Count Belisarius

Belisarius said: 'Offer King Teudel a pitched battle as soon as you have landed, before he has time to collect his troops from the fortresses; no Gothic King can resist a pitched battle, even when his forces are greatly inferior in numbers to the enemy. Stand on the defensive as we did at Daras, posting your foot-archers well forward on either flank, facing inwards. Bait the trap with mail-clad spearmen: King Teudel has had reason to despise the Imperial infantry, who seldom face a cavalry charge'

Narses objected: 'But if I do as you advise, will not King Teudel, swallowing the bait, carry the trap away with him?'

Belisarius replied: 'There is that danger, and I was therefore about to suggest that your spearmen should be dismounted cavalry, whose courage would be of a higher order.'

'Good. And I must place my light cavalry forward on the flanks, I suppose?'

'Yes. Keep them thrust well out, not near enough to invite attack, but near enough to act as a menace. Hold my Household Regiment, with your other heavy cavalry, in reserve'

Narses asked: 'But if Teudel attacks the foot-archers first?'

'It would be against the Gothic code of kingly honour to do so. Mailed horseman disdains to attack leather-coated archer.'

Thus the famous Battle of Taginae was won already at the Brazen House at Constantinople, and by Belisarius, though Narses never acknowledged his indebtedness to him, nor did Belisarius ever seek to diminish from Narses' glory by recalling it. The battle, which King Teudel eagerly accepted, began with his lancers charging into the re-entrant that Narses offered them and being raked with distant flanking fire from 8,000 long bows. The confusion caused by the uncontrollable kicking and plunging of a huge number of wounded horses and by the death or unhorsing of most of the chieftains, conspicuous by their armour and trappings, slackened the charge from a gallop to a trot, from a trot to a walk. When momentum is lost, charging cavalry are no match for courageous mail-clad spearmen, and their horses offer a most vulnerable target. Teudel's leading squadron could not break the line of spears; the squadrons behind could do nothing to assist them, and lost heavily from continuous arrow-fire. At last Teudel himself was wounded. The Goths wavered. The Roman spearmen then opened their ranks and the Household Regiment swept through the gap; and it was to the war-cry 'Belisarius' that the Gothic lancers were thrown back upon their own infantry, who became involved in the rout and scattered in all directions.

King Teudel was overtaken and killed a few miles from the battlefield. His blood-stained garments and his jewelled hat were dispatched as trophies of victory to the Emperor at Constantinople.

The dismantling of the fortifications of so many cities by the Goths proved their undoing: there was nothing to oppose Narses' progress. Rome was captured at the first assault by one of his generals. Then the Gothic fleet came over to him. Within two months, after a last engagement on the banks of the Sarno, in the neighbourhood of Mount Vesuvius, the war was won. The surviving Goths were broken in spirit; they agreed cither to quit Italy or to submit to Justinian.

Shortly before this agreement was made a venerable institution came to a sudden end. For of the Roman Senators and their families, 300 persons whom Teudel had kept as hostages beyond the Po were butchered in revenge for his death; and the rest, hurrying from Sicily to Rome on news of its capture, were intercepted by the Goths near Vesuvius and likewise destroyed without mercy. The Order had not been revived, and never, I think, will be. Its only excuse for continuance during the last few hundred years had been its riches and its ancient traditions of culture. Justinian inherited the riches; the traditions could not be cither recovered or established afresh. So much then for the Senatorial Order of the West, and for King Teudel, and for the Goths – whose name is now extinct in Italy, though there are still Visigothic Kings ruling in Spain.

The end of Bessas: he redeemed his loss of Rome by his success in Colchis, where he recaptured Petra, the capital, from the Persians; and died in honour at Constantinople, not long afterwards. But Petra was once more taken by the Persians. Then a strange coincidence – Dagistheus, the Roman commander at Petra, redeemed his loss of that city by his success in Italy; for it was he who recaptured Rome, lost by Bessas, for Narses.