THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYin 551, owed much to his having insisted on being given enough resources to
raise suffi cient troops and pay the soldiers’ arrears. In the encounter at Busta
Gallorum (552), the Byzantines for once outnumbered the Goths, whose
weakness in archery again told against them. The Gothic king Totila was fatally
wounded in this battle, before which he performed a dramatic war-dance,
wearing armour plentifully covered with gold, and the decoration on his
cheek-plates as well as on his helmet and spear was of purple – indeed a
wonderful display of regal splendour.
(Proc., Wars VIII.31.18)A few months later his successor Teias was also defeated in battle at Mons
Lactarius. But even before this, Procopius’ account had become more and
more disillusioned about Justinian and imperial policy generally, and he left
the closing stages of the war to be told by his successor Agathias in the early
570s.^41
In taking on the task of reconquering Italy, Justinian clearly underestimated
the power of the Ostrogoths to mount a long-term and serious resistance, as
well as the consequent costs to the empire of keeping up the military effort
year after year. He may have thought in terms of an offensive as short term
as Belisarius’ spectacular campaign against the Vandals. No one could have
foreseen the plague of 541 or its drastic impact on the capital, and the relative
quiet of the situation on the eastern frontier at the start of the Italian cam-
paign was to prove illusory. Once conquered, North Africa, and eventually
Italy, each required a new administrative organization – also costly. There
was investment in religious structures, as with the large pilgrimage complex
at Bir Ftouha in Carthage, dated to the 540s,^42 and in the case of Africa, this
also meant a massive investment of men and resources for the province’s
defence, which added to the diffi culty of carrying on the wars elsewhere. But
in addition to all these factors, Justinian himself turned out to be an uncertain
commander, suspicious of his subordinates and jealous of allowing them even
the forces they needed for the task in hand.
Moreover, the military problems went hand in hand with those of maintain-
ing religious unity. The closing stages of the Gothic war in the 540s and early
550s coincided with a tense period in ecclesiastical politics which led up to the
Fifth Ecumenical Council held in Constantinople in 553–54, by which Justin-
ian hoped to fi nd a formula acceptable both to the anti-Chalcedonians in the
east and to the church of Rome. Passions ran very high on all sides. The Latin-
speaking North African bishops, who were strongly on the side of Rome and
against the emperor, went to Constantinople en masse, while Pope Vigilius,
still in the capital, spent months under virtual house arrest, and for a long time
refused to attend the council altogether, only recanting in its fi nal stages.^43 The
crisis followed Justinian’s own religious initiative in 543, known as the affair
of the Three Chapters, because of his decree ordering the condemnation of
the works of three earlier dyophysite theologians (Theodore of Mopsuestia,