Totila
Totila, original name Baduila, was the penultimate King of the Ostrogoths, reigning from 541 to 552. A skilled military and political leader, Totila reversed the tide of the Gothic War, recovering by 543 almost all the territories in Italy that the Eastern Roman Empire had captured from his Kingdom in 540.
A grandnephew of Theudis, sword-bearer of Theodoric the Great and king of the Visigoths, Totila was elected king by Ostrogothic nobles in the autumn of 541 after the deaths of Kings’ Ildibad & Eraric. Both had been killed by the Gothic nobility for attempting to surrender to the Romans. Totila proved himself both as a military and political leader, winning the support of the lower classes by liberating slaves and distributing land to the peasants. After a successful defence at Verona, Totila pursued and defeated a numerically superior army at the Battle of Faventia in 542. Totila followed these victories by defeating the Romans outside Florence and capturing Naples. By 543, fighting on land and sea, he had reconquered the bulk of the lost territory. Rome held out, and Totila appealed unsuccessfully to the Senate in a letter reminding them of the loyalty of the Romans to his predecessor Theodoric the Great. In the spring of 544, the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I sent his general Belisarius to Italy to counterattack, but Totila captured Rome in 546 from Belisarius and depopulated the city after a yearlong siege. When Totila left to fight the Byzantines in Lucania, south of Naples, Belisarius retook Rome and rebuilt its fortifications.
After Belisarius retreated to Constantinople in 549, Totila recaptured Rome, went on to complete the reconquest of Italy and Sicily. By the end of 550, Totila had recaptured all but Ravenna and four coastal towns. The following year Justinian sent his general Narses with a force of 35,000 Lombards, Gepids and Heruli to Italy in a march around the Adriatic Sea to approach Ravenna from the north. In the Battle of Taginae, a decisive engagement during the summer of 552, in the Apennines near present-day Fabriano, the Gothic army was defeated, and Totila was mortally wounded. Totila was succeeded by his relative Teia, who later died at the Battle of Mons Lactarius. Pockets of resistance, reinforced by Franks and Alemanni who had invaded Italy in 553, continued until 562, when the Byzantines were in control of the whole of the country following Justinian's conquests.
Early life
"Totila" was the nom de guerre of a man whose real name was Baduila, as can be seen from the coinage he issued. "Totila" is the name used by the Byzantine historian Procopius, who accompanied the Byzantine general Belisarius during the Gothic War, and whose chronicles are the main source of information for Totila. According to Henry Bradley, 'Totila' and 'Baduila' are diminutives of Totabadws. Historian Marco Cristini has proposed that the consistent use of the name "Totila" by Procopius and other Eastern Roman authors, rather than the Gothic king's actual name "Baduila", may have served a propagandistic purpose. Cristini argues that this naming choice was likely encouraged by Emperor Justinian as a means of delegitimising the Gothic leader. The name "Totila," potentially perceived as diminutive or less dignified, could have been employed to reinforce the narrative of Baduila as a mere usurper or rebel, rather than a legitimate monarch. Given the numismatic evidence, Cristini contends that the true name was certainly known to Byzantine authors, suggesting that its omission was a deliberate rhetorical strategy. Born in Treviso, Totila was a grandnephew of Theudis, king of the Visigoths, and a sword-bearer; a role that made for a good career among his kin.Totila was elected king of the Ostrogoths in 541 after the assassination of his uncle Ildibad and having surreptitiously engineered the assassination of Ildibad's short-lived successor Eraric, in 541. Like Alaric I, Totila was quite young when he became king and was declared such by the Goths to recover dominion over the Italians. The official Byzantine position, adopted by Procopius and even by the Romanized Goth, Jordanes—writing just before the conclusion of the Gothic Wars—was that Totila was a usurper. According to historian Peter Heather, as Ildebadus's nephew, Totila nonetheless hailed from a prominent Gothic family, one that surrounded and "even occasionally challenged Theodoric's Amal dynasty".
Initial victories
Eraric's murder and replacement with Totila suggested to the Byzantines—since Eraric favoured negotiation with Imperial power—that this Gothic successor likely preferred war and so a Byzantine expeditionary force of twelve thousand men was sent north from Ravenna to Verona to stave off any possible impending attack.At Verona, a local sympathizer allowed a contingent of Roman soldiers into the city and while the Goths panicked at first, they soon realized that the main army was stopped some distance from the city. They promptly shut the gates and the Roman soldiers who had made it into the city escaped by leaping from the walls. Meanwhile, the Roman forces retreated back to Faenza, where Totila met them with 5,000 men to give battle, while another 300 Gothic archers surprised them from the rear, resulting in a rout, whereby the Goths acquired both prisoners and battle standards. Correspondingly, historian Thomas Burns claims that Totila was a gifted warrior and governor, and as an Ostrogoth ranks only second to Theodoric the Great himself.
After securing victory in 542 at Faenza, Totila's Goths besieged the stoutly-defended Florence in an effort to open the Via Cassia to Rome but when Imperial forces arrived to relieve the city, Totila withdrew to the Mugello valley, where historian Herwig Wolfram states, they "inflicted a crushing defeat on the enemy", at the Battle of Mucellium. Since this region was relatively spared of any previous conflicts, Totila's Goths were able to secure significant provisions and booty. In the meantime, instead of pursuing the conquest of central Italy, where the Imperial forces were too formidable for his small army, he decided to transfer his operations to the south of the peninsula. He captured Beneventum as well as Cumae, which remained a Gothic stronghold even after Gothic kingship no longer existed.
During a period of crisis amid the Eastern Roman military leadership, which placed strains on its civilian population across its domains, historian Victor Davis Hanson asserts that Totila posed as a "national liberator who would throw off the renewed chains of Roman oppression." Hanson further contends that this squabbling among Byzantine generals from "different factions and ethnicities" caused the forfeiture of what Belisarius had previously won in 540. In the aftermath of the Battle of Faenza, Totila not only achieved a tactical victory over the Roman forces but also succeeded in attracting Roman deserters to his own ranks. Historian Marco Cristini argues that undermining the cohesion of the Roman army was a deliberate and strategic component of Totila’s military approach. Equally important, according to Cristini, was the reinforcement of his own forces through the integration of disaffected Roman soldiers. These individuals, often disgruntled due to unpaid wages, disputes with commanding officers, or personal ambitions, were exploited by Totila to gain intelligence and logistical advantages. Cristini further notes, citing Procopius, that in a similar episode in 548, following Totila’s capture of the fortress of Roscianum, approximately 300 Roman soldiers defected to his side, choosing to oppose Belisarius.
Image:Totila fa dstruggere la città di Firenze.jpg|thumb|300px|Totila razes the walls of Florence: illumination from the Chigi ms of Villani's Cronica
Totila's strategy was to move fast and take control of the countryside, leaving the Byzantine forces in control of well-defended cities, and especially the ports. When Belisarius eventually returned to Italy, Procopius relates that "during a space of five years he did not succeed once in setting foot on any part of the land... except where some fortress was, but during this whole period he kept sailing about visiting one port after another." Totila circumvented those cities where a drawn-out siege would have been required, razing the walls of cities that capitulated to him, such as Beneventum. Totila's conquest of Italy was marked not only by celerity but also by mercy, and Gibbon says "none were deceived, either friends or enemies, who depended on his faith or his clemency." However, Totila could be merciless, as Procopius recounts. For instance, after a successful siege of a resisting city like Perugia, Totila had its bishop, St. Herculanus of Perugia, beheaded by a soldier. Procopius left a written portrayal of Totila before his troops were drawn up for battle:
The armour in which he was clad was abundantly plated with gold and the ample adornments which hung from his cheek plates as well as his helmet and spear were not only purple, but in other respects befitting a king … And he himself, sitting upon a very large horse, began to dance under arms skillfully between the two armies. And as he rode he hurled his javelin into the air and caught it again as it quivered above him, then passed it rapidly from hand to hand, shifting it with consummate skill.
Where Totila learned this "dance" is never made clear by Procopius, but these actions likely meant something to the Goths and despite his firm conviction of coexistence with the Romans and their culture, Burns relates, much like Theodoric, he "remained a Goth." Despite his ethnic status as a Germanic warrior, Totila did not plunder the countryside for supplies like other barbarians had done; instead, he collected rent and taxes to provide the income he needed without ruining the cities and towns he captured. He also recruited slaves into the ranks of his army. While some sources, including Procopius, claim that Totila recruited slaves into his army, historian Marco Cristini suggests this may be an exaggeration intended to portray the Gothic forces as desperate or illegitimate. Although it is plausible that slaves were present within the Gothic military context, Cristini argues that their roles were likely limited to auxiliary functions such as cooking, maintaining equipment, laundering, and tending to the wounded, rather than participating directly in combat. He emphasises that Totila’s core military force primarily consisted of trained cavalrymen, skilled in the use of spears and accustomed to warfare from a young age. While it is not impossible that a small number of slaves may have taken up arms, Cristini contends that their lack of military training and the logistical challenges of equipping and preparing them for battle make widespread slave participation in combat unlikely, contrary to Procopius’s portrayal.