Count Belisarius (62 page)

I had been sent by Belisarius to the municipal lime kilns on the first days to see whether any lime was available for making mortar, so that
at least the angles of the walls might be strengthened; but I found only a few bags. Nailed to the wall in the President's office was a parchment document which, since it was no longer valid, I took down and kept as a memento of the siege. I copy it out here as a curiosity. It was the President's official appointment by Theoderich some years previously.

King Theoderich to the Distinguished Faustulus, President of the Lime Kilns, greeting!

It is a glorious labour indeed to serve the City of Rome! Who can doubt that lime, which is snow-white in hue and imponderable as an African sponge, is of mighty service in the construction of the most magnificent edifices? In proportion as it is itself debilitated and broken down by the fierce breath of fire, so does it lend force to massive masonry. It is a dissolvable stone, a petrifying downiness, a sandy pebble which (O wonder) burns the best when abundantly watered, without which stones do not stay nor grains of gravel commodiously cohere.

Therefore we set you, our industrious lord Faustulus, over the burning of lime and its decent distribution; that there may be plenty of this substance available both for public and private works, and that thereby people may be persuaded and encouraged confidently to build and rebuild our beloved City. Perform this well, and you shall be promoted to yet more honourable offices!

When I first read these elegant words I did not know whether to laugh or weep, they seemed so incongruous to the present desolation of the city and the barbarous Camp Latin of the soldiers who now formed its principal population. A philosophical train of thought was started in my mind, about the essentially evil nature of war, however just the cause; which I instantly smothered as monkish Christian and no more congruous to the situation than the document itself. But enough of this.

When King Teudel came within sight of the city he made an immediate attack upon us from the north-east, sending his men in mass against the Nomentan, Tiburtine, and Praenestine Gates. I think that he expected the rebuilt walls to fall at the mere noise of his war-horns, as the walls of Jericho are said to have fallen to the war-horns of Jewish Joshua. I witnessed the cavalry-charge at the Tiburtine Gate, where I was once more at the same task that had me occupied ten years previously – serving a catapult with bolts while my mistress laid the sights. There were 10,000 Gothic lancers drawn up just out of range, and squadron by squadron they charged in column with levelled lances
at the bridge that guarded the gate. It was like pouring wine into a bottle with an obstruction in the neck.

Few indeed of the Goths reached the gate, over a mound of dead and dying, to spit themselves there upon the spears of the phalanx as an Indian bear upon the quills of a porcupine. Their fearful losses were due not merely to our heavy and accurate fire from the walls, with bows, catapults, scorpions, wild asses, but to the iron caltrops which guarded the approach – a device never before used against the Goths. I have remarked that the necessary artisans for the making of new city gates were not available; but the farrier-sergeants of the army had been working night and day, employing all skilled and half-skilled men in the manufacture of these iron caltrops. A caltrop consists of four stout spikes, each a foot in length, fitted to an iron ball at such an angle that all their points are equidistant from one another. Thus, however thrown upon the ground, the caltrop always rests upon a firm triangle of spikes, with one spike sticking threateningly upward. Some call it the ‘Devil's tripod'. The caltrop was the family badge of Belisarius, and was embroidered in gold by my mistress's women upon the white Household standard. The motto read: ‘
Quocunque jeceris, stabit
' – ‘wheresoever you cast it, it will find its feet'. Cavalry cannot pass a position heavily strewn with caltrops unless they first dismount and carry them away one by one; otherwise the horses catch their feet in the spikes and stumble and fall impaled.

Five squadrons in succession charged this fearful barrier. The mound of dead rose higher and higher until every upward spike had spitted a man or a horse. Thus – as the rhetoricians would put it – the bridge became passable at last by reason of its very impassability. There was heavy fighting at the gate, the Gothic infantry being now engaged, and from the flanking-towers stones, boiling water, and beams came showering down upon them. Our spearmen, Isaurians, fought in relays; but since there were only fifty men in each team and the Goths came pressing forward in their hundreds and hundreds, they grew very weary. It was only my mistress's heartening presence and her promise of great rewards to every man who survived the day that kept them at their post. By midday our catapults had exhausted their supply of bolts and the wild-asses had kicked themselves to pieces. I seized a bow and found that I had not altogether forgotten my former archery practice, though my arms were feeble.

There was no pause for dinner, but we snatched mouthfuls of bread
and cheese as we fought, and slaves carried around pitchers of sour wine. In the afternoon it rained heavily, the rain turned to sleet, and our bow-strings became useless. Even soldiers who usually took an honest pleasure in fighting began groaning and cursing in their distress. But the Goths suffered more than we. The approach to the gate became very slippery; our spearmen, to whom my mistress gave rough cloths to tie about their feet, had a great advantage over the enemy, who staggered and slid here and there on their wet leather soles.

The battle ended at nightfall, the Goths being held at every gate. They retired for the night, and we sent out the labourers in gangs with torches to recover bolts and arrows, for which we paid them by the bundle of fifty; while we ourselves cleared the bridges, freeing the bloody caltrops of their dead and taking plunder of golden torques and rings and shirts of mail.

King Teudel attacked again shortly after dawn, and again there was the same dreadful drama of slaughter, and again every bridge was held. I killed a Goth with my second arrow, striking him in the face at short range. They withdrew at noon, pursued by two squadrons of Household cuirassiers from the Praenestine Gate; but rallied a mile away. Our whole cavalry was sent out to support these squadrons. In the battle which followed, bow and arrow once more prevailed over the lance. During these two days 15,000 Goths had been killed and many more carried away seriously wounded. Twenty thousand dead horses also strewed the battlefield. Our total losses were 450,200 of whom were killed in the cavalry engagements.

A few days later the Goths returned to attack for the third time, but with such evident reluctance that Belisarius – who knew better than any general who ever lived, I suppose, exactly when to turn from the defensive to the offensive – went out himself against them with all the cavalry. They say that from a quarter of a mile's distance, with his strongest bow, Belisarius aimed at the Gothic standard-bearer riding ahead of the line. There was a following wind, or the shot would have been impossible: the arrow, falling from a great height, struck the standard-bearer in the groin, and pinned him to the saddle, so that the horse, pricked by the arrow, reared up and threw him. Others, jealous perhaps of Belisarius's feats, claim that the arrow was not fired by Belisarius, but by Sisifried, the guardsman who had survived Isaac's defeat; but if so, Sisifried did something extraordinary and far beyond
his usual powers. The more natural account is that the arrow was Belisarius's, though perhaps Sisifried also aimed one at the standard-bearer.

King Teudel's standard tumbled to the ground; which was the worst of omens. At once our leading squadron charged to seize it, shooting from the saddle as they went, and there was bitter fighting for its possession. Two Gothic lancers were tugging at one end and two Household cuirassiers at the other. A Gothic officer hacked the staff through with a blow of his sword, and our men had to be content with the butt. This same officer chopped off the left forearm of the standard-bearer, because around the wrist was buckled a golden bracelet set with rubies and emeralds which he wished to deny to us. Then the Goths retreated, and in the pursuit lost 3,000 men more. When Belisarius returned that night he had horses to mount the remainder of his Thracians, and every man of them could at last be dressed in a mail shirt. He had lost nine men only.

Teudel broke the siege on the next day, and retired to Tivoli, first destroying all the bridges over the Tiber, upstream from Rome, with the single exception of the Mulvian, which Belisarius had already seized. Teudel was forced to bear the angry reproaches of his surviving noblemen that he had been hoodwinked by Belisarius's letter into sparing Rome from complete destruction. If he had kept to his original threat and levelled the whole city to a sheep-walk, they said, the war would not have taken this evil turn for the Goths. But when he came to Tivoli, he asked them: ‘And suppose all Tivoli had been levelled with the ground? Come now, my lords, the fault at Rome – if fault it was – lies with you; for I entrusted each of you with the pulling down of a part of the Roman ramparts, but you were lazy and left too much standing. Fortunately, you have done the same thing here: so that the credit of quickly rebuilding the walls of Tivoli will be yours, as well as the fault at Rome. To work, to work, and let posterity praise you!'

Belisarius now found the necessary artisans for making new city gates. Soon the task was done and the gates in position. Before the end of February he could send a set of keys to Justinian at Constantinople; asking, in return, for reinforcements to enable him to complete the reconquest of Italy, and money to pay the troops under his command. ‘He gives twice, who gives quickly,' Belisarius wrote, ‘and I trust to make speedy repayment with the person and treasures of another captive king.'

He wrote not once but three times, and my mistress wrote also to Theodora. No reply and no reinforcements came. When he had put the necessary garrisons into Ostia and Civita Vecchia, he stood in greater need of a field army than ever before, and he was now paying the regular troops as well as those of his Household with treasure from his own purse. Nor was it possible, though he tried this, to lay even the smallest taxes upon the impoverished Italians. They possessed neither money nor anything that could be exchanged for money.

Justinian at length replied that he had already sent a large army to Italy under Valerian. He commanded Belisarius and Bloody John (who had not met for three years now) to be reconciled to each other. They were to join forces at Taranto, where this army should by now have arrived.

But Valerian remained for months on the farther shore of the Adriatic, detaching only 300 men for service in Italy. It was no fault of his: Illyria was being raided again – not by Bulgars this time, but by Slavs, in enormous undisciplined numbers – and Valerian had orders not to leave Durazzo until the danger had passed. The general commanding the Imperial Forces in Illyria dared not risk an engagement with the horde of Slavs, but followed ineffectively in their rear from district to district. His caution was due to the mutinous mood of the troops, who had not been paid for several months, and, in lieu of pay, now plundered the already plundered countryside. The whole Diocese had reached the condition described by the Jewish prophet Joel: ‘That which the palmer-worm hath left, hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left, hath the canker-worm eaten; and that which the canker-worm hath left, hath the caterpillar eaten.'

We did not know of this Slav invasion, or of Valerian's delay, and sailed for Taranto cheerfully. With us were all the troops that could be spared from garrison service – a mere 700 horsemen and 200 infantry. I, for one, was not sorry to say good-bye to Rome. As we left the Port of Rome early in June and were carried by a favourable breeze towards the Straits of Messina, we all had hopes of a speedy and victorious return to Constantinople. After passing through the Straits our sailing ships, now towed by the galleys, struggled against the wind along the ‘sole of the buskin', as that part of Southern Italy is called because of its shape on the map. We were headed for Taranto, which lies in the angle of the buskin's high heel. But, to continue this geographical figure, we had not yet passed the ball of the foot when a
tremendous north-easterly gale struck us and we were driven to take refuge at Cotrone, where was the only safe anchorage within a great many miles. At first it seemed a dangerous position: few troops, an unwalled town, the Gothic army not far away, grain scarce, the wind continuing to blow strongly from the north-east. Belisarius persuaded all the able-bodied inhabitants of the town, men and women, to assist his infantry in fortifying the city with a stockaded rampart and a fosse; and sent the 700 cavalry ahead to hold two narrow defiles in the range of mountains, at the instep of the buskin, which enclose and protect this district of Cotrone. But the longer he viewed the situation, the better he liked it. The district was rich in grazing grounds and well stocked with cattle. He pointed out to his officers that the mountains made it a natural fortress, far more convenient for organizing his forces than Taranto. ‘It was a lucky wind blew us here,' he said. ‘This will be the assembly-place of the armies.'

Then, while he supervised the facing of the rampart with stones and the construction of towers, still waiting for the wind to change, disaster came upon him. His 700 horsemen had hardly reached the mountain passes which he had directed them to occupy when they sighted a large force of King Teudel's lancers. These Goths were on the way to besiege Rossano, a neighbouring city on the coast between Cotrone and Taranto. It was in Rossano that Bloody John had stored all his plunder of the last three years, and many Italian noblemen had also taken refuge there. The 700 laid an ambush and routed the lancers, killing 200 of them. But victory gave them a false sense of security, so that with no Belisarius to watch them they neglected their duties, posted no sentries in the passes, despised the enemy. They spent their time foraging in small parties, or playing games, or hunting. King Teudel suddenly came against them in person one day at dawn at the head of 3,000 life-guards and caught them entirely unprepared. They fought bravely, but to no purpose. Teudel's Goths rode down all but fifty of them, who reached Cotrone with the news only a few minutes before the arrival of Teudel. The fortifications of the town were not yet completed, for they were planned on a large scale, and Belisarius had no choice but to re-embark instantly with the 200 infantry and the fifty survivors of his cavalry. Cotrone was left in Teudel's hands. The gale which had delayed our voyage to Taranto was still blowing, and carried us in a single day the whole distance to Messina in Sicily, which is 100 miles.