Count Belisarius

The sacred relics were distributed among the churches, appropriately to the dedication of each, and every church of importance received something. But one small, anonymous community of very poor monks, who lived by begging and occupied a ruinous house in the suburb of Blachernae, did not share in all this bounty. Their abbot came to Belisarius presently and asked him, in Christ's name, whether he had perhaps some trifle of his own that he could give them; for while he was in Africa they had prayed for his success night and day.

He replied:' Venerable Father, yours is a fraternity of poor begging brothers who have small regard for silver or gold, and I shall therefore give your house no object that may distract their minds from religious thoughts. But I shall lend you a famous relic, the begging bowl of St Bartimaeus, which the Emperor himself gave me after the fight at Daras, and you shall display it in your house and keep it as a reminder of your vows of poverty, patience and virtue. Remember, it is a loan only, since I cannot seem ungrateful to His Sacred Majesty. One day I may have need for it again.'

Thenceforth this house was never without food and drink, for it became a centre of pilgrimage, and was thereafter known as the monastery of St Bartimaeus.

As for the golden Mercy Seat and the golden seven-branched candlestick and the shew-table and the other Jewish treasures, Justinian was persuaded by the Bishop of Jerusalem to return them to that city. The Bishop argued that they had brought no luck to the men of Rome, whose dominion had passed to the barbarians, nor to the Vandals, whom Justinian himself had defeated. They plainly carried a curse with them. Justinian sent them back to Jerusalem, to the very building where they had once been stored for a thousand years – the Temple of Solomon, which was now a Christian church. What a grand source of profit for the clergy there. The Jews lamented that they were still deprived of their holy instruments of worship, and prophesied that the Christians would before long be cast out of Jerusalem; but this has not come to pass in my time.

When the news of Belisarius's conquest of Africa reached the Persian Court, King Khosrou was surprised and vexed. He sent a congratulatory embassy to Justinian asking, half in earnest, half in joke, for his share of the spoils of Carthage. But for the Persian peace, he said, Justinian would never have been able to spare troops for Carthage. Justinian pretended to take the joke in good part, and sent Khosrou a valuable gold dinner service. So the Eternal Peace still remained in force.

There is no need to give a detailed account of my mistress's life in Constantinople during the days that followed our return from Carthage. She was again in attendance on Theodora, and spent her leisure time in parties and pleasure excursions and visits to the theatre. Theodosius was constantly with her, and a good deal of loose talk about their friendship was current at Court; but Belisarius, since Theodosius was his godson, disdained to take any notice of it, treating the young man with every mark of confidence.

News had by this time come to Belisarius which grieved him greatly: that Rufinus and Aigan and the 500 cuirassiers that he had left behind with Solomon had been destroyed by the Moors. Solomon had sent them to the interior, to a town called the Royal Springs in the centre of the corn country, 100 miles inland from Hadrumetum; they were to rescue a large number of Roman African peasants who had been carried off in a Moorish raid. The cuirassiers succeeded in this task and were slowly escorting the peasants home when they were trapped in a narrow mountain-pass by a force of several thousand Moors, who cut them to pieces in a desperate fight. The Moors were now also raiding in the western parts of the Diocese, and Solomon's forces were altogether inadequate to protect the Roman Africans. Solomon wrote to the Moorish chieftains, protesting against these outrages: he reminded them that they were now Justinian's allies, that they had sent their children to Carthage as hostages of good behaviour, and that they should be warned by the fate of the Vandals. The Moors merely laughed at this letter. They pointed out in their reply that their alliance with Justinian had not improved their condition in the least. Being polygamous, they did not set much store by children, who were easily replaceable, nor did they indulge those soft sentiments of family affection which had lost Geilimer two battles and his kingdom. The defeat of the Vandals was a sadder augury for the Roman Africans than for themselves, they said. Their raids continued.