Totila was smart, strong, and patient, and so his forces began to recruit directly from the other side. There was little difference between the two sides in origins or loyalty, and if anything those who fought for their homeland had the advantage, and could even offer turncoat mercenaries the prospect of a home in the new land. We know, for example, of the general Herodianus, who had commanded a captured Naples for Belisarius, had accompanied Belisarius to Constantinople in the time of false peace, and then in 545 was sent back to command Spoleto, in the mountains between Ravenna and Rome. There he surrendered to an attack from Totila and fought at the side of his vanquisher.
The years of Totila’s war were dismal for much of the peninsula, and one gets the sense that Constantinople had trouble keeping its attention and enthusiasm focused on the conflict there. In 545, Totila had made his way south, picking off Naples, and focusing his intended siege once again on Rome. Belisarius, now back in Italy, tried both by land and by sea to force his way into the old capital, but failed. The siege dragged on through 546 and ended with victory for Totila in December. By the time Totila had his way with the city, there were said to be only about 500 civilian citizens left inside; the rest were dead from starvation or (many more) had escaped during the siege to take refuge elsewhere. For Totila, the city was only a token and not a real goal, so far had its lingering symbolic value outstripped its practical importance. He left it behind for Belisarius to reoccupy and attempt to restore. It stood empty for forty days after the departure of the victor who despised it and before the return of the general who felt obliged to maintain it.
Corsica Sardinia and Sicily
Totila’s story was not that of a desperate last stand resistance, for he could muster considerable force and considerable ambition. Even late in his war, he took control of Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily and sent an impressive fleet against the coast of Greece. He is traditionally thought to be the last barbarian freedom fighter, but it is fairer to think of him as the last Roman general defending the ancient order against the blundering hammer blow of Byzantine ignorance customized istanbul city tour.
Stories of gloom and doom are everywhere in the literature, and saints’ lives in particular capture fragments of a pervasive atmosphere of misery and fear. Boethius’s surviving daughter Rusticiana, one of the last offspring of the old senate to be seen in the city, is said to have been reduced to begging for food by the end of this siege, throwing herself on Totila’s mercy when he took the city. She fled then to Constantinople to start a new life, and that is when she made a good marriage for a daughter with a wealthy family from Egypt; the family flourished at the court of Maurice late in the century. (And she still drew revenues from property that others managed for her near Syracuse and near Rome.) We know a few stories in more detail, and they give us a sense of what it was like to endure in these years: how hard it was, but how in the end endurance was possible.
Theoderic and Gothic Italy
Consider a landowner, Gundila, by name associated with the new order of Theoderic and Gothic Italy, by now a long-established presence.7 He lived somewhere in Theodahad’s country, north of Rome on the edge of Tuscany. In 539, as the tide turned against Witigis, Gundila lost his property to Justinian’s armies, but by a timely conversion from Arianism to Catholicism at the hands of Pope Vigilius in 540, he took advantage of the victor’s generosity and got his property back. He even had a certificate from the Arian bishop of Rome to confirm that he had apostasized. Grateful, generous, and prudent, Gundila gave some of the land to the Catholic church of Saint Mary in the town of Nepi, north of Rome in territory swept back and forth repeatedly by the conflicting armies.
Wars did not let up. At some time in the early 540s, when Totila brought the native forces south again, he seized Gundila’s land a second time and gave it as a reward to one of his own officers, the count Tzalico. In 544-545, Belisarius returned to Nepi and Gundila’s hopes rose, but when Tzalico was expelled, Belisarius gave the land to the Catholic monastery of Saint Aelia in Nepi Amalasuntha’s death gave Justinian the pretext.
Gundila was resourceful, and so he went over Belisarius’s head, so to speak, to Pope Vigilius and persuaded the pope to order the monks of Saint Aelia to return the property to him. Still grateful, generous, and prudent, Gundila shared his recovered property by donating some of it back to the monks of Saint Aelia and some more to another community of monks, Saint Stephanus’s.
