Who won the Battle of Taginae?
At the Battle of Taginae, also called Busta Gallorum, in June or July 552, the Byzantine general Narses defeated the Ostrogothic king Totila in the central Italian Apennines. Narses dismounted his barbarian allies to hold the center as infantry and placed some 8,000 foot archers on the wings, which shot the Gothic cavalry charge to pieces. About 6,000 Goths fell, Totila was mortally wounded, and Justinian's long reconquest of Italy was all but complete.3
Before the armies met, Totila rode out alone into the space between them. Procopius, who Bury believed had the story from an eyewitness, describes the king in armor plated with gold and hung with purple, on a huge horse, wheeling in circles, hurling his javelin into the air and catching it as it quivered above him, passing it from hand to hand like a trained dancer. He kept it up for the whole morning. He was not showing off: he was playing for time.4
The long Gothic War
In 535 the emperor Justinian launched a war to win back Italy from the Ostrogoths, the Germanic people who had ruled it since the days of Theodoric. At first it went quickly. Sicily fell almost at once, and by 540 the Goths were beaten and their king, Witigis, had been carried off to Constantinople as a prisoner. Italy seemed to be Roman again.5› Belisarius: the last of the Romans
Totila's revival
The war was not over. In the autumn of 541 the Gothic chiefs chose a new king, Totila, a relative of the Visigothic king Theudis. He won over the poor of Italy by freeing slaves and giving land to peasants, and by 543 he had retaken most of what the Goths had lost. A plague that swept the empire from 542 left Justinian unable to answer. Totila took Rome in 546 after a long siege, lost it, and took it again in 549; by the end of 550 the Goths held all of Italy except Ravenna and a few coastal towns.6
J. B. Bury, the great historian of the period, was unimpressed by the romantic Totila of later writers. His nine years of success, Bury argued, owed most to an emperor who starved his Italian army of men and money, and much of his famous moderation toward the Italians was calculated policy. When Justinian finally committed real resources, everything Totila had built was undone in two years.7
Narses takes command
The man Justinian sent was an unlikely general. Narses, born in Armenia around 480, was a palace eunuch who had risen to command the imperial bodyguard of eunuchs and then to grand chamberlain. In 532 he had helped save Justinian's throne during the riots in Constantinople, partly by force and partly with lavish bribes. In 538 he had been sent to Italy to assist Belisarius and to spy on him, and the rivalry between the two men paralyzed the campaign until Narses was recalled.8
This time he came with what he needed. Lombard King Audoin sent more than 5,500 fighting men, and there were more than 3,000 Heruls, 400 Gepids, Huns and a band of Persian deserters, alongside the regular regiments and troops raised in Thrace and Illyricum. The total strength is not recorded: Britannica gives 20,000 in one entry and 30,000 in another, and Bury's estimate was about 25,000.9
The march to the Apennines
In the spring of 552 Narses marched from Salona on the Dalmatian coast around the head of the Adriatic. The Franks held the roads into Venetia and refused him passage, and Totila's best captain, Teias, waited at Verona to block the way. On local advice the army followed the coast instead, with a fleet of small boats ferrying it across the river mouths, and reached Ravenna safely. After nine days there, Narses pushed south, determined to bring Totila to battle and settle the war in one day.10
Totila, who had been near Rome, marched north to meet him and camped in the Apennines near a village called Taginae, the ancient Tadinum, close to modern Gualdo Tadino. Narses camped about 100 stades away, a little more than 14 Roman miles (about 21 km) by Bury's reckoning, at a place Procopius calls Busta Gallorum, the tombs of the Gauls, which local tradition linked to an ancient Roman victory over the Gauls. Its exact site is unknown; Bury looked for it east of the Flaminian Way near Fabriano.11
The fight for the hill
Narses sent envoys urging Totila to make peace, and asking him, if he meant to fight, to name a day. Totila answered with bravado: in eight days. Narses did not believe him and prepared for battle the next morning. He was right. At dawn the Gothic army stood drawn up within two bowshots of his lines.12
A small hill on the Roman left commanded the only path by which either side could get behind the other. During the night Narses had sent fifty infantrymen to hold it. In the morning Totila threw troop after troop of horsemen at them. The fifty stood shoulder to shoulder in the bed of a stream, beat their shields to terrify the horses and thrust with their spears, and every charge failed. Two of them, Paulus and Ansilas, stepped out of the line and shot down men and horses until their arrows ran out; Paulus then fought on, wrenching four spears out of the enemy's hands, and Narses made him one of his personal guards.13
A morning of delay
Narses drew up his army with the Lombards, the Heruls and the other barbarian allies in the center, made to dismount and fight on foot, so that, Procopius says, they could not easily flee if their courage failed. The regular troops held the wings, with about 8,000 foot archers. Beyond the left he set 1,500 horsemen at an angle: 500 to rescue any part of the line that gave way, and 1,000 to swing round behind the Gothic infantry once it was engaged. Procopius places Narses himself on the left near the hill; Bury puts him on the right.14
Neither army attacked. A Gothic champion named Coccas, a deserter from the imperial army, rode out and challenged any man to single combat; Anzalas, an Armenian of Narses's guard, swerved past his lance and speared him in the side, and the Roman army roared. Then came Totila's display between the lines. He was waiting for 2,000 Gothic horsemen still on the march, and when they arrived around midday, he pulled his army back to its camp for a meal, changed into the armor of a common soldier and led it out again, hoping to catch the Romans off guard. Narses had kept his men in ranks and in armor, eating where they stood.15
The crescent of archers
For the second attack Totila put all his cavalry in front and his infantry behind, and gave the strange order that his men should use no weapon but the spear. Narses swung the archers on his wings forward so that they formed a crescent. The Gothic horsemen charged at the dismounted allies in the center and rode straight into the space between the two bodies of archers. Raked by arrows from both sides, they lost many men and horses before they ever reached the Roman line.16
The barbarian infantry in the center held, and toward evening the Gothic cavalry broke and fled back on their own foot soldiers. Instead of opening ranks to let them through, the infantry turned and ran with them, and in the rout, Procopius writes, they killed each other as if in a battle at night. About 6,000 Goths died. Many surrendered and were killed a little later, among them former imperial soldiers who had deserted to Totila.17
Bury gave Narses full credit. He had answered mounted troops with unmounted ones and used his bowmen to break the charge, so that his barbarian allies stood firm where the Roman infantry had failed against the Gothic horse at Adrianople. One historian called the battle the first experiment in the combination of pike and bow known to modern history, and Bury compared it to Crécy, won eight centuries later by similar tactics. Britannica, too, credits the victory to the imperial archers.18› The Battle of Crécy, 1346
The death of Totila
Darkness was falling when Totila fled with no more than five companions. Procopius gives two accounts of what followed. In the first, a Gepid named Asbad, chasing the group without knowing who led it, was about to strike when a young Goth of the king's household cried out, "What is this, you dog? Are you rushing to smite your own master?" Asbad drove his spear into Totila with all his strength. The king's escort carried him, fainting, some 84 stades to a village called Caprae, where he died and was buried.19
In the second version, Totila had been hit by a chance arrow during the fighting, while dressed as a common soldier, and his wound threw the whole Gothic army into panic. Either way, the Romans learned of his death only when a Gothic woman showed them the grave. They dug up the body to be sure, and Bury adds that the king's bloodstained clothes and jeweled cap were sent to Constantinople and laid at Justinian's feet.20
The end of the Ostrogoths
Narses's first act after the victory was to send home his Lombard allies, whom Bury describes as busy with arson and rape, with a large reward in gold. The survivors of Totila's army fled north to Ticinum, modern Pavia, and made Teias king. Narses marched on Rome and took it, and later in 552 Teias fell fighting at Mons Lactarius in Campania. Gothic garrisons held out in the north for years: Verona and Brescia were not recovered until 562, when Narses sent the keys of their gates to Justinian.21
Taginae decided the Gothic War and made Justinian master of Italy again, the high-water mark of his effort to restore the Roman empire in the west. The victory did not last long. Narses governed Italy until the emperor's death, but in 567 Justin II dismissed him, and a year later the Lombards, whose warriors had fought for him at Taginae, invaded and conquered much of the peninsula. Rumor said Narses had invited them in revenge; Britannica notes that this was never confirmed.22
For the wider story, see the greatest battles of the Byzantine Empire and the Middle Ages era page.
