Absolute Monarchs by John Julius Norwich Read Free Book Online Page B

in Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina , vol. 69, cols. 113–19.
    5. Diptychs were the two-leaved folders in which were inscribed the names of all Christians, living and dead, for whom special prayers were to be made in the liturgies. The striking of a name could thus be taken as a sign of excommunication.

CHAPTER IV

    Gregory the Great
    (590–604)
    J ustinian’s anxieties over the Three Chapters, though largely of his own making, had turned his mind away from his Italian problems. He had always tended to underestimate the Goths; it may well be, too, that the recovery of Rome by the Byzantines in April 547, only four months after its capture by Totila, had confirmed him in his belief that, given only a little more time, the Gothic opposition would crumble of its own accord.
    Alas, it had done no such thing. On January 16, 550, for the second time, a few disaffected members of the imperial garrison had opened the gates to Totila’s men. But whereas in 546 the Goths had entered the city as invaders, they now showed every sign of staying. Many of them had appropriated empty houses and settled in with their families; the Senate was reopened; refugees were encouraged to return to their own homes; damaged buildings were repaired and restored. The following summer, Totila had given still more conclusive evidence of his intentions: he had staged a full-scale revival of the games in the Circus Maximus, personally presiding over them from the imperial box. Meanwhile his fleet was ravaging both Italy and Sicily, returning in 551 loaded to the gunwales with plunder. Those two insults had finally stung Justinian to action. His first choice of commander for the projected new expedition was his own first cousin Germanus, but in the autumn of 550 Germanus died of a fever. Did the emperor now turn, as he had turned twice before, to Belisarius? If so, Belisarius must have refused; for the man chosen for this last attempt to bring Italy back into the imperial fold was a eunuch named Narses, by now well into his seventies.
    The choice was not as perverse as might have been thought. Although Narses had spent most of his life in the Imperial Palace he was not without military experience, having fought with Belisarius in Italy during the former’s first campaign. He was also a superb organizer, strong-willed, and determined, and despite his age and his castration he had lost none of his energy or decisiveness. He had no delusions about the magnitude of his task; by now only four cities in all Italy—Ravenna, Ancona, Otranto, and Crotone—remained under Byzantine control. But he probably knew Justinian better than any other man alive, and he easily persuaded him to make available at least 35,000 men. In the early summer of 552 he marched them into Italy, and toward the end of June, at Taginae near the modern town of Scheggia, the Roman and Gothic armies met for what was to prove the most decisive encounter of the entire war. The Gothic army, progressively outflanked and outfought, fled in panic as the sun was sinking. Totila himself, mortally wounded, took flight with the rest and died in the little village of Caprae (now Caprara) a few hours later. One more battle remained to be fought. Teias, the bravest of Totila’s generals, had determined to continue the struggle, and at the end of October there came the final encounter, just a mile or two from the long-forgotten Pompeii. It was that battle beneath Vesuvius that marked the final defeat of the Goths in Italy. Justinian’s grandest ambition was realized at last.
    But not for long: the war had ushered in a dark age. Italy was a desolation; Milan in the north and Rome in the south lay in ruins. And now, within a few years of the Goths’ departure, a new Germanic horde appeared on the scene: the Lombards under their warlike King Alboin, crossing the Alps in 568, spreading relentlessly over northern Italy and the great plain that still bears their name, finally establishing their capital