Dynamics – Page 7

Crossed the Rhine in 406

February 17, 2022

The war band we call the Vandals had crossed the Rhine in 406, far from Rome, when Honorius’s and Stilicho’s attention was focused elsewhere. They appeared in Africa more than twenty years later, under disputed circumstances. At a minimum, we must account for the romanization of a generation that elapsed between the crossing of the Rhine and the crossing of the Strait of Gibraltar. The young men who fought in Africa had all been raised to manhood inside Roman boundaries, and however romanized they were as its neighbors, they were assuredly more so now. Their role in Africa, moreover, was not that of men from the moon, but that of participants in local political dramas.

It was said, very likely falsely but said nonetheless, that they had been invited into Africa by one of the Roman generals there, seeking allies against rivals. In the course of a decade, they supplanted those generals and constituted the sole military power between Gibraltar and Cyrene. Carthage fell to them, less by main force than as a result of their growing rootedness in Africa itself. The advantage shared by all these rogue war bands—the ones we call barbarian—was their willingness to settle down and make a place their own. Rome had flourished by building professional, rootless armies that could go anywhere. Armies like that make excellent attacking machines, but if the task is defense, troops close to their homes have a great advantage: short supply lines, easy recruitment of replacements, and a passionate commitment to what they fight for. Roman government in Africa in the fifth century was a plant that lost its roots and so consequently lost its branches and flowers.

From an African point

The new regime in Carthage owed nothing to anyone and saw no reason to regret its independence. From an African point of view, the heavy taxation that had drawn the produce of Africa, and much of its wealth, across the water to Italy could be done without very easily. The harbor of Carthage was renovated in the fifth century and trade clearly continued, though on terms more advantageous to the Africans than in the days of Roman taxes. Scholars continue to explore just how far the economic relations between Africa and the rest of the world were different in the last years of the fifth century from what they had been a century earlier, but the volume certainly subsided istanbul tours guide.

In Carthage itself, you might not notice the change. The Vandals, if we have to call them that, are famous for the decadent luxury of members of their upper classes, who clearly prospered well in their capital city. If archaeology were freer to pursue its business in Algeria than has been the case since before the war of independence half a century ago, we would know better just how much the decline of involuntary trade was reflected in the fading of prosperity in the Numidian uplands and the valleys where Augustine had grown up and lived. But the Vandals ran their province much as it had been run before. For the rest of the Roman world, the experience was a bit like the “oil shock” of 1973. Prices went up, and the sellers did just fine, while customers learned to make do with less for their money. The real blow of the Vandal conquest, in other words, was felt outside Africa.

Carthage was still Carthage. We have remarkable works of literature written there under Vandal rule, none more remarkable than Martianus Capella’s Wedding of Philology and Mercury, nine books in which old myth and new erudition dance together in what amounts to a handbook of the liberal arts for the most refined of literary tastes. The collection called Anthologia Latina, which we have in an eighth-century manuscript, was put together in Carthage c. 532-534: that is, just on the brink of the moment when Justinian’s forces would shatter a very civilized regime. Its riddles, epigrams, and showpiece verses that can be read backward and forward reflect a highly sophisticated audience, and the Vergilian centos they contain—that is, fresh poems made entirely out of lines of Vergil— required a well-educated audience to be appreciated at all The skirmishes at the beginning of Khusro’s reign.

Theoderic’s contemporary

Thrasamund, Theoderic’s contemporary on the throne of Carthage, appears as a benevolent monarch building and restoring the glories of his realm, as any Roman might. Latin was the only language in use, and when the Vandals were overthrown and we come to a period where more documentation and narrative survive, the life of a traditional Roman province was so easily resumed that we have to believe it was never really interrupted. Fulgentius, a writer both traditional (in his Mythologies) and orthodox (for his books of Christian theology), came from a family that had recovered its ancestral estates, where he spent his early years managing the business. (We met him on a pilgrimage to Rome when Theoderic was there.) If we did not know the story of Africa and its conquests, the archaeological remains we can see would not encourage us to think of great disruptions.

The skirmishes at the beginning of Khusro’s reign

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February 17, 2022

The skirmishes at the beginning of Khusro’s reign concluded with what both sides called the “endless peace” of 532, purchased by Justinian for a mere 11,000 pounds of gold. “Endless peace” lasted eight years.

But when Justinian started sending his main forces west to fight even more foolish battles, Khusro doubtless understood what it meant and so in the late 530 s began pressing for tribute. There was an old argument that Persia deserved Roman support for what it did in protecting the Caucasus passes against invaders from the steppes, protection from which both Rome and Persia benefited. Rome never acquiesced, so the Persians took to the field. (They may have been encouraged by an embassy sent to Persia from Witigis, whom we shall see leading the beleaguered forces Justinian was trying to overthrow in Italy, now encouraging the Persians to open a second front.) City by city, Khusro got what he wanted, from Edessa, Hierapolis, and Apamea. In the year 540, he got as far as Antioch, raiding, plundering, and devastating the great city of the Roman east, which would never be the same. It could not have helped if the city’s residents heard that when Khusro returned to Ctesiphon, he built (or perhaps merely renamed) a city there “Khusro’s City Better than Antioch” to mock them!

A revival of Roman attention in the early 540s led to a truce in 545, which would last, in the main, until Justin II frivolously returned to warmongering in the 570s, leading to another twenty years of intermittent conflict, and then again to twenty more years in the early seventh century. Because Procopius gives us a detailed account of the skirmishes of the late 520s and again some coverage of the 540s, it is customary to take these hostilities more seriously than they deserve to be taken in themselves, as though they represented (as Justinian probably thought they did) a recrudescence of ancient hostility between east and west, between great personified empires. No such backsliding needed to occur istanbul day tours.

At the end of the sixth century, the border between Rome and Persia would still be more or less what it had been 200 years earlier. Blood and treasure had accomplished nothing except the exacerbation of hostility and an impediment to mutual understanding. The stage was set for bloody and desperately ill-advised conflict in the seventh century.

SHOCK AND AWE IN AFRICA

The flotilla that Belisarius led to Africa was arguably the largest force of sea power ever assembled to that date, unless we believe that the emperor Leo’s ill-fated assault on the Vandals in 468 had numbered the 100,000 troops our sources imagine. Nothing like Belisarius’s flotilla would sail in the Mediterranean until the wars of Turks, Venetians, and Spaniards in early modern times. Ten thousand infantry, 5,000 cavalry, and another 1,000 light-armed mercenaries from amid the Huns and Heruls filled 500 carrier ships, accompanied by another 100 or so light warships for defense and maneuvering.

From Constantinople down through the Aegean

Setting out from Constantinople in June 533, with the prayers of the patriarch filling its sails, the flotilla made its leviathan way from Constantinople down through the Aegean with halts and delays, including one for a bout of dysentery among the troops. It passed Crete, then accepted the hospitality of Theoderic’s successors, who let its ships port and water in Sicily. From there it struck out bravely at just the right season for the African coast at the shortest crossing, heading for the Tunisian coast south of Carthage The reputation of Vandal Carthage.

The flotilla’s size was both its strength and its weakness. Laden with soldiers, drawn mainly from Balkan provinces that could ill afford to spare them, it probably carried enough weapons and food to sustain the trip on limited rations, but fresh water was a trickier business, as always with the transport of human beings on a salt sea, whether it was crack Roman legions or African slaves more than a millennium later. If rainwater failed to supply enough, the ships had to land periodically, with consequent devastation to all those on shore wretched enough to come within reach of hungry, thirsty, libidinous soldiers.

The Africa the flotilla approached was far from ready for it and easy to misread. Justinian was sure, Procopius was sure, and therefore every modern reader is sure that his troops were invading the “Vandal kingdom of North Africa,” which sounds like a very different thing from the Roman Africa that had gone before. As everywhere and every when in this period, it’s important to catch both the continuities and the discontinuities, region by region and place by place, to make sure we don’t deceive ourselves.

Maximian regarded

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August 4, 2020

Constantine had no reason to suspect that Maximian regarded him as anything other than simply the tribune who headed Diocletian’s personal guard, until he was startled at the beginning of their second week of residence in Rome to receive a peremptory summons from Maximian himself. Shortly he was ushered into a small audience chamber in the palace where the Emperor of the West and his family were staying upon their state visit to Rome for the triumph and the celebration of the Vicennalia, as well as the beginning of Diocletian’s official year as Consul.

Constantine had not seen Maximian at close hand before, but he knew him to be a soldier of considerable reputation whom his father respected. To his surprise he saw evidence of softness in the man’s face, the corpulence of his body and even the stain of wine upon his tunic, although it was still fairly early in the morning. When Constantine saluted, Maximian did not even bother to return it.

“So you are Constantius’ bastard,” he said. “No one could doubt that he is your father, no matter who your mother was.”

“You will find that my birth was quite legitimate, Augustus.” By now he had become so accustomed to unjustified slurs upon his legitimacy that he had learned to control himself, particularly when they came from a source which he could not force to swallow the slur. “You have only to ask the Emper ”

Maximian snapped

“Rome has two Emperors,” Maximian snapped. “We rule together and neither has authority over the other.”

Constantine did not dispute the assertion, though even the veriest plebe in the suhura knew Diocletian’s orders were obeyed without question by Maximian and both the Caesars.

“Maxentius has told me how you won favor with Diocletian by almost killing the Frankish prince, who was master of horse at Nicomedia,” Maximian continued. “And I have heard from Caesar Galerius of your trickery in claiming victory over the Persians when, in actual fact, he had already turned back the forces of King Narses.”

Constantine did not bother to dispute the lies, since Maximian had quite obviously decided already what he wished to believe.

“Everybody knows, too, how you insinuated yourself into the favor of Empress Prisca and Lady Valeria by supporting them in their Christian heresy,” Maximian continued. “But I must warn you that you shall not worm your way into my household through my daughter. Fausta is still a child and only a scoundrel would use her in the hope of gaining my approval for his ambitions, whatever they are.”

Fausta was quite as lovely

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August 4, 2020

“You will be free. I promise it.”

And free he was not entirely to his surprise to meet her chair the next afternoon, according to a note brought to him that morning by a slave from the imperial household. Fausta was quite as lovely and entrancing in the daylight as she had been the night before and, even in a typically narrow Roman street, the people gave way to the sedan chair bearing the emblem of Maximian Augustus.

In order to reach the better shops of the city, they had to traverse an area of what was called the subura, where many of the lower classes of Rome lived. Constantine had never seen houses like those, often with as many as seven stories, that jammed the narrow streets on every side. There were taverns everywhere, too, with people going in and out constantly, as well as all kind of shops those for the sale of food, barbershops, crowded bazaars in which discarded clothing and almost anything else one might wish to buy was for sale, small sidewalk booths where fortune tellers, soothsayers, money changers, street peddlers, and others held forth. And beggars, of course, were everywhere.

At the Septa Julia inside the Via Lata, Fausta stopped the chair and took Constantine’s arm, while they strolled through the shaded arcades where the finest shops of Rome were located. Exquisite crystal from Alexandria reminded him of the sorry state in which he had last seen that once lovely city, so he moved on to where Fausta was exclaiming over necklaces, earrings, jeweled combs and silvermounted mirrors eagerly offered for her inspection by the merchants, along with rich embroideries from Babylon, emeralds from Egypt and silk from China.

Nubian lands

Another stall displayed carved trinkets of ivory from the Nubian lands far to the south in Africa, delicate colored tile inlays from Syria and the Phoenician cities, as well as fabrics of all hues and colors. Everything the heart of a woman could want for these shops catered to feminine taste was on display, while in another area, booksellers offered scrolls in every tongue known to man, maps of faroff lands and the detailed descriptions of the geographer Strabo, whose works encompassed the entire world.

Fausta soon tired of shopping and, when they resumed their chair, ordered the slaves to carry them to the pleasure park given the people of Rome by the statesman Agrippa in honor of the Pax Romana. Here the chair was stopped again, while its mistress and her escort walked along paths that wound between rose arbors, finely trimmed hedges and beneath the shade of towering trees. In the portico of Europa, they paused before a large map of the world which Agrippa had ordered chiseled from marble, so that all Romans might see the extent of the Empire.

Fausta assured him

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August 4, 2020

“This will be ours one day,” Fausta assured him, running her finger across the marble boundaries of nations and seas. “The whole of it, and even more.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I know myself and I’m beginning to know you,” she told him. “When I saw you for the first time last night, Constantine, I knew that a great and deep ambition burns within you, just as it does within me. I must be Augusta and, since a woman cannot rule Rome, it must be as the wife of an Augustus. You should be proud that I chose you.”

“I still find it a little dazzling.”

“It takes a woman to show a man what he can really do. Between us we shall go far.”

Almost three hundred years

Constantine looked at the great sun dial of Augustus, which had stood in this place for almost three hundred years. Already the sun was so low that its shadow was hardly discernible from the surrounding marble pavement.

“We had better find your bearers,” he said. “In an hour I’m supposed to accompany the Emperor to the great feast your father is giving in his honor.”

“I shall see you there,” she promised. “Be sure to wear your handsomest uniform, for I shall be very proud of you.”

In the week that followed, Constantine saw Fausta almost every day and each time was even more entranced. He quickly learned that she was quite serious in her ambition to become Augusta through him and, in truth, he was not at all disheartened by the prospect. He was not so dazzled even by love, however, that he failed to keep his eyes and ears open; and nothing he saw or heard in Rome made him feel that accomplishing his ambition would be either easy or soon. Powerful factions were obviously already plotting against the day when Diocletian would doff the purple for the role he had confided often to Constantine that he longed for most that of gardener in his beautiful palace of Salonae overlooking the Adriatic Sea. And none of the plotting in Rome Constantine was sure included a place for him.

Maxentius’ obvious desire to centralize all power at Rome once again and Constantine did not doubt the ambition of the Senate and the Praetorian Guard to regain much of its former power through encouraging him, was discarded as the sort of thing he would expect from a boaster and a wastrel. But the CoEmperor Maximian, Faust a’s father, he quickly realized, planned nothing less than to succeed both Diocletian and himself as sole Augustus.

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Britain and the channel

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August 3, 2020

“Why not go beyond it?” Constantine bent over the map that occupied the top of the table. “Just north of a line drawn eastward at the northern tip of the island of Hibernia there appears to be a deep inlet in the coast of Britain. Unless the map is wrong, it narrows the country into a corridor there not much wider than the one where the Antonine Wall is located.”

The others were bending over the map looking at the point he had put his finger upon, a spot where the jagged outline of the coast was cut by many deep inlets and rivers.

“Why not land there in the first place?” one of the legion commanders, a brawny soldier named Cornelius Celia, asked.

“The channel between Britain and Hibernia is often stormy,” Constantius objected. ‘We will be lucky to get the two fair days in succession we need to ship the horses across. Besides, we can move troops easily by land, since all the major cities of Britain are connected with fine roads. We’ve been building them since the time of Julius Caesar.”

“But not in the far north where Crocus tells me the stronghold of the Piet leader, Bonar, is located,” Constantine said.

Eumenius stepped into the breach again. “You might be able to use the coastal fleet that guards Britain and the channel from pirates for some sort of waterborne invasion such as Tribune Constantine seems to have in mind. Remember the patrol galleys you ordered built, Augustus? The soldiers call them Piets because their sides are painted green like the sea and the crews wear green clothing. They are excellent for slipping along the coast undetected at night.”

“By the thunderbolts of Jove!” Constantius exclaimed. “I’d forgotten about them.”

“Could these boats carry troops?” Constantine asked.

Crews are familiar

“Not very many,” Eumenius admitted. “But the crews are familiar with the coast, so they could guide a fleet of larger vessels in landing troops north of the Antonine Wall, near where Bonar’s villa is located. We know it’s the most important rallying place for the Piets in that area and, if it could be destroyed in a surprise attack, they would be dealt a body blow.”

“It’s a daring scheme,” Constantius agreed. “And with winter coming on, we need to make the campaign as short as possible. We’ll put the whole thing in your hands, Flavius.”

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

“You’ll be commanding a varied force, including a naval fleet, so it will not be enough that you are merely the commander of a legion. To demand the allegiance of all elements of the army, you need to be named my deputy.”

“I, for one, am ready to acclaim him Caesar,” Cornelius Celia said.

“And I,” Crocus agreed.

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Far north of the Antonine Wall

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August 3, 2020

Constantine, however, spoke before his father could answer. “I still say I must earn whatever honor shall come to me,” he insisted. “Name me your deputy for now, Father; we will let the future take care of itself.”

Constantine was far north of the Antonine Wall, at the villa of Bonar, the Piet chieftain, when an urgent message arrived from Eumenius at Eboracum, the capital of northern Britain. Constantius, the message said, was gravely ill and might not last until his arrival there. Taking horse less than an hour later, Constantine rode southward with a small bodyguard, for the Piet chieftain and his people were now at peace with Britain, a feat which many considered no less remarkable than Constantine’s daring dash by water and land a few months earlier into the heart of Bonar’s domain to capture the rebel leader.

Arrival at Gesoriacum

The plan Constantine had outlined to his father and the assembled commanders the day of his arrival at Gesoriacum had gone off almost without a hitch. While the main body of the troops rode northward to the provincial capital at Eboracum following the crossing of the channel and the landing in Britain itself Constantine’s picked band had angled northwestward across Britain. There they had joined a fleet of galleys dispatched on the long seaward run around the island’s southwestern tip and northward along the coast facing the green island called Hibernia. Embarking far to the north and guided by the green painted boats of the coastal patrol, they had gone ashore deep in the territory of Bonar, the Piet chieftain, and, after a forced march inland, had captured both the villa and the person of the rebel leader.

The Piets, powerful warriors who often wore the skins of animak and went into battle with fierce cries, had fought well, but the element of surprise, plus their antiquated weapons, had proved their undoing. After burning the villa, Constantine had retreated

southward, with Bonar in chains, to meet a force under the command of Crocus riding northward from Eboracum.

Constantius and the generals had thought only of executing Bonar, but Constantine had insisted upon carrying out the second portion of a plan by which he hoped to remove northern Britain as a trouble spot in the Empire. And, with such a spectacular victory behind him, even his father had not opposed the move.

Roman rule had brought to Britain

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August 3, 2020

Scrupulously treating the giant Bonar with the respect due a local king, he had taken him on a tour of the countryside, letting him see the manifold blessings Roman rule had brought to Britain: the busy mines where lead, silver and other ores were dug, the smelters where the metal was extracted, the prosperous shops of the artisans, the rich life of the lords in their great country villas, where all kinds of produce were grown for their own use, sold in the cities, or exported in the thriving trade conducted between Britain and the rest of the Empire.

In the end the intelligence of the Piet leader, which Constantine had been counting on, had seen the advantages of a treaty of peace over execution. Once the treaty was signed, Constantine himself had ridden northward with only the small bodyguard as a token of good faith to install Bonar officially as ruler under Rome of the farthest northwest comer of the Empire, just as King Tiridates ruled the farthest northeast comer.

These activities had consumed much of the winter and had been very tiresome, so Constantine had remained with Bonar for a while, enjoying the hunting and feasting and training the Piet chieftain’s men in using the new weapons Rome supplied them. He had barely finished that pleasant chore when Eumenius’ urgent letter had arrived.

Room at Eboracum

When he came into the room at Eboracum where his father lay, a quick glance told Constantine that Eumenius had not been wrong in sending for him. The waxy pallor of Constantius’ cheeks, the shallow hurried breathing, the grave faces of the men gathered about the couch all testified to the fact that the Emperor of the

West was dying. Eumenius got up quickly and went to meet Constantine, who had come directly to the sick room in his muddy boots, pausing only to drop the heavy cloak from his shoulders.

“Thank Jupiter you are here,” the plump secretary said in a low voice, for the sick man was sleeping. “The attack was sudden, and severe. I think there is bleeding within his body.”

“Then there is no hope?”

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Italians living in Ravenna

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August 3, 2020

Totila, indeed, was willing enough to meet him before his city walls, but could not catch him there, since like the rest of the Roman army he was afraid to fight. Wherefore Belisarius recovered nothing of what had been lost, but even lost Rome in addition; and everything else, if there were anything left to lose. His mind was filled with avarice during this time, and he thought of nothing but base gain. Since he had been given no funds by the Emperor, he plundered nearly all the Italians living in Ravenna and Sicily, and wherever else he found opportunity: collecting a bill, as it were, for which those who dwelt there were in no way responsible. Thus, he even went to Herodian and asked him for money, and his threats so enraged Herodian that he rebelled against the Roman army and gave his services, with those of his followers and the city of Spoletum, to Totila and the Goths.

And now I shall show how it came about that Belisarius and John, the nephew of Vitalian, became estranged: a division that brought great disaster to Roman affairs.

Nephew of the Emperor

Now so thoroughly did the Empress hate Germanus, and so conspicuously, that no one dared to become a relative of his, though he was the nephew of the Emperor. His sons remained unmarried while she lived, and his daughter Justina, though in the flower of eighteen summers, was still unwedded. Consequently, when John, sent by Belisarius, arrived in Constantinople, Germanus was forced to approach him as a possible son-in-law, though John was not at all worthy in station of such an alliance. But when they had come to an agreement, they bound each other by most solemn oaths to complete the alliance by all means in their power; and this was necessary because neither had any confidence in the good faith of the other. For John knew he was seeking a marriage far above his rank, and Germanus feared that even this man might try to slip out of the contract.

The Empress, of course, was unable to contain herself at this: and in every way, by every possible device, however unworthy, tried to hinder the event. When, for all her menaces, she was unable to deter either of them, she publicly threatened to put John to death. After this, on john’s return to Italy, fearing Antonina might join the plot against him, he did not dare to meet Belisarius until she left for Constantinople. That Antonina had been charged by the Queen to help murder him, no one could have thought unlikely; and when he considered Antonina’s habits and Belisarius’s enslavement by his wife, John was as greatly as he was reasonably alarmed.

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Word of honor to Photius

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July 20, 2020

Now everybody took it for granted that Belisarius had arranged this with his wife and made the agreement about the expedition with the Emperor, merely so as to get away from his humiliating position in Constantinople; and that as soon as he had gotten outside the city, he intended to take up arms and retaliate, nobly and as becomes a man, against his wife and those who had done him wrong. Instead, he made light of all he had experienced, forgot or discounted his word of honor to Photius and his other friends, and followed his wife about in a perfect ecstasy of love: and that when she had now arrived at the age of sixty years.

However, as soon as he arrived in Italy, some new and different trouble happened with each fresh day, for even Providence had turned against him. For the plans this General had laid in the former campaign against Theodatus and Vitiges, though they did not seem to be fitting to the event, usually turned out to his advantage; while now, though he was credited with laying better plans, as was to be expected after his previous experience in warfare, they all turned out badly: so that the final judgment was that he had no sense of strategy.

Indeed, it is not by the plans of men, but by the hand of God that the affairs of men are directed; and this men call Fate, not knowing the reason for what things they see occur; and what seems to be without cause is easy to call the accident of chance. Still, this is a matter every mortal will decide for himself according to his taste.

HOW THEODORA TRICKED THE GENERAL’S DAUGHTER

From his second expedition to Italy Belisarius brought back nothing but disgrace: for in the entire five years of the campaign he was unable to set foot on that land, as I have related in my former books, because there was no tenable position there; but all this time sailed up and down along the coast.