And so in 535, Amalasuntha’s death gave Justinian the pretext he needed—supposed instability and illegitimacy—to set his fleets on the water again, this time with a base of operations in Africa and doubtless still more confidence that he could seize and use Sicilian ports along the way.
Belisarius worked his way up the coast. As he took Naples against almost no opposition, the shudder of his impact cost Theodahad the throne. The last of Theoderic’s family to rule, Theodahad was overthrown by one of his own hard-nosed senior officers, Witigis. Then, as he fled from Rome to Ravenna, Theodahad was cut down and killed, probably by people wanting favors from the new king.
The Italians were luckier in choosing Witigis to lead them. After forty years of mainly peaceful tenancy of a fertile, prosperous land, they had found a leader who was a gifted and able general and who would marshal them fiercely and well in combat, but to no avail in the end.
Rome by November 536
Witigis inherited an unready force facing a serious invasion, and so he yielded Rome by November 536, in the rainy season, but there was strategy in his concession. By January, with Belisarius thinking himself settled comfortably and even a bit triumphantly inside the capital city, the Italian forces reappeared and laid siege to the city, the first in a series of three dismal standoffs, which would batter and batter a city that had not been prepared to withstand ordinary warfare, much less such a wearing, tedious siege. In these desperate moments, the occupiers of the city became themselves enemies of the residents and destroyers of the city’s fabric.
A year of sallies, skirmishes, and inertia passed before Belisarius broke out at last. Leaving behind a garrison, he pursued Witigis north for two years, through 538 and 539. He called for and received reinforcements from the east, and eventually his underlings took Rimini and Milan. At length Belisarius succeeded in cornering Witigis in Ravenna and, in 540, gained the capital of the kingdom that Theoderic had refounded and led from there customized tour istanbul.
No victory in this war would be a true one, and distraction followed distraction. The defeated forces in Ravenna made a quite rational choice, offering the heroic conqueror the throne he had just earned. The irony of Justinian’s reign—that he was a military man who sent other soldiers to fight his wars for him—was no business of the Italians, who simply sought to make the best possible deal.
Goths or Romans
Belisarius rejected the offer, but it compromised him nonetheless. Though he returned in victory to Constantinople with a retinue of dignitaries—captives, hostages, or guests, Goths or Romans, depending on your point of view—he was denied a second triumph and instead sent to fight again the Persians on the eastern front. Every surviving member of Theoderic’s Amal family was by now either in Constantinople or pacified and tamed back in an Italy that supported Belisarius’s new regime. Witigis himself was scorned and rewarded with a genteel retirement. The war in Italy, after all, was over.
But it wasn’t. First, the Franks chose the moment of destabilization to assert their presence, sacking Milan while all the attention was on the other end of the Po valley, not so much to claim land on the peninsula as to ensure their own dominant position in Gaul by projecting their power across the Alps. In the disarray of that moment, a general—briefly king in the eyes of his followers—named Ildibad rallied the native forces of the northern corners of Italy, Liguria and the Veneto. Then a few months later a new leader emerged at the head of the Gothic-led remnants in those parts of northern Italy that Belisarius’s forces had not directly subdued: Totila, a general every bit the equal of Belisarius Some indication that Gundila.
Totila led that Gothic resistance for more than a decade. His ability to recruit forces all through the 540s, starting north of the Po, gives the lie to any thought that the regime of Theoderic’s successors was inauthentic or poorly rooted. By all rights, an Italy that had been invaded and defeated, and whose capitals and leaders had been captured, should have subsided into surly dependency. But Totila was able to capitalize on the boorishness of Byzantine colonial rule. Very quickly, the alien presence in Italy realized that it would be confined to cities and safe zones, and from there would have to sally out to fight the unrelenting natives.
