Free Lost to the West by Lars Brownworth

life wouldn’t be a whole lot easier with another man on the throne.
    Justinian was far too busy with foreign affairs to notice storm clouds on the domestic horizon. In 528, war had finally broken out with Persia, and he had been busy reorganizing the eastern army. The aging Persian king sent a huge army to flatten the Romans, but Belisarius defeated it with his characteristic flair, and he even managed to conquer part of Persian Armenia. It was the first clear victory on the Persian frontier in living memory, and it sounded the clarion call of imperial revival.
    It also resulted in the fall of the Vandal king of Africa. He’d been maintaining an increasingly difficult balancing act for years, and this latest triumph of Byzantine arms had made his position nearlyuntenable. On the one hand, he had to placate Justinian to keep the imperial armies away, but too much of an effort to keep the Byzantines happy would inevitably invite charges of betrayal by his own subjects. Most Vandals feared for their independence and wanted a tough stance from their leader, but the king chose this moment to unveil a new series of coins with the emperor’s portrait on them. The ill-timed attempt to ingratiate himself with the eastern court cost him his crown. Aided by the outraged Vandal nobility, the king’s cousin Gelimer easily overthrew him and seized the throne of Carthage.
    From the start, Gelimer made it clear that he didn’t intend to be intimidated by any bullying from Constantinople. When Justinian sent a letter protesting his usurpation, Gelimer told him to mind his own business, subtly reminding him that the last Byzantine military expedition against his kingdom had ended in a complete fiasco. If these blustering Byzantines wanted their land back, Gelimer announced, let them come and get it. They would find Vandal swords ready for them.
    Justinian was slightly disappointed by the change in Vandal kings, since he was quite sure the right diplomatic pressure would have delivered North Africa back into the Roman fold without the loss of a single soldier, but Gelimer’s warlike stance would do almost as well. The contemptuous letter provided an insult to be avenged, a useful bit of propaganda for the emperor and the perfect pretext to invade. The Vandal occupiers had plundered Roman land and thumbed their noses at Constantinople for long enough. Now they would find out what it meant to taunt the Roman wolf.
    There was only one man who could be entrusted with the African campaign, but Belisarius was busy fighting on the Persian frontier. In 531, he managed to fight a much larger Persian army to a standstill, and, with his customary good luck, this proved to be the decisive conflict of the war. A few days later, the demoralized Persian king unexpectedly died, leaving a young but shrewd son named Chosroes to take his place. The new king desperately needed peace to consolidate his power, and hastily agreed to an “Everlasting Peace,”leaving Justinian’s favorite general free. * Nothing, it seemed, could now stop the reconquest of North Africa.
    But Belisarius had barely arrived in Constantinople when a very different sort of war erupted. While Justinian was dreaming of glory in Africa, tensions in the capital had built to a fever pitch. Upset by the rising taxes and increasing corruption, the population had reached its boiling point when the emperor severely restricted the privileges of the Blues and the Greens in order to cope with a rise in factional violence. Not only had Justinian allowed his surrogates to fleece the citizens with cruel taxes, but now he was interfering in their sports as well. Games celebrating the ides of January were held to defuse the situation, but when the spectators caught sight of Justinian taking his usual seat, things began to get ugly. The anonymity of the crowd gave someone the courage to taunt the emperor, shouting out that he wished Justinian’s father had never been born, and the stadium shook