Sorry for the doublepost, but I got bored.
The Empire Strikes Back.
By 518, Rome was slowly beginning to get back to the uptick. The army was being rebuilt and remodeled, the long-empty coffers were starting to refill, and the Empire's enemies were beginning to enter crises of their own. The stage was set for a new Golden Age, a return to the days of old, when Rome would reassert her eternal superiority over the hordes of barbarians that confronted her and carry the Cross to victory. The ascension of Justin I, the former Chancellor of the Excubitors and the sole Roman Emperor, seemed to signify a switch in imperial policy: Rome was going over to the offensive.
Justin I may have been a Thracian peasant, but he certainly wasnt stupid; an able general, he surrounded himself with political advisers, including his nephew, one F. Petrus Sabbatinus. This Peter Sabbath proved so politically adept that he had managed to get himself adopted by the Emperor and renamed the more imperial Justinian I. With his sons advice, Justin decided to befriend the Blue faction, made up of rich Graeco-Roman landowners, against the now-unpopular Greens, the faction of merchants, which put him back in the good graces of the Bishop of Rome and ended the brief east-west schism. Justinian was duly made consul for 521 and spent more on games and lavish celebrations 3700 pounds of gold than anything the Constantinopolitans had ever seen. With a combination of none-too-subtle bribery and the new imperial support for the popular and orthodox Blues, the civil strife that had bedeviled Emperor Anastasius, Justin's predecessor, began to melt away. The support of the army for their longtime general also provided a handy stick to accompany the carrot that the Emperor Justin was dangling in front of the masses. When the Persians launched a war against the Romans in 524 after the Romans lagged on payments to keep the fortresses of the Caspian and Caucasian Gates in tip-top shape a condition of previous wars Justin was able to deal with the new problem that arose with his back secure and his full attention focused on the East.
A Genius For War, 524-536.
Despite the imperial concentration on the Mesopotamian front, the first years of the war went somewhat evenly for the Romans. The Sassanids had lost control of Lazica in 522, and when Iberia tried to do the same thing and switch to the Roman allegiance the Persians, unable to use the fortresses for which the Romans hadnt paid to crush the revolt, declared war. Mundhir IV, King of the Lakhmid Arabs, provided excellent support for Shah Kavadhs main army in Mesopotamia, which repulsed a lackluster Roman attack on Nisibis in 527, but who themselves couldnt make much headway against the powerful fortifications of Dara. Persian attempts to reconquer Lazica failed as well. It seemed as though this war was to be a slow, drawn-out, boring affair with little gain to either side. This feeling on the Roman side was exacerbated when Emperor Justin died in 527, only a few months after having finally named an heir, his son Justinian. Justinian, former official commander of the Army of the East, hurried back to Constantinople to assert his position as the new Emperor.
A peasant, just as his adoptive father had been, Justinian came to the capital while still a child, at the request of the newly-appointed Commander of the Excubitors, his uncle Justin. He was well educated in theology, jurisprudence, and spoke excellent Latin. He served for awhile with his uncle in the Excubitors but was eventually transferred to the Scholae, another guard regiment, where he was an officer at the time of Justins ascension to the throne. Justin, having adopted Justinian as his son, promptly raised him to the office of Count of the Domestics and awarded him the rank of Patrician. It was Justinian, as we have noted, who healed the rift with the Pope in 519, when a papal embassy was graciously received by Patriarch John the Cappadocian, who at Justinians behest declared poor old Acacius a heretic, and also struck Zeno and Anastasius from the diptychs. The Churches of Old Rome and the New Rome were duly declared one and indivisible, the schism was healed, and the West was comparatively secured. Justinians prestige consequently rose; it was almost shocking when he made Theodora, a former courtesan who had subsequently undergone a religious experience in Alexandria, his mistress. Empress Lupicina, a Thracian peasant just like her husband and adopted son, was overjoyed to find someone of even lower extraction than herself, and for two years she terrorized the couple, held back only by the fact that the young woman was a Blue (that, after all, was how she had met Justinian); after her death in 524 and an edict by Emperor Justin that allowed intermarriage between social classes in 525, Theodora and Justinian were married in St. Sophia. When Justin died in 527, they ascended to the throne
together, as Emperor and Empress Consort, and the woman who had once been a harlot made no bones about her sharing power.
While the war in the East raged, Justinian decided to solidify his domestic position with a major reforming spree; after continuing his adoptive fathers policy of domestic appeasement by constructing the epic Church of SS. Sergius and Bacchus, which was paid for by a general streamlining of the tax system, the Emperor decided to go whole hog and put together a team of himself, John of Cappadocia, a tax maven, and Tribonian, an unreconstructed pagan and jurist who was also one of the most brilliant political minds of his age, although he was unfortunately rather venal. Tribonian and John headed a special Imperial Commission that initiated a complete recodification of Roman law. All edicts that didnt mesh with Church doctrine were thrown out; repetitions and contradictions were eliminated entirely. Clarity and concision were substituted for the previous confusion and chaos. Less than fourteen months after Justinian initiated the project, Tribonian rolled out the new and duly improved
Codex Ivstinianvs, and in the next four years Tribonian and his commission would develop the
Pandects, a collection of the writings of all the Roman jurists from the first days of the Republic on down as well as the introduction of a system that linked their findings; he then finished the
Institutes, which contained the most important parts of both for reference use in imperial law schools. Still, all this took money
and besides, there was a war on! Shortly after his ascension, Justinian refused an attempt by Kavadh to have his son, Khosrau Anushirvan, adopted by the Romans and thus guarantee peace; instead, he ordered one of his eastern generals, Belisarius, to launch a long-range raid against the Persians in 529. The success of this first attempt, largely through Belisarius talent, induced Justinian to stay the course; he provided Belisarius with more men, upping his strength to 25,000 men. The Romans were still vastly outnumbered by the 40,000-strong army that the Sassanid general Firouz brought to besiege Dara in 530. Belisarius made his dispositions: he dug trenches to redirect the Persian cavalry, and gathered his infantry in a solid line, while massing his Heruli and Hunnic cavalry on either flank, with a Roman cavalry contingent under one John in the rear as a reserve. Firouzs army came barreling in along the road, with two lines of infantry in the center and cavalry massed on either flank under the command of Pityaxes on the right and Baresmanas on the left. Pityaxes launched a preliminary attack against the Heruli contingent, which initially retreated but for their fear of Hunnic retaliation, and who subsequently counterattacked and scattered the Persians. After a brief episode of single combat, where the Heruli warrior Andreas showed his prowess, the Persians withdrew to their camp at Ammodius, five miles away, where they received 10,000 more reinforcements. On the second day, Firouz resumed his attack, first by trading arrow-shots with the Romans and then by launching a full attack against the Roman center, which was beginning to retreat when a force of Roman cavalry erupted from cover behind the Persian right flank and forced the Sassanids to halt their attack. The Persian Immortal cavalry was sent against the Roman flanking force, but Belisarius not only repulsed the Immortals but then launched an attack against the Sassanid center that split Firouzs army in two; the Persians scattered except for Baresmanas, who attempted to rally the army and who was killed for his pains, along with about 5,000 of his soldiers. Belisarius initially pursued, but decided to halt for fear of a Sassanid attempt to regroup. Egged on by his fellow commanders, the Romans reluctantly renewed their pursuit; with the aid of the Lakhmids under Mundhir IV, Kavadh himself halted the Roman pursuit at Nisibis and dealt Belisarius a bloody nose.
The following year, Kavadh and Mundhir mounted several joint raids into Roman Syria to no real result, as Belisarius regrouped and managed to repulse them easily. Once again, his subordinates pressured him to pursue a particularly large raiding force under the command of the Sassanid generalissimo Azarethes; Belisarius refused, and decided to continue building up his forces, launching other raids throughout 531 into Persian-held Iberia. Again, the Emperor was impressed with the successes of these minor actions and his generals unwillingness to risk his army in a fallacious pursuit. The next year Belisarius was recalled to the capital to organize a renewed expeditionary force to finally take the war to the Persians and smash them once and for all. The high taxes levied for this expedition and for the revamping of the civil code and other assorted bureaucratic reforms were making the Constantinopolitans themselves unhappy, though; upon his entry into the New Rome Belisarius was met with sullen crowds and angry protests by both Blues and Greens, compounded by imperial arrest of two men, a Blue and a Green, who had murdered some of their enemies in the confusion and rioting following a previous chariot race. On January 13, Justinian arrived at the Hippodrome to watch the races with the crowds, to hopefully calm them down; instead, he received insults from both sides. The chants of Blue and Green slowly became a single cry, that of Nika!, or Win! After the last race, the crowds finally abandoned the Hippodrome and spilled into the city proper; they attacked the offices of the City Prefect and released the two prisoners, then began to set fires throughout the city. The Praetorian Prefecture was next, followed by the Senate House and even the Churches of St. Irene and St. Sophia; by the end of the day the city was covered in smoke. The next day, the rioters demanded the dismissal of Tribonian, John of Cappadocia, and City Prefect Eudaimon, which Justinian quickly agreed to. With the Great Palace under siege and most of the city in their effective control, the rioters began to plan a revolution; another nephew of Justin, one Hypatius, was tracked down and crowned at the imperial box in the Hippodrome. Justinian began preparing to flee the capital; it was only with the intervention of his wife that he decided to stay. It was unthinkable, said she, that an Emperor ever shed the purple and flee his duty; the Empress declared that she would stay the course to the death and not give in to the ruffians what surrounded the palace. After all, the imperial purple was the noblest winding-sheet of them all; better to die a royal death than live a coward. The Empress turned to Belisarius and his fellow-general Mundus, who had collected some of the expeditionary force for departure to the East. The cream of the crop of these men, a group of Scandinavian mercenaries, was divided between the two, who marched on the Hippodrome from opposite directions. Most of the rioters were congregated in the massive Circus, and when the imperial troops burst in from either side of the vast edifice the rioters were first surprised and then slaughtered by the brutal Scandinavians. No quarter was given or received; Blue or Green, the rioters were all killed. Narses, an imperial eunuch, was posted at the exits of the Hippodrome with the Scholae and the Excubitors, and his men cut down all of the rioters that tried to escape. Thirty thousand Constantinopolitans were butchered that day, and when it was all over poor Hypatius was led quivering to the Emperor, who at first was inclined to be clement. Empress Theodora dissuaded him; Hypatius and his brother were executed the next day, their bodies thrown off the Sea Walls into the Golden Horn. The Great Nika Revolt was over.
In the wake of the destruction, Justinian quietly reinstated John of Cappadocia and Tribonian in their former positions, and the two went back to work on the
Institutes as though nothing had happened. Their orders were significantly different this time, though: no taxation beyond the bounds of reason. The Emperor was unwilling to risk another revolt; his people, on the other hand, were painfully aware of their inability to make and unmake Emperors at will. Naturally, though, Justinian wasnt about to leave his capital in ruins. Despite the fact that there was a war on despite the continuing expenses due to the legal reform Justinian embarked on a grand new rebuilding project in Constantinople, to be capped by the most glorious project of all a rebuilt, grand, epic Church of the Holy Wisdom. His two architects, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, had already been tasked with designing a grand church, the greatest building in all of Christendom; the Nika riots simply gave Justinian an excuse and a place to build it. The new Church of St. Sophia was to but utterly unlike almost every Christian place of worship in the world. Instead of a rectangular or cross-like construction, it was to be almost perfectly square, culminating not with the raised apse at the eastern end but with a gigantic central dome. Two teams of opposing workers was set on opposite sides of the grand church construction project; these two groups of 5,000 men each competed against each other for glory and prizes. Provincial governors were to send any surviving classical remains suitable for incorporation into the grand church; eight porphyry columns came from Rome, while eight green marble ones were brought from Ephesus. Mosaics covered the inner walls with gold and decorative patterns with red, blue, and green
tesserae, and relics were scattered everywhere, including a piece of the True Cross, brought back from the Holy Land, as well as Christs swaddling clothes and the table at which the Twelve had eaten the Last Supper with Jesus. Those were not the most impressive attributes of the enormous cathedral; what struck visitors the most wasnt the glorious interior but the tremendous exterior dome, what was 107 feet across, starting 160 feet above the street and pierced with forty windows around the base that lit up the interior mosaics and reflected off the glittering gold inside. On Christmas Eve, 537, Justinian stood before his new church right before its first service and was heard to murmur, Solomon, I have surpassed thee.
But it was in the East that Justinian was to truly to gain his fame, for that was where he won his greatest victories. After the Nika riots Belisarius spent the rest of the year gathering one of the largest armies since Basiliscus 468 expedition; 50,000 men were massed in Mesopotamia under his personal command as
magister militum per Orientem while Mundus kept the Sassanids on their toes via vigorous skirmishing. Belisarius first objective as the campaigning season began in 533 was to capture Nisibis as a stepping stone to even greater conquests in Mesopotamia; though generalissimo Azarethes did his best to halt the Roman tide, this time it was the Sassanid army which was outnumbered. At Sisaurana the Persians made a stand, drawing up their army echeloned to the right forward so as to cover a major hill outside of town and then covering one flank with ditches and the other with a massed wedge of cavalry; Belisarius, in the model of Julius Caesar at Pharsalus, reinforced his cavalry with Hunnic and Herulian mercenaries and a third line of foot soldiers, and drove the vastly superior Persian knights off the field, then smashed into the rearward echeloned Sassanid left flank. In the meantime, Roman engineers managed to bridge the ditches and another cavalry force, this of heavy cataphracts, crashed into the Persian infantry right flank and began to swarm around in the rear of the echeloned army. As the Sassanid infantry began to break up, individual units were targeted by the Roman cavalry; only the elite Persian heavy infantry from Daylam managed to extricate themselves in a reasonably organized fashion. Other than the lucky (and extremely skilled)
Daylami, there were few Sassanid formations left after the Roman double envelopment. With the thrusts on both flanks, Azarethes army collapsed, and it was all the generalissimo could do to gather ten thousand men from the disaster and retreat back towards Ctesiphon. Belisarius ignored him; he was after Nisibis. The garrison had been partly emptied by the Persians who had wished to mass as many men as they could at the Battle of Sisaurana, but to no avail; with few men to man its defenses, the mighty fortress passed back into Roman hands in the fall of 533.
Justinian, anxious to reduce his expenses and always looking over his shoulder having come close to being replaced with the
Nika revolt, he was instinctively suspicious of anything that could possibly unseat him decided to reduce the number of men Belisarius had under arms, ostensibly to protect the weak flank of the Roman army in Lazica and Iberia. This was, of course, complete tripe, as all well knew, for Mundus was in control in Lazica against sadly few Persian troops, and he had encountered very few problems in solidifying Christian control of the province and was even switching over to the offensive. In any event, Belisarius command shrunk by a fifth, and he was left to try to prosecute an offensive into Mesopotamia with but forty thousand men. When Azarethes replacement, Nachoragan, managed to scrape up 50,000 men for an attack on Nisibis in 534, Belisarius was hard pressed to fend them off, and after a long, sanguinary struggle that lasted most of a day, the Sassanids were only narrowly driven off by the arrival of a contingent of mercenary Hunnic cavalry that had been scouting and just happened to drive into the Persian rear at a convenient moment. This, combined with the friendship between Belisarius wife Antonina and the Empress, convinced Justinian to release more troops for the East again; what chance had he of besting Trajan if his armies were hard pressed even on defense? With a full army once again, plus contingents under the imperial eunuch Narses and the general Solomon, Belisarius resumed the offensive in 535 and slowly rolled south again, taking care not to endanger his supply lines; with a large army one fights significantly differently than one would with a smaller one, after all, and Belisarius was trying to ensure a lasting conquest. The last times Roman armies had rolled through Mesopotamia was in the time of the misguided Julian, who had ultimately failed before Ctesiphon; a long series of failures stretched all the way back to Trajan, who had taken all but Hatra, which had been his downfall, and Crassus, whose defeat at Carrhae still reverberated down through the centuries. The ones who had succeeded Septimius Severus being the prime example had done so through workmanlike campaigns that had focused on consolidation and slow advance, not the glamorous runs of victory that more often than not ended in disaster. Still, Belisarius acknowledged that his program for victory allowed the Sassanids time to gather their forces once again and attempt to rebound from their defeats. After another year of skirmishing while Belisarius was gathering his men for another slow push, Justinian decided to conclude peace with the Persians new shah, the young Khosrau Anushirvan, on the basis of the current Roman conquests, which included Nisibis, Singara, Lazica, and Iberia; this was a hard pill to swallow for the young shah, but he had little choice if he were to free up his western front in order to consolidate his power amongst the feudal Persian lords and if he wished to eliminate the Hephthalites as a political factor in Persia. The pill went down easier, of course, when the Romans paid a significant tribute in gold to reimburse the Sassanid shah and so he could cement his power, to prevent a stronger candidate from emerging. Having cleared his east, Justinian soon began to look westward
The Gothic Kingdoms, 488-526.
The Emperor Zeno had managed to get rid of the dratted Ostrogoths by shrewdly inducing them to attack Odoacer; the old man must have jumped for joy as the entire Ostrogoth nation slowly trekked over the Julian Alps into Odoacers Italian realm. While Zenos days in power waned in the East, a series of titanic clashes between Theodorics army and Odoacers mercenaries began in the West. The wily Patrician of the West had managed to skillfully withdraw his strung-out troops from his eastern domains in Illyricum, Pannonia, and Noricum, where he had been crushing the Rugians; as Theodorics troops trudged towards the great city of Aquileia, still recovering from its destruction at the hands of the fearsome Attila the Hun, Odoacer drew up his army at the Sontius River and dared his rival to attack his strong fortifications.
Theodoric barely allowed his soldiers a day of rest before boldly attacking the Scirians in August; Odoacers overconfident troops were surprised and their palisade was scaled by the Gothic troops, who drove Odoacer from the field and forced the Italian army to flee to Verona. Odoacer quickly took charge of the remnants of his first army and wedded them to a group of reserves what had been making their way towards the Sontius position; Theodoric launched another assault on Odoacers troops on the banks of the Adige at Verona in September. This time, the contest was longer, bloodier, and far more in doubt, but in the end, Odoacer panicked when Theodoric sent a small detachment of cavalry and archers on a wide sweep around his rear, and fled once more, abandoning the field and a large chunk of his army, which promptly switched allegiances, as mercenaries are wont to do. Theodoric himself entrusted the van of his army to one of these deserters, so as to hound Odoacer back into the formidable fortifications of Ravenna, while he himself would take the core of the army to Mediolanum to seize that great and critical city. The deserter ended up betraying the vanguard to Odoacers loyalists, and the Italian troops laid waste to the detachment at Faventia. Theodoric, stuck in Ticenum, was forced to call on the aid of the Visigoths in Aquitaine and southern Gaul, who lent him enough men to continue the contest until next year. Finally, Odoacer sallied forth from Ravenna north to the Addua River, where Theodorics troops met the Italian army in battle once more in August 490. This time the Ostrogoths seemed at a clear disadvantage, as Odoacers army attacked with vigor and drove Theodorics columns back towards the river; the sought-for Visigothic reinforcements arrived just in time, though, and Odoacers army was forced to halt its forward charge as they were set upon on their left flank. At the same time, Theodoric and his mother rallied the fleeing Ostrogoth army as its shattered remnants began to disperse; with a small chunk of his remaining force, Theodoric launched a desperate counterattack and drove Odoacer from the field. The Scirians fled to Ravenna, where they were shut up inside the formidable walls of that great, swamp-girt city; Theodoric first gathered his forces once more and then made the rest of Italy secure before besieging Odoacers holdouts in the former imperial residence at Ravenna. The epic siege lasted three years, with frequent sallies by the Patrician and his men to try to disrupt the besiegers to great effect. Finally, in 493, the supplies began to run low, and Odoacer finally agreed to give up the fight in return for joint rule over Italy with his new buddy Theodoric; it was only a few days later, at a banquet to celebrate the end of the war, that Theodoric had the former Patrician killed.
Ostensibly, Theodoric was merely Anastasius viceroy in Italy; in practice, an Ostrogothic Kingdom was firmly established. The Gothic King avoided the problems that Odoacer had caused, because he knew of the world of hurt that the Eastern Empire could bring down upon him. Instead of trying to circumvent the imperial system, Theodoric allowed Roman citizens to live under Roman law, Roman judicial practices, and no attempts at any real cultural assimilation took place. Quite the opposite, actually: Theodoric did his best to have his less numerous Ostrogoths integrated with the Roman populace, to ease the transition. There were a few immediate political reasons for this, of course, but Theodorics main plan was to hold Italy first as a fief of the Roman Emperor in Constantinople, then to perhaps reestablish the briefly-defunct Western Empire with Ostrogoths providing a renewed vigor to imperial conquest, and once more Gaul, North Africa, Hispania, and Italy would be united under the rule of the men in Urbs Roma. As mighty as his recent conquests were, Theodoric knew that he was but a pinprick on the surface of the great majesty of hundreds of years of Roman domination. Despite the troubles that the East had suffered fighting against a true enemy, Persia, and having to deal with barbarians from the north besides the portion of the Empire that had been ruled from Constantinople was still going strong. Why not a
renascentia in the West?
Theodoric, after consolidating Italy, launched a new series of conquests, all in the Eastern Emperors name. He reestablished Odoacers hegemony over Pannonia and Dalmatia in 504 and 505, which had been disrupted by an opportunistic Gepid invasion; this led to sparks flying between the Ostrogoths and the Eastern Roman Empire, because Anastasius wanted the strategic city of Sirmium under Eastern control; this led to a brief skirmish between the Ostrogoths and the Eastern troops, which ended indecisively after the Battle of the Margus, after which Theodoric was confirmed to the control of Sirmium and the rest of Illyricum. In the West, Theodoric was much more active, working against the encroaching Frankish Empire of Clovis in conjunction with the Visigoths of Hispania. This Frankish Empire had been expanded by Clovis from the original kingdom created by Meroveus and his son Childeric; when Clovis, Childerics son, came to the throne, he switched from the previous Roman-allied stance of his ancestors to a more aggressive policy. Syagrius Dominion of Noviodunum was shattered after the Battle of Nogent in 486, after which the Roman fled south to seek refuge with the Visigoths, causing a brief diplomatic incident that was resolved when Syagrius was yielded to the Franks on threats of war. Syagrius was then secretly assassinated the next year on Clovis command; so ended the last Gallo-Roman holdouts. Clovis then allied himself with Gundobar and Godegesil of Burgundy, sealed by a marriage of Clovis to the princess Clotilda in 493. Clotilda and the rest of the Burgundians were Chalcedonian Christians, and Clovis soon began to lean toward the Chalcedonian creed, attempting to disseminate the religion throughout his Frankish followers as well. Unlike the Arian Christian Visigoths, who had been converted by Ulfilas over a century before, the Chalcedonian Franks were able to make nice with their similarly-oriented Gallo-Roman subjects and sped integration along considerably. While this damaged some of Clovis relations with other Arian warlords, his overwhelming force and virtual hegemony in northern Gaul made him essential to placate, so when the Alemanni attacked the Kingdom of Colonia Agrippina in 496, Clovis was called in to assist his Ripuarian Frankish brethren, and landed a major victory on the Alemanni that year at Tulpiacum, just south of Colonia, during which, it is said, Clovis called upon the Christian God to lead his men to victory, upon which the Alemanni dispersed and the Franks shattered their army. Clovis quickly made his conversion official by having himself baptized by St. Remigius, Bishop of Durocortorum into the Chalcedonian faith. Clovis soon turned on his Burgundian allies with a family dispute as the casus belli; Frankish armies swept into the Rhone Valley, and were only held back by the skillful defense of the fortress of Avennio by Gundobar, who eventually accepted nominal vassalship under Clovis. When the Frank had his back turned, fighting once more against the Alemanni, who were basically destroyed as a result of his victories, Gundobar killed his siblings and destroyed all opposition, which had gathered at Vienne, and asserted sole control over Burgundy by 506.
