[Intro Music]
As smoke drifted over the city, there was a silence in Constantinople.
The sort of silence that can only come after riot, and clangor and death.
Large swaths of the city had been burnt to the ground; people wandered the streets
looking for lost loved ones, or picking through the wreckage for smoke blackened belongings.
But as Justinian looked out from his palace, over the guards repairing the gate, over the soldiers taking bodies from the hypodrome,
he knew a new and greater Constantinople would rise from these ashes
and with it, a new and greater Rome.
39 days after the riots,
39 days after the fire and the chaos,
the first bricks were set on what would stand for a thousand years
as the greatest Christian Church in the world.
Where the old Hagia Sophia had collapsed,
and began to be gutted by flames just a few scant weeks earlier;
a church hundred time more magnificent began to rise.
Treasure from all over the empire flowed into the Capital to adorn its walls and to pay its workers.
The city as a whole united to reconstruct what they had destroyed.
And as the walls of the Hagia Sophia began to rise,
Justinian set his mind to his last great project.
The reconquest of what had been lost in the west.
He was the Emperor of Rome, not merely Greece or Anatolia.
A bare 60 years ago the West had fallen,
There were still men who lived in the empire
who remembered when Rome stretched from Asia to the far coasts of Gaul.
It was time to revive that legacy.
Time to take back what was lost,
and to do this, he had to start with North Africa.
The North African provinces had always been some of Rome's most stable and prosperous territories.
They had been immune to the turbulence in Europe and the Germanic invasions.
They weren't ravaged by constant war or desolated by raids,
but in the 430s, Vandal kings had crossed the straits of Gibraltar and marched east
laying siege to Carthage, that ancient enemy Rome had conquered and occupied more than 500 years ago,
and taking it as the seat for their new kingdom.
But those kings had found more than a capital there.
In Carthage, they found a navy.
The great shipyard of Carthage fell to the Vandals, and with it, much of the Roman fleet.
This allowed the Vandals to become pirates,
This allowed the Vandals to become pirates, then raiders,
This allowed the Vandals to become pirates, then raiders, then seaborne conquerors.
And in time, most of the Mediterranean islands, even Sicily itself, fell to Vandal arms.
But most shocking to the Roman world was an event that had happened in the year 455.
In 455, the Vandals descended on Rome itself
and sacked it for 14 days.
This had led to the last great combined effort of the East and the West
when, in 468, they sent a force of over 100,000 men to retake the North African provinces.
And in one of the worst military disasters of the ancient world,
were utterly wiped out.
After that, an uneasy peace formed between the Vandals and the Romans.
Justinian needed to break this peace if he was to restore the glory of Rome,
if he was to retake what had been taken from them
and avenge the humiliating sack of the Holy City.
But even in ancient times, declaring war still required a reason, or a casus belli.
The most recent Vandal king had been pro-Orthodox and friendly to Rome
so Justinian bided his time,
marshaling his forces and putting his capital back together.
But then in 533, an opportunity came.
Gelimer, the cousin of the Vandal king, was afraid that the Vandals,
who mostly believed in Aryan Christianity,
were on their way to becoming subjects of the Orthodox Roman empire,
and rallied a group of like-minded nobles behind him to overthrow the Vandal king.
Justinian demanded the legitimate king's restoration.
Gelimer flatly refused.
Now Justinian had a reason for war.
But even as he armed Belisarius with 16, 000 men and a fleet 600 ships strong,
Justinian himself began to fight a diplomatic war.
He knew that to win with 16,000 troops where 100,000 men, and the combined arms of two empires had failed,
he would need to give himself all the advantages he could.
He got both Tripolitania, the eastern part of the Vandal kingdom in North Africa
and Sardinia to revolt.
As luck would have it, Gelimer sent his fleet to deal with the uprising in Sardinia
clearing the seas for Belisarius's fleet and allowing them to land in Africa unnoticed.
Avoiding naval conflict and establishing a beachhead
meant that the Eastern Roman fleet had already achieved the tasks which had given
the earlier, larger Roman force the most difficulty.
But there was still much of Africa to retake.
Belisarius's men started to ravage the countryside, looking for food and loot
but Belisarius reined them in,
demonstrating the second non-violent part of the reconquest strategy.
He told his men that everything they took was to be paid for.
He told his men that they were liberators, not conquerors
and that the populace were to be treated like Romans.
Because they were Romans, just living under the Vandal yolk.
And with that, he won over the local populace.
Towns were opened to him;
grain and water were readily sold to his troops.
He could start marching northwest, up the coast.
He would need to cover 150 miles to make it from their landing site to Carthage.
But by now, word had reached Gelimer of the arrival of the invasion force.
Gelimer sent word to his brother to gather their forces and meet him south of the capital.
He had a plan:
he knew that anyone marching onto the capital
would have to march through a valley 10 miles east of the city itself.
His brother would bring the garrison from the capital and use his smaller force to pin the Byzantines in the valley
where they couldn't bring their numbers to bear.
While Gelimer would move his larger force in from where they were stationed in the southeast
and attack the Romans from behind.
Belisarius would have been taken totally by surprise
but Gelimer's brother got to the valley just as Belisarius's advanced guard were scouting it.
And this elite cavalry guard not only got word back to Belisarius that something was up,
but they also smashed the out of position Vandals,
killing Gelimer's brother and chasing the remaining troops almost to the walls of Carthage.
Gelimer, having no idea that this had happened, charged his forces into the Byzantines from the rear.
But since they were pinned down by the other Vandal troops in the valley,
the Byzantines could wheel around and meet the attack.
Despite this though, the Vandals began to get the better of the day, pushing the Byzantines back.
Since they were attacking them from behind, this meant that they were pushing the Byzantines toward Carthage.
But, as they pushed the Romans through the valley,
the same valley where the Roman cavalry had earlier defeated Gelimer's pinning force
Gelimer came upon his brother's men, fallen along the roadside
and the body of his brother, shattered and broken upon the ground.
And when he saw his brother, he wept.
His men came to him for orders, but the only order he would give was that his brother be buried.
His men milled about, anxiously waiting for battle commands
but Gelimer just would not respond to the situation at hand.
Meanwhile, Belisarius, having been pushed through the valley
soon found himself reunited with his elite cavalry force.
With these reinforcements, he regrouped and charged the now-disorganized Vandal horde.
The Vandal army broke and scattered out into the countryside.
This force of Vandals that had been one push away from cutting Belisarius off from his cavalry,
and perhaps ending the life of one of the greatest generals of late antiquity,
that had been one push away from ending Justinian's dreams of a reunited Rome,
was now dispersed.
A day later, Belisarius marched into Carthage
to a people who welcomed him as a liberator and hailed him as a hero.
But Gelimer wasn't dead.
He had escaped the battle, and so he called his other brother from Sardinia
where he had been putting down the revolt Justinian had helped orchestrate.
With the aid of his brother's forces, Gelimer planned another attack on Belisarius.
This time, he'd be taking the fight to the walls of Carthage.
Belisarius, fearing treachery from some of his mercenaries,
opted to sally out of the city and meet Gelimer on the open field.
The fighting was tough. No brilliant tactics - no clever flanking, just direct, grinding, brutal combat.
Battle favored the Byzantines but just barely.
The scales of war could tip either way.
Then, during a Byzantine charge, Gelimer's other brother was cut down in front of him.
And he fled the field.
The Vandal forces would never recover from this defeat.
They held out for a few months in the hills, but by spring, the Vandal kingdom had effectively disappeared.
For his service, Justinian awarded Belisarius an honor that hadn't been seen outside the imperial family
since the days of Augustus, 500 years before.
A triumph - the greatest honor a Roman general could receive.
Belisarius and his troops marched with the spoils of war and the captives of the campaign
through the streets of Byzantium to cheering throngs.
But as he and the captive Vandal king stood before the emperor,
Gelimer the Vandal lord was heard to say,
"Vanity of vanities; all is vanity."
This would be the last triumph Rome was ever to see.
But we've not yet reached the apex of Justinian's achievements nor of Belisarius's.
Join us next time as the true reconquest of Rome begins.
[Outro music]