The war dragged on, and at some point Totila returned; we have some indication that Gundila lost land again. After the war was over and a settled regime was in place, Gundila took the case to law before a magistrate at Rome—and this is how we happen to know his story. From that perspective, the case was a mess, with, for example, heirs of Tzalico still able to claim ownership by right of the grant from Totila, and to hope the new regime that owed allegiance to Constantinople would recognize the grant. We don’t, alas, know the outcome, but Gundila had made it through the two decades of war in one piece, fighting for his property and status.
In the southern reaches of Italy, in modern Calabria, Tullianus was a landowner whose family came from nowhere, yet who had broad power in his region and good connections beyond it. When the Byzantine general Johannes came south to claim and exercise control over the cities of that region in 545—while Belisarius was making his great effort to regain the control he thought he had won in 540 —Tullianus appeared in his presence. He represented the population of this region as independent but prudent.
They would go along with whatever regime was in power, out of a desire for self-preservation rather than by conviction or design. The people said they had gone along with Theoderic’s regime reluctantly, but then they felt aggrieved when the emperor’s men treated them as though they were the barbarian enemy. Johannes won Tullianus’s loyalty by pledging generosity. When in the next wave of conflict Totila again sent forces south to this mountainous area, Tullianus was ready to take sides and lead, and so rounded up a militia of peasants from the region. At this point he anticipated medieval feudal lords and their retinues, heroically holding a pass against the enemy. Totila was able to recruit others from the region, however (this must have happened frequently), and won the day tour guide istanbul.
Crotone in modern Calabria
Tullianus’s brother, Deopheron, encountered Totila in those days not far from what is now Crotone in modern Calabria. Another general, Godilas, came with Deopheron. Godilas is identified as a Thracian, with no indication whether he had come through the Balkans on Theoderic’s side or had been an officer with the forces sent from Constantinople. Together Godilas and Deopheron pleaded for the safety of people around Crotone in the face of Totila’s arrival. Usually, Totila could afford to be magnanimous, but he made an example of the commander of the fortress there—a man of Massegetic origins, therefore probably a captive or refugee from Persia—for not living up to an earlier truce agreement. He had the man castrated, and cut off his hands besides. The Italians in the citadel with him lost all their property, but the surrounding people were allowed to keep theirs if they joined with Totila. Eighty of them did.
One more glimpse can help us capture something of the mentality of the higher classes. A minor figure in the old and long-powerful senatorial family of the Anicii, Maximus, betrothed to Mathesuentha, sister of the dead king Athalaric, was quickly and probably rightly suspected by Belisarius of supporting Witigis in the 530s. He sought refuge under the protection of Totila, who put him out of the way by sending him to Campania, south of Rome, where he lived as a sort of hostage on property of his own for many years, waiting out the war. In the end, something went wrong and Totila’s short-lived successor Teia had Maximus executed in 552—one of the myriad of personal tragedies in the aftermath of that war Totila was smart.
The church of Rome was ever itself. In 537 Belisarius, in command of the city of Rome, forced the election of a pope, the wretched Vigilius, who would comply with Constantinople’s wishes in matters of political loyalty and doctrinal agreement. Vigilius was heavyset, and his enemies snorted that he brought down columns the way Samson did, but only by accident. He had been the Roman church’s representative in Constantinople and Theodora sent him back precisely to see him installed as a pope likely to comply with Constantinople’s wishes. Nothing we know about him suggests that a fragment of talent, principle, or wisdom disturbed him in his assiduous exploration of his anxieties and in his search for new ways of truckling to the powers that controlled him.
