There were frequent skirmishes that summer on the slope of the hill between the city walls of Osimo and our camp. The Goths would creep out at dusk to cut fodder for their horses, and our patrols would engage them; on moonlight nights there would be very sharp fighting. It was down that hill one morning, against a battalion of our infantry advancing in line, that the Goths suddenly rolled a huge number of wagon-wheels with long knives and sickles lashed to the hubs. By good luck not a man of ours was hurt; the Goths had miscalculated the direction of the slope, and the wheels swerved harmlessly away into a wood, from which we recovered them. It was on that slope too that, riding out one morning with my mistress, I was witness to an unforgettable sight. A number of Goths under an officer were out on the hill-side cutting fodder by daylight; and a company of Moors, dismounted, went out to stalk them, creeping up a grassy ravine. But the fodder-cutting party was a bait concealing an ambush: as the Moors emerged from the ravine with a loud yell, up sprang another party of Goths to meet them and there was a hand-to-hand tussle, many men falling on both sides. The officer in command of the fodder-cutting party, who was wearing gilded plate-armour but no helmet, was killed by an upward stab of a Moorish javelin in the groin – plate-armour, intended for mounted use, has a weakness at this spot. The Moor who had struck the blow uttered a cry of triumph and, seizing the corpse by its yellow hair, began dragging it off. Then a Gothic spear flew and nearly transfixed the Moor’s two calves a few inches above each heel, as one skewers a hare’s hind-legs with a twig for greater ease in carrying it home. But the Moor did not release his hold. He crawled slowly downhill like a caterpillar, arching and flattening out, dragging the corpse behind him. All this my mistress and I saw with our own eyes from the shelter of a holly tree. One of our trumpeters now blew the Alarm, and a troop of Bulgarian Huns galloped past us up the hill to the rescue. The leading Hun picked up the Moor, javelin and all, and threw him across the back of his horse. The Moor would still not let go his corpse, which bumped and clattered along the ground as they rode back to safety.
Another memorable occasion was the fight at the cistern. This cistern was built on the steep ground to the northward of Osimo, close to the walls. It provided the garrison’s chief, but not only, water-supply; it was fed by a small trickle of pure water and protected by a vault to keep the water cool. The Goths used to fill their pitchers at it by night, with a strong covering party posted all around. Five Isaurians now volunteered to destroy it, if they were provided with the necessary cold chisels, hammers, and crowbars, and protected while they worked. Early the next day Belisarius brought up his whole army and posted them in a circle at intervals around the wall. Long ladders were held in readiness, as if for an escalade. When the Advance was sounded and the attention of the Goths engaged, the five Isaurians would slip unobtrusively inside the cistern and begin their work of demolition.
The enemy waited quietly for the expected attack and held their fire until our men should be within easy range. The trumpets blew, there was shouting and shooting from our men, but the ladders were advanced only at a single point, 300 paces from the cistern; here the Goths came crowding up to repel the attack. In spite of this diversion the Isaurians did not escape notice as they scrambled up the rock and stole inside the cistern. The Goths realized that they were the victims of a ruse and made a furious sortie from the postern-gate close by, intending to capture the five men. Belisarius led an immediate counter-attack and held them off. It was bitter work, for the Goths were more numerous and had the advantage of the steep hill; but Belisarius’s companions were sure-footed Isaurians and Armenian mountaineers, who loved this sort of fighting. Like them, Belisarius fought on foot, wearing only a buff-coat and armed with two javelins and a cutlass. He kept urging them to renewed efforts, though their losses were heavy. The longer the five Isaurians could work undisturbed in the cistern, he reckoned, the shorter would the siege be.
The Goths retreated about midday. As Belisarius rushed forward in pursuit a sentry on the neighbouring tower took a steady aim at him with a javelin; he cast, and the javelin came darting surely down. Belisarius did not see it, for the sun was shining in his eyes from the south, immediately over the edge of the battlements. It was the spearman Unigatus, at Belisarius’s side, who saved his life. Being a much shorter man than his master, he was already under the shadow of the wall and could see the javelin coming. He leaped forward and sideways, catching at it. The long head pierced his palm and cut all the sinews of the fingers, so that he was crippled in that hand for the rest of his life. But he said: ‘To save my lord Belisarius, I would gladly have interposed my breast.’
Belisarius went down into the cistern himself. Though the Isaurians had been hammering and heaving away with all their might at the big stone blocks, they had not succeeded in shifting so much as a pebble. It was the habit of the men of old to build not for a year, or even for a lifetime, but for ever. The stones were jointed so closely together and the interstices filled with so iron-hard a cement that it seemed a place hollowed out of the living rock. There was nothing else for it but to do what Belisarius had a natural repugnance against doing: he fouled the good water by throwing into the cistern the corpses of horses and quicklime and poisonous shrubs. The Goths, who were already reduced to eating grass, must now rely on a single well inside the fortifications and on rain-water from the house-roofs caught in tubs. But this was a year of drought, and no rain fell.
Fiesole yielded from famine in the month of August, and Belisarius displayed the captive leaders to the garrison at Osimo, hoping to persuade them to yield. Yield at last they did, for Belisarius offered them generous terms. He would not make slaves of them, but they must renounce their allegiance to King Wittich and swear loyalty to the Emperor Justinian, and also give up half their wealth to our men in lieu of plunder. By now they were angry with Wittich for abandoning them to their fate when his armies were still much more numerous than those of Belisarius – who was a soldier after their own hearts. They all volunteered to serve in the Household Regiment. They were picked men, and Belisarius enrolled them gladly. Thus the last of the fortresses southward from Ravenna had fallen to our arms.
Meanwhile King Wittich’s nephew Uriah had been encamped at Pavia on the upper Po, prevented by the two Johns from marching to help his uncle at Ravenna. One day in June he heard good news – the embassy to King Theudebert had taken effect and 100,000 Franks had crossed the Alps and were marching to his aid through Liguria. These Franks are Catholics in name only, and still retain many of their blood-thirsty old German customs; they have, moreover, a greater reputation for perfidy than any race in Europe. They are not horsemen, like the Goths and Vandals, their distant kinsmen, except that a few lancers accompany each of their princes and that every gau-leader is mounted as a mark of dignity. They are infantry, very brave and very undisciplined; and are armed with broadswords, shields, and their dreaded franciscas. These franciscas are short-handled, double-headed axes which, as they charge, they throw in a concerted volley; the blow from such an axe will shatter any ordinary shield and kill the man behind it.
Soon King Theudebert’s forces reached the bridge-head over the Po at Pavia, which Uriah held; and the Goths welcomed them heartily. But the moment that the first battalions of the Franks had crossed unmolested, a dreadful surprise awaited Uriah. The Franks broke ranks and ran here and there, chasing Gothic women and children; and sacrificed those they captured, as the first fruits of war, by hurling them headlong into the river! This was an old custom of their pre-Christian days, but they justified it on Orthodox grounds: as the fitting treatment for Arian heretics who denied that Jesus Christ was the equal of His Almighty Father! Uriah’s Goths were so taken aback by the horror of this sight that they fled away in a mad rush to their camp. Pursued with volleys of hurtling axes, they did not stop to defend the camp – there was a general stampede down the road towards Ravenna. They burst through Bloody John’s outposts in their tens of thousands; and hundreds were shot down as they st
reamed past his camp.
Then Bloody John gathered his bodyguard together and galloped towards the Gothic camp, believing that Belisarius had made a surprise move through Tuscany, and that it was he who had routed the Goths. By the time that he had learned his mistake the Franks were swarming down the road; he fought a sharp engagement and was worsted. Abandoning his camp, with all his pillage of two years in it, he retreated to Tuscany. King Theudebert had won the whole western part of Liguria at a single stroke.
It had been a year of drought; and, because of the dangers of the time, farming activities had been interrupted throughout the north of Italy. The little corn that had been planted withered before it came to an ear, and the stocks in the granaries and barns had long ago been commandeered by King Wittich for his armies, or by the Milanese who had revolted against him, or by the Herulians in their raids. Consequently, when the Franks had consumed the provisions which they found in the two captured camps, they were forced to subsist on the flesh of oxen cooked in the waters of the Po, which was running very low that year and was tainted with corpses. An army composed entirely of infantry has a narrower range of foraging than a cavalry army, and the Franks are heavy eaters. Thus they suffered great distress. When August came they were attacked by dysentery, and no less than 35,000 of them died.
Belisarius wrote King Theudebert a letter reproaching him for the breach of faith with his ally the Emperor Justinian; he suggested that the pestilence was a divine retribution for this and for the cruel murder of the Gothic women and children. Theudebert did not contradict him, and presently marched home. But Western Liguria was left a desert, and it is computed that 50,000 Italian peasants died of starvation that summer.
The Moors in Africa were also defeated in this year by Solomon; and the Lombards therefore thought it convenient to remain where they were, unless perhaps the Persians should strike their promised blow and Justinian be forced to draw away all his western armies to save Syria and Asia Minor from invasion. Then, unsolicited, a powerful nation drove at the Empire from another quarter – the Bulgarian Huns, united under a powerful Cham for the first time for thirty years. They were easily able to force the passage of the Lower Danube. Justinian had, for years past, been gradually denuding his northern frontier fortresses of men to supply his armies in the West, and this without raising a single new battalion or squadron; and had allowed the fortresses themselves to fall into disrepair, considering the building of new churches to be a more glorious practice than the patching of old ramparts. I must here interrupt my account of the great Hunnish raid with a description of a Paradise which Justinian, at enormous expense, had constructed for Theodora and himself on the Asiatic coast of the Sea of Marmora, not far from the city, and on the site of a temple of Hera. The Summer Palace of this Paradise, surrounded by trees and vines and flowers, was at once acknowledged the most beautiful private building in the world, just as St Sophia was the most beautiful sacred one. Marble and the precious metals were lavished upon it, and the baths and colonnades outshone in luxury any that Corinth itself had boasted before the earthquake. Because of the difficulties of the currents in the Straits, Justinian built out two long jetties here – sinking countless chests full of cement in the deep water, to form a private harbour. This great undertaking is worthy of mention here not only because it represented an additional drain on the Treasury, but also because it was the southern tide-mark of the Hunnish raid.
The Bulgars, then, overran the whole of the Balkans as far southward as the Isthmus of Corinth, capturing no less than thirty-two fortresses as they went; and the whole diocese of Thrace as far as Constantinople itself where they broke through the long walls of Anastasius and were only restrained by the inner wall that the Emperor Theodosius had built, stoutly defended by Narses. Some of them crossed the Hellespont from Sestos to Abydos and raided in Asia Minor, being with difficulty driven off from the gates of Justinian’s new Paradise. Two hundred thousand prisoners, 500,000 dead, vast quantities of treasure, the destruction of fifty prosperous towns: such was the price that the Bulgars exacted of Justinian for his false economy in the matter of troops and fortifications. They returned home unmolested.
Belisarius was gathering all his forces to press the siege of Ravenna; and another small Imperial army sailed over to assist him from Dalmatia. But Ravenna is the most difficult city in the world to capture, because of its geographical position. The great Theoderich besieged it unsuccessfully for three years; on the landward side the marshes kept him out, and on the seaward side the shallows and fortifications – that he won it at last was a diplomatic not a military victory. It seemed likely that Belisarius, too, must be content to wait for three years. King Wittich had huge stocks of corn and oil and wine in the city, and at his request an additional supply was being sent by Uriah down the River Po from Mantua.
But a few weeks later, in spite of all this, Wittich was in a most difficult position with regard to food supplies. First, the drought had so shrunken the stream that Uriah’s corn barges grounded in the shallows at the mouth of the river and were unable to proceed southward through the connected series of lagoons which form the waterway to Ravenna; the entire convoy was captured by Hildiger, whose patrols were very active and alert in this quarter. Then a second blow was struck against Wittich in Ravenna itself by his own wife, Matasontha. She contrived, during a thunderstorm, to set fire secretly to the two largest granaries in the city. The damage was ascribed to lightning. Wittich conceived the idea that God hated him and was grinding his face in the dust.
King Theudebert of the Franks now sent envoys to Wittich at Ravenna. Because the Franks were still supposedly his allies, Belisarius permitted them to pass through his lines, but only on condition that his own envoys should be permitted to accompany them and hear what they had to say to Wittich, and plead the cause of the Empire. Theodosius was chosen as Belisarius’s representative and acquitted himself well enough.
The Frankish envoys proposed an offensive and defensive alliance with the Goths, boasting that they could send half a million men across the Alps and bury ‘the Greeks’ under a mound of axes. They said that they would be content to take no more than one-half of Italy in payment for their aid.
Theodosius then pointed out that the Franks were wholly untrustworthy as allies, having accepted subsidies from both sides and made war on both; that mobs of infantry would stand no chance of victory against disciplined bodies of cavalry; and that to offer a Frank half a loaf of bread was to give away the whole loaf, together with bread-knife and platter. If King Wittich made his peace with the Emperor he would at least save something from the wreck of his hopes. The Gothic ambassadors sent to Constantinople during the armistice at the close of the siege of Rome had asked for terms which neither justice nor the military situation warranted; Wittich would be well advised now to throw himself upon the clemency of the Emperor, whose generosity to a fallen foe had been proved in the case of King Geilimer and of many a lesser chief.
King Wittich listened attentively to Theodosius, dismissed the Franks, and sent fresh ambassadors to Constantinople. While he waited for their return, the Gothic Alpine garrisons made their submission to Belisarius; and Uriah’s army, moving down from Mantua, was so reduced by desertions that he could do nothing more to assist his uncle, but must turn back again as far as Como.
We camped outside Ravenna, and the winter drew on. There was no fighting, but the vigilance of our guards and patrols was not relaxed. Not a single sack of corn was allowed to enter Ravenna, nor a single ship to run the blockade. It was during this period that my mistress renewed her former intimacy with Theodosius, to relieve the tedium of her life. He had a good singing voice and revealed a talent for musical composition; they would sing duets together, very prettily, and accompany themselves on a lyre and a fiddle. One of Theodosius’s songs was an outline of why the Italians should love the Greeks: this war of liberation had given them a merry time indeed – massacre, rape, arson, enslavement, famine, plague, cannibalism. The verse
s were so graceful that nobody could think the sentiments they expressed disloyal. Throughout this period Theodosius and my mistress behaved towards each other with exemplary discretion.
It was in this summer that Theodora’s brother-in-law Sittas, who was commanding in the East as Belisarius’s successor, was killed in a casual border skirmish in Armenia. He was the only general of reputation in these parts, and his death caused the Persians great joy. King Khosrou decided to break the Eternal Peace in the following spring. Wittich’s priestly ambassadors had assured him, through their Syrian interpreter, that the Franks and Moors would assist the Goths by campaigns in the West. Khosrou’s first answer had been: ‘If we strike from the East, our royal cousin Justinian will abandon his conquests in the West and bring Belisarius against us with all his forces. For Rome is far away from his capital, but Antioch is near. This will benefit your Goths, but not us.’
The priests could not find a convincing answer. But the interpreter was equal to the occasion. I must now disclose a circumstance of which I became aware only after this Syrian plot had matured, but which I shall not withhold from you here – since it will perhaps add to your interest in what I am about to relate: the interpreter was none other than my former master Barak! In a private audience with the Great King, Barak protested that there was nothing to fear from Belisarius. It was an open secret, he said, that Belisarius intended to remain in Italy. In the new year he would throw off his allegiance to Justinian, proclaim himself Emperor of the Western World, and make common cause with the Goths and the Franks; North Africa would be included in his dominions.
‘When we have news that Belisarius has so proclaimed himself, we shall invade Syria at once,’ said Khosrou, well pleased.
But Barak said: ‘King of Kings, it surely would be more consonant with your dignity if you struck without waiting for Belisarius to act? Then his assumption of the Diadem might seem to be encouraged by your invasion of Syria, rather than contrariwise.’