The Battle for Rome: Belisarius vs. the Goths

The legacy of General Belisarius

0:00The Roman general, Flavius Belisarius, was the most famous military commander of his generation. He brought large swathes of lost Roman territory in North Africa back under imperial control before going on to reconquer the lost city of Rome itself. He survived a volcanic winter, the bubonic plague, and many jealous attempts to destroy him. But while no one managed to assassinate General Belisarius, his reputation was not so fortunate. The sex scandal and the shame

0:35that was attached to his name would destroy his reputation for generations to come. This is the story of how that happened and the truth behind the general who reconquered Rome. You are listening to Villains and Virgins podcast, and this is episode two in a series on General Belisarius. Now, in episode one, we introduced the man and the beginning of his career and his relationship with the emperor. So if you want more of a deep background, you may want to go check that out. But you don't have to. This episode is entirely self-contained, and you can dive right in to the

1:11conquest to reconquer Rome right here. Now, before we get into all the details of today's story, there

Special course announcements

1:17are a couple of special announcements that I want to make. And the first one is a limited time opportunity. So I'll be teaching a six-week course out of Simon Fraser University on the most famous couple in Spanish history, and that would be Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, their role in the Reconquista and the Spanish Inquisition. Now, what makes this special is that it's a university-offered course, but you don't need to have a university background, you don't have to have taken other university courses before, and there's no essay writing. In fact, any homework attached to the

1:53course is entirely optional. So you have the opportunity to do some additional reading if you'd like, but if you just want to show up and attend the sessions, which are all online, you have that option as well. So the course is beginning on September 9th, and registration opens very soon. If you'd like to join the course, check out the link in the description for today's episode, and you can click on that to get the option to register. Or you can email the podcast, which is villainsandvirginspodcast at gmail.com. But don't delay, because the registration window is very narrow, and the course begins on

2:29September the 9th. Now, if you've been listening to the last few episodes on the podcast, you know I've been on a bit of a deep dive on the history of the Eastern Roman Empire. And there are even more episodes available than the ones you've probably seen, because I do a special monthly bonus episode every month, exclusively for people who support this podcast on Patreon. And the most recent episode was The Woman Who Became Emperor. Yes, she was crowned emperor, not empress, eventually, and she rules in

3:00her own name and issues coinage under that name. She was Irene of Athens, and how she got to be emperor is a bloody story. So you can check that out on the ever-growing library of monthly bonus episodes that are available to supporters of this podcast. Head on over to patreon.com slash Eva Schubert to get access to all of that. And it's not only monthly bonus episodes, there's even Villains and Virgins merch for supporters of the podcast, as well as live history chats that I host every month. So if you want

3:33to have a conversation with me in real time about this episode or anything else historical, that's an

Setting the sixth-century stage

3:38option too. So with all that said, let's set the stage for today's story. General Belisarius lives in the 6th century. He's born in the year 500, and a lot of the events of his life are going to be happening in the first half of the 500s. And at this point, the Roman Empire looks very different. The western half of the empire, which was governed out of the city of Rome, has fallen. Rome itself fell to a guy called Odoacer in 476, and shortly afterwards it was ruled by the Goths. So it's no

4:13longer under imperial control. But that wasn't the end of the Roman Empire, because the Roman Empire also had an eastern capital, the city of Constantinople. And the Roman emperors in that city continued to wear the purple, to dispense Roman law, and to hold Roman triumphs. And we saw one of those happen in our last episode. That happened because General Belisarius had been dispatched on a mission to reclaim a lost Roman province in North Africa. Now, North Africa today seems like a very

4:45hot, almost desert-like environment. But during this period in the 6th century, it was much more fertile, much more agriculturally productive. So Roman territories in North Africa had been part of the breadbasket of the empire for quite some time. So during the time of Belisarius, the emperors in Constantinople still control Egypt, but they've lost control of what is now Tunisia. And that's because a Germanic tribe called the Vandals rolled in there, and they've been ruling it for the last 60 years.

5:17So in our last episode, we saw Belisarius go into North Africa and retake it from the Vandals. And his reward was a classic Roman imperial triumph through the streets of Constantinople, which ended with the Vandal king, Gelimer, being forced to prostrate himself in public before Emperor Justinian. As a result of this amazing military conquest, Belisarius is the most celebrated man in Rome. And he and his wife Antonina receive promotions, they've become incredibly wealthy, and in fact,

5:50they are the most prominent couple in the empire next to Emperor Justinian and his wife Empress Theodora. But Belisarius' next mission will be even more significant. Emperor Justinian is about to dispatch him to Italy to reconquer the lost city of Rome itself. The obvious question to ask here is, why is Emperor Justinian about to begin a war with the Goths in Italy? Why now? After all, the Goths have been in control of Italy and the city of Rome for the last 60 years or so. So why is it at

Justinian attacks the Goths in Italy

6:27this particular moment that Justinian decides it's a good time to make war? Well, there are a number of factors, as you would expect, that influence this decision. So Emperor Justinian is negotiating with this Gothic queen, and he's trying to get her to concede returns of some of the land in Italy back to Justinian's control, back to the Roman Empire. This queen herself is not necessarily supported by all the Goths, and she's doing her own maneuvers to try to keep her position and to minimize the many

6:58threats that the Goths are currently facing. However, all these negotiations were suddenly overturned when the queen of the Goths was murdered. The Goths are now led by a new guy called Theodahad, and any negotiations that Justinian had hoped to conclude suddenly had to go back to the beginning. But Emperor Justinian recognizes that these internal divisions amongst the Goths that have led to the murder of one queen and the sudden promotion of another man to wear the crown make them vulnerable. And so he decides that the moment is right to attack. Now, Justinian also has the luxury of more

7:35resources and more troops available at this moment, because he's just made sort of a truce with the king of Persia. And you might recall from our previous episode, General Belisarius had been very busy on the eastern front fighting the Persians. So it's only because things with the Persians have quieted down for the time being that Emperor Justinian can contemplate sending military and economic resources to a new military campaign. So it was that in the summer of 535, Belisarius and

8:06his army were dispatched to Sicily, the island off the toe of the Italian boot, and they're going to begin their campaign there. Once again, Belisarius takes his wife Antonina with him. And it's important to introduce her into our episode at this point because she's going to play a very large role in many of the key events that are going to unfold. But at this juncture, let me just point out that it wasn't at all usual for Roman generals to bring their wives along with them on military campaigns. It wasn't unprecedented, there had been a few examples of this in history, but it wasn't by any means

8:41routine. So Antonina will be accompanying Belisarius on this and all other major campaigns in this episode. Now at first things in Sicily go extremely well. Many cities just open their gates and let Belisarius and the Romans in without even a fight. And this is happening for two reasons. One, many of the cities in Sicily aren't particularly well fortified, so they're not really in a good position to defend themselves. And this is even more the case because there aren't many Gothic soldiers garrisoned in those cities. So there's nobody there to man the walls. And as a result,

9:16Belisarius and his men essentially walk into and occupy many cities in Sicily. And by December 31st, at the end of 535, they've taken all the major cities in Sicily, and Belisarius and his troops are garrisoned in the city of Syracuse, waiting for their spring marching orders. It was customary for armies at this point to rest during the winter months, and then when the weather improved and the temperatures warmed up in the spring, it was a new campaign season. So the beginning of the Italian campaign in Sicily has been a cakewalk. Unfortunately, Belisarius' progress is going to be rudely

A mutiny in North Africa

9:50interrupted by news of a bit of a mess back in North Africa. So Belisarius had retaken North Africa in a previous episode, but things in that province had gotten out of control as a result of imperial mismanagement. So once Justinian and the government administrators went in there to start taxing people and organizing this reclaimed Roman province, things began to go south. And there were a couple of reasons for this. Number one, North Africa was full of Aryan Christians. Many of the Vandals had converted

10:23to the Aryan form of Christianity. So even though they're conquered, they're still Aryans. But Emperor Justinian is really focused on religious orthodoxy in the Christian Roman Empire, and he wants everybody practicing the right version of Christianity, which according to him is not the Aryan version, it's the Nicene Christian version. And so he begins to regulate religion in North Africa, and say to the Aryan Christian population, you can't practice your religion the way you've been

10:54doing. You need to get the right kind of priest and the right kind of service and fall into line with what we say is the right version of Christianity. So that wasn't particularly popular. Number two, many of the Roman soldiers who'd been on that North African campaign had married Vandal women. Many of these men were expecting to receive parcels of land in North Africa, the same land that had belonged to the women that were now their wives. But Emperor Justinian picked this moment to change imperial policy on this, and he said actually all of this newly conquered land should revert directly to

11:26the emperor. So now you have disgruntled soldiers. And to make matters worse, administrators weren't particularly vigilant about paying people on time. So you have religious resentment, you have land that people expected to get which they're not getting, and then you have pay which is overdue. So these three factors contribute to a mutiny amongst Roman soldiers in North Africa. And Belisarius receives word that he has to leave Sicily, run across the water in the early campaign season of 536, and deal with this

11:58mutiny in North Africa before he can go back to Sicily and resume the Italian campaign plan. This is going to be a trend that we're going to see happen a lot to Belisarius in the rest of this episode. When there's a problem, call Belisarius. So he's been sent to North Africa before, he fixed the situation there, it's a Roman province, and then he's off to Italy, he's going to retake that. But now there's a problem in North Africa, not caused by him, but Belisarius is going to have to go and mop that up before being sent back to Italy. And we're going to see this go on again and again,

12:31which tells you a lot about how effective Belisarius was. That when there's a problem, he's the guy who gets the call, he's the one who's sent in to fix it, because he's got a very high success rate. Unfortunately for Belisarius, there are some problems that even he can't solve.

The volcanic winter of 536

12:48And so before he can get back to reconquering Italy, we have to talk about another disaster that's going to affect not only Belisarius, but the entire world as he knows it. And scientists and historians talk about this as a climate crisis in 536. What they think happened was a series of massive volcanic eruptions. And these were so large that they actually changed the climate and the temperature for a number of years. And this happens because really large volcanic eruptions spew gases and

13:24ash high up into the atmosphere. So this created a thick haze that actually masked the light of the sun for months and years. It's sometimes called a volcanic winter. And people who lived through it said that the light of the sun was no brighter than the moon. Again, this was not just for a period of a few months. This affected weather, temperature, and crops for something like a decade. And it was the coldest summer in more than 2000 years. Again, it wasn't just a single summer. It was a series of summers that

14:00were affected by this. So apart from the eerily gray skies and the disconcertingly cold temperatures, the other really important outcomes of this were economic. Because if your summer is cold, crops begin to fail. And when crops begin to fail, there are food shortages. So then you have people who are hungry and desperate. These conditions are going to affect not only Belisarius and the city of Constantinople, but most of Europe for the next decade. We have to keep this in mind because not only did it have

14:33massive economic impacts, which are going to affect things like the amount of money and troops that will be available for Belisarius in the next decade, but we also have to remember that many people at the time would have seen this kind of an event as a portent of divine displeasure. Something in the heavens that signaled that something very wrong had happened or something worse was coming. And so Belisarius and everybody he knows are going to be living through colder, hungrier times for the next decade. And so it

15:06is. In the strangely cool and dim summer of 536, just after mopping up a mutiny in North Africa, Belisarius receives his marching orders to sail from Sicily into the mainland of Southern Italy and resume his campaign against the Goths. Once again, it goes well initially in places like Calabria. Many cities do not have enough defenders and he and his troops are able to walk in and take possession until they get to the city of Naples. Now, Naples is one of the largest and most important cities

The siege and fall of Naples

15:39in Southern Italy. And the Goths were aware of this as well, which is why they left a reasonably sized garrison in charge of defending it. The city also had excellent fortifications. And so the Goths in the city felt fairly confident that they could defend it. As a result, when Belisarius and his troops roll up outside the walls of the city, they make the usual offer to the inhabitants. Surrender now without a fight and you can all leave safely. We'll make you a nice deal. Nobody needs to die. We don't need to have pillaging and violence. You can just hand it over

16:14to us. But the Gothic soldiers stationed inside were fairly confident that they could defend the city. And so they refused to surrender. The siege of Naples began. Now, you may think of a siege as immediately lobbing rocks and projectiles at the walls, but that's not normally the first priority. Belisarius knew that the first thing he needed to do was to cut off food and water supplies to the city. So you have to identify the points at which food and water can enter the city, and you have to systematically choke them off. That's far more important than lobbing projectiles.

16:48You get to that part later. The city of Naples was supplied by a number of aqueducts, being a Roman city. And the Romans were famous for building these aqueducts. You can still see them in many cities across the world. And sometimes they're above ground and look like large walls, and they channel water from sometimes miles and miles away. So General Belisarius has to find all these points and he has to cut the aqueducts so that they're no longer channeling water into Naples. Belisarius got his men to do all this, but the siege of Naples was threatening to

17:21drag on for longer than expected because Naples had wells inside the city. And so they weren't entirely dependent on aqueducts bringing water from outside. They could actually access groundwater from their wells inside the city walls. And this meant that they could potentially hold out for a lot longer. Then Belisarius had an incredible stroke of luck, or just a really curious soldier. Apparently one of his men decided to poke around in one of these aqueducts,

17:52which were already centuries old at this point, having been built in the early imperial days of Rome, and sometimes even before. And so this soldier had a curiosity to see the work of the ancient Romans in constructing these incredible aqueducts, and he went up inside one and was poking around. What he discovered was a gap in the aqueduct that could potentially lead into the city. It was a very small opening, but if that opening were enlarged, you could get men through it. And so instead of

18:24channeling water into the city, the aqueduct could become a secret tunnel for channeling men into it. When Belisarius was advised of this opening in the aqueduct, he immediately gave orders to have his men work on enlarging it. And once it was big enough, he assigned 400 men to go through this secret tunnel that they had created into the walls of Naples. They were tasked with carrying torches, because of course they'd be operating in the pitch black, and they brought a few trumpets with them.

18:55So 400 men are now trying to sneak as soundlessly as possible through this secret tunnel into the city of Naples. Now apparently, halfway through, 200 of these guys lost their nerve, and they decided to turn back. Perhaps they were claustrophobic, perhaps it was too dark, but they go all the way back to Belisarius, and they've abandoned the mission. Belisarius immediately selects another 200 men and sends them right back into the aqueduct to go after the first batch. But the 200 men who had abandoned the

19:26mission were so shamed by this that they also turned around and followed their reinforcements back into the tunnel. So now you have 600 men making their way through this secret tunnel. And even when they're trying to be quiet, 600 men could make a lot of noise. So Belisarius needs to set up some kind of a distraction. He has some of his men speaking to goth soldiers on the walls, near where this secret tunnel is located. And his men are loudly telling these goths, you need to surrender, otherwise we're going to do terrible things, but if you make a deal with us and

20:00you open the wall, you guys can get out without harm. And the goths are yelling back at them all sorts of defiant things. And with this noise, they're distracted from the sounds of shuffling feet and soldiers making their way into the city. Once the men are through, they quickly attack and kill the gothic soldiers on that part of the wall. And then they blow their trumpets, which is a signal to Belisarius and the rest of the army outside the gates to begin an all-out assault. Between the men

20:31inside and the army outside, they succeed in opening the gates and sacking the city of Naples. So the city of Naples falls. And when we talk about sacking, we mean that soldiers are going house to house and grabbing anything that seems valuable. They're taking money, they're taking jewels, they're taking anything that's worth anything and appropriating it for themselves. And this includes people. Women and children were usually made captives and slaves. This was standard procedure for the Roman army and many other armies at this period. But here's where Belisarius intervenes.

21:06He tells his men that the women and children that they've grabbed and taken captive need to be returned to their families inside the city of Naples. This is really unusual. And doubtless, there were men in the army who deeply resented it because taking people captive and then selling them as slaves was incredibly profitable. But Belisarius says, we're not doing this. And the reason why is that he wants the people of Naples and of Italy to regard the Romans more as liberators than as an

21:36oppressive conquering force. And so they're not likely to think well of the Romans if their women and children have just been captured, raped, and enslaved. So Belisarius demands that these people be handed back to their families. But still, massive amounts of wealth in Naples were confiscated as a standard reward for the soldiers on that mission. The fall of Naples had immediate repercussions for the Goths as well. Specifically, many Goths were disgusted with their leader, King Theohadad,

22:06who had failed to send reinforcements or prevent the fall of Naples. Also, he'd been busy engaged in secret negotiations with Emperor Justinian about getting a nice deal for himself if he handed over pieces of Gothic territory. As a result, the fall of Naples leads directly to the fall of King Theohadad. The Goths find themselves a new leader, a king they call Vityges, sometimes called Wityges, depending on which source you're reading. It's a W or a V. But this king has much more stomach

22:38for the fight ahead. General Belisarius' work has just gotten harder. After taking Naples,

Marching into the city of Rome

22:45Belisarius was keen to march on the city of Rome itself. Now, Rome was located some 140 miles or 200 kilometers north of Naples, and he wanted to get there before the end of this campaign season. After all, Rome wasn't just any city. It was THE Imperial City, the place where the Roman Empire began. It had been outside of imperial control since 476, and Belisarius wanted to be the man who took it back. Belisarius and his men march for eight days along a well-established road

23:21called the Via Latina, or the Latin Way, that takes them in the direction of Rome. And on the way, they receive even better news. The people of Rome are willing to let them into the city without a fight. They've taken note of what happened to Naples, and they have no desire to see their own wealth confiscated in a sack of their city. So they make the decision that they're going to open the gates. And as a result, on December the 9th, 536, General Belisarius and his men march into Rome. The Gothic

23:53garrison that had been left to defend that city marches out of a gate in the back at about the same time. Because once they realize that the people of the city are willing to open the gates, there's absolutely no point in them attempting to stay and defend a city that the people themselves are willing to hand over. So it's an amazingly bloodless seizure of this lost imperial capital. Imagine how General Belisarius felt marching through the gates of the Eternal City. This was the place where it had all

24:23begun. This was the city in which the dream of the Roman Empire unfolded. Here was where Julius Caesar had his triumph. Here the first Roman Senate. This was a city that had been lost to the Empire for the last 60 years. And now, under General Belisarius' command, they had it back. It must have been a moment that dreams were made of. Of course, General Belisarius didn't have much time to get nostalgic in the Roman forum. He knew that the Goths would soon be back, with much larger numbers. And so now that it was

24:59December and the end of the fighting season for 536, Belisarius has his men busy checking out the fortifications of the city and laying in as much food and supplies as they possibly can in preparation for next season. He also wrote to Emperor Justinian requesting reinforcements. The army that he'd been sent to Italy with was already smaller than the roughly 20,000 that he probably had at his disposal for his Vandal campaign in North Africa. And the Goths were going to be returning with a much

25:31larger force. So Belisarius is doing everything he possibly can to prepare for that confrontation. Sure enough, by March of 537, General Belisarius receives word that a Gothic army is marching toward Rome. Now, Procopius, who's traveling with Belisarius at this point and writing an official history of these campaigns sometime later, gives an enormous figure for the Gothic army. It's something like 140,000. And we can't take that figure seriously. Military historians who look at the actual strategy

26:05that Belisarius employed with his men, and that the Goths employed with theirs, say that it's entirely impossible that the Goths brought that many men. The strategies the Goths used indicate that they didn't have enough men to entirely encircle the city. And if they'd had 140,000, that would have been plenty. So this number is somewhat inflated, and that's not surprising. When Procopius is writing his official history of the wars, he very likely inflated the numbers for enemy forces, because this just made the Romans look

26:36even more heroic when they fought them. Although we don't know the exact number of Goths versus Romans, it's a fair assumption that the Romans were significantly outnumbered. And Belisarius is working to delay the arrival of this Gothic army outside the walls of the city of Rome. So as part of this, he orders his soldiers to construct a tower over a bridge just outside the city walls. He's hoping that this tower will be a defensive structure that can be used to fire on the Goths and slow their advance toward the city. When construction of the tower was finished, Belisarius rode out with a

27:10thousand cavalrymen to inspect the structure. But what he found was a rude surprise. The tower was finished, but the men who had been left behind to garrison that tower had fled. And they fled because they saw a huge Gothic army on the horizon coming toward the tower. And they realized they were going to be hopelessly outnumbered and would be slaughtered. So they just fled. So he rolls up thinking he's doing a routine inspection and instead finds himself confronting arriving units of an enemy army.

27:40Now, fortunately, the Gothic army wasn't expecting to meet him either. So they weren't formed up and ready for combat. But neither were they prepared to simply sit on their horses and exchange civil greetings. What happens is an immediate desperate battle between Belisarius and his cavalry units and these arriving units of the Gothic army. Belisarius is in the thick of this. He's swinging his sword, cutting down Goths in every direction. Meanwhile, his own personal guard are desperately trying to keep him alive by bringing their shields up and trying to minimize the amount of fire that he comes

28:15under because he is, after all, their general. But the chances that Belisarius could die in this encounter are excellent. It's a very risky, very difficult moment. Belisarius and his cavalry managed to force some of the Goths back in disorder, creating a little bit of room. And then it's time to get the hell out of there because they are in no way equipped to take on the entire Gothic army. And they had the element of surprise which worked in their favor in their skirmish with these initial units. But as

28:46more Goths arrive and they're now aware of Belisarius and his men and able to organize, there's no chance they're going to survive if they stick around. So having created a bit of space, they turn tail and gallop back to the nearest section of the Roman wall, hoping to get behind those fortifications as quickly as possible. And they know that there are Goths already pursuing them at a gallop. So here is Belisarius galloping toward the wall with a few hundred men, covered in dust and gore. And behind

29:17him are Gothic military units also galloping at full speed, many of them covered in dust and blood. Now from the perspective of the guys on the Roman wall, they're not entirely sure who's who. They can see there's a Gothic army coming, but these guys who are riding at the front really, really fast, are they Goths? Are they friendlies? We don't know. And so with an army behind them, and this aggressive ride toward the wall, the men in charge of defending it say, we're not opening the gate. So imagine now Belisarius

29:51and his men, they've arrived at the wall, they're desperately pounding on the gate to be let in, having managed to outrun the Goths so far, they need to get inside to safety, and the guys behind the gate are saying, nope, we're not opening it, we don't know who you are. At this moment they realize that they're about to die. They're pinned between a door that's not opening and an army that's closing the distance. So Belisarius and his men turn around to face the Gothic army, and they decide to do the only thing they

30:22can do. They murmur some prayers, they form up, and they charge. These men in this moment believed that they were about to die. And how could you not? But better to go down fighting than to be pinned between a wall of swords and a wall of stones. So there's this heroic charge as Belisarius and his men swords up, yelling at the top of their lungs, charge with this incredible ferocity into the far larger number of Goths that are coming to kill them. And here's this incredible moment. Their charge is so

30:59ferocious that the Goths are forced back in disarray, and the men behind the wall now realize, oh, these guys aren't Goths. Look, they just killed a bunch of Goths. So when Belisarius and his men wheel around one more time, the gate opens, they ride through it at top speed, the gate comes down, and they're inside. They've cheated death twice that day. This is one of my favorite stories about Belisarius because it demonstrates something about the man and his character under the most intense

31:30conditions. I mean, first he has to organize his men to face a Gothic army and stay alive, and then he has to do it again when there's even less hope that they're going to survive. The idea that that second cavalry charge would have worked, that any of them could have hoped to survive, is highly unlikely. So here's a man, literally between an army and a hard place, telling his men, well boys, if we're going to go out, this is how it's going to be. They couldn't have predicted that they would have had enough space, that the Goths would have retreated enough as a result of that

32:04charge, that they would actually get a second chance to survive. That's what happened, but that was sheer good fortune, and not what any of them could have predicted. So Belisarius is now safe inside the city, covered in dust and blood and pumped full of adrenaline, and he's done these two battles while fasting, which I think makes it even more incredible. Because if you've ever tried fasting for a day or multiple days, you'll know that your energy level is low, you feel exhausted all the time,

32:36and so to be fighting not once but twice desperately for your life under those conditions is just a little bit extra. So why is Belisarius fasting? Well, Belisarius is a very religious man, and this is the thing about the Roman Empire in the sixth century. It's a Christian Roman Empire, and not everyone who calls themselves Christian is the same level of devoted, but Belisarius is one of the devoted ones. And we know this because regularly throughout his life, he's rigorous about observing fast

33:06days, when Christians are supposed to abstain from certain types of food, or sometimes all food altogether. So Belisarius had been doing this on this day. He's now inside the city, evening comes, and his wife Antonina comes to him with a few of Belisarius' friends. And she comes to try to convince him to eat. Because despite the kind of day that he's had, despite cheating death twice, Belisarius is still trying to maintain his fast, because those are the rules. And he's a disciplined man, and he's trying

33:39to stay by those rules. And his wife is coming with reinforcements, good friends of his, saying, listen, listen, husband, you need to eat. Because we need you to be able to defend the city, to give everyone the directions they need to avoid the raping and the murdering and the slaughter that's going to happen if those Goths get over the walls. So under these conditions, please eat some bread. It's just bread, it's still very austere, but these are special circumstances, and you need to eat some food. And the

34:11other thing that's interesting about this moment is, again, it gives us a glimpse into the relationship that Belisarius has with his wife. First of all, she's with him on this campaign. It's a dangerous campaign. Antonina's physical safety is not guaranteed if the Goths get into that city, by any means. And even if they don't, she's going to be right next to her husband during a siege, with all of the difficulty and the food deprivation and the stress that that entails. She could very easily have been comfortably at home in Constantinople. She doesn't need to be here. There was no social expectation of her being here,

34:46quite the opposite. And here she is, coming to her husband in this desperate time, trying to look out for his physical health, and trying to persuade a man who's got a very disciplined, very stubborn character that really he needs to bend the rules a little bit for the good of everyone concerned. Now we have Belisarius arranging his men inside the city of Rome to defend it, and we have the Goths, under the leadership of their new king, Vitigis, arranged outside the walls. And they're doing the same things Belisarius did to Naples. They're cutting off the aqueducts that bring water into the city,

35:20they're trying to ensure that no food and no water is going to get inside, so that very quickly, Belisarius and his men and the population of civilians inside the city will begin to suffer from thirst and hunger. That's the idea. But the Gothic king sends a message to Belisarius, very standard, saying, here we are, we've surrounded the city, we've cut you off, this is your opportunity to surrender. And if you surrender now, we'll give you a nice deal and you can leave in safety. We don't have to have the whole pillaging, sacking, murder part of this equation.

Endurance through a brutal siege

35:52But this is your opportunity. And Belisarius writes back to the Gothic king and he says, for as long as I live, I will not relinquish Rome. So that was that then. The Gothic army begins building their siege engines and soon after they're going to be lobbing projectiles at the walls. This siege, which begins in March of 537, is going to last a year and nine days. It's going to be a very protracted affair. And Belisarius is prepared for this. One of the things that he does at this

36:24juncture is to instruct his army to send away all women and children so that there are not as many mouths to feed inside the city. So send these people back to Naples, get them out of Rome, because we're going to need to hold on here for a very long time. And obviously the more mouths we have to feed, the faster we're going to go through our food supplies. So women and children are leaving the city. This also tells you that there were other women traveling with the Roman army. So it was quite unusual for a high-ranking Roman woman like Antonina to be there. But soldiers may have brought their

36:59own slaves or concubines. There were prostitutes. Presumably there were also civilians inside Rome. So these are people who are being sent away. But Antonina is not being sent away. She doesn't leave the city as part of this exodus. And that's because Belisarius considers her too important to send away. And she's going to have a major role in the events of this siege as we shall see. The first of these moments where Antonina plays a really significant role happens quite early on in the siege. And it

37:30also tells us again something about the relationship between Belisarius and Antonina. And we have to take a close look at this because that relationship is the key to the slander that's used to eventually destroy Belisarius reputation. So there's a reason why I'm dwelling on the things we know before we get to the things that are said later. So what happens is the pope in Rome receives a summons from General Belisarius. So he's supposed to come and see the general in the quarters that he has inside the city.

38:02And the pope at this time is a guy called Silvarius. So Silvarius owes his position as pope to the previous gothic king. He was essentially approved by that king and placed in that position rather than being elected by churchmen as was the normal procedure at the time. And so he's seen as a gothic sympathizer. Somebody who has close connections to the goths and who even now may be engaged in treasonous communication with the goths. So it's an important measure to eliminate anyone inside the city who might be

38:37passing information or intelligence to the enemy goth army outside. So Silvarius is summoned to the house where Belisarius is staying. And this scene comes to us from multiple sources. It's not just Procopius, who later writes such terrible things about Belisarius and Antonina, but multiple different sources talk about this meeting. Silvarius comes into the room and he finds General Belisarius and his wife Antonina waiting for him. And apparently it's Antonina who initiates the conversation quite aggressively.

39:08And she says something like, tell us, Pope Silvarius, what have we done to you that you would turn us over to the murderous hands of the goths. So it's a pretty aggressive, pretty accusatory opening. And that's because this is not a conversation. This is a deposition. Shortly after Antonina says this, there are other people who come forward and strip Pope Silvarius of his robes of office. So he's now being deposed as pope. He's no longer going to be pope. He's dismissed. And he's going to be

39:40sent out of Rome along with a number of Roman senators who are also seen as gothic sympathizers and people who might be passing information to the goths and trying to make comfortable exit deals for themselves by betraying Belisarius and his army. And what's interesting about this moment is that Antonina and Belisarius are visibly working together. Antonina is not just present in the room quietly as some sort of moral support. She is very much in a front row active role here. In fact,

40:11she initiates the charges. And in many ways, this scene of Antonina and Belisarius side by side, exercising power, parallels the way Justinian and Theodora, the emperor and empress, were operating at this time. Where we have seen in our previous series on Justinian and Theodora, that the empress was accorded equal honors to Justinian, that he insisted that people show her the same level of deference and respect that they showed him. And so we see that Antonina is sitting in a very

40:43equal role to Belisarius in this position, and she's actively exercising authority here.

40:54After getting rid of Pope Silvarius, a new pope, whose name is Vigilus, was then appointed under Belisarius and Antonina. So they essentially preside over installing him in office. And he's a candidate who was very likely already approved by Empress Theodora. And as we discussed in our series on the empress and the emperor, she had her own theological issues that she was trying to settle in the empire. So she was hoping that by choosing Vigilus as pope, this would be someone who was more willing to work with the emperor and empress on finding some

41:29kind of collaborative solution to the theological disputes that were tearing the Christian communities in the empire apart. As the months of the siege dragged on, food began to run short in Rome. But the good news was that the city of Naples was still under Roman imperial control. And when General Belisarius had written to the emperor to ask for reinforcements, they were sent. So at this point, Belisarius is expecting some 5,000 men from the east to arrive in Naples. So Belisarius sends his

42:02secretary, Procopius, the same Procopius who's going to be writing the official history of this war, and who will later write an unofficial secret history that we'll talk more about. So Procopius is going, and Belisarius' wife Antonina is going on a special mission to Naples. Their job is to gather as many provisions as they can in Naples and bring them back to Rome, which is of course quite challenging because Rome is under siege and the Gothic army is there to ensure that food doesn't get into Rome.

42:32But that's where those 5,000 reinforcements are going to come in handy. So Antonina is in charge of this mission to coordinate with Roman officers and to gather supplies and then make a plan so that the Roman reinforcements are going to distract the Gothic army and allow these desperately needed food supplies to get into the city. Now Procopius is the one who gives us the written record of this, and predictably he tries to minimize Antonina's role. He can't deny the fact that she was there and that she

43:06was sent on this mission, but he tries to position himself as the one who was really in charge of doing this important work. But this is quite frankly unbelievable. And that's because Antonina was a patrician. She was a high-ranked noble Roman woman. She was the wife of the general. The idea that she would be playing second fiddle to her husband's secretary and sort of acting as an assistant while he had the important conversations with military officers and made the important plans is ridiculous. That's how

43:37Procopius would like to be remembered, but it's not likely an account of the facts. Antonina is there because Belisarius considers her to be his right hand, someone that he can trust to organize this desperately needed mission. Antonina sends word to Belisarius that they're on their way. The 5,000 Roman reinforcements begin marching from Naples north to Rome, and Antonina and Procopius follow sailing and supply ships loaded with food along the coast. Coordinating with Belisarius, they decide that

44:09he's going to launch an assault on the Goths to distract them while these Roman reinforcements arrive. So they're going to keep the Goths tied up and busy, and this is going to buy some space for Antonina to get the food off the ships and into the city of Rome, which is no easy task. After conversing with several of the officers in the army, Antonina decides on a strategy of moving the food from the supply ships into small little rowboats and essentially rowing them up the river Tiber and

44:40into the city of Rome, and that's how they get the food inside. These reinforcements and the food supplies allow Belisarius and his men to continue holding on until finally the Goths give up. So the siege of Rome ends in March of 538. After lasting for a year and nine days, the Goths decide to burn their army camps, turn around, and leave Rome. It's no longer encircled. They're moving on to regroup somewhere else. Once again, Antonina had chosen to be with her husband Belisarius on this campaign.

45:12She'd been living with him in Rome under siege, as food shortages made life increasingly difficult for everyone. And we have no reason to believe that Belisarius was the sort of guy who was hoarding food for himself so that he and his staff could eat comfortably while his men were surviving on half or quarter rations. That's not the kind of character that he had. So if Belisarius' men weren't eating very much, you can be fairly certain that Belisarius was also living on diminished rations, which means so was his wife. And it's not just about being hungry. There's the ever-present threat

45:47of being overrun, so the violence of the Goths getting into the city, but also the less obvious but more deadly threat of disease. Because when people are living in close quarters without much water, and their bodies are weakened by hunger, they become incredibly vulnerable to disease. And in many siege situations, you have outbreaks of disease that kill as many or sometimes far more people than the actual fighting itself. So all of these are hazards that Antonina voluntarily exposes herself

46:19to. And then when Belisarius needs someone he can trust to coordinate bringing men and food into the city, she's the one that he sends and she comes through. Of course, the end of the siege of Rome wasn't the end of the entire Italian campaign. The fighting would drag on for another two years, and we simply don't have the space here today to cover all the events that happened in that period. But we're going to look at how it ends, because it's quite a surprise and it's very dramatic. It was early in the year 540 that

46:51Emperor Justinian sends a couple of envoys to the Gothic king with an offer for peace. And the emperor's offer is this, we'll let the Goths keep all of Italy north of the Po River, which is really not much of Italy. If you look at the Po River on a map, it essentially runs east-west in the northern part of Italy. So it's the top 25%. Milan and Venice are in that zone. The other 75% of the country is south of the Po River. So Justinian is saying, we're going to keep everything south of this river, you guys can have this northern

47:25portion above the river, and we'll call it peace. Emperor Justinian is keen to draw things to a rapid end point in Italy at this moment, because he now has other problems. Things have heated up with the Persians on his eastern border, and the Persians are a formidable enemy. The Persians were simply too powerful an enemy to fight with one hand. Justinian needs to bring his star general, Belisarius, and many of the troops that are currently on the Italian campaign back to the eastern front.

47:57And there are other pressures that are coming to bear on imperial resources as well. Remember, we're still dealing with volcanic winter. So there are crop shortages, there's hunger, there are just fewer resources overall at the emperor's disposal, and he can't afford to be fighting two different wars on two different fronts. So the emperor's priority is to put an end to the Italian campaign, and redeploy his resources and his general to face the Persians in the east. But this peace plan

48:28was not welcomed by General Belisarius. And when you think about it from his perspective, it's not hard to see why. He'd been fighting really hard in Italy for the last five years. He'd endured living a full year of siege in the city of Rome. He now has the Goths on the run, and the Gothic king Vitigis holed up in the city of Ravenna. From where Belisarius is sitting, he's been fighting hard for five years, and total victory looks like it's just within reach. So it really

48:58runs against all his instincts to now sign off on this imperial peace plan, which from his perspective is far too generous to the Goths. It gives the Goths way more than they deserve. Belisarius is thinking, if I can just keep the pressure on a little bit more, I could have a total victory, or at least a much more significant settlement than the terms of this overly generous peace plan. So Belisarius just can't bring himself to sign off on this offer. And this makes the Goths very suspicious. They're thinking, well, is this a real offer? We know this General Belisarius guy. We've been fighting him for

49:33five years. If he's not willing to sign it and put his stamp on it, then maybe it's just an imperial trick. Maybe this is not really a peace offer at all. So the Goths approach General Belisarius himself, and they make him an offer. And they say, listen, we're willing to surrender to you if you will be crowned Emperor of the West. And we will serve under you as Western Roman Emperor. Think about this moment for just a second, because it tells you so much about the Goths

50:05and about Belisarius himself. First of all, the Goths are willing not just to surrender to Belisarius, but to serve under his command. This is an indication of the respect in which they held Belisarius. You don't volunteer to serve under the command of someone that you have contempt for. So at the very least, we know that the Goths had a high level of respect for Belisarius as a warrior and as a leader, as someone who could be trusted to keep his word. Secondly, this idea of a Western

50:36Roman Emperor wasn't an unprecedented situation. In fact, the Roman Empire had been in a scenario where it had an emperor in the East, in Constantinople, and an emperor in the West, for centuries. So the Goths are simply saying, let's return to an arrangement that we've all seen before. Now what the Goths are proposing here is not an unprecedented situation. The idea that the Roman Empire could have more than one emperor wasn't new. In fact, that had been the situation under which Rome was conquered

51:08in 476 by Odoacer. There had been an emperor in the West ruling out of Rome, and he was ruling the Western half of the Empire, and there was an emperor in the East, in Constantinople, ruling the Eastern half of the Empire. This idea of the empire divided and more than one emperor working together goes all the way back to Emperor Diocletian in the late 200s. So the Goths are essentially saying, let's return to a situation that we're all familiar with. Emperor Justinian will continue being emperor over there in

51:39the East, and you, Belisarius, will take over here in the West. You'll be the Western Roman Emperor, and we will happily serve under your command. From Belisarius' perspective, this is a little bit of a Lord of the Rings moment. Forgive me if you're one of those people who haven't read or watched the Lord of the Rings, but there's this idea of the ring as representing ultimate power, and this is essentially a moment where Belisarius is being offered the ring. You can be emperor. And this offer is so seductive that it had successfully turned many a Roman

52:12general before him, who had had the same amount of military victory and popularity as Belisarius. It was very common for generals who had had the amount of success that Belisarius enjoyed to develop imperial ambitions of their own and say, why not me to rule the empire? And so here, Belisarius doesn't even have to campaign. It's being offered to him on a silver plate, and Belisarius, unlike many other Roman generals in his position, says no. But he doesn't say it out

52:46loud. Belisarius, in his heart, will not do this because he's very loyal to Emperor Justinian, he's a man of his word, he's sworn not to lead a rebellion, and he's not going to do it, even when it's being offered to him. But to the Goths, he says something else. He says, okay, that sounds like a reasonable plan. I will come to the city of Ravenna, where the Gothic king, Vitigius, is trapped, and I'll go through with this plan. Now, this is a really dangerous moment. Belisarius is exposing himself to the charge of treason, because in order to fool the Goths,

53:21he has to say that he's going along with this plan. What if some of his officers report to Justinian that General Belisarius has agreed with the Goths that he's going to be Emperor in the West? So Belisarius has to play this really dangerous game of fooling the Goths enough that they think he's going along with the plan for a little while, but not allowing his officers and soldiers to understand what he's doing so that word goes back to Justinian, and Justinian decides he has a traitorous general on his hands. So Belisarius literally sends some of his officers away so that they're not even along

53:56for the ride, and he goes into Ravenna having made this agreement with the Goths. And once he's inside the city, he grabs hold of the Gothic king and puts him under custody. He grabs the Gothic treasury, so he takes all their money and their resources, and then the Goths say, okay, that's fine. Now, when are we having your coronation ceremony? And this is when Belisarius says, actually never. I'm a loyal general, I serve Emperor Justinian, and I have no plans to make myself emperor. Belisarius took the Gothic treasury and the Gothic king, Vitigius, loaded them onto his ships, and headed

54:30back to Constantinople at the end of the summer in 540. He had managed to take the city of Ravenna without a fight. He did have the Gothic treasury, but there was no peace deal. However, it's highly unlikely that any agreement that Belisarius might have signed would have lasted very long in any case. Belisarius is welcomed back by Emperor Justinian, but he doesn't receive a formal Roman triumph, the way he did at the end of his successful campaign against the Vandals in North Africa.

55:00And this might be because Emperor Justinian was a bit wary of Belisarius' incredible popularity and fame. After all, history had taught again and again that the biggest threat to a sitting emperor was a very successful general. So he's congratulated, he's rewarded, but things are a little bit quieter, and very soon Justinian will be sending Belisarius to the eastern front to deal with the pressing

Procopius and the secret history

55:28threat of the Persians. We've seen how and why Belisarius earned his fame and built his incredible career. But now it's time to take a look at why his reputation was so heavily damaged. And in order to do that, we have to talk about Procopius. So Procopius is a very important and a very difficult source for the history of this period. As we've seen, he was working as Belisarius' secretary for many years. And so he had a front row seat to a lot of these military campaigns against the Vandals and

56:02against the Goths. And some years later, he writes an official history of these wars. It's a multi-volume set of different books where he gets into great detail of all the battles and the events that happened on these campaigns. And without Procopius writing on this score, we would know far less about the period. So Procopius writes these official histories of Belisarius and his military campaigns. And in these histories, Belisarius comes off looking great. He's portrayed as a brave general,

56:33a man of principle and loyalty and virtue. And while we can imagine that Procopius sometimes massaged the facts, you know, giving us inflated numbers for enemy forces, or perhaps refining the language that Belisarius is supposed to have used for certain speeches or letters, just for the record, there's a large accountability for these facts. I mean, when Procopius publishes these books, as he does during his lifetime, they're going to be read by a large numbers of people who were there.

57:04And so Procopius can't really make too much up. There were thousands of men on these campaigns who were also there and know what happened. So he has to stay pretty close to the record of what actually did occur. The problem with Procopius is that years after that, he writes another document. This one is called The Secret History. And it's absolutely full of scandal, slander, and the most venomous accusations against the four most important people in the empire at the time.

57:38And those were, of course, Emperor Justinian, his wife, Empress Theodora, Procopius' former boss, Belisarius, and Belisarius' wife, Antonina. And the secret history is full of the most bizarre accusations. For example, Procopius will tell you that Emperor Justinian was actually a demon king, and that he wandered the palace at night without his head. His head just sort of floated along and went on its own adventures. Procopius will tell you that Emperor Justinian was actually a

58:09demon king. They are over the top, and they are the wildest, most salacious, most outrageous things you can imagine. And all four of the main characters in the secret history are absolutely vilified. Empress Theodora is this angry, venomous woman who harbors grudges for a lifetime and is merciless at hunting down her enemies. She never has a benevolent or kind reason for doing anything. And Belisarius' wife, Antonina, comes out as even worse. Even worse than Empress Theodora, who Procopius is happy to talk

58:45about her past as a prostitute. But Antonina gets an even worse treatment. And as for Belisarius, well, you're about to see what happens to him. And I should mention at this point that unlike his official histories, his books on the wars that Belisarius conducted, Procopius' document, the secret history, the scandal sheet, was never published in his lifetime. And the reasons for that are very interesting. Procopius himself tells you in the preamble of his secret history that he can't publish this during his lifetime because he would be punished. And he wants you to believe

59:18that he would be punished for telling you the truth, the real, ugly, scandalous truth about the four most important people in the empire. But it's equally likely that Procopius would be punished for telling the most slanderous lies about the four most important people in the empire. And the reasons why he would write something that was full of lies, we'll explore in just a little bit. But let's focus on Antonina. Procopius wants to portray her as a villain. According to the secret history,

59:49Antonina is busy cheating on her husband Belisarius with their adopted son, a guy called Theodosius, who's probably still in his late teens. So it's not just adultery. It's the most scandalous, incestuous form of adultery. And it's happening inside the household. And Procopius would have you believe that Antonina is doing this for years. That she is just overcome with this incredibly improper, disgusting, lust for this young man who she should be acting as a parent toward, but she's basically enlisted him

1:00:26as her lover and is cheating with him every chance she gets. So to give you an example of this, in the secret history, Procopius is talking about a moment during the Vandal campaign. And the Vandal campaign was in North Africa. And Belisarius apparently walks in on his wife, Antonina, who's with him on this campaign, and their adopted son, Theodosius. And they're in some underground room. It's basically a treasure seller. There's all kinds of Vandal wealth that's been confiscated as part of the military campaign. And Belisarius walks in on them in this room, just his wife and Theodosius. And he

1:00:59says, well, what's going on here? And Procopius would have you believe that Theodosius' belt was sort of hastily tied, suggesting that it had been untied. And why? Because Theodosius and Antonina were going to be having sex in this room. That was why they were down there together. But Antonina says to Belisarius, we're here looking at this Vandal treasure and we're deciding which pieces to keep and which pieces to pass on. Now this, by the way, would have been perfectly standard. So it was quite expected that generals or government administrators would take a cut of confiscated wealth before passing

1:01:34the rest of it on to the imperial treasury. So for Antonina to be saying to Belisarius, Theodosius and I are down here deciding on what's being kept and what's being sent, was a perfectly logical explanation for why they were in that room. Procopius wants us to believe that Antonina is telling this lie to conceal her sexual intent for being down in this private space with their adopted son. But there's not really any good reason to believe that Antonina is lying. In fact, this focus on money and on Theodosius and his role in keeping pieces of the wealth that General Belisarius is

1:02:09collecting may actually be the seed of truth that the whole story is built around. There is a family fight that's going to unfold in the household of Belisarius, but the reason for that fight may not be an incestuous affair. It may simply be about money and who's keeping it. When we look at the record of events in the life of Belisarius, there's no reason to think that he distrusted Antonina. Quite the opposite. In fact, he repeatedly relies on her for incredibly important missions like

1:02:41resupplying Rome or being next to him in Rome during a siege. So either we have to believe that Belisarius is a really wise, far-seeing, disciplined man militarily, but a complete fool who lacks all judgment when it comes to his wife. Or we have to consider the possibility that perhaps Antonina was entirely trustworthy and Procopius is the one who's dubious here. The seeds of the real conflict that's going to unfold in Belisarius' household have to do with money. So beginning with the Vandal

1:03:14campaign that we covered in our last episode, Belisarius and Antonina become incredibly wealthy, and that's only going to continue with his further military success in Italy. So there's a very large amount of money that's being amassed in his household. This is standard. The question is, who's going to inherit this money? So let's look at the domestic setup for Belisarius and Antonina. When Belisarius marries Antonina, she's a widow with two children for a previous marriage. She has a girl whose name we don't know and a son called Photius. Belisarius marries her,

1:03:48and they together have another daughter. But later on, when it becomes obvious they're not going to have any more children, they adopt a son together. So they now have two sons. So we have Photius, Antonina's biological son from a previous marriage. The father of that boy is dead. And now we have Theodosius, the son that Antonina and Belisarius adopted together. And these boys are similar in age. Photius may be a few years older than Theodosius, but they're not that far removed. And there's some

1:04:20evidence that Belisarius was quite close to Photius. I mean, first of all, he'd had more time raising the boy into a young man. And also Photius was trying to follow Belisarius's footsteps and have a military career. So Photius is an active duty soldier on the Italian campaign against the Goths, and also on this about to happen campaign against the Persians. We'll call it Persia round two. And so Belisarius and Photius are working together. They have an affinity. Belisarius is Photius's stepfather. Antonina seems to

1:04:54be close to Theodosius. Now, Procopius wants to paint that into this scandalous sexual thing, but it doesn't necessarily have to mean anything like that. It could be that she had a soft spot for this boy that they had adopted, presumably because he was an orphan, and wanted to make sure that he was set up well in life. But the conflict that begins to emerge is between these two young men, Photius and Theodosius. Which of them is going to inherit the massive fortune that Belisarius and Antonina

1:05:26have accumulated? And Photius is likely to have resented Theodosius, because if Theodosius wasn't there, Photius would have been the undisputed heir to the entire fortune. But Theodosius is there, and he's now a competitor. And so when Antonina and Theodosius are doing things like selecting the wealth that's going to be kept in the household, and perhaps assigning some valuables to be Theodosius's property, Photius looks at that as stuff that should have been his, maybe at a later date by inheritance, which is now going to this other brother that he would

1:06:00rather perhaps not have had. Ultimately, Photius may have been the origin point of the accusation that Antonina was having an affair with her adopted son Theodosius. This was a bitter and jealous accusation that Photius might have come up with as a way of eliminating his rival Theodosius and trying to make himself the sole inheritor. And so he may have told this story to his stepfather Belisarius while they're on campaign against the Persians, and this is going to explain a fight

1:06:34that does happen between Belisarius and his wife. So to re-situate us on our timeline, Belisarius and Antonina have returned from the Italian campaign, they've touched down in Constantinople, they've been celebrated, and Belisarius has his marching orders to go to the Eastern Front and fight the Persians. So we're now in fighting season, summer of 541. On this campaign, according to Procopius' secret history, so I'm going to give you the version of this story that Procopius writes in his very dubious secret history first. According to Procopius, it's the summer of 541, Photius has gone out to fight the

1:07:11Persians with General Belisarius after the Italian campaign. And they're out there in military camp, and Photius comes to Belisarius, his stepfather, and says, look, I have to tell you, mom's been having an affair with Theodosius, and it's disgusting, but I've discovered this, and I thought you needed to know. And apparently Belisarius is outraged, and he's horrified, and he and Photius swear revenge together. And they make this plan. Belisarius says, okay, Photius, you go chase down Theodosius, get him under lock and key, grab whatever wealth he's run off with, and I will deal with Antonina.

1:07:46And he swears that he's going to stick by Photius, and the two of them have this pact, and they're going to take revenge on the evil mother and the evil adopted son. But again, according to the secret history, when Antonina shows up to rejoin her husband on this military campaign again, even though he's very angry with her and he puts her under lock and key, he's unable to do the right thing, which according to Procopius would be to kill her or divorce her. And he says that he's just overcome with erotic passion for his wife, so every time he thinks

1:08:19about harming her he just can't bring himself to do it. And also Antonina is apparently drugging him with magic potions. So Antonina is bewitching him by use of her physical charms and some form of dark magic. But even worse, according to this secret history, Belisarius is not only unable to do anything against his wife, but he also stands by helplessly as his stepson Photius is punished for interfering in his mother's affair. Procopius says that Empress Theodora steps in on behalf of her friend Antonina,

1:08:53and she takes Photius to the palace and has him tortured to make him reveal where he's hidden Theodosius. So here's Photius being punished for telling the truth, and General Belisarius apparently can't lift a finger to help him. He just betrays the oath he's made to his stepson and is willing to do nothing while watching him get tortured and imprisoned. Allegedly Empress Theodora discovers where Theodosius has been hidden. She reunites her friend Antonina with Antonina's illicit adopted son,

1:09:24lover, and poor Photius is left languishing in a dungeon for three years, and he finally escapes to become a monk. Now there are many internal inconsistencies and things about this story that just don't make sense, but Procopius built it around some grains of truth, and so in parsing the slander and fantasy from the things that actually happened, I'm very much indebted to Professor David Parnell, whose book on the marriage of General Belisarius and Antonina has done a lot to shed light on how

1:09:54to read Procopius and when to read between the lines. So what is a far more likely account of what happened is this. Belisarius is on campaign in the summer of 541, fighting the Persians. His stepson Photius comes and tells him this scandalous tale about Antonina. Belisarius sends Photius after Theodosius, and when Antonina comes to be reunited with her husband, he confronts her with this accusation. Antonina is rightfully outraged and livid at how crazy this accusation is and why

1:10:24her husband would think she's capable of such a thing. And very quickly, Belisarius and Antonina are reconciled. They realize what's happened. Photius has told a malicious story as part of his campaign to get rid of his adopted brother. So what's going to happen is that the entire family is going to have to reunite in Constantinople at the end of fighting season. I mean, right now, despite their soap opera family problems, there are Persians to fight. So no one's going anywhere until fighting season in 541 is

1:10:56over. But when the winter comes, and people go home for those months, there's going to be this really awkward family reunion. Imagine the most awkward family reunion you've ever had at Christmas, where there's some terrible family fight going on, and scandal. This is a hundred times worse. So essentially Antonina and Belisarius have to gather all their children together in Constantinople and sort out, once and for all, who is going to inherit. But Photius is going to have to be punished for lobbing this hand grenade into

1:11:28the center of his family, potentially destroying the marriage of his parents and his brother in an attempt to get his hands on all the money. So the part about Photius going into a monastery is very likely true. But it wasn't because some evil empress was trying to help out her adulterous best friend. Going into a monastery is very much an act of penance. And it's likely that Photius is confronted by his two parents with what he's done, and basically told, you're going into a monastery where you're going to

1:12:00relinquish your military career and any claim on family wealth as a result of what you've just done. And in an interesting footnote, many years later, Photius emerges from the monastery after both his parents are dead. And he actually resumes some military activity in those years, which only supports the idea that he was forced into a monastery as punishment for telling this story. And that the reason for his being in a monastery was directly connected to his parents, which is why once they were dead,

1:12:34he emerges from there and begins doing some un-monk-like things. So that's very likely the seed of truth behind this entire veneer of sexual scandal that Procopius whips up, knowing that people would just love to read something this crazy. Now this version of events that Professor David Parnell has painstakingly mapped out, fits much better with everything else we know about these people in the historical record. It doesn't require us to believe that Belisarius was a cowardly fool where his wife was concerned,

1:13:08but somehow still a lie on the battlefield, which was well attested by many other people. Now we have a picture of Belisarius that is consistent. And it also squares with what we know about Antonina. This is a woman who voluntarily accompanies her husband on military campaigns again and again. And these campaigns go on for years. She could very easily have been ensconced in luxury back in Constantinople, enjoying all the benefits of her wealth and the imperial court. And furthermore, if Antonina had been inclined to be adulterous, don't you think that would have been a lot

1:13:43easier from a mansion in Constantinople while her husband was gone for months or years at a time? Surely that would have been the ideal setup. Whereas trying to conduct affairs in a small army camp while living under hardship and deprivation in close proximity to her husband is definitely not the ideal setup for that kind of activity. This leaves us with a very different picture of these two people and their marriage. Antonina accompanies Belisarius because she loves

1:14:14him. Because she's devoted to him. Because she wants to be near him. And that suggests that she was every bit as besotted with her husband as Procopius tells us he was with her. She stays close to Belisarius when things are going well and when things are going badly. And things are about to take a terrible turn.

Plague and royal disgrace

1:14:36We're now looking at the spring of 542. So the terrible Christmas drama of Belisarius's family is over. It's the next fighting season and he's returning to the Eastern Front to fight the Persians for another year. But the beginning of 542 is a grim and terrible time. And that's because this is when the bubonic plague breaks out across the Eastern Roman Empire, including in the city of Constantinople itself. Now we covered this in more detail in episode 3 of the series on Justinian and Theodora.

1:15:08But what you need to know for now was that there were tens of thousands of people dying in the city. And this bubonic plague is the same Black Death that devastated Europe many centuries later in the 1300s. So same fatality levels, absolute wreckage and destruction. There are so many bodies in the city that they're running out of places to dispose of them. So Belisarius is in his military camp and he receives word from Constantinople that not only has the plague broken out there, but that Emperor

1:15:39Justinian himself has contracted it. And everybody knows what that means. It means that very likely they're going to be looking at a new Emperor. So this is a moment when some conversations happen amongst Belisarius and some of his generals and other officers about what next. And these are probably in hushed tones. You don't necessarily want it to be all over the army camp that the Emperor has just gotten the Black Death and is probably on his deathbed or even maybe already dead.

1:16:10But Belisarius and some of his close members of staff are talking about what next. What happens if the Emperor dies? Some of these generals said that if the Emperor died, they were not willing to accept another Emperor chosen by Imperial officials or Empress Theodora. The next person to wear the Imperial crown should be one of them. And who was the most prominent general of his age? The most popular? The most successful? That would be Belisarius. So the implication here is that if Justinian is dead,

1:16:46the next Emperor should be the most successful general. The one that the army chooses. Now amazingly, against all the odds, Emperor Justinian recovers. So he doesn't die as a result of this illness. And this leaves some of the officers who are involved in these conversations feeling very vulnerable. Everybody knows that if word of that conversation gets back to the palace, heads could roll. And so now we have a version of the prisoner's dilemma. The best outcome is everyone keeps their mouth shut. And nobody back in Constantinople needs to know that there was a conversation about contingency

1:17:22planning and what happens if the Emperor dies. But here's the problem. If one guy in that circle goes and tells about this conversation, you could be fingered as the treasonous voice. And so several of these officers begin to think that the best thing to do is to be the first to go and blow the whistle and talk about this conversation so that they can position themselves as the loyal ones and point the finger of treason at other people who were in that room. The results of these reports reaching the Imperial

1:17:54Court in Constantinople were very unfortunate for Belisarius. We don't know what exactly he said or even if he was in the room. But the idea that there was a conversation had amongst high-ranking officers in the army about putting Belisarius on the throne did not go over well in the ears of Empress Theodora or presumably Emperor Justinian. After all, that was their worst nightmare. Belisarius was at the same time their most effective general and also potentially their biggest threat. Even though

1:18:28he himself had never said or done anything that looked particularly treasonous, word that some officers were willing to put him on the throne had to be taken seriously. We'll never know what exactly was said or by whom. The officers who made these reports might have been trying to protect themselves, or they might have maliciously been attempting to destroy Belisarius. After all, envy is a terrible thing and Belisarius's star had risen so high there had to be some people who would have loved to see

1:18:59him swept aside and this was a perfect opportunity to do that. So Belisarius is recalled to Constantinople as a result of these reports and he's immediately stripped of his command. He loses his own hand-picked corps of personal guards so he's no longer being followed around by several hundred excellent fighters and even his incredible wealth is confiscated. He goes from being the wealthiest, most popular, and most successful general in the empire to being a private citizen walking around the streets of the

1:19:33city entirely undefended and in disgrace. This dark period in Belisarius' career lasts for some 18 months and then he's forgiven and restored to his rank, titles, and wealth. Procopius in his secret history tries to give us the inside story of how this happens and it has the same sorts of problems with believability as his stories about Antonina's affair, but it may be built around a nugget of truth. This is what Procopius' secret history claims. Procopius says that Belisarius was utterly demoralized and he

1:20:09was basically lying on a couch in his house waiting to be assassinated when messengers from Empress Theodora show up at the house and Belisarius apparently thinks, oh no, my time has come, you know, here is my throat, why don't you just cut it for me? But the messengers haven't come to kill him. They've come from the Empress Theodora to tell him that he's been forgiven and he's going to be restored to his wealth and his titles, but that all of this is due to his wife Antonina. Because Empress Theodora is a friend of Antonina and Antonina has done many things for the Empress and so the Empress,

1:20:42just to please Antonina, has decided to have Belisarius reinstated. And supposedly when Belisarius hears this he falls at his wife's feet and begins licking the soles of her feet, saying to her that from now on he will not be her husband but her loyal slave. So Procopius is painting this scene which makes Belisarius look like a coward and also someone who's completely servile. Which again doesn't square with anything else we know about him. And the first problem is that Procopius is

1:21:15not with Belisarius at this point in his life. He's long since left Belisarius' employ several years ago. So he's not present when this happens. He's certainly not in the bedroom of Antonina and Belisarius where this is supposed to have occurred, nor is it likely that he was talking to somebody else who was. So what is Procopius doing here? He's deliberately assassinating Belisarius' character. All the details of this scene that are being painted are designed to undermine everything that the

1:21:45historical record tells us about Belisarius. And he's essentially saying, yeah, yeah, that great battlefield hero. At home, his wife wore the pants. He was her slave. He was completely emasculated. You know, and there's this shameful personal side to him that you didn't know, which should make you question whether he was such a great guy after all. Procopius is inventing these details to construct the most vile and contemptible picture of Belisarius that he can possibly imagine. Now this brings us to the

1:22:16question of why. Why is Procopius giving us multi-volume histories of Belisarius the war hero, where he's doing all the things we've previously discussed in this episode, including charging the Goths twice against overwhelming odds, successfully defending Rome, taking back Vandal territory. Why is he now taking the time to completely destroy this image of Belisarius? Did he have a hatred for the man? Was this some secret grudge? The most persuasive theory I've heard about why Procopius paints these

1:22:52two totally opposite pictures of Belisarius is this. Procopius may have been trying to construct an insurance policy for himself. In other words, if there was a regime change, if Emperor Justinian was toppled or died, the people who were closest to him, which means Theodora, Belisarius, and Antonina, would go with him. They were so closely connected that if the Emperor fell, all four of those people were out. And that's a problem for Procopius because he was closely connected to this government.

1:23:26He wrote the official histories. He worked for Belisarius. He was in the imperial court. So if Procopius is trying to create some job security for himself, in other words, if his boss and the Emperor go, he wants to make a spot for himself with any new government so he can still have a job. He could then pull the secret history out of a box, hand it to the new governors, and say, look at this present I've made for you. You can use this record to completely discredit those other rulers. And hopefully there's a place for me working under this new government as well.

1:24:01This explains why the secret history was never published in Procopius lifetime. It wasn't discovered until many centuries after his death. So it might have been something that he wrote, not because it was true, certainly, and not because he necessarily hated Belisarius, but because he was thinking about contingencies and how to create a security for himself in the event of regime change. But let's go back to this moment where Belisarius is restored from his disgrace. It's entirely possible that his wife Antonina had something to do with this.

1:24:35She did have a long-standing relationship with Empress Theodora, and perhaps behind the scenes she had conversations with the Empress in which she pleaded the loyalty of her husband, and pointed out that he'd had an opportunity to become Western Emperor in Italy if he wanted it. He turned it down. Were these the actions of a treasonous man? Were these the actions of the man who had ambitions to replace the Emperor? So these conversations may have taken place, but we also don't know what interactions Belisarius and Justinian might have had during this period.

1:25:10These were men who had known each other for decades, and Justinian had a record of being merciful. So someone could be suspected or in disgrace for a period of time, but very frequently they would be restored. And this is what happens to Belisarius. By the fighting season of 544, he's fully restored, he has a new command, and he is being sent back to Italy again to deal with the Goths. Because as you remember, there was no peace settlement there, and so there are ongoing problems that need to be dealt

1:25:43with. And who better to deal with them than Belisarius? Unfortunately, this second Italian campaign is doomed to failure from the start. Emperor Justinian simply doesn't have the resources economically or the manpower to send with Belisarius in order to support this mission. So Belisarius is ludicrously understaffed. He only has a few thousand troops at his disposal at any given time, and it's simply not enough men to engage the Goths in open warfare. And so he's reduced to skirmishes and very,

1:26:18very minor engagements. It's a war that he can't possibly win with the resources that he's been given. At this point, Belisarius is probably 44 years old, and his wife Antonina goes with him again on this second Italian campaign, and she's probably a few years older than him. So imagine Antonina at the age of 48 or 49, riding alongside Belisarius back into Italy. This second Italian campaign doesn't achieve much. There's no victory to be had with the resources available. And after

1:26:48five years of fighting there, Belisarius is finally recalled to Constantinople. And why? Because once again, the Persians on the Eastern Front are a problem, and Justinian is going to send his most effective commander to deal with the most pressing threat. At this point, when Belisarius is recalled from his second Italian campaign, and he's told he needs to fight the Persians again, he's got to be close to 50 years old. He's had a career in the military that's lasted for more than 25 years. He's more than

1:27:19served his time. And so he agrees to serve and fight the Persians for another year or two before he finally goes into retirement. The Eastern Roman Empire's attempts to hang on to Italy and to the city of Rome itself were ultimately doomed. This didn't happen immediately after Belisarius left. There was actually a subsequent campaign under a eunuch general called Narses, which was much better funded and did achieve some more significant victories. But in the long term, the Eastern Roman

1:27:50Empire became far too pressed by threats much closer to home, like the Persians, and no longer had the resources to maintain control of territory so far afield in Italy. So ultimately, this territory would once again be lost to the Eastern Roman Empire. Now, while doing the research for this episode, I stumbled across some paintings of Belisarius that looked like they were done in the 18th century. And they depicted Belisarius as an old man who was begging and had been blinded. And not naturally,

1:28:25his eyes having been gouged out. And these paintings purport to show some of Belisarius' former soldiers recognizing their glorious general now reduced to a blind beggar on the streets. And this was a horrifying thought. Had Belisarius really been blinded? Was he reduced to this level of desperation and destitution in his old age, after such a long, glorious, and loyal career? You'll be happy to know, as I was, that the answer to that is no. There is no contemporary account

1:29:00supporting the idea that Belisarius was blinded by Emperor Justinian or anybody else, or that he lived out the last few years of his life as a beggar. This story of his blinding and his poverty first emerged in the 10th century, some 400 years after he had died. And it emerged as kind of a moralistic tale, Belisarius' glorious military career was well known, and by telling a story that involved his fall to such a desperate and pathetic state, was a way of saying, you can climb to the highest heights

1:29:36and be reduced by a twist of fate to the lowest of lows. It was using Belisarius' legend to create a sort of morality story. And this account is based on one final disgrace Belisarius actually suffered. So this was in 562. Belisarius had long since retired as a general. He was in his 60s at this point. And there was some plot that was hatched by some servants in his house, apparently. A treasonous plot against Emperor Justinian, who at this point was in his 80s, by the way. And Emperor Justinian gets

1:30:11wind of this. And so once again, Belisarius is stripped of his titles and he's in disgrace for some period of time. Emperor Justinian's judgment probably wasn't the greatest at this point in his 80s. So perhaps he was a little more querulous and more willing to credit unlikely reports. But the idea that Belisarius in his 60s would be conspiring with a few servants against the Emperor is quite ludicrous. Once again, after some period of months, Belisarius is reinstated with

1:30:43full honors and he lives out the rest of his days in the comfort of his mansion and dies a few years later at the age of 65. So there's no blinding, there's no beggary. But there is evidence of the ongoing hazard of being such a successful general that even the Emperor couldn't sleep well at night when he heard rumors that he possibly had competition. So what happens to Antonina, or the daughter that Antonina and Belisarius had together? We don't actually know. Both Antonina and the daughter

1:31:18she has with Belisarius disappear from the historical record a few years before Belisarius himself dies.

Final victories and historical judgment

1:31:25And we can only suppose that they pre-deceased him. General Flavius Belisarius commanded the armies of the Eastern Roman Empire at an extremely difficult time. He achieved remarkable victories that expanded the empire and demonstrated a high degree of personal courage and honor. Although Italy and Rome would not long remain in the possession of the empire, this was the closest to reunification that the two halves of the empire ever came. He was a brilliant general, an incredibly brave man,

1:31:58and someone who was intensely loyal, not only to his wife, but to his emperor, despite many, many opportunities to be otherwise. He deserves to be remembered for all that he was, and not for the slanderous shadow of shame that Procopius cast upon him." In closing, I give you the words of Edward Gibbon, one of the most famous historians of the Roman Empire and the author of a six-volume set of books called The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

1:32:30Edward Gibbon is writing in the 18th century, and this is what he says about General Belisarius. The spectator and historian of his exploits has observed that, amidst the perils of war, he was daring without rashness, prudent without fear, slow or rapid, according to the exigencies of the moment, that in the deepest distress he was animated by real or apparent hope, but that he was

1:33:00modest and humble in the most prosperous fortune. By these virtues he equalled or excelled the ancient masters of the military art. Victory, by sea and land, attended his arms. He subdued Africa, Italy, and the adjacent islands, led away captives the successors of Genseric and Theodoric, filled Constantinople with the spoils of their palaces, and in the space of six years recovered half the provinces of the Western Empire. In his fame and merit, in wealth and power,

1:33:37he remained without a rival, the first of the Roman subjects. The voice of envy could only magnify his dangerous importance, and the emperor might applaud his own discerning spirit, which had discovered and raised the genius of Belisarius. I hope you've enjoyed this second and final episode in the incredible story of the life of General Belisarius. Don't forget to check out the link in the description for this episode if you're interested in registering for the September course,

1:34:09or email the podcast at villainsandvirginspodcast at gmail.com. And head on over to patreon.com slash Eva Schubert if you want even more historical stories just like this one. Thank you so much for being here with me today, and I'll see you in the next episode.

1:34:39Thank you.