Masking his huge relief that this nonsense of a reconstituted Western Empire-cum-Romano-Gothic entente was now dead in the water, Narses enquired, ‘You wish me then to take over as supreme commander in Italy?’
‘Precisely.’
‘Then I gladly accept, Serenity. ‘However,’ he went on, a note of steel entering his voice, ‘there are conditions.’
‘Conditions?’ Justinian’s eyebrows lifted. ‘You forget yourself, I think, General.’
‘I’ll be blunt, Serenity. I leave for Italy only when I have sufficiency of troops. And Roman troops at that, drawn from regular units of the field armies. Not a ragbag collection of personal retainers, mercenaries, and barbarian federates, such as Belisarius was fobbed off with. Before you recalled him, that is.’
‘My hands were tied!’ protested Justinian. ‘You must see that, Narses. With revolt in Lazica threatening to destabilize the whole eastern frontier, I needed a strong general on the ground to contain a crisis that could escalate.’
‘I understood that Belisarius was no further east than Constantinople.’
‘Granted he may not physically be in Lazica, but his very presence in the capital has been enough to make the Lazi draw their horns in. As to your military demands — ’ Justinian shook his head and spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘Impossible, I fear. The financial resources of the Empire are severely over-stretched — suppressing insurgency in Africa, countering Totila in Italy, building a chain of forts across the Balkans against Slav invaders,** relocating troops to meet this new threat in the East, the cost of rehabilitation following the plague. . You’ll just have to make do with whatever extra forces can be scraped together, I’m afraid.’
‘Then, Serenity, I must decline your offer,’ declared Narses with icy self-restraint. ‘Find some pliant nobody to do your bidding — a yes-man who won’t object to taking up lost causes.’ He rose and bowed. ‘With your permission Serenity, I’ll take my leave.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Narses, do sit down!’ snapped Justinian. ‘I daresay we can come to some arrangement that’ll keep you happy.’
Sensing victory, the general re-seated himself. ‘My request’s a simple one, Serenity,’ he said with a conciliatory smile. ‘Give me the men; I’ll give you Italy.’
To meet Narses’ ambitious targets, with chilling efficiency the full might of the Roman tax machine now bore down on all parts of the Empire, including Italy (or at least those parts of it not under Totila’s control) and Africa, now largely pacified by John the Troglite. Men, equipment, ships and money were raised in ever-increasing quantities, creating a force of awesome power such as Rome had seldom mustered. Narses, tirelessly involved on a tour of military establishments based mainly in Thrace and Illyria, at last declared himself satisfied.
A realist who was also both humane and clear-sighted, the Armenian knew that the surest way of mitigating the cruel consequences of war was to defeat the enemy as swiftly and decisively as possible. Men like Belisarius, Totila and Germanus, the general reflected, obsessed with outmoded ideals of restraint towards an enemy they respected and admired were anachronisms — more suited to the Trojan War than to this modern age of realpolitik. Their peculiar code of honour had allowed the war in Italy to drag on for nearly twenty years, laying waste vast swathes of the peninsula and inflicting untold suffering on the civilian population. What was needed was a speedy victory. And this could only be achieved, Narses told himself, by taking on the Gothic host with a force of such overwhelming power as to utterly annihilate it. That this inevitably meant the wiping out of most male Goths of fighting age was unfortunate. But in the end it was more merciful than waging a campaign of slow attrition, which ultimately must bring about the same result, as well as prolonging the country’s economic misery and incurring the death of many thousands of non-combatants.
At last, the great expedition fully mobilized, Narses set out northwards from his headquarters at Salonae* and, the fleet keeping level with the army, rounded the head of the Adriatic and descended upon Italy.
On the last day of June of that same year, Totila, pushing up the Via Flaminia from Rome, halted his army (the bulk of which was cavalry) near the village of Tadinae, midway between Ariminum to the north and Perusia to the south.* Accompanied by his chief general, Teia, he rode out a further mile to survey the terrain on which he would most likely have to fight the Romans — a bleak plain surrounded by the high peaks of the northern Appennines. The place, so Totila’s scouts had informed him, was called Busta Gallorum — ‘The Tomb of the Gauls’ — site of a great Roman victory against that people, fought eight centuries before.
‘Good cavalry country, Sire,’ observed Teia, a tough veteran who had vainly tried to halt Narses’ advance, flooding the Padus valley by breaching the dykes of that river and its tributaries — a move that Narses had circumvented by marching his army along the coast, crossing the delta’s mouths by means of pontoon bridges.
‘Provided they choose to fight us on the level,’ muttered the young king (he was not yet thirty), noting with dismay the Roman dispositions. Narses had drawn up his army, which far outnumbered the Goths’, on rising ground at the northern end of the plain, which was surrounded by steep and broken slopes, ruling out all but a frontal attack on their position — save at one spot. This was a gully to the right** of the low ridge on which the Romans had encamped, constituting a possible route by which they might be outflanked. Pointing out the feature to Teia, Totila said, ‘Today we rest. Tomorrow, by which time our expected cavalry reinforcements should have joined us, we will try to force the gully and attack the Romans from the rear.’
Though making himself sound calm and positive, Totila in fact felt close to despair. In the ten years since his great victory at Faventia, he had fought the Romans to a standstill, occupied the greater part of the peninsula, taken Sicily, achieved naval superiority in western waters, won over the Roman people to his side, and come within a hairsbreadth of securing an honourable peace by which Goth and Roman would share the government on equal terms. Yet it had all been for nothing. With the sudden and unexpected death of Germanus, the picture had changed completely. That terrible old man in Constantinople had recovered his resolve and, prompted by Narses, mobilized the full might of the Roman Empire against Totila’s people. Even at the height of his success, Totila had known he could never achieve full victory against the Romans; a compromise settlement was the best that he could hope for. Their Empire was simply too strong, their resources too vast, for him to match. Clearly, between them Justinian and Narses had decided finally to bring matters to a head in an attempt to finish off the Goths for good. The fate of his nation, Totila told himself, depended on whether he could push through that gully on the morrow.
The Battle of Tadinae/Busta Gallorum, 1 July(?) AD 552
The Kalends of July dawned grey and overcast. From his own position on the left wing of the Roman line, Narses surveyed the arrangement of his troops. All were dismounted, the right wing (Romans like his own command) under an experienced general, Valerian; in the centre, Lombard, Herul, and Gepid allies — stout warriors of Germanic stock. Before each wing was ranged a screen of archers — all expert marksmen, armed with powerful recurved bows of laminated wood, horn, and sinew.
Narses had never shared the prevailing Roman bias which favoured cavalry over infantry, believing that well-trained pedites were (as in Rome’s glory days) superior to equites every time. The Ostrogoths on the other hand, from having in the past been mainly foot-soldiers, had gradually changed to fighting principally on horseback, perhaps in imitation of Belisarius’ tactics, or perhaps reverting to an earlier tradition. Centuries before, migrating from northern Germania to the steppelands of the Euxine littoral, their way of life had changed to that of mounted herdsmen. As such, they had been absorbed into the Empire of the Huns, supplying Attila with formidable cavalry shock troops, which had almost turned the tide in his favour at the great Battle of the Catalaunian Plains.*