CHAPTER SIX
The King of the Goths was not inclined to be idle either; he reacted to his reverse by sending a large force to take the Roman harbour at Portus, the place where incoming ships bearing food were unloaded, their cargo being brought upriver by barge, this a signal to Flavius that nothing had happened to dent his determination to retake Rome. Starvation would be added as a weapon, while the carrot was being dangled, inviting the defending forces to redress this ploy, which would bring them into the open in conditions which favoured their enemies.
Witigis still lacked the troops required to completely surround Rome and he had to maintain pressure where he could, yet if it was still not a full-blown siege, the action made matters more difficult for the defenders. A heavily garrisoned Portus under Goth control required that supplies, for both the army and the city, had to be landed at Antium, ten leagues further south. If that as a distance did not sound great, it imposed a huge burden, given it required a minimum two-day journey, the employment of a large number of waggons and oxen as well as a strong escort.
In response, Flavius ordered that the women and children be evacuated to Naples, and if many sought to dodge this edict – the prostitutes and dancing girls flatly refused to budge – the maternal were happy to join, with their dependants, a well-supplied column and move to a region where food would be plentiful and the risk of Gothic wrath, which would be terrible if they did retake Rome, was a distant one. As to a military reaction, they had already been considered and the necessary moves put in place.
With them went another reply from Flavius to his wife; Antonina had moved to Naples and was expected by her husband to remain there until Rome was secured. That this did not sit well was evidenced by the stream of complaints that came winging north, insisting her place was at his side. It was no use pointing out the dangers; had she not risked those in North Africa?
Flavius would have liked to remind her that her presence on that campaign had not been his idea, and also that wives accompanying generals of armies engaged in conquest was far from common. To do so he would have had to allude to the truth; it was at the instance of Theodora that her friend Antonina sail for Carthage with her husband, and if at the time Flavius had wondered at the reason for such a request, he was eventually disabused by Procopius.
Antonina and Theodora were bosom friends from their days working in those taverns so beloved of Justinian. When the latter had moved into the imperial palace as wife to the then co-emperor, Antonina had been granted an apartment of her own so they could remain close. It was a gloomy thought on which Flavius spent much time in reflection; the way he and she had been brought together, sucking him into a marriage that at the time had seemed to him a gift from God.
Older than him and previously married, Antonina already had a son in Photius who, delightfully, had treated him from the very beginning as if he was his real father. His wife was vastly more experienced in so many ways than her paramour, not least in the bedchamber, a fact in later consideration being not one to dwell on. If Theodora had been no saint it was reasonable, if uncomfortable, to assume the same applied to her close friend.
Scales had covered his eyes and Flavius too often recalled the day they were frayed by his secretary. Procopius had risked his own position to tell him of two truths: that Antonina had a passion for Theodosius and secondly and no less disturbing, she was in constant communication with the Empress. In effect he thought she was spying on him.
‘I’d rather have Witigis sharing my Roman villa than you, my dear.’
These whispered sentiments were expressed as he affixed his seal to the latest missive telling Antonina she must stay in Naples. To have her in Rome would mean facing the demons of the knowledge he had, too much of a distraction for an army commander trying to win a desperate battle.
The seven palisaded camps Witigis had set up to invest Rome might seem formidable, and in normal circumstances could have been so. What the Goth could not calculate for was the nature of the man and the army he faced. Even many of those who had not been personally trained by Flavius Belisarius had fought with him for several years now, the junior commanders included, though that did not always apply to his immediate subordinates, men whose views required to be accommodated.
Given he knew his men well and they trusted him, this allowed Flavius a flexibility denied to any contemporary general. Nowhere did that hold more true than within his own comitatus, the bucellarii component forming a unit he had first brought into being, marrying the abilities of the Sassanid heavily horsed and armoured cataphracts with the fast-riding archery tactics of the Huns.
There were light cavalry too, but men so well taught and their leaders so experienced they acted with a different state of mind to those they generally opposed. If they charged, which they were eager to do, it was with a specific aim in mind, to either rout a fleeing enemy or, more often, to break up any infantry attack. That achieved they would quickly re-form and get back to the position from which they set out, to remain a cohesive asset to their general.
With their siege equipment destroyed and seemingly at a loss to conjure up any variation of tactics, Flavius calculated Witigis was not planning any immediate assaults. This presented a window in which the Goths would remain in their camps until their king was ready for another bout, and they were far enough apart to allow for each to be tested in turn.
It was necessary to order the walls to be cleared on the day of his first sortie. A parapet crowded with the now mainly male citizens of Rome would merely alert the enemy to the fact of impeding action. Nor were there trumpets; Flavius sent two centuries of his men out of the Porta Salaria with orders to occupy the crown of one of the many vine-covered hills that dotted the landscape and sat within close proximity to one of the Goth camps.
The reaction was as had been anticipated; the enemy quickly gathered to repel this act of impudence, and since the Byzantines seemed in no way alarmed by this, they formed up five-hundred strong for an assault with time on their side. Just before noon they came, to be greeted by a hail of arrows that decimated their formations and broke apart their unity.
In the slight confusion that followed the Goths had to hastily re-form to repel a mounted assault by the Byzantine light cavalry, men who, once they had inflicted enough casualties, withdrew back to the crown of the hill. Flavius had taken much trouble to scrutinise the Goth approach to fighting, habits they would have evolved over several decades, perhaps even a whole century, his conclusion being they lacked flexibility. Repulsed once, they employed exactly the same tactic when they renewed their advance, usually to suffer exactly the same reverse.
Their battle tactics depended on getting close to their enemies, where their individual skills with sword, spear and axe would allow them to impose themselves and bring about victory. Yet without sufficient archers of their own they could not advance against a body of men overly supplied with that weapon and imbued with the proficiency to employ it.
The cavalry that hit them next did the most telling damage; the bucellarii first rode to just out of spear-casting range and, still moving, began to pick off individual targets, most notably the various junior commanders, which did nothing for the cohesion of what men remained. Arrows exhausted, his heavy cavalry made no attempt to drive home the advantage they had gained; they too retired to join with their comrades, arrows also too far depleted, in a well-ordered retreat to the Porta Salaria.