Belisarius — The General Who Refused The Crown

He was offered the crown of the Western Roman Empire twice in his life. Twice he gave it back. Flavius Belisarius — born in obscurity on the Thracian frontier around the year 500, dead in his own bed in Constantinople sixty-five years later — won the only campaigns in Roman memory in which a general retook provinces lost to barbarians within living memory. He destroyed the Vandal kingdom in Africa with fifteen thousand men. He held the city of Rome against a Gothic army ten times his size for one year and nine days. He saved the throne of his emperor in an afternoon at the Hippodrome, when thirty thousand Roman citizens lay dead on the floor of the great stadium by evening. And when the Goths offered him the crown of the Western Empire — the throne that had been vacant since the fall of Rome — he took the city by accepting and then handed everything to the master who had spent a decade undermining him. This is the man we have been considering. This is what such men do.This script draws on Procopius of Caesarea's Wars, Buildings, and Secret History — the primary sixth-century source, written by a man who served as Belisarius's secretary and saw the campaigns firsthand — along with the later chroniclers and modern scholarship on the Justinianic reconquest. ⚔ CHAPTERS00:00 — I. The Trench at Dara11:55 — II. The Hippodrome19:07 — III. The Vandals26:54 — IV. Italy38:42— V. The Crown45:33 — VI. The Long Recall56:36 — VII. The End1:00:55 — IX. The Teacher