Justinian, however, had not been conned. He knew the sordid truth: a desperate imperial administration had bribed Theoderic and his Ostrogoths with the offer of Italy to remove them from the doorstep of Constantinople. He knew as well that the burnishing of Rome’s awesome inheritance, which he had made his life’s mission, required the proper ordering of lost provinces as well as of mildewed laws. Barbarian kings, no matter how sedulously they might ape the manners of a Caesar, were self-evidently an affront to God’s wishes for the world. Theoderic, for all the sheen of his classical education, had been given to murdering courtiers with his own hands, and sporting a moustache.5 And even that was not the worst. Monstrously, two whole centuries after the Council of Nicaea, there were churches standing in Ravenna in which it was openly denied that the Son was “of one Being with the Father.” Like a ghoul rising from a long-sealed sarcophagus, Theoderic had trailed after him the stench of evils that orthodox Christians had imagined buried for good. Not merely a heretic, he had been that veritable heretic of heretics: an Arian.
There was, in this devotion of Theoderic’s to a creed that most Romans had presumed extinct, compelling evidence of just how hospitable to otherwise vanished beliefs a wilderness might be. As in the deserts beyond Palestine, so in the forests beyond the Danube and the Rhine, heresies long since consigned to oblivion within the limits of the empire had demonstrated a striking ability to endure, and even to thrive. The Goths’ Arian loyalties had a venerable pedigree. In the late 340s, when a son of Constantine still sat on the throne, and Julian was lurking in the wings, a bishop named Ulfilas, of Gothic extraction and Arian sympathies, had headed north towards the Danube and embarked on a mission to convert his compatriots. If the stories subsequently told about him were something more than fantastical exaggeration, his success had been prodigious. Certainly, within a century of his death, he was being hailed as the Moses of the northern barbarians.6 This, for people who were all too painfully conscious of Roman snobbery, was a thrilling notion: they too, like the Children of Israel, might have been chosen by God to receive a Promised Land. The consequence was, when a group who called themselves the “Good,” or “Visi,” Goths, succeeded in winning Spain, they pointedly refused to abandon their Arianism in favour of Catholic orthodoxy. Theoderic too, even after he had won for himself the throne of Italy, clung to his Arian faith with a no less obdurate show of devotion.
Granted, he was careful not to force it down the throats of his Roman subjects. “We cannot impose religion,” he solemnly declared, “because no one can be made to believe against his will.”7 A statement of principle, no doubt—but calculating as well. In both Visigothic Spain and Ostrogothic Italy, the invaders constituted a tiny minority. They certainly had no chance of forcing the natives to renounce Nicaea and embrace the teachings of Arius. As it was, Theoderic was content to leave the Catholics in peace, fattening them up the better to fleece them. Meanwhile, even as he played with dazzling skill and sophistication at being a Roman, his Arian faith helped him to forge an ever more distinctive identity for himself and his followers, recruited as they were from a number of disparate sources. Long hair, an aptitude for running people through with lances while ululating loudly on horseback, and an emphasis on the humanity of Christ: such were the markers of Italy’s new elite. “A Goth on the make,” so Theoderic had once ruefully observed, “wishes to be like a Roman—but only a poor Roman would wish to be a Goth.”8 This appraisal, however, might have been unduly pessimistic. A few decades into his reign in Ravenna, there was no shortage of high-born Romans eager to master his native tongue. Given time, who knew just how Gothic they might end up?
But time, as events were to prove, was running out. No sooner had Justinian signed up to the optimistically titled “Eternal Peace” with Khusrow in 532 than he was turning his gaze westwards. Most of his advisers—well aware that the war with Persia had emptied the treasury so assiduously filled by Anastasius—were appalled. Justinian imperiously brushed aside all muttered objections. In a dream, an African bishop, martyred a few decades previously on a bonfire, had urged the emperor to conquer Carthage, which for almost a century had been lost to the Roman people. Who could doubt, then, that Christ was all in favour of the emperor’s new initiative? Certainly, the bishop’s murderers, a gang of unregenerate savages named the Vandals, could hardly have done more to brand themselves as enemies of God. Their theft of the wealthy cities and fertile wheat fields of North Africa had been only the first step in their career of iniquity. Like the Ostrogoths, the Vandals were Arians; unlike the Ostrogoths, they had been prompted by a blend of paranoia, fanaticism and their own force of numbers to strip the Catholic Church of all its privileges, to persecute its leaders, and to proclaim Arianism their state religion. Well, then, might Justinian thunderously denounce them as “the enemies alike of soul and body.”9 News that the Vandal court had abruptly succumbed to a vicious bout of in-fighting only strengthened his resolve, and his assurance that God was willing him on. Accordingly, it was not Italy but Africa upon which Justinian first set his sights.
In 533, when a great war fleet that had been assembled off the imperial palace weighed anchor and departed the Bosphorus, most of those watching it glide towards the setting of the sun feared the worst. Cavalry and infantry totalled only eighteen thousand men, and although their commander was Belisarius—the general who had so brilliantly defeated the Persians at Dara—the Roman military’s record since then did not inspire any great confidence. Before long, though, the people of Constantinople would be thrilling to a catalogue of barely believable accomplishments. The Roman task force, disembarking on African soil after a voyage of two months, briskly marched on Carthage, routed the enemy in a couple of great battles, and forced their surrender. The churches and cathedrals of North Africa, cleansed of all traces of Arianism, were lovingly restored to Catholic worship. Meanwhile, the defeated Vandal king, transported to Constantinople along with all his treasure, was paraded in chains before the cheering crowds of the Hippodrome. “Vanity of vanities,” he was heard to mutter wistfully, “all is vanity.”10
Hardly, of course, a message for which Justinian had much time; and sure enough, buoyed by his stunning victory, he did not hesitate to press for further conquests. In 535, Belisarius duly swept down with a fresh war fleet upon Sicily, where the garrison of Ostrogoths was routed with promising ease. A year later, and the long-awaited invasion of Italy itself was launched. By the early winter of 536, Belisarius was advancing upon Rome; and on 9 December, at the prompting of the city’s bishop, the ancient capital opened its gates to the imperial forces. “So it was,” as an aide to Belisarius exulted, “that Rome once again, after a period of sixty years, became subject to the Romans.”11
Which was, of course, to overlook the awkward fact that Italy—officially, at any rate—had never ceased to be subject to the Romans. Certainly, to the Italians themselves, the news that they were being liberated came as something of a surprise. If there were many who welcomed with open arms what Justinian grandly termed a “renewal” of the Roman world, then there were many more who despaired of the slaughter and impoverishment that this “renewal” seemed to mean in practice. The Ostrogoths, unlike the Vandals, displayed an infuriating reluctance to crumple. Only a few weeks after the fall of Rome to Belisarius, they were back, camped out in such prodigious numbers before the walls of the city that “the people of Rome, who were entirely unacquainted with the evils of war and siege,”12 hurried to their liberator and begged him to capitulate. Belisarius, playing the role of an antique hero from the city’s distant past to perfection, sternly refused. One year and nine days later, after an immensely creative and obdurate defence, it was the Ostrogoths who were obliged to retreat. By then, though, the one-time “Head of the World” had effectively been decapitated. Rome’s aqueducts, which for centuries had provided the city with its life-blood of water, had been ruined beyond repair; its baths emptied; its harbours destroyed; its water-mills clogged with corpses; its senators, those who had not been captured and executed by the indignant Ostrogoths, reduced to beggary. Even worse was to follow. By 538, famine was rife across central Italy. Food shortages were so severe that innkeepers, so it was credibly reported, were reduced to spit-roasting the occasional guest, just to get by. The following year, the Ostrogoths, signalling as brutally as they could their determination to continue the fight, wiped out the city of Milan. Here, even to someone as supremely self-confident as Justinian, was unmistakable evidence that not everything was going according to plan.