540 to 541
So I checked, and it has been twenty-six months since we last talked about Italy at all. That is wild to me. Time. Sheesh. Since then we’ve been talking about the Visigoths and those darn Franks who, like water on the sidewalk, get into every crack and crevice. Fair enough I suppose since they did build the most extensive, powerful, and prestigious entity in the Post-Roman west, but I think we can all agree that it is time for a change.
So today I’ll review quickly the situation in Italy when we left off, which was about in the year 540, then go from there. Today’s episode is a short one, especially compared to the last couple. We’ll end up running through a period of disarray for the Ostrogoths, and end when they start to get their act together. It feels a little like that long period of Visigothic history where the ancestral dynasty was terminated and they spent ages trying to find a new center. The Ostrogoths go through a similar process, but under the circumstances, they’ll have to speedrun it. Once we’re through that, I have a little bit of an announcement at the end.
The Ostrogoths had been beaten, and soundly. Admittedly, it had taken a while, five years. Justinian had offered generous terms for their surrender, offering to let them keep the lands north of the Po River, while the empire reabsorbed the territories to the south. Given the soundness of the thrashing that had been administered, it really was remarkably lenient.
Belisarius thought so too, and disliked that he was being prevented from completing his conquest. Initially he refused to sign up to the treaty. Things were left up in the air, and in the uncertainty, the Goths offered an alternative. What if Belisarius was to become their new king, or even their new emperor? A new emperor of the west? Belisarius toyed with the idea, and strung the Gothic negotiators along as he laid siege to Ravenna. Eventually the city gave up, and Belisarius entered it in May 540. He made sure the inhabitants were well treated. Looters were severely punished. He took half the official treasury and sent it off to Constantinople, but private goods were left in possession of their owners. Immediately behind the army came supply ships and wagons to relieve the privation that the siege had caused. The fall of Ravenna triggered the surrender of other cities across Venetia, cities that would have been held by the Goths under Justinian’s treaty now pledged their loyalty to the imperial victor.
In the glow of success, Belisarius finally made it clear that he had no intention of taking any crown for himself, as either rex or imperator.
Word of the offer, though, had made its way back to the imperator in Constantinople, and he was not thrilled. Success in Italy, obviously, was great, but Belisarius had clearly worked his way around Justinian’s express wishes to change the terms of the Goth’s surrender. Even without the sketchy offer of diadems, it was not the kind of thing on which the emperor could look the other way. Luckily, the Shahanshah of Persia had taken his spear in hand and begun a war in the east. Luckily because Justinian now had need of his greatest general, in a theater far from that general’s Italian successes. Belisarius was called back to Constantinople.
He went, along with the deposed Gothic king, Vitiges, and a significant pile of treasure and captives. There was no triumph on his arrival though, as there had been after his victory in Africa. After that brush with destiny, Justinian saw no need to inflate Belisarius’ ego or reputation any further than it already was. It almost didn’t matter though, since according to Procopius (remember Procopius?) Belisarius could scarcely move around the city without being thronged by admirers and well wishers.
Belisarius left behind him an Italy that should have fallen easily back into the bosom of the empire. Most of the peninsula had been conquered outright. The only places where Ostrogothic leaders remained defiant were Verona, Pavia, and a strip of territory along the road between the two. It should have been easy to finish off this rump, or to come to some kind of deal with them.
I’m sure you can guess that neither of those things happened. You are smart people, and I am not being subtle.
The Goths were in the midst of what you might call a leadership crisis. They had had a run of disappointing kings since the murder of Amalasuintha. Before Belisarius had even entered Ravenna, they were casting about for someone to step into the space vacated by the mostly incompetent Vitiges. There were two candidates, both of them nephews of important people. Uraias was the nephew of the aforementioned Vitiges, and was based in Pavia. The other was Ildibad, nephew of Theudis, who had been, until just a few years ago, king of the Visigoths in Spain. Both were from powerful clans within the Gothic confederation, then. Uraias had the political sense to know that his family’s clout had been severely damaged by his uncle’s failures, and pushed the Gothic nobility to choose Ildibad, which they duly did. Ildibad attempted to negotiate with Belisarius, but got nowhere before the general was recalled.
Now smart people, I know exactly what you’re thinking. Except you, yeah, you, what are you smiling about? Never mind, I don’t want to know. But the rest of you are probably thinking that Justinian, the great Justinian, the wise Justinian, the reformer of Roman law, the restorer of Roman glory, that Justinian must have sent someone to take over in Belisarius’ place as supreme commander of the armies in Italy.
Well, you’d think that wouldn’t you?
But no, nothing doing. No new commander was sent, none of the commanders already in-country were promoted. They were all on their own, left to their own devices. Pretty much overnight the Roman army went from being one united body – riven by factionalism, but still mostly united – to a handful of smaller armies. Each one was under the command of a general who saw no reason to submit to the opinions or plans of the others. That turned out to be a problem.
The armies themselves were a mixed bag, as all Roman armies that we’ve talked about were. They were a cobbled together collection of auxiliary units, many from outside the empire, including Huns, Rugians, Isaurians, and Herules.
There were five generals left, and I’ll list them but won’t put them on the quiz. To start with there were two Johns, one just the regular model and another called John the Glutton. There was Bessas the Goth, highlighting how ethnicity continued to be a complicated proposition and was no guarantor of political affiliation. The two others were called Vitalius and Constantianus, who were relative newcomers. If you have an excellent memory you’ll be wondering about Narses, the eunuch who had been causing problems for Belisarius, but he had been recalled to Constantinople as well. So these five comparatively junior commanders found themselves with no clear mission, with armies that needed pay and reward, and accountable to no one except the emperor, who was far away.
Discipline began to break down pretty much immediately. The goal for all five seemed to be twofold. First, to grab up as much plundered wealth as possible before any kind of oversight arrived from the capitol. Second, to fight as little as possible, since it got in the way of enjoying all that wealth. The civilian population of Italy, already battered by years of war, found that this supposed imperial victory only exposed them to the greed of the imperial generals. Before too long, insult was added to this injury. Justinian had sent no commanding officer to take over military operations, but he was not slow to deploy the civilian arm of the imperial government, in the form of tax men.
These officials, called logothetes, who supervised the collection of imperial levies, were paid one-twelfth of their take. You can imagine that that arrangement quickly made them fabulously wealthy and fabulously unpopular. Their overseer, Alexander, was nicknamed “The Scissors” because on top of his salary, he was skilled at clipping coins in a way that was nearly undetectable. The real problem was that with war with Persia heating up, Justinian and his court were pulling resources away from the western adventure. Payroll problems were the inevitable result, as transfers into Italy slowed to a trickle. In order to maintain the army, and to stave off mutiny in the ranks, the generals had to make the invasion of Italy pay for itself.
The educated classes who had served the Gothic kings were called on to render accounts of every solidus that had passed through their hands in the course of their service. It wasn’t about punishing these men for working with the barbarian regimes. It was about punishing them for not working with them. The rulers of Italy from Theodoric through Theodahad were declared to have been legal rulers under the aegis of the emperor, so any embezzlement or dishonest dealings with them were prosecuted, and fined, as such. To the Italians, who had by and large been happy to see the arrival of Belisarius, and had often helped him however they could, this seemed to be a mind-boggling bit of double-speak.
All of that money, as far as the populi could see, disappeared right down the logothetes gullets. The formerly glorious infrastructure of Italy – roads, aqueducts, bridges – was neither repaired nor maintained. And judging by their aggressive foraging, the taxes didn’t seem to be going to support the army either. In fact, the logothetes effectively taxed the soldiers right along with the populace.
Rather than regular army discipline, the armies were subjected to administrative fines. The soldiers, understandably, resented such punishments, frankly they would have preferred to just take a whipping and be done with it, instead of having these bureaucrats in fancy suits nickle-and-diming them every time they turned around. Promotions became nearly impossible thanks to the logothetes too. Promotions could only happen when a higher-ranking soldier died or retired. The tax men came up with the idea of simply not promoting anyone when that happened. They would keep the dead or retired man on the rolls, and so everyone stayed at the same level and the same pay grade. Apparently the retired men’s pay did not, as you would expect, make its way into the logothete’s already bulging purses, but it did wonders for keeping the cost of the army down. For that reason, Procopius hints, Justinian thoroughly approved of the practice.
As Italian grumbling grew in the territories held by the empire, Gothic power grew in the north. Belisarius had left without a completed peace settlement, and the army he left behind was unqualified to enforce one even if it had existed. Ildibad had started with just a thousand men and Pavia, but his forces quickly swelled as disaffected Goths and Italians came to join him, along with a fair number of imperial deserters. With this force, Ildibad was able to make a case to the towns and cities of Liguria and Venetia, and many of them put themselves back under Gothic control.
Of the five generals, only Vitalius moved to counter Ildibad. In late 540 or early 541, he and his army of mostly Heruli fought the Goths near Treviso. He was badly beaten, barely escaping with his life. The victory strengthened Ilidbad’s legitimacy, and even more fighting men rallied to him. Vitalius had been in command of the only army north of the Po, and the whole territory slipped from the empire’s grip.
It really is impressive how quickly the whole thing went sideways, and how poorly it was handled. Now might be a good time to mention that from here on in the story of the Gothic wars, we have to be more careful of our sources. Procopius is still the best, but he’s no longer a first-person reporter, having apparently returned from Italy with Belisarius. It’s possible that he stayed with the general when he went to fight on the Persian front, but he would never return to Italy, so all his narrative of events there are second-hand. Much of the material that covers the corruption I was just talking about, especially the part directly implicating Justinian, comes from Procopius’ other famous work, the Anecdota, or Secret History. I’m sure I talked about it before, but the Anecdota was a hit piece, essentially, a collection of gossip and worse about Justinian and his court, which goes so far as to imply that Justinian was actually a supernatural being, and not in a good way. It catalogues the salacious details of empress Theodora’s career in the theater before being plucked from obscurity by the emperor, and paints an unflattering picture of Belsiarius as a man completely emasculated by his wife. The purpose of the Secret History is argued over by historians, with theories ranging from simple gossip rag for a close circle of friends, to an insurance policy in case of successful conspiracies against Justinian. It’s not even clear how it survived at all, since it certainly wasn’t published in Procopius’ lifetime. The earliest surviving manuscript is in Greek and dates from the 13th century. It lay forgotten in the Vatican Library until it was discovered in the 1620s, translated into Latin and published in 1623 by Nicolo Alamanni. (Weinberg 2015)
The point of all of this is that we need to be careful about the stories that appear in the Secret History, since it’s hard to pick out Procopius’ motive in writing it. The stories of corruption seem plausible enough, though. Earlier, Belisarius had been forced to put the Italian campaign on pause and head down to Africa to deal with a revolt that had been triggered partly by overeager tax collectors. It certainly was also true that Ildibad and his Goths were resurgent and successful very quickly after Belisarius left. It’s just that the gossipy, personal stories that move the narrative are open to question, is all I’m saying. And now having said that, let’s hear some more gossipy personal stories. This one, surprise surprise, blames a negative outcome on a couple of women.
Neither is named, of course, but they are the wives of Uraias and Ildibad. Uraias had declined to reach for leadership, but was still kin to the former king, and his wife apparently felt very strongly about that status. One day, she was visiting the baths (presumably in Pavia), along with her retinue, and bumped into Ildibad’s wife. Ildibad had previously been based in Ravenna, and most of his property was lost with the fall of the city. So, in spite of her husband’s newly acquired importance, Mrs Ildibad was not nearly as well fettled as Mrs Uraias. The latter snubbed Mrs Ildibad, made a few snide remarks about her outfit and retinue, and swished her way into the baths.
This is the kind of thing that aristocrats get super aerated about, across time and space. Nothing makes me more grateful to be a modern western human than reading about all of these societies where failing to remove your hat in the presence of some chinless wonder could get you a beating, or worse. I have enough to think about without worrying about that kind of stuff, thank you.
Anyway, Mrs Ildibad did not enjoy being snubbed, and went to complain about it to her husband, the newly minted king of the Italian Goths. One thing led to another, yadda yadda yadda, and Mr Ildibad had Mr Uraias murdered.
[well that escalated quickly]
I didn’t mean to imply that Uraias was chinless, by the way, either literally or metaphorically.
Putting aside the gossip again in favor of actual analysis, this account is almost certainly nonsense. Procopius would have no way of knowing about this kind of internal strife, other than rumor. In the absence of actual information, he’s perfectly happy to make things up. It may be that there was an economic difference between Ildibad and Uraias, a mismatch in resources that made Ildibad’s kingship a little bit less legitimate than it could have been. Herwig Wolfram suggests that the story simply personalizes an inter-clan feud, with Uraias’ family allied with others in rebellion against Ilidibad’s leadership. Uraias, as the most likely candidate for kingship regardless of his earlier reticence, represented a threat to the king’s power and had to be removed.
The imperial leadership didn’t pounce on this disquiet in the Gothic ranks, for whatever reason. Probably simple incompetence, or bad intelligence, which actually would also be incompetence. For whatever reason, though, they didn’t, and the feud ground on to its seemingly inevitable conclusion, with Ildibad murdered at a banquet by one of his own retinue. After a promising start, he had been king of the Ostrogoths for around one year. We don’t know how old he was.
Well, great, the Goths thought to themselves, as they looked wildly around the dugout, who’s up now? Their bench had been seriously depleted already, and now both batter and the guy on deck have been unfairly ejected. What is a manager to do?
I would love to extend the baseball analogy here, but I just can’t get there with anything that makes any sense. Alas.
What actually happened was a faction within the Goths snuck in a surprise candidate of their own. It was a warrior named Eraric, which sounds like I’m saying something else with a Baltimore accent, but that’s it, Eraric. He was a Rugian. That might ring a bell somewhere, and if it does, that’s because the Rugii were the Germanic tribe that Odoacer had led when he took over Italy from little Romulus Augustulus back in 476. The Rugii that had survived Theodoric’s invasion had made their peace with the Ostrogoths but apparently maintained their own identity and leadership, and now, when no one was looking, penciled their own man into the top box of the org chart.
The situation now, with the Goths holding the north bank of the Po, was in effect the exact situation that had been on offer in Justinian’s original peace deal. None of the imperial generals were prepared to challenge that after what had happened to Vitalius’ army. But they weren’t prepared to give any kind of recognition to the new king either, and Justinian was even less so. The old treaty was dead and gone, even as a starting point for negotiation, and so Eraric was informed.
Eraric wasn’t really cut out for this. His clan had held a small chunk of Venetia in the old days, he wasn’t rich enough or connected enough to be a credible leader. So he quietly put out diplomatic feelers, offering to turn over the whole shebang. All he asked in return was the treatment that he had seen Vitiges receive: a comfortable set up in Constantinople, with high rank and an appropriate pension. That lost him whatever respect the imperial negotiators may have had for him.
One of the Goths negotiating with the Romans in Ravenna was a young warrior named Baduila. Baduila was a nephew of Ildibad, and a young man, though no one knows for sure exactly when he was born. He had been a commander at the Battle of Treviso, where Vitalius had been humiliated, and was a fighter of talent.
Rumor of Eraric’s double-dealing had gotten out, as rumors often do, and the Goths of Pavia passed the information to Baduila. An offer of leadership came along with that information. Baduila was game, but demanded that the way be cleared for him before he would accept the offer of a crown publicly. He even named the day that the clearing should take place. So, in October 541 (probably) Eraric was assassinated, and Baduila assumed leadership of the Ostrogoths of Italy.
They didn’t know it yet, but the Goths had finally found their General Zhukov, the leader who would reverse all the Roman successes of the previous years. We know his name, Baduila, from the coins that he struck (still positioned as Justinian’s representative, would you believe), but Procopius gives him a different name, by which he has been better known ever since: Totila.
I hope that is a suitably dramatic place to end. This episode has covered at most two years, which I think is a record. I don’t know, I’m not going to check. Next time we’ll talk Totila and see what kinds of things he’s able to achieve.
Now, news.
The news is that there is now a Dark Ages Podcast store open. It’s available at darkagespod-fourthwall.com. I’ve added the link to the website. There’s just a couple of designs available at the moment, the logo and one other. I’ve had some ideas for others, as well as some that some of you have suggested, and those will pop up there as soon as I get the designs beaten into shape. If you do have stuff you’d like to see, let me know through the contact page on the website which is darkagespod.com.
Oh, and a reminder that the interview I did with Shae on the Podbean Amplified podcast will be available on the ninth of this month, that would be this coming Monday. Because they’re actual professionals and have a predictable production schedule. Podbean Amplified is available on any good podcast catching app, and probably the cruddy ones too. Not naming names of course.
Alright, enough already. Come back next time to hear how things go for our new boy Totila. Until then, take care.
The Dark Ages Podcast 