ITALY AND HER INVADERS.
BOOK V
.
CHAPTER XII.
SIEGES OF FIESOLI AND OSIMO.
The war had now lasted four years, and it was over a ruined and wasted
Italy that the wolves of war were growling. The summer of 538 was long
remembered as the time when Famine and her child Disease in their full horror
first fell upon Tuscany, Liguria, and the Aemilia. The fields had now been left
for two years uncultivated. A self-sown crop, poor but still a crop, sprang up
in the summer of 537. Unreaped by the hand of man, it
lay rotting on the ground: no plough stirred the furrows, no hand scattered fresh
seed upon the earth, and in the following summer there was of course mere
desolation. The inhabitants of Tuscany betook them to the mountains, and fed
upon the acorns which they gathered in the oak-forests that cling round the
shoulders of the Apennines. The dwellers in the Aemilia flocked into Picenum, thinking that the nearness of the seaboard would
at least preserve them from absolute starvation; Procopius marked the stages of
decline in this hunger-smitten people, and describes it in words which were
perhaps meant to remind the reader of Thucydides' description of the Plague of
Athens. First the pinched face and yellow complexion surcharged with bile; then
the natural moisture dried up, and the skin, looking like tanned leather,
adhering to the bones; the yellow color turning to a
livid purple, and the purple to black, which made the poor famine-stricken
countryman look like a burned-out torch; the expression of dazed wonder in the
face sometimes changing to the wild eyes of the maniac;—he saw and noted it
all. As is always the case after long endurance of hunger, some men, when
provisions were brought into the country, could not profit by them. However
carefully the nourishment was doled out to them, in small quantities at a time
as one feeds a little child, still in many cases their digestions could not
bear it, and those who had survived the famine died of food.
In some places cannibalism made its appearance. Two women dwelt in a
lonely house near Rimini, and were wont to entice into their dwelling the
passers-by, whom they slew in their sleep, and on whose flesh they feasted.
Seventeen men had thus perished. The eighteenth started up out of sleep just as
the hags were approaching for his destruction. With drawn sword he stood over
them, forced them to confess all their wickedness, then slew them.
Elsewhere the famine-wasted inhabitants might be seen streaming forth
into the fields to pluck any green herb that could be made available for food.
Often when they had knelt down for this purpose their strength would not serve
them to pull it out of the ground. And so it came to pass that they lay down
and died upon the ungathered herbage, unburied, for
there was none to bury them, but undesecrated, for
even the birds of carrion found nothing to attract them in those fleshless
corpses.
One little story told by Procopius brings vividly before us the misery
caused in Italy by the movements of the hostile armies. When the historian
accompanied Belisarius on his march over the Apennines for the relief of
Rimini, he saw a child which was suckled and watched over by a goat. The mother
of this child, a woman of Urbs Salvia, had fled before the approach of John's
army—the liberating army—into the province of Picenum.
In her flight she had been for a moment, as she supposed, parted from her
new-born babe; but either death or captivity had prevented her from returning
to the place where she had laid it down. The babe, wrapped in its
swaddling-clothes, lifted up its voice and wept. A she-goat which was near ran
to it, and pitying its cry, nourished it as she would have nourished her own
little one, and guarded it from all other animals. When the inhabitants of Urbs
Salvia found that John's army had friendly thoughts towards them, they returned
to their homes; but among them was not the mother of the child. One after
another of the women offered to give suck to the child, but it refused all
nourishment save that of its four-footed nurse; and she with loud bleatings and gestures of anger claimed the child as her
own charge. It was therefore left to the care of the goat, and named, like the
outcast prince of Argos, Aegisthus, “the goat's child”. Procopius, as has been
said, saw this marvel on his way through Urbs Salvia. The goat was at the time
at some little distance from her charge, but when Procopius and his friends
pinched it and made it cry, she came bounding towards it with a bleat of
distress, and standing over it, signified with butting horn that she would
guard it against all assailants.
Notwithstanding the cruel exhaustion of Italy, the parties were still
too evenly matched for the struggle to come to an end: Witigis, who by his
tardy and resourceless policy reminds us not a little the Saxon Ethelred, began
to cast about him for allies, a step which, if he had taken it three years ago,
might perhaps have saved him from ruin. The Franks were too utterly
untrustworthy; the Lombards, to whose King Wacis he
sent an embassy offering great gifts as the price of his alliance, refused to
break with Byzantium. He therefore called an assembly of the elders, and there
setting forth the difficulties of his situation, asked for the advice of his
subjects. After long deliberations and many idle suggestions, a proposal was
made which was fitted to the present state of affairs. It was pointed out by
one of the Gothic statesmen that the peace which Justinian concluded on the
accession of Chosroes in 531 was the true cause of the disasters both of the
Vandal and the Gothic monarchies. Had the Caesar of Constantinople not felt
secure of attack from the Persian King, he had never dared to employ the
matchless skill of Belisarius on the banks of Libyan rivers and under the walls
of Umbrian towns. It was therefore proposed and decided to send ambassadors to
Chosroes to stir him up, if possible, to a renewal of hostilities against the
Roman Empire. The ambassadors chosen were not Goths, whose nationality might
have prevented them from traversing in safety the wide provinces of the East,
but two priests of Liguria, probably Arian by their creed though Roman by
speech and parentage, who for the promise of a large sum of money undertook
this hazardous enterprise. One of these assumed the style of a bishop to give
weight to his representations, and the other accompanied him as an
ecclesiastical attendant.
The journey of these men to the Persian Court of course occupied a
considerable time, and the full results of their mission were not apparent for
more than a year after the period which we have now reached. The mere rumor, however, that negotiations were being opened between
the Goths and the Persians made Justinian, who knew the weakness of his eastern
frontier, so anxious to close the Italian war that he at once sent home the
Gothic envoys, who for a twelvemonth had been waiting in his ante-chambers,
suffering all those heart-breaking delays which seem to be engendered by the
very air of Constantinople. Now they were bidden to return, offering to the
Goths a long truce on terms which should be beneficial to both the combatants.
Belisarius, however, who throughout this stage of the proceedings overruled
with little hesitation the decisions of his master, refused to allow the Gothic
envoys to enter Ravenna till the sanctity of the persons of ambassadors had
been vindicated by the return of Peter and Athanasius, the Emperor's envoys to
Theodahad, who, for nearly four years, had been kept in unjustifiable
captivity. They returned, and as a reward of their devotion were promoted to
high offices in the Empire. Athanasius was made Praetorian Prefect of Italy in
the room of Reparatus, slain at Milan; and Peter, the
brave and outspoken disputant with Theodahad, was hailed as Illustrious Master
of the Offices, and received the embassies of foreign rulers in the palace-hall
of Byzantium.
In these negotiations the winter and early spring of 539 wore away. In
May 539 Belisarius addressed himself to the capture of the two fortresses which
still held out for the Goths south of Ravenna: and such was the strength of
position, perched upon their almost inaccessible heights, that all the rest of
the year was consumed upon the task. The two fortresses were Faesulae and Auximum, represented
by the modern towns of Fiesole and Osimo, the one overlooking the gleaming
Arno, the other beholding the blue Adriatic upon its horizon.
Every Italian traveler knows the little Tuscan
town to which we climb for our finest view of the dome of Brunelleschi and the
tower of Giotto, pausing in our ascent to visit the villa of the Magnificent
Lorenzo, and thinking of Milton's conversations with Galileo as we gaze upon
'The moon whose orb
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist viewed
At evening from the top of Fiesole.'
Instead of all this cluster of enchanting sights and memories, what had
the Faesulae of the sixth century to show? She had,
no doubt in greater extent, that stupendous Etruscan wall, the mere fragments
of which make the Roman ruins by the side of it look like the handiwork of
pigmies. She had the high fortress or Arx, a thousand feet above the Plain of
Arno, where the friars of St. Francis' order now kneel for worship; the Temple
of Bacchus, which was perhaps even then turned into a Christian basilica; and the
Theatre, on whose stone seats we may still sit and imagine that we see from
thence the couriers of Belisarius or Witigis spurring their steeds along the
Cassian Road below. She had perhaps some remembrance of the day, six centuries
ago, when Petreius defeated Catiline under her
cliffs. More probably, her inhabitants yet pointed to the spot, near to her
walls, where the vast horde of Radagaisus was surrounded and starved into
submission by Stilicho.
Fiesole was held by a body of Gothic troops, of whose numbers we are not
informed. To compel their surrender, Cyprian, one of the old officers who had
fought under Belisarius at the siege of Rome, and Justin, one of the new
arrivals under Narses, were sent with some of their own soldiers (probably
cavalry) and a band of Isaurian auxiliaries, together with five hundred of the
regular infantry, who still represented, though faintly, the old Roman legion.
John, now again obedient to the orders of Belisarius; another John, whose
mighty appetite procured him in the camp the nickname of the Glutton; and
Martin, apparently forgiven for his disgraceful failure before Milan, were sent
with a large body of troops to cover the siege of Fiesole and to hover about
the upper waters of the Po. If possible, they were to intercept the
communications of Uraias with Ravenna; if that were impossible, and if he
should march to the relief of his uncle Witigis, they were to keep up an active
pursuit of his army. These generals found the town of Tortona (then called Dertona), by the bank of the Po, a convenient basis of
operations. As it was unwalled, it could be easily occupied by them; but by the
command of Theodoric it had been plentifully supplied with houses suitable for
the quartering of troops, and these were now taken advantage of by the generals
who came to overthrow his kingdom. After a few skirmishes the siege of Fiesole
settled down into a mere blockade. The Roman soldiers were unable to scale the
heights on which the city stood, but they could easily surround them and see
that no provisions were brought into Fiesole. Pressed by famine, the garrison
called on Witigis, who ordered his nephew Uraias to advance to their
assistance. Uraias with a large army marched to Pavia, crossed the Po, and sat
down over against John and Martin, at a distance of some seven miles from their
camp at Tortona. Neither party was willing to begin the fight. The Romans felt
that their end was gained if they prevented Uraias from attacking the besiegers
of Tortona. The Goths feared that one lost battle would shatter the last hope
of their monarchy.
Both armies therefore resumed that waiting game which they had played
before the fall of Milan, and for which the Lombard plain (as we now call it)
is so eminently adapted.
While this was the position of affairs, a new enemy swept like a torrent
down the ravines of the Alps of St. Bernard, an enemy whose advent for a time
changed the whole aspect of the war in Upper Italy. “The Franks”, says
Procopius, “seeing the mischief which Goths and Romans were inflicting on one
another, and the length to which the war was being protracted, began to take it
very ill that they should obtain no advantage from the calamities of a country
of which they were such near neighbours. Forgetting, therefore, the oaths which
they had sworn and the covenants which they had ratified only a short time
before with both kingdoms—for this nation is the most slippery of all mankind
in its observance of its plighted word—they marched into Italy to the number of
100,000 men under the guidance of their King Theudibert.
A few horsemen armed with spears surrounded the person of their King: all the
rest fought on foot, having neither bow nor spear, but each with a sword and
shield and one axe. The iron of this axe is stout, sharp, and two-edged; the
handle, made of wood, is exceedingly short. At a signal given they all throw
these axes, and thus at the first onset are wont to break the shields of the
enemy and slay his men.
When the Goths heard that this new host under Theudibert's own command was descending from the passes of the Alps, they trusted that the
Franks were about to throw their weight into the opposite scale to that of the
Empire, and that the hard struggle of the last four years was at length to be
terminated by their co-operation. The Franks took care not to undeceive them so
long as the Po had still to be crossed, but marched as a friendly force,
harming no one, through Liguria. Having entered Pavia, having been allowed
quietly to obtain possession of the bridge at the confluence of the Ticino and
the Po, they threw off all disguise, and slaying the Gothic women and children
whom they found there, cast their dead bodies into the stream, as an offering
to the unseen powers and as the first-fruits of the war. Procopius assures us
that this savage deed had really a religious significance, “since these
barbarians, Christians though they be, preserve much of their, old creed, still
practicing human sacrifices and other unhallowed rites, by which they seek to
divine the future”. Thin as the varnish of Christianity was over the Frankish
nation, “the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church”, it is hardly possible
that this statement can be literally true. There were many Alamanni, doubtless,
and other men of tribes confessedly still heathen, in the wild horde which
clustered round the horse of King Theudibert; and it
may have been some of these who performed the religious part of the rite, the
Christian Franks only sharing in the brutal butchery which preceded it.
When the Gothic sentinels on the bridge saw the horrid deed perpetrated
by these savages, they fled without striking a blow. The Franks proceeded
towards Tortona; the main body of the Gothic army, still believing in their
friendly intentions, advanced to meet them, but were soon undeceived by the
storm of flying axes, swung by Frankish hands, laying their bravest low. In
their consternation they turned to flee, and fled right through the Roman camp,
never stopping till they reached Ravenna.
When the Imperial troops saw the flight of the Goths, deeming that
Belisarius must certainly have arrived, must have conquered, and must be now
pursuing, they advanced, as they supposed, to meet him. They too were cruelly
undeceived, and being easily routed by the vast host of the Franks, fled across
the Apennines, some into Tuscany to join the besiegers of Fiesoli,
others to Osimo to tell the grievous tidings to Belisarius. The Franks, having
thus won an easy victory over both armies, and sacked both camps, rioted for
some time in the enjoyment of all the good things that they found there. When
these came to an end, having no proper commissariat, and, like the brutish
barbarians that they were, having no skill for aught but mere ravage of the
country in which they found themselves, they fell short of provisions. The
large draught-oxen of Liguria furnished them for a time with beef, but their
only drink was the water of the great river. The combination proved injurious
to the digestion of the greedy soldiers, and diarrhea and dysentery soon scourged the army of Theudibert, a
third part of which, so it was reported, fell victims to these diseases.
Belisarius was filled with anxiety for the fate of the besiegers of
Fiesole when he heard of the Frankish invasion. He wrote a letter to Theudibert charging him with conduct which the basest of
mankind could scarcely have been guilty of, in violating his sworn and written
promise to join in a league against the Goths, nay more, in actually turning
his arms against the Empire. He warned him that the wrath of the Emperor for
such a wanton outrage would not be easily turned aside, and recommended him to
take care lest, in his light-hearted search after adventures, he fell himself
into the extreme of peril. The letter reached Theudibert just at a time when his fickle soldiers were loudly complaining of the loss of
so many thousands of their comrades by disease. The purpose of his soul was
changed, and he vanished across the Alps with the remainder of his host as
speedily as he came, having done nearly as much mischief and reaped as little
advantage as Charles VIII, the typical Frank of the fifteenth century, in his
invasion of Italy. Thus already is the melancholy strain begun which for a
thousand years and more was to be the dirge of Italy. Already might a truly
statesmanlike Roman see the mistake which had been made in rejecting—for merely
sentimental reasons—the wise policy of Theodoric and Cassiodorus, that policy
which would have made the Roman the brain and the Ostrogoth the sword-arm of
Italy. Might that scheme have had fair play,—
Then, still untired,
Would not be seen the armed torrents poured
Down the steep Alps, nor would the hostile horde
Of many-nationed spoilers from the Po
Quaff blood and water, nor the stranger's sword
Be her sad weapon of defence, and so,
Victor or vanquished, she, the slave of friend or foe.
While these events were passing in the north and west of Italy,
Belisarius was prosecuting, with less success than had hitherto fallen to his
lot, the slow siege of Osimo. This little city, which stands on a hill 900 feet
above the sea, is ten miles south of Ancona, and about nine west of the
Adriatic shore. Few travellers now climb up to its difficult height except
those who may be disposed to take it on their way, when making pilgrimage to
the Holy House of the Virgin brought, as the story goes, by angels from
Nazareth and deposited on the neighbouring hill of Loretto. The journey leads
us through one of the fairest districts of Italy; a fertile undulating land,
each height crowned with its own village, a stronghold in former days. We meet
the stalwart peasants of La Marca driving their milk-white oxen in their
antique chariot-like carts. Each cart is adorned with some picture of virgin or
saint, or, for those who do not soar so high, of wife or sweetheart, rudely
painted, but testifying to that yearning after the beautiful in Art which is
the Italian's heritage. At length the road mounts steeply upward. After a
toilsome ascent we stand upon the mountain crest of Osimo and survey the wide
panorama.
Almost at our feet lies Castelfidardo, where,
in 1860, Lamoriciere, commanding the soldiers of the
Pope, sustained a crushing defeat at the hands of the general of Victor
Emmanuel. The curving coast of Ancona on the north, the Adriatic filling up the
eastern horizon, the long line of the Apennines on the west, and their king the
Gran Sasso d'Italia in the dim south, may all be seen
from our airy watch-tower. In the Palazzo Pubblico of
the town we find abundant evidence of its vanished greatness. Here are many
inscriptions, belonging to the age both of republican and imperial Rome,
betokening the pride of the Auximates in their city,
once like Philippi in Macedonia, “a chief city in that country and a colony”.
The gens Oppia seems for some time to have supplied the chief persons of
the miniature senate, but all, of whatever family, proudly claim the title of “Decurio of the Roman colony of the Auximates”,
that word Decurio being still a badge of honor, not yet the branded mark of servitude. Looking at
these tombs we recall with interest the words of Caesar, who tells us that at
the beginning of the Civil War, the Decuriones of Auximum sent a message to the Senatorial general who
commanded the garrison, “that neither they nor their fellow-townsmen could
endure that after all his services to the Republic, Caius Caesar the general
should be excluded from their walls”. In the years, nearly six hundred, which
had passed since that important resolution was formed, Auximum had generally played its part with credit, as the leading city of Picenum. Ancona, which now far surpasses it in importance,
was then its humble dependent, bearing to it nearly the same relation that
Ostia bore to Rome or Piraeus to Athens.
Auximum was garrisoned by some of the noblest and most martial of the Goths, who
rightly looked upon it as the key of Ravenna. The Roman troops were quartered
in huts all-round the foot of the hill; and the garrison saw a chance of
success by making a charge at evening upon a portion of the host while
Belisarius was still engaged with his body-guard in measuring the ground for
the camp. The attack was bravely repelled, and the garrison retired, but the
moment they stood again on their precipitous hill-top the battle again inclined
in their favour. Night fell: a number of the garrison, who had gone out to
forage the day before, returning, found the camp-fires between them and Auximum. A few managed to steal through the lines of the
Romans into the city, but the greater number took refuge in some woods near,
and were there found by the besiegers and killed.
Reluctantly Belisarius, having carefully surveyed the ground, came to
the conclusion that the place being absolutely unapproachable all round, except
by a steep ascent, was invulnerable to any sudden stroke, and must be
blockaded. The blockade took him seven months, months of weariness and chafing
delay, during which the Frank was descending into Lombardy, the Courts of
Ravenna and Ctesiphon were spinning their negotiations for alliance, and the
position of the Empire under the grasping policy of Justinian was becoming
every day more full of peril.
There was a green patch of ground not far from the walls of Osimo which
was the scene of many a bloody encounter. Each party by turns resorted to it to
obtain forage for their horses and cattle, sometimes, in the case of the
hard-pressed garrison, to pluck some herbs by which men could allay the pangs
of hunger; and each party when thus engaged was of course harassed by the
enemy. Once the Goths, seeing a number of Romans on the foraging-ground,
detached some heavy wagon-wheels from their axles and rolled them down the hill
upon their foes: but the Romans easily opened their ranks and let the
wagon-wheels thunder past them into the plain, guiltless of a single besieger's
life. In reading of these naive expedients of the Goths for inflicting injury
on their foes, one feels that they were but overgrown schoolboys, playing the
game of war with a certain heartiness and joviality, but quite ignorant of the
conditions of success.
Their next move, however, showed a little more tactical skill. They
stationed an ambuscade in a valley at some little distance from the town, by
judicious appearance of flight drew the Romans towards it, and then with their
combined forces inflicted heavy loss on the besiegers. The misfortune of the
position was that the Romans who remained in the camp could plainly see the
ambuscade, and shouted to their comrades not to venture further in that
direction: but in the din of battle the shouts were either unheard or supposed
to be shouts of encouragement, and thus the Gothic stratagem succeeded.
While Belisarius was brooding over this disappointing day's work, his
secretary, the literary Procopius, approached him with a suggestion drawn from
his reading of the war-books written by ‘the men of old'. “In ancient times”
said he, “armies used to have one note on the bugle for advance, another for
recall. It may be that your troops, largely recruited from among the
barbarians, are too untutored to learn this difference of note, but at least
you may have a difference of instrument. Let the light and portable
cavalry-trumpet, made as it is only of wood and leather, be always used to
sound the advance: and when the deep note of the brazen trumpet of the infantry
is heard, let the army know that that is the signal for retreat”. The general
adopted his secretary's suggestion, and calling his soldiers together delivered
a short harangue in which he explained the new code of signals, at the same
time cautioning them against headlong rashness, and assuring them that, in the
skirmishing kind of warfare in which they were now engaged, there was no shame
in retreat, or even in flight when the exigencies of the position required it.
Of those exigencies the general must be the judge, and he would give the signal
for retreat, when he deemed it necessary, by a blast from the infantry trumpet.
In the next skirmish at the foraging-ground under the new tactics the
Romans were victorious. One of the swart Moorish horsemen from Mount Atlas
seeing the dead body of a Goth covered with gold armour—haply such as Theodoric
was buried in at Ravenna—began dragging him from the field by the hair of his
head. A Goth shot an arrow which pierced the spoiler through the calves of both
of his legs. Still, says Procopius, the Moor persisted in dragging the golden-armoured
hero by his hair. Suddenly the trumpet of retreat was heard, and the Romans
hurried back to the camp carrying off with them both the Moor and his prize.
The garrison, who were beginning to be hard pressed with hunger, resolved to
send messengers to Ravenna to claim the help of their King. The letters were
written and the messengers prepared. Upon the first moonless night the Goths
crowded to the ramparts and uttered a mighty shout, which made the besiegers
think that a sally was in progress or that assistance was arriving from
Ravenna. Even Belisarius was deceived, and fearing the confusion of a nocturnal
skirmish he ordered his soldiers to keep quiet in their quarters. This was
exactly what the barbarians desired, since it enabled their messengers to steal
through the Roman lines in safety. The letter which they delivered to Witigis
was worded in that independent tone which the German warriors feared not to
adopt to their King. “When you placed us, 0 King, as a garrison in Auximum, you asserted that you were committing to us the
keys of Ravenna and of your kingdom. You bade us hold the place manfully, and
you promised that you with all your army would promptly move to our assistance.
We, who have had to fight both with hunger and Belisarius, have been faithful
to our trust, but you have not lifted a finger to help us. But remember, that
if the Romans take Auximum, the keys of your house,
there is not a chamber therein from which you will be able to bar them”.
Witigis read the letter, heard the messengers, sent them back to buoy up the
beleaguered garrison with hopes of speedy assistance, but took not a single
step in fulfilment of his promise. He was afraid of John and Martin, hovering
over the valley of the Po: he was perhaps more justly afraid of the difficulty
of provisioning his troops on the long march into Picenum.
To the Romans who had possession of the sea, and who could import all that they
needed from Sicily and Calabria, this difficulty was far less formidable than
to him. Still, if the relief of Osimo was dangerous, its reduction meant
certain ruin. Anything would have been better than to let his brave soldiers,
trusting to his plighted word, starve slowly on their battlements, while he
himself, like another Honorius, skulked behind the lagoons of Ravenna.
After these events came the mad torrent of the Frankish invasion,
bringing equal consternation to Goths and Romans, and affording to Witigis
something more than a mere pretext for the postponement of his promise. The
garrison of Osimo of course knew nothing of this invasion; and Belisarius,
informed of the previous embassy by deserters, watched the fortress with added
diligence to prevent any second-message from being sent. In these
circumstances, the Goths, bent on bringing their case again before their King,
began to parley with a certain Burcentius, a soldier
(probably an Armenian) who had come to Italy with Narses the Less, and who was
stationed in a lonely place to prevent the foraging expeditions of the
garrison. Large moneys in hand and the promise of more on his return from
Ravenna induced this man to turn traitor and to bear the Second letter of the
Goths to Witigis. The letter ran thus: “You will best inform yourself as to our
present condition by enquiring who is the bearer of this dispatch. For it is
absolutely impossible for any Goth to get through the enemy's lines. Our best
food is now the herbage which grows near the city wall, and even this cannot be
obtained without the sacrifice of many lives. Whither such facts as these tend
we leave to be judged of by you and all the Goths in Ravenna”.
To this short and pathetic letter Witigis returned a long and shifty
answer, laying the blame of his past inactivity on Theudibert and the Franks; promising now with all speed to come to the assistance of his
brave soldiers, and beseeching them to continue to act worthily of the
reputation for valour which had caused him to single them out from all others
as the defenders of his kingdom.
With the King's letter and many pieces of Gothic gold in his girdle, Burcentius returned to his station by the foraging-ground.
His six days' absence was easily explained to his comrades. He had been seized
with illness, and had been obliged to spend those days, off duty, in a neighbouring
church. At a suitable time he gave the King's letter to the garrison, who were
greatly encouraged thereby, and persevered many days longer in their diet of
salad, ever hoping that the trumpet of Witigis would be heard next day beneath
their walls.
Still the slothful and cowardly King came not. Once more the Goths
employed the services of the traitor Burcentius, who
this time bore a letter from them saying that they would wait five days, no
longer, and would then surrender the city. Again Burcentius returned after his opportune illness, bringing yet further flattering words and
false hopes from the Nithing (as Saxons would have
called him) in his palace at Ravenna. Again they were duped, and waited on in
the extremity of hardship, resisting all the kind and coaxing words of
Belisarius, to whom it began to be a matter of life and death to get the siege
speedily ended.
Utterly perplexed by this extraordinary pertinacity of the Goths, and
longing to find out its cause, the General discussed with his subordinate
Valerian, whether it would be possible to capture some prisoner of distinction
and extort from him the desired knowledge. Valerian mentioned that he had in
his train some Slovenes from the banks of the Danube, and that these men were
wont to crouch behind some small rock or shrub and stealing forth from thence
to capture unwary travelers, either Romans, or
barbarians of another tribe. This savage accomplishment, as it seemed, might
now be turned to useful account. A tall and powerful Slovene was chosen and
told that he should receive a large sum if he would capture a living Goth. He
went forth accordingly in the dim morning twilight, and, bending his stalwart
limbs into the smallest possible compass, hid behind a bush close to the
foraging-ground. Thither came soon a Gothic noble to pick some herbs for his
miserable meal. He cast many a look towards the Roman camp, to see if danger
threatened him from thence, but suspected nothing of his nearer foe. While he
was stooping down, suddenly the Slovene was upon him, grasped him tightly round
the waist, and in spite of his struggles carried him into the camp to
Belisarius. The prisoner, when questioned as to the cause of his countrymen's
extraordinary pertinacity, revealed the history of the last two messages to
Ravenna, and pointed to Burcentius as the bearer of
them. The wretched Armenian confessed his guilt, and was handed over to his
comrades to be dealt with according to their& pleasure. The pleasure of
these barbarians was that he should be burned alive in the full sight of the
garrison, his employers. “Thus” says Procopius, “did Burcentius reap the fruit of his greediness for gain”.
Still the indomitable Goths would not surrender the fortress which had
been confided to them by the faithless Witigis—faithless, but yet their king,
Belisarius therefore determined to cut off their supply of water, and thus
force them to a capitulation. There was outside the city, but near the walls, a
cistern constructed of massive masonry, from which the Goths used to draw
water, each excursion for the purpose being a sortie, which had to be effected
hurriedly and by stealth. The General's design was to break down the masonry of
this cistern sufficiently to prevent any large accumulation of water therein,
as the Goths would never have time to wait and fill their amphorae from the
slowly-running stream. Drawing up all his troops in battle array and threatening
the town with an attack, he kept the garrison occupied while five Isaurians,
equipped with axes and crowbars, stole into the cistern. They were, however,
perceived by the garrison, who guessed their errand, and assailed them with a
cloud of missiles. The strong vaulted roof over their heads, placed there by
the builders of the cistern to keep its waters from the noon-day sun, proved to
the Isaurians an effectual shelter. Hereupon the garrison issued forth to
dislodge them. So fierce was their onset that the besiegers' line wavered
before them. Belisarius rushed to the spot, by voice and gesture exhorting them
to stand firm. While he was thus engaged an arrow from a Gothic bow came
whizzing towards him, and would certainly have inflicted on him a fatal wound
in the belly, had not one of his guards, named Unigat,
seeing the General's danger, interposed his hand and in it received the hostile
weapon. The faithful guardsman was forced to quit the field in agony, and lost
for the remainder of his days the use of his hand; but the General's life was
saved:—his narrowest escape this, since he rode the dark roan charger on the
first day of the siege of Borne. At the same time, seven Armenian heroes
(soldiers of Narses the Less and Aratius) did great
deeds of valor, charging uphill against the Goths,
dispersing their forces on the level ground, and at length, about noon-day,
turning the battle, which had begun at dawn and seemed at one time likely to be
a Roman defeat, into a Roman victory. Great, however, was the disappointment of
Belisarius when he found that all this bravery had been wasted. The Isaurians,
emerging from the cistern, were obliged to confess that in six hours of labour
they had not been able to loosen a single stone. “For the masons of old time”,
says the historian, “put such thoroughly good work into this as into all their
other buildings, that they yielded not easily either to time or to the hand of
an enemy”. This remark, which is fully confirmed by all that we see of the
earlier work of the Romans in our own land, is perhaps meant as a covert
criticism on the ostentatious but unenduring edifices of Justinian.
Thus foiled in his attempt to destroy the cistern, Belisarius,
regardless of those general instincts of humanity which have endeavoured to
formulate themselves under the title of “The Laws of War”, resolved to poison
the well. The bodies of dead animals, poisonous herbs, and heaps of quicklime
were thrown by his orders into the cistern. Still, however, the brave garrison
held out, drawing their water from one tiny well in the city, and looking forth
daily for the Gothic banners on the northern horizon.
At length the end of this tedious siege came from an unexpected quarter.
The garrison of Fiesole, unable to endure their hardships longer, surrendered
to Cyprian and Justin, on condition that their lives should be spared. Bringing
their new prisoners with them, the generals marched to Osimo The sight of their
captive fellow-countrymen, aided by the remonstrances of Belisarius, broke down
the long endurance of the defenders of the capital of Picenum,
and they offered to surrender if they might march forth with all their
possessions to join their countrymen at Ravenna. Belisarius was earnestly
desirous to end the siege at once, before an alliance which he dreaded between
Franks and Goths should have had time to consolidate itself. On the other hand,
he was reluctant to allow so many noble Goths, the bravest of the brave, to
swell the ranks of the defenders of Ravenna; and his soldiers loudly murmured
that it was monstrous, after subjecting them to the hardships of a siege, and
such a siege, to deprive them of a soldier's heritage, the spoil. At length the
two parties came to a fair arrangement. The Goths were to surrender half their
property to the besiegers, taking a solemn oath to conceal nothing, and were
allowed to retain the other half. So satisfied were they with these terms, and
probably also so exasperated at the faithlessness of their King, that they
appear to have actually taken service under the standards of the Emperor. There
were evidently still many Goths to whom only two relations towards the Empire
suggested themselves as possible, hostile invasion of its territory, or
settlement as foederati within its borders. The siege of Osimo had lasted,
according to one authority, seven months. It probably began in May, 539, and ended
in December of the same year.
