Count Belisarius

One day, when the siege had lasted three months, King Geilimer was sitting in a hut watching a Moorish woman, his hostess, making a very small barley-cake. When she had pounded the barley and made a paste of it with water and kneaded it a little, she put it to bake in the embers of her thorn fire. Two children, his little nephew and the son of his hostess, were crouched beside the hearth, both very hungry. They waited impatiently for the cake to be baked. The young Vandal was suffering severely from intestinal worms, caught from the Moorish children, which rob the stomach of its sustenance and so increase the natural appetite. The cake was only half-baked, but he could wait no longer, and snatched it from the ashes and, without dusting it or waiting for it to cool, thrust it into his mouth and began eating it. The young Moor seized him by the hair of his head, struck him on the temple with his fist, and thumped him between the shoulders, so that the cake flew out of his mouth; and then ate it himself.

This was too much for the sensitive soul of Geilimer. He immediately took a pointed stick and a torn piece of sheepskin, and ink of powdered charcoal and goat's milk, and wrote to Pharas again. He said that he surrendered on the terms that had been proposed; but he must first be given Belisarius's pledge in writing.

Thus the siege ended, for Belisarius gave the pledge required and sent an escort to bring Geilimer to him. Geilimer descended from the mountain with all his family; and a few days later, at Carthage, he met Belisarius for the first time, who came to greet him in the suburbs.

I was present at that meeting, in attendance on my mistress, and I was a witness of King Geilimer's pitiful and strange behaviour. For, as he came towards Belisarius, he smiled, and the smile changed to hysterical laughter, and the laughter to weeping. There were tears in Belisarius's eyes, too, as he took the former monarch by the hand and led him into a neighbouring house for a drink of water. He laid him down on a bed and comforted him as a woman comforts a sick child.

chapter 12

BELISARIUS'S CONSULSHIP

Th ough the Vandals were crushed beyond question, the wild Moors of the interior still constituted a threat to our men and to the 8,000,000 unwarlike Roman Africans of the Diocese. The Moors, who numbered perhaps 2,000,000, had been at constant war with the Vandals and, as the latter degenerated, had gradually encroached on their territories. When Belisarius first landed, all but a few, such as the tribe on Mount Pappua, allied themselves with him, promising to help him against his enemies and sending their children to him as hostages. These Moors live principally in Morocco, which lies opposite to Spain, but they are also settled in the interior of the whole coast from Tripoli to the Atlantic Ocean. They claim to be descendants of those Canaanites whom Joshua the son of Nun drove out of Palestine. Ever since the time when the Emperor Claudius, shortly after the time of the Crucifixion, conquered and annexed Morocco, their paramount chiefs have not been acknowledged by their vassals as worthy of obedience unless presented with insignia of office by the Emperor himself. The insignia consist of a silver staff, fluted with gold; and a crown-shaped cap of silver tissue, banded with silver; and a white Thessalian cape with a golden brooch on the right shoulder containing a medallion of the Emperor; and a gold-embroidered tunic; and a pair of gilded top-boots. During the last hundred years the chiefs had grudgingly accepted these objects from the Vandal kings, to whom the sovereignty of Africa had lapsed; but their vassals had often made it an excuse for disobedience that they were not the authentic insignia, especially the brooches. Belisarius therefore won the favour of these chiefs by presenting them with staffs, caps, capes, brooches, tunics, and top-boots, all straight from Constantinople; and, though they did not fight with him in the two battles which destroyed the Vandals' power, neither did they fight against him.