Belisarius

Recorded sideEastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire

Recorded resultdecisive victory

Decisive Eastern Roman victory. Fighting on the tactical defensive against a larger army, Belisarius broke two successive Persian wings by counter-charging his hidden and flanking cavalry, then rolled up the Persian center; the Sassanid army was driven from the field.

Belisarius refused to meet a bigger cavalry army on open ground on its own terms. In front of his line he had his men dig an interlocking system of ditches - a long central trench with forward-angled arms at the flanks - that channeled, slowed, and blunted the Persian horse exactly where he wanted them. He anchored his wings, hid detachments of Hunnic horse to strike the flanks, and held the tactical defensive until the Persians committed. When their left and then their right pressed the attack, his allied and household cavalry (the bucellarii) counter-charged into the disordered attackers and enveloped them, cutting the elite Immortals off and collapsing the wings inward. It is a textbook marriage of field fortification, combined arms, and counter-envelopment - engineering and discipline substituting for numbers.

What followed

Dara was Belisarius's breakout victory and one of the few clear field wins the Romans scored over Sassanid Persia in the Iberian War. It made his reputation, marking him as the outstanding general of the age and putting him on the path to command Justinian's reconquest of the West a few years later. Strategically it stabilized the eastern frontier long enough for Justinian to turn his armies toward North Africa and Italy - the same overreach that would ultimately exhaust the empire.

Recorded sideEastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire

Recorded resultvictory

Eastern Roman (Byzantine) victory. After roughly a year of investment the Ostrogoths, worn down by disease, hunger, and constant harassment while Belisarius kept the city fed by sea, abandoned the siege in March 538 and withdrew north.

Belisarius won a siege the way sieges are actually won - by logistics, not walls alone. Outnumbered many times over, he refused to sit passively: he repaired and manned the Aurelian circuit, launched near-daily sorties and horse-archer harassment to keep the Goths off balance and bleeding, and never let them settle into a comfortable blockade. But the decisive front was supply. When Vitiges cut the aqueducts, Belisarius adapted, and above all he kept the sea lanes open - grain convoys ran from Sicily and North Africa up the coast and the Tiber to feed both the garrison and the city, while the huge Gothic army sickened and starved in disease-ridden camps outside the walls it could not take. A siege is a contest of who runs out of food and health first; command of the sea meant the besiegers, not the besieged, lost that contest.

What followed

The successful defense of Rome was the hinge of Justinian's Gothic War and his dream of reconquering the Western Empire (the renovatio imperii). Holding the old capital kept the reconquest alive and cemented Belisarius's fame. But the war it advanced dragged on for two decades and devastated Italy - depopulating Rome, wrecking the countryside, and leaving the peninsula so exhausted that within a generation, in 568, the Lombards walked in and tore most of it away from an overstretched, plague-weakened empire. The defense was a triumph; the war it served was close to a pyrrhic one.