at Faenza, then another at Mugello near Florence. The imperial generals stop working together and shut themselves up in their own separate towns.

    Procopius, Wars 7.3–5 · Wars 7.4.1 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 229

28. 542–543

    Totila takes the south

    Going around Rome, Totila takes Benevento, Cumae and most of southern Italy. He frees the senators’ wives he finds at Cumae, collects the taxes and the landowners’ rents for himself, and pulls down the walls of the towns he takes so the Empire cannot use them.

    Procopius says Totila’s kindness to the senators’ wives “won a great name for wisdom and humanity among all Romans.” Razing the walls was a deliberate policy. As Totila later put it in a speech Procopius gives him, it was so that “the enemy’s army might not be able, by having any strong base,” to fight from them.

    Procopius, Wars 7.6.1–5 · Wars 7.25.11 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 230

29. 541–543 Disputed

    The plague

    A pandemic spreads from Egypt across the Mediterranean. In Constantinople, where Procopius lived through it, the dead reach 10,000 a day, and Justinian himself falls ill. DNA from graves of the time shows it was bubonic plague.

    Procopius says it started at Pelusium, on the edge of Egypt, and reached Constantinople “in the middle of the spring” of 542. Soldiers and taxpayers alike died, and both armies in Italy fought on with fewer men. The emperor caught it too: “he too had a swelling of the groin.”

    Bury called it more destructive than the plagues of ancient Athens and of London in 1665. How many died is still argued over. Many historians have put the toll at between a quarter and half of the people of the Mediterranean. A 2019 study of the laws, coins, papyri, inscriptions and pollen of the time found no sign of the collapse that would mean, and argued that the toll has been overstated.

    It came back again and again for two hundred years.

    Procopius, Wars 2.22.1–9 · Wars 2.23.1–21 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 62 · Harbeck and others, PLOS Pathogens, 2013 · Mordechai and others, PNAS, 2019 · Britannica, “plague of Justinian”

30. 543

    Naples surrenders to Totila

    Besieged and starving, Naples surrenders to Totila when no help comes. He keeps its people in the city and feeds them back to health a little at a time, so the starving do not die from eating too fast, and lets the garrison sail away.

    The city had agreed to surrender if no help came within three months, and Totila promised not to attack it in the meantime.

    Procopius calls the treatment of the captives a “kindness ... which was to be expected neither from an enemy nor from a barbarian.”

    Procopius, Wars 7.7.1–20 · Wars 7.8.1–6 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 230 · Procopius, Wars 7.7.19

31. 543

    Totila writes to the Romans

    Totila writes to the Roman Senate, asking how it could forget what Theodoric and Amalasuntha had done for it. When the commanders in Rome forbid an answer, short letters promising that the Goths will harm no Roman appear in the city’s squares at night.

    The letter, as Procopius gives it, also pointed to the accounts of the emperor’s auditor, Alexander, as a taste of what the Romans had gained by changing masters.

    The commanders suspected the Arian priests in Rome, the Goths’ own clergy, of posting the letters, and expelled them all from the city.

    Procopius, Wars 7.9.6–21 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 231 · Procopius, Wars 7.9.13

32. Summer 544

    Belisarius comes back with too few men

    Justinian sends Belisarius back to Italy with about 4,000 raw recruits and no money. “We have arrived in Italy, most mighty emperor, without men, horses, arms, or money,” he writes to the emperor, and asks for his old guards and for Huns, with money to pay them.

    His own veterans were still on the Persian front, and he had gathered the recruits by touring Thrace and offering pay.

    Procopius, Wars 7.10.1–3 · Wars 7.12.1–10 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 232

33. Rome changes hands

    545 to 549. Totila starves Rome, takes it and empties it. Belisarius walks back in, and four years later he goes home with the war no nearer its end.

34. 545–546

    Totila starves Rome

    Totila blockades Rome. Grain sells for seven gold pieces a bushel, the city’s commander, Bessas, sells from his own hoard at a profit, and the poor live on nettles from the ruins. Belisarius sails up the Tiber to break the blockade and fails within sight of the city.

    Some Romans, Procopius says, could no longer find “dogs or mice or any dead animal of any kind” to eat, and killed themselves.

    Belisarius’s attack on the Goths’ boom across the Tiber was going well until the officer he had left guarding his base was captured, and Belisarius, thinking it lost, turned back.

    Procopius, Wars 7.17.1–19 · Wars 7.18–19 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 238

    Nov 22, 545 The pope is taken to Constantinople. By the emperor’s order an official arrests Pope Vigilius in the church of Saint Cecilia, as he is handing out gifts, and puts him on a ship on the Tiber. The crowd follows to the river, and he is kept in the East for nearly ten years.

    Book of the Popes, p. 156 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 258

35. Dec 17, 546

    Totila takes Rome and empties it

    Four Isaurian guards let the Goths in at night, and Totila finds only about 500 people left in Rome. He pulls down a third of the walls and threatens to make it a sheep pasture, until a letter from Belisarius talks him out of it. Then he empties the city.

    Totila sent the deacon Pelagius to Justinian with a letter offering peace on the terms of the days of Theodoric and Anastasius: “thou wouldst properly be called my father, and thou wilt also have us hereafter as allies.” Justinian answered only that Belisarius had full power to settle the war.

    Belisarius’s letter argued that Rome was the greatest city under the sun, and that destroying it would rob the past of its memorials and the future of the sight of them. Totila read it many times and spared the city.

    Totila kept the senators with him and sent everyone else into Campania. A chronicle of the time says Rome stood empty for forty days.

    Procopius, Wars 7.20.1–26 · Wars 7.21.18–25 · Wars 7.22.6–19 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 242 · p. 258

36. Apr 547

    Belisarius walks back into the empty city

    Belisarius marches into deserted Rome, rebuilds the broken walls in twenty-five days and fills it again with people from the countryside. Totila hurries back and attacks before the gates are even hung, and fails.

    Procopius, Wars 7.24.1–34 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 244 · p. 258

37. 548–549

    Belisarius leaves Italy for good

    After four years of making do, Belisarius is called home at his wife Antonina’s request, with most of Italy in Gothic hands. He never returns.

    Antonina had sailed to ask the empress Theodora for more troops and found her dead. She asked Justinian to recall her husband instead, and with the Persian war pressing, he agreed.

    Even in the Wars, Procopius calls the journey home “an inglorious one.” In five years, he says, Belisarius had not made a single march by land in Italy, and had sailed from one fortified town on the coast to the next.

    The Secret History says the same in harsher words, that he “departed from there most ignominiously,” and adds that he grew greedy in those years and squeezed the Italians of Ravenna and Sicily for money, “alleging that he was making them pay a reckoning for the acts of their past lives.”

    Procopius, Wars 7.30.1–25 · Wars 7.35.1 · Secret History 5.1–4 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 246

    Jun 28, 548 Theodora dies. The empress, Justinian’s wife and closest partner in power for twenty-one years, dies of cancer.

    Procopius, Wars 7.30.4 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 66

38. 549 to 554 Narses

    Totila at his height

    549 to 551. Totila holds Rome, takes Sicily and raids Greece, while Justinian’s first choice of new commander dies before he can march.

39. Jan 16, 550

    Totila takes Rome a second time, and keeps it

    Unpaid Isaurian guards open the Gate of St. Paul. This time Totila means to keep the city. He brings back the senators, rebuilds what he had torn down, and presides over horse races in the Circus Maximus.

    The Isaurians had seen how rich the guards who betrayed Rome in 546 had become, and they had not been paid for years.

    Totila had asked the Frankish king for his daughter’s hand. The king refused, saying that Totila neither was nor ever would be king of Italy, since he had taken Rome and then let it go.

    He sent an envoy to Justinian offering to end the war and fight for the emperor as his ally. Justinian would not let the man into his presence.

    Procopius, Wars 7.36.1–29 · Wars 7.37.1–7 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 250 · p. 252

40. 550–551

    Totila takes the war to sea

    Totila crosses to Sicily and plunders it, then sends 300 warships to raid the coast of Greece, around Corfu, where they capture ships carrying supplies for the emperor’s new army. His fleet takes Corsica and Sardinia.

    Procopius, Wars 7.39.1–5 · Wars 8.22.17–32 · Wars 8.24.31–33 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 252

41. 550

    The emperor’s cousin marries Theodoric’s granddaughter

    Justinian gives the war to his cousin Germanus, who marries Matasuntha, Vitiges’s widow, hoping the Goths will not fight Theodoric’s granddaughter. He raises a large army, and then dies of an illness in the autumn of 550, before he can march.

    Bury notes that Germanus was expected to succeed Justinian, so Matasuntha might have shared the throne of the Empire.

    Their son, also named Germanus, was born after his father’s death. Jordanes, a writer of Gothic descent in Constantinople, ends his history of the Goths with him: the union of a great Roman family with Theodoric’s, he wrote, “gives hopeful promise, under the Lord’s favor, to both peoples.”

    He paid for much of the army out of his own fortune, and fell ill at Serdica, now Sofia, two days before he meant to set out.

    Procopius, Wars 7.39.9–29 · Wars 7.40.9 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 253 · p. 254 · Jordanes, Getica 314 · Procopius, Wars 7.39.16

42. 551

    Narses takes command

    Justinian puts Narses, the elderly palace eunuch who had fallen out with Belisarius in 538, in command, and gives him the money and men no general before him had. His army includes 5,500 Lombards, more than 3,000 Heruls, and Huns, Gepids and Persian deserters.

    Nobody recorded the size of the whole army, Bury notes, only its parts. Narses was famous for his generosity, and soldiers came eagerly to serve under him, some to repay old favors, Procopius says, and others hoping for new ones.

    Procopius, Wars 8.21.6–9 · Wars 8.26.5–17 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 261 · Britannica, “Narses”

43. 551

    The Empire wins at sea

    Fifty imperial warships meet forty-seven Gothic ones off Senigallia on the Adriatic. The ships lock together, and the crews fight from the decks with swords and spears “as if on a plain.” Only eleven Gothic ships escape.

    Procopius says the battle “especially broke the spirit and weakened the power of Totila and the Goths.”

    Procopius, Wars 8.23.1–42 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 259

44. The last battles

    552. Narses marches into Italy, Totila dies at Busta Gallorum, Rome changes hands for the fifth time, and the last Gothic king falls under Vesuvius.

45. Late Jun or early Jul 552

    Busta Gallorum: Totila is killed

    Near the village of Taginae in the Apennines, Narses meets Totila. Before the battle Totila, in gold armor, dances his horse between the lines. The Gothic cavalry charge breaks on Narses’s archers, 6,000 Goths die, and Totila is mortally wounded.

    Procopius describes the dance. Totila wheeled his horse in circles, hurled his javelin into the air and caught it as it quivered above him, and passed it from hand to hand, as if he had been taught to dance from childhood.

    Procopius gives two versions of Totila’s death. In one, a Gepid in the pursuit spears him without knowing who he is, and his men carry him off to die. In the other, he is hit by a stray arrow early in the battle, and his army, seeing him fall, loses heart. He had ruled for eleven years.

    Narses had marched around the head of the Adriatic, since the Franks barred the road through Venetia, and reached Ravenna in June. Bury puts the battle no later than the end of June or the first days of July.

    Narses’s Lombard allies burned houses and raped women who had taken refuge in churches. He paid them off and sent them home.

    Procopius, Wars 8.29–32 · Wars 8.33.2 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 261 · p. 264 · p. 291 · Britannica, “Battle of Taginae” · Procopius, Wars 8.31.18–20

46. 552

    Narses takes Rome, the fifth change of hands

    Narses retakes Rome after a short fight and sends its keys to Justinian. Procopius counts it the fifth time the city had been captured in Justinian’s reign.

    The five: Belisarius in 536, Totila in 546, Belisarius in 547, Totila in 550 and Narses in 552.

    Procopius, Wars 8.33.13–27 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 270

47. 552

    Teias, the last king, and his revenge

    The Goths who escaped make Teias king at Pavia, where Totila’s treasure is kept. When Rome falls, Gothic garrisons in Campania kill every senator they can find, and Teias kills the 300 children of Roman nobles whom Totila had been holding as hostages.

    Procopius says the victory brought the Senate and people of Rome “far greater destruction” than defeat would have.

    Procopius, Wars 8.33.6–8 · Wars 8.34.1–8 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 270

48. Late 552

    The last stand under Vesuvius, and the Goths agree to leave

    Teias marches south to save the treasure at Cumae and is cornered below Vesuvius. After two months, the Goths fight on foot for two days, and Teias falls holding his ground. The Goths who are left agree to leave Italy with their own money.

    Procopius compares Teias’s stand to the heroes of legend: he fought for a third of the day with twelve spears stuck in his shield before a javelin found him while he was changing it. His head was raised on a pole, and still the Goths fought on until night, and all the next day.

    The Goths asked to go “not, however, to obey the emperor, but to live in independence” somewhere beyond the Empire. Narses agreed, on John’s advice. A thousand broke away and went north to Pavia.

    Here Procopius’s history of the war ends. The date is uncertain: a chronicle from Ravenna gives October 1, 552, but Procopius’s two months of waiting would put it later. Bury doubted that Procopius’s account of the fighting could be taken as it stands.

    Procopius, Wars 8.35.1–38 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 273 · p. 274 · p. 291

49. The Franks, and the settlement

    553 to 554. A Frankish and Alamannic army plunders Italy and is destroyed, and Justinian lays down how Italy is to be ruled.

50. 553

    Cumae, Lucca and the Gothic towns

    Gothic garrisons still hold Cumae, with the royal treasure, and towns in Tuscany and the north. At Lucca, Narses pretends to behead the town’s hostages, who have wood strapped under their clothes, to frighten it into surrender.

    When Lucca still held out, Narses brought the hostages back alive and unharmed, and promised the town good treatment. It surrendered after three months, at the end of autumn.

    Aligern, Teias’s brother, gave up Cumae and the treasure at about the same time, judging that the Franks were in Italy for themselves and would never restore the Gothic kingdom.

    Bury, vol. 2, p. 275 · p. 276 · p. 277

51. 553–554

    The Franks and Alamanni invade

    Two Alamannic brothers serving the Frankish king, Leuthari and Butilinus, plunder Italy as far as the Strait of Messina. Disease kills Leuthari and much of his army on the way home, and Narses destroys Butilinus’s army near Capua.

    The army was said to be 75,000 strong. The Franks, who were Catholics, spared the churches, but the Alamanni, who were not yet Christian, stripped the church plate and pulled the roofs off.

    At Capua Narses had about 18,000 men. His cavalry, all mounted archers, wheeled in on both sides of the Frankish column and shot into it from behind, and Butilinus was killed with nearly all his men.

    Agathias, who took up the history where Procopius left off, is the main source for these years; no free English translation of his history is online, so the links are to Bury’s account of it.

    Bury, vol. 2, p. 275 · p. 278 · p. 279 · p. 280

52. Aug 13, 554

    Justinian settles Italy

    Justinian issues a law for Italy, the Pragmatic Sanction. It keeps the grants made by Athalaric, Amalasuntha and Theodahad, cancels every one made by Totila, gives property back to the owners who fled the war, and puts Italy under the Empire’s own laws.

    Bury explains why the law mattered so much: Italians needed to know at once how far the new government would honor what the Gothic kings had done, above all about land. Totila had handed estates to their tenants and freed slaves to fight for him, and the law undid that.

    It was issued at the request of Pope Vigilius, who had been held in Constantinople since 547. He set out for home and died on the way, at Syracuse, in June 555.

    Bury, vol. 2, p. 282 · Book of the Popes, p. 160

53. 554 to 568 After the war

    After the war

    555 to 568. The last Gothic towns give up, Justinian dies, and three years later new invaders come over the Alps.

54. 555–562

    The last Gothic towns fall

    The last Gothic garrisons hold out for years. The mountain fort of Conza, with 7,000 Goths, gives up in the spring of 555. In November 562 Narses sends Justinian the keys of Verona and Brescia, the last Gothic towns.

    At Conza their commander, Ragnaris, asked for a parley, and when Narses refused his terms, he turned and shot an arrow at him. It missed, one of Narses’s guards shot Ragnaris dead, and the garrison surrendered.

    Bury, vol. 2, p. 281

55. Nov 14, 565

    Justinian dies

    Justinian dies at about eighty-three, after thirty-eight years on the throne, and his nephew, Justin II, succeeds him. Belisarius had died eight months before.

    Bury, vol. 2, p. 71 · p. 69 · Britannica, “Justinian I”

56. 567–568 Disputed

    Narses is dismissed, and a legend

    The new emperor dismisses Narses. A later story says the empress Sophia mocked the old eunuch, offering to set him to handing out wool to her maids, and that he answered he would weave her a web she could not undo, and invited the Lombards in.

    Paul the Deacon says the Romans had written to the new emperor, Justin II, threatening to hand Rome to the barbarians unless he freed them from Narses.

    The story is told two hundred years later by Paul the Deacon, the Lombards’ own historian, and historians treat it as a legend. Narses went back to Rome and died there not long after, Paul says, and his body was taken to Constantinople in a lead coffin.

    Paul the Deacon, p. 59 · p. 68

57. 568 and after

    Where it ended

    • Apr 568The Lombards come into Italy, three years after Justinian’s death.
    • 572Pavia, where the last Gothic kings kept their treasure, falls to the Lombards after a siege of more than three years.
    • About 751Ravenna, the seat of the emperors’ governors in Italy since the war, falls to the Lombards.
    • Apr 1071The Normans take Bari, and the Empire’s rule in southern Italy ends.

    Three years after Justinian died, the Lombards under their king, Alboin, crossed the Alps into Italy with their families. Within a few years they held “everything as far as Tuscany except Rome and Ravenna,” in the words of their historian, Paul the Deacon.

    Paul dates their setting out to April 568, “on the day after holy Easter.”

    Paul gives a reason the Italians did not fight: plague in Narses’s time had killed great numbers in the north, and a famine had followed it across Italy. Nearly twenty years of war had won Italy back for the Empire. The Lombards came fourteen years after Justinian’s settlement of 554, and six after the last Gothic towns gave up.

    Paul the Deacon, p. 62 · p. 80 · Bury, vol. 2, p. 281 · Britannica, “Lombard” · Britannica, “Ravenna” · Britannica, “Robert Guiscard”

Every card links its sources: Procopius’s own words, down to the sentence, wherever he tells the event, then the history J. B. Bury wrote from all the sources in 1923, and the other writers of the time where they add to Procopius or disagree with him. Where the sources tell an event differently, its drawer gives each account and says whose it is. Every number is the source’s own, and where historians doubt it, the drawer says so.