Meanwhile, Belisarius sent troops out of the city to enter the gate of the vivarium and attack the Goths there from the rear. In hard fighting the Byzantines drove them out. Sallies from various city gates then drove off the Goths in disorder and resulted in their siege engines’ being burned to the ground. The Goths admitted to losing 30,000 dead, with an equal number wounded.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Military History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

After that, the city and its besiegers settled down to a war of waiting. This was interrupted by occasional sorties by Byzantine cavalry, which involved essentially the same tactical feat: A troop of horsemen would leave the city by one of the gates, provoking a number of Goths to attack them. The Byzantine horse archers would then shoot their assailants from a distance with their powerful bows. When the Goths retreated in the face of that missile onslaught, the Byzantines would charge the unprotected Gothic infantry with their lances. While the Goths had both armored lancers and foot archers, they never combined the two methods of fighting into a single system as the Byzantines had done, and so the Byzantines’ strategem routinely succeeded.

The cumulative successes of those forays had an unwonted effect upon the Roman populace. Dreaming no doubt of their earlier glory, they wished to join the Byzantine soldiers in a grand attack against the Goths. Belisarius explicitly opposed the idea, because the citizens had neither the training nor fighting experience and did not even have enough armor. Still the Romans insisted, and he reluctantly agreed.

The sortie, as Belisarius had feared, was a fiasco. Sallying from a number of gates, the regular Byzantine cavalry acquitted itself well and successfully engaged the Goths. The townsmen-cum-foot-soldiers fought as spearmen and were arranged in a phalanx outside of the Flaminian Gate to the north of the city. They were held in reserve until Belisarius was content that they could engage the enemy with the least amount of danger to themselves. They then marched forward against the demoralized Goths and drove them from the Field of Nero into the surrounding hills. At that point, however, the Romans, being mostly an undisciplined rabble, broke ranks and began to loot a Gothic camp, only to be attacked by Goths who could see they were in disarray. The Roman foot soldiers were driven back in flight to the walls of Rome, only to find the populace, again fearful of the pursuing Goths, refusing to open the gates. The Byzantine cavalry intervened and extricated them. Any gain that might have come from the fight was lost.

As the siege dragged on, the Goths destroyed the aqueducts that powered the flour mills. Belisarius countered that by setting the mills in boats on the Tiber within the city walls and suspending the mill wheels in the flowing water. Knowing there would be a shortage of food, he dismissed from the city all those he thought unnecessary to its defense.

The siege settled into a more complete blockade when the Goths took the port of Rome a few miles from the city itself, where the Tiber flows into the Mediterranean Sea. That impeded Belisarius’ already limited efforts to bring food and supplies into the city. As hunger set in, the populace at first pressed for a decisive battle to resolve the siege but later vacillated when Belisarius assured the people that reinforcements were on the way. None arrived, however, despite his request to Emperor Justinian. Belisarius knew the people were fickle, so he changed the locks on the city gates and rotated the watches over them so the Goths could not strike up friendships–and deals–with the guards. At night, Belisarius’ Moorish auxiliaries, accompanied by dogs, patrolled the trench outside the walls. The wisdom of his prudence was proved when a letter was intercepted from Pope Silverius to Vittigis, offering to betray the city. Belisarius had Silverius clothed as a monk and shipped east into exile while a new pope was elected.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to