At Taginae in 552, Narses destroyed the Ostrogothic army with massed archery and dismounted infantry, and Totila was killed in the rout.
Taginae was fought in the summer of 552 in the central Apennines, and it decided the Gothic War after seventeen years.
Narses had a large, well-paid army for the first time in the conflict, and he used it in a formation that gave the Gothic cavalry no good option.
Totila was killed, the Gothic field army ceased to exist, and the kingdom followed within a year.
Narses marched south from Ravenna in 552, avoiding the coast road that Gothic garrisons controlled, and Totila moved to meet him in the mountains.
Totila was waiting for reinforcements — a body of two thousand horsemen still on the road — and needed time.
Both armies drew up, and there followed the episode Procopius makes most of: Totila riding out between the lines in gilded armour, wheeling his horse and throwing and catching his lance in a display of horsemanship, spinning out the hours until his reinforcements arrived.
Narses formed his centre of dismounted heavy troops, with some four thousand archers on each wing curving forward, so that anything attacking the centre entered a pocket enfiladed from both sides.
Totila attacked with cavalry and, according to Procopius, ordered his men to use lances only — a decision that gave up any answer to the archery.
The charge was shot to pieces before it reached the line. The Gothic cavalry recoiled onto its own infantry, the formation collapsed, and the whole army broke.
Totila was wounded in the flight and carried to Caprae, where he died. The scale of the Gothic loss was such that no field army could be reformed.
The surviving Goths elected Teias and withdrew southward toward Campania and the royal treasure.
Narses moved on Rome, which fell shortly afterwards, and then south after Teias.
It ended a war that had been unwinnable for a decade, and it did so because the empire finally paid for it — the tactical brilliance mattered, but so did having enough archers to form two wings of four thousand.
The formation itself became a set piece in military history: dismounted heavy infantry as an anvil, with massed missile troops shaped to enfilade anything that closed.
For the archive it is the decisive engagement of Justinian's Italian war, and the point from which the Ostrogothic kingdom had a year left to live.