Narses was a court eunuch who took command in Italy in his seventies and won the Gothic War that Belisarius had been unable to finish.
Narses was a eunuch of the imperial household who rose to be one of the most powerful men at Justinian's court, and then, in his seventies, became the general who finally won the Gothic War.
He had no significant field career before that. He was a palace official, a treasurer and a chamberlain, and his military reputation rests almost entirely on the last decade of a very long life.
He won the war Belisarius could not finish, and he did it by being given what Belisarius never was: enough men and enough money.
He was born around 478, probably in Persarmenia, and came to Constantinople as a eunuch of the imperial household — a career path that could lead to enormous influence and was closed to no one by birth.
He rose through the treasury to become praepositus sacri cubiculi, the head of the emperor's household, one of the great offices of the court.
His first recorded moment of consequence is the Nika riots of 532, where he reportedly went among the factions with a bag of gold and bought off enough of the Blues to split the rising.
Procopius, who disliked most people, treats him with a certain wary respect: careful, patient, generous with money and unusually good at managing the barbarian contingents that made up much of his army.
His handling of those troops is the trait everyone notes. The Lombard and Herul mercenaries he took to Italy were difficult, and he managed them by paying them properly and sending them home before they became a problem — a competence in logistics and personnel rather than in heroics.
He was also devout in a way the sources emphasise, attributing his victories to prayer and to the Virgin, and he built and endowed churches in Italy. Whether that piety is his or his biographers' is not fully separable.
He was sent to Italy in 551 with an army far larger and better funded than anything Belisarius had commanded there, and with the authority to spend.
At Taginae in 552 he destroyed the Gothic army and Totila was killed. At Mons Lactarius shortly afterwards he destroyed its successor and Teias with it, ending the Ostrogothic kingdom.
He then spent years mopping up Frankish and Alemannic invasions and Gothic garrisons, and governed Italy into the 560s.
A persistent tradition holds that Narses, dismissed and insulted by Justin II's empress, invited the Lombards into Italy out of spite — and they duly invaded in 568.
The story is late and hostile, and it does the convenient work of blaming a foreigner and a eunuch for a disaster with much deeper causes.
What is not in doubt is that Italy after eighteen years of war was too exhausted and too thinly garrisoned to resist, and that the Gothic War itself is the better explanation for what happened in 568.
He won the war, and the manner of it is instructive: what changed between Belisarius's failure and Narses's success was not generalship but resources.
His victory was also hollow. Italy was devastated, Rome was a shell, and within fifteen years the Lombards had taken much of what he had reconquered.
He remains one of the most unusual figures of the period — a household eunuch who ended a Gothic kingdom in his mid-seventies — and the sources have never quite known what to do with him.