Count Belisarius

We sailed home by way of Tripoli and Crete – an uneventful voyageand in midsummer of the year of our Lord 534 we entered the Bosphorus again. We were given a tumultuous welcome at the docks, and a royal welcome at the Palace. My mistress Antonina and the Empress Theodora embraced with tears; and Justinian was so elated by the extraordinary value of the treasure unloaded from our ships and so impressed by the sight of our 15,000 stalwart prisoners that, forgetting his suspicions of Belisarius, he called him 'our faithful benefactor' and took him by the hand. As Commander-in-Chief of the armies, however, he assumed all the official credit for the defeat of the Vandals; and in the preamble to his new Digest of Laws (published on the day of the Tricamaron battle) he had already styled himself'Conqueror of the Vandals and Africans' – Pious, Victorious, Happy, and Glorious – and, without mentioning that anybody else had shared in the victory, referred to ' the sweats of war and the night-watches and fasts' on his own part that had secured it. The triumph to be celebrated was his own, not Belisarius's: for no private citizen has been awarded a full triumph since the Empire was founded, lest he should be puffed up by victory and become a rival to the throne. As I say, the Emperor, even if his warlike exertions are confined to sending off an expedition from the docks with his blessing and congratulating it on its safe return a year or more later, is always the victorious Commander-in-Chief.

None the less, Theodora insisted that he play the same sedentary part in this triumph as he had played in the victory and leave the procession to the conduct of Belisarius. He agreed. On the anniversary day of the capture of Carthage, Belisarius came out from his private residence close to the Golden Gate in the Wall of Theodosius, and passed in procession down the whole two-mile length of the High Street. He went on foot, preceded by priests and bishops singing a solemn Te Deum and swinging censers; not, as the ancient custom was, riding in a chariot preceded by trumpeters. The street was decorated with flowers and coloured silk hangings and wreaths and congratulatory greetings, and thronged with wildly cheering crowds. At each of the great squares through which we passed- the Square of Arcadius, the Ox Market, the Amastrian Square, the Square of Brotherly Love, the Bull Square (where the University professors and students were assembled), and finally the Square of Constantine (where the City militia were drawn up on parade) – the City ward-masters came with gifts and words of welcome and a fanfare of trumpets was sounded. Behind Belisarius, who was accompanied by Cappadocian John and other distinguished generals, rode his cuirassiers and the marines and the Massagetic Huns (who were to return home by way of the Black Sea on the following day), and behind these the Vandal prisoners, in chains, headed by Geilimer in a purple cloak, with his cousins and brothers-in-law and nephews. Then followed all the spoils of Africa heaped on wagons.

These were extraordinary spoils, the richest ever carried in any triumph in the world before; for though the soldiers at Tricamaron had plundered the camp, that treasure was only a tithe of what was collected at Carthage and Hippo and Bulla and Grasse and elsewhere from the city treasuries and royal palaces and seats of the nobility. It consisted of the Vandals' accumulated trading profits from overseas and their revenues from Africa – the surplus of a hundred years – and the spoils of Geiserich's extensive piracy. The Vandals had been a small and oppressive aristocracy in a fertile, teeming land, and what they were too lazy to spend on public works they had hoarded. So, heaped on these carts were millions of pounds of bar-silver, and sacks of silver and gold coin, and quantities of bar-gold, and golden cups and dishes and salt-cellars encrusted with gems, and golden thrones and golden carriages of state and statues of gold, and copies of the Gospel bound in gold and studded with pearls, and heaps of golden collars and girdles, and gold-inlaid armour- in short, every luxurious and beautiful object that can be imagined, including priceless antiquities from King Geiserich's sack of the Imperial Palace at Rome and of the Temple of Jove on the Capitolinc Hill. There were also a great number of sacred relics: bones of martyrs, miraculous images, authentic garments of Apostles, the nails from St Peter's cross on which he was crucified upside down.