Count Belisarius

On the day after the departure of the first party from the Port of Rome, which lies eighteen miles from the city, King Wittich seized the fortifications at this place; we had been unable to spare troops to guard them, and sailors are not fighters. Hitherto convoys of stores had reached us in barges from the Port, hauled up the river by oxen. We were now cut off from the sea, and our fleet retired to Naples. This occurred in April. In May we were put on half-rations of corn. In June the reinforcements arrived from Greece, under a general named Martin: 1,600 heathen Slavs and Bulgarian Huns.

These Slavs, who have curiously European features for so wild a race, had recently appeared in great force on the banks of the Danube, dispossessing the Gepids. They are horse-archers and excellent fighters if well fed, well paid and well led; and are also men of their word, but very dirty in their habits. Justinian had provided them with body-armour and helmets- usually they wear only leather jerkins and trews. He had also paid a great sum of money on their account to the priests of their tribe: for the Slavs have all things in common, and the priests, by whose ministrations they worship the Lightning God, act as their treasurers. When these Slavs learned that Belisarius was of their race and even knew a little of their language, they became well disposed to him; and so did the Huns (whom I have already described) on finding a few fellow-tribesmen of theirs in his Household Regiment held in great honour.

Belisarius now proposed to take the offensive against the Goths, though 1,600 men are not 10,000. He did not wish the new arrivals to feel that they were cooped up like prisoners in the city; as soon as they had been posted to their stations and given instruction in their guard-duties he staged a demonstration for their benefit. In broad daylight he sent out from the Salarian Gate 200 of his Household cuirassiers, under an Illyrian named Trajan, a troop commander and a wonderfully cool fellow. Following the orders that they had received, these men galloped to a little hill within sight of the walls and there formed up in a ring. Out rushed the indignant Goths from the nearest camp, snatching up their weapons and mounting their horses in great eagerness to attack them. By the time that it takes a Christian to say a Paternoster slowly, Trajan's men had shot 4,000 arrows into their disorderly column and killed or wounded 800 horsemen; but as soon as the Gothic infantry began to arrive Trajan's men galloped off, shooting from the saddle. They accounted for 200 more Goths before they returned, without a single casualty, to the shelter of the gate, where they entered under covering fire from a massed battery of catapults. Observe: the Gothic horsemen were armed only with lance and sword, and those of their infantry who were archers wore no body-armour and would go nowhere without the escort of mail-clad spearmen, who were very slow of foot. It was not to be wondered at that Trajan's men had it all their own way. A few days later a second force of 200 cuirassiers went out, but with a hundred Slavs attached to them for instructional purposes. They, too, seized a small hill, shot down Goths by the hundred, retired. A few days later still another force, Household cuirassiers and Bulgars, did the same thing. In these skirmishes the Goths lost 4,000 men; yet Wittich did not draw the obvious moral as to the inferiority of his armament, believing that the success of our men had been due merely to their daring. He ordered 500 of his own Royal Lancers to make a similar demonstration on a hill near the Asinarian Gate. Belisarius sent out a thousand Thracian cavalry under Bessas; the Goths were shot to pieces, hardly a hundred escaping back to their camp. The next day Wittich, who had reviled the survivors for cowards, sent out another lancer squadron of similar size. Belisarius let the Slavs and Bulgars loose on them, and every Goth was killed or taken prisoner.