Gothic War: Byzantine Count Belisarius Retakes Rome

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Accordingly, he fortified the Mulvian Bridge with a tower and set a small garrison of mercenaries to defend it. Belisarius must have thought that a small force positioned in a fortification could hold off a large number indefinitely, especially since they could be reinforced by nearby troops and the Goths could attack only from the narrow front of the bridge’s roadway. But these barbarian mercenaries proved untrustworthy. Shortly after Vittigis’ huge force arrived, the garrison force became terrified and deserted to the enemy, handing over control of the fortified bridge. The next morning Belisarius went on a reconnaissance into the area with 1,000 horsemen, completely unaware that he no longer held the bridge. A large body of Gothic cavalry surprised him and engaged him at close quarters. The deserters from the bridge recognized the general mounted on a white-faced bay and exhorted everyone to attack him with a view to ending the campaign on the spot. But Belisarius, fighting sword in hand, and his men engaged the Goths in a bloody fight in which they killed 1,000. The Goths broke and fled to their camp, pursued by the Byzantines. Reinforced there, the Goths compelled Belisarius to conduct a fighting retreat back to the city, where, to his anger, he found the gates closed to him. In fact, Belisarius was already falsely rumored to be dead and the Romans, failing to recognize him in the dark, feared the Goths would follow the fugitives into the city and take the town if they opened the gates.

As Belisarius and his men gathered beneath the walls, an ever greater number of Goths converged on them to finish the fight. At that point, the general conceived a plan both simple and daring–he ordered a charge. The Goths, surprised and supposing that he was being reinforced by fresh troops coming from another gate, withdrew. Instead of pursuing them, Belisarius turned back to the city and was finally admitted. Despite hours of close combat, the general had not been touched by a single weapon.

Belisarius realized that Rome would soon be completely surrounded and there would be no easy path for reinforcements. He was right; the Goths established a seventh camp in the Vatican Field and prepared for an assault. Meanwhile, Belisarius had flanges built onto the left sides of the battlements to shield the defenders, installed catapults on the city walls and ordered a ditch, or fosse, dug beneath the walls. He also drafted townsmen into brigades to defend the walls and interspersed them among his own soldiers to enforce discipline. He thus spread his thin forces farther and involved the Romans in the defense of their own city. He had a chain drawn across the Tiber to prevent the Goths from entering on boats and fortified the tomb of the Emperor Hadrian. The tomb, a fortress known today as the Castel’ Sant’Angelo, jutted out a bit from the city walls at that time to form an unintended bastion.

It took the Goths 18 days to prepare their attack. They constructed four siege towers to the height of the city walls, each of which contained a battering ram. The Goths also prepared fascines to toss into the fosse to allow the towers to be drawn over the ditch and to the wall by oxen. Other soldiers stood by with scaling ladders to strike at other places along the walls.

On March 21 the Goths began to bring the siege towers forward while the defenders watched in alarm. Belisarius, however, remained cheerful as he surveyed the attacker, then took up his bow and killed a Gothic officer at a great distance. His men hailed him, and he repeated the remarkable feat. Belisarius then commanded the men to shoot–not at the men, but at the oxen pulling the siege towers. The animals died in a hail of arrows, and the towers came to a halt without reaching the walls.

Meanwhile, some Goths had broken into the vivarium, an enclosure on the eastern side of the city made by joining two low walls at a right angle against the exterior of the city wall. Romans had penned wild animals there before sending them to the amphitheater for combats with gladiators, but the sport had long been outlawed, and the walls were crumbling. At the same time the Goths launched an assault on Hadrian’s tomb. The Byzantine soldiers placed there were in extreme peril because the rectangular shape of the monument’s base jutted out from the city wall and allowed the Goths to get somewhat behind the defenders. The defenders shot back at the attackers until they ran out of arrows. Then, in desperation, they broke up the statues at the tomb into chunks of rock and tossed them upon the Goths. By doing so, they managed to hold their position.

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Tags: Ancient-Medieval, Historical Conflicts

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