Conflict, Imperial Expansion and Warfare in the 6th Century

The east Roman emperors of the early sixth century faced three problems in terms of military strategy and foreign policy: the constant threat from Persia in the east; the danger posed by the Vandal kingdom in Africa; and the unstable northern frontier along the Danube. The western part of the empire had been transformed into a patchwork of barbarian successor states, but Constantinople continued to view all the lost territories as part of the empire, and in some cases to treat the kings of the successor kingdoms as their legitimate representatives, governing Roman affairs in the provinces in question until Constantinople could re-establish a full administrative and military presence. This is most obviously the case with the Ostrogoths. By the same token, the leader of the Salian Franks in northern Gaul, Clovis, had quite deliberately adopted orthodox Christianity in order to gain papal and imperial recognition and support for his rule, where he also claimed, at least nominally, to represent Roman authority, exploiting the fact of his orthodoxy to justify warfare against his Arian neighbours, the Visigoths in southern Gaul in particular.

Roman emperors thus considered the west not as ‘lost’, but rather as temporarily outside direct imperial authority. Under Justinian, this point of view was the basis for a series of remarkable, if opportunistic, reconquests which, whatever their original motivation, were certainly represented as restoring the Roman world in its greatness, and re-establishing Rome’s power as it had been at its height. In the event, the resources required to achieve and then successfully to maintain this imperial expansionism were exhausted before Justinian died.

When Theoderic the Ostrogoth died in 526, conflict erupted over the succession, throwing the kingdom into confusion. The same occurred in the Vandal kingdom of North Africa. The political conflict and civil strife which broke out upon the death of the Vandal king, as well as the reported persecution of the Roman population at the hands of the Arian Vandals, gave Justinian his chance and, in 533, in a lightning campaign, the general Belisarius was able to land with a small force, defeat two Vandal armies and take the capital, Carthage, before finally eradicating Vandal opposition. The timing of this campaign is perhaps not an accident, for its success redeemed the emperor’s reputation in the aftermath of the Nika riot at Constantinople, which had nearly cost him his throne. Encouraged by this success, Sicily and then southern Italy were occupied in 535 on the pretext of intervening in the affairs of the Ostrogoths to stabilise the situation and to restore orthodox Christian rule. The Goths felt they could offer no serious resistance, their capital at Ravenna was handed over, their king Witigis was taken prisoner and sent to Constantinople, and the war appeared to be won. But at this point Justinian, who appears to have harboured suspicions about Belisarius’ political ambitions, recalled him, partly because a fresh invasion of the new and dynamic Persian king Chosroes I (Khusru) threatened to cause major problems in the east. In 540 Chosroes was able to attack and capture Antioch, one of the richest and most important cities in Syria, and since the Ostrogoths had shortly beforehand sent an embassy to the Persian capital, it is entirely possible that the

Persians were working hand-in-glove with the Goths to exploit the Roman preoccupation in the west and to distract them while the Goths attempted to re-establish their situation. For during Belisarius’ absence they were able to do exactly that, under a new war leader, the king Totila. Within a short while, they had recovered Rome, Ravenna and most of the peninsula. It took the Romans another ten years of punishing small-scale warfare throughout Italy finally to destroy Ostrogothic opposition, by which time the land was exhausted and barely able to support the burden of the newly re-established imperial bureaucracy.

Justinian’s ambitions did not end there, however. He had further expansionist plans, but in the end only the south-eastern regions of Spain were actually recovered from the kings of the Visigoths, also Arians (Justinian exploited the opportunity offered by a civil war in 554). But arguably his most significant contribution to restoring imperial greatness was the codification of Roman law which he ordered and which was begun well before the military expansionism which began in 533, and which produced the Digests and the Codex Justinianus, providing the basis for later Byzantine legal developments and codification. He persecuted the last vestiges of paganism in his efforts to play both Roman and Christian ruler, defender of Orthodoxy and of the church, and he also introduced a large number of administrative reforms and changes in an effort to streamline and bring up-to-date the running of the empire (although in the event many were rescinded within a few years). But his grandiose view of the empire and his own imperial position brought him into conflict with the papacy. In 543, at the beginning of what came to known as the ‘Three Chapters’ controversy, the emperor issued an edict against three sets of writings (the ‘Three Chapters’) of the fourth and fifth centuries, by Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrrhus and Ibas of Edessa, who had been accused by the Monophysites of being ‘pro-Nestorian’. The intention was to conciliate the Monophysites, and required the agreement and support of the Roman Pope Vigilius. The pope did indeed - eventually - accept the edict, but there remained very substantial opposition in the west, and in 553 an ecumenical council at Constantinople condemned the Three Chapters. The pope was placed under arrest by imperial guards and forced to agree. But the attempt at compromise failed to persuade the Monophysites to accept the ‘neo-Chalcedonian’ position.

Upon his death in 565 Justinian left a vastly expanded but perilously overstretched empire, both in financial as well as in military terms. Justinian had seen himself as the embodiment of Roman imperial power, and there can be no doubt as to the brilliance of his reign and the enormous enhancement of Roman prestige which his reconquests brought. But his successors were faced with the reality of dealing with new enemies, lack of ready cash, and internal discontent over high taxation and constant demands for soldiers and the necessities to support them. Justin II, Justinian’s successor and his nephew, opened his reign by cancelling the yearly ‘subsidy’ (in effect, a substantial bribe paid to keep the Persian king at a distance, and regarded by the latter as tribute) to Persia, beginning a costly war in the east. In 568 the Germanic Lombards crossed from their homeland along the western Danube and Drava region into Italy, in their efforts to flee the approaching Avars, a Turkic nomadic power

Map 2.4 Conflict, imperial expansion and warfare in the 6th century.

Which, like the Huns two centuries earlier, were in the process of establishing a vast steppe empire. While the Lombards rapidly overran Roman defensive positions in the north of the peninsula, soon establishing also a number of independent chiefdoms in the centre and south, the Avars occupied the Lombards’ former lands and established themselves as a major challenge to imperial power in the northern Balkan region. Between the mid-570s and the end of the reign of the Emperor Maurice (582-602), the empire was able to re-establish a precarious balance in the east. Although the Romans suffered a number of defeats, they were able to stabilise the Danube frontier in the north, the lands over which the campaigning took place, especially in Italy and the Balkans, were increasingly devastated and unable to support prolonged military activity. Maurice cleverly exploited a civil war in Persia in 590-591 by supporting the young, deposed king Chosroes II. When the war ended, with Roman help in the defeat of Chosroes’ enemies, the peace arrangements between the two empires rewarded the Romans with the return of swathes of territory and a number of fortresses which had been lost in the previous conflicts.