Belisarius was Justinian's foremost general, who destroyed the Vandal kingdom in a single campaign and fought the Gothic War in Italy for two decades.
Belisarius was the outstanding general of Justinian's reign and one of the most successful commanders in Roman history, which is a strange thing to be able to say about a man who was almost never given adequate forces.
He destroyed the Vandal kingdom of Africa in about nine months with an army of some fifteen thousand, then spent two decades in Italy fighting the Ostrogoths with resources that were rarely equal to holding what he had taken.
He is documented in exceptional detail because Procopius served as his legal secretary and wrote the history of his campaigns — which is both a gift and a problem.
He was born around 500 in the Balkans, and like Justinian he came from the provincial Latin-speaking world rather than from the capital's aristocracy.
He entered the imperial guard and rose through service on the Persian frontier, where he won at Dara in 530 and lost at Callinicum the following year.
His decisive moment came in 532, when he was one of the commanders who suppressed the Nika riots — a service that made his career and bound him closely to the emperor.
Procopius knew him personally and drew him as disciplined, personally brave, unusually restrained with plunder and severe about his soldiers' behaviour toward civilians — a general who understood that an army looting a province he was trying to hold was defeating itself.
The same writer, in the Secret History, presents him as weak in his own household and dominated by his wife Antonina, and treats his loyalty to Justinian as something close to servility. Both portraits come from the same well-placed witness, and neither can simply be discarded.
What is not in doubt is that he refused the purple. Offered the western empire by the Goths in 540 as a way of ending the war, he appeared to accept, took Ravenna, and then handed everything to Justinian — an act that his contemporaries found either admirable or incomprehensible, and which the sources still argue over.
In 533 Justinian sent him to Africa against the advice of most of the court, which remembered a catastrophic failed expedition in 468 and expected another.
He landed unopposed, marched on Carthage, and destroyed the Vandal field army at Ad Decimum in September and again at Tricamarum in December. The kingdom that had held Africa for a century was gone within the campaign season.
He returned to Constantinople with Gelimer as a captive and was granted a triumph — the first held by a private citizen in Rome or Constantinople for centuries, and effectively the last of its kind.
He crossed to Italy in 535 and took Sicily, Naples and Rome, then held Rome through a Gothic siege lasting more than a year with a garrison that should not have been able to do it.
Recalled, sent to Persia, and returned to Italy in 544, he found the Gothic War transformed and himself starved of men and money. The reconquest of Italy was eventually completed by Narses rather than by him.
In 559 he was brought out of retirement to meet a Hunnic raid approaching Constantinople and drove it off with a scratch force, which was the last military act of his life.
The best-known story about Belisarius is that Justinian had him blinded and reduced to begging in the streets, and it is the subject of a whole genre of paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
There is no contemporary basis for it. Procopius, who was hostile enough to record it gladly, says nothing of the kind, and the story first appears centuries later.
What did happen is duller and more plausible: he was briefly disgraced in 562 on a charge of conspiracy, his property was seized, and he was restored the following year. The legend grew out of that episode and out of a moral appetite for the fall of great men.