Byzantine armies under Belisarius and Narses reconquer Italy from the Ostrogoths
Emperor Justinian's attempt to restore Roman rule in the West, and its cost
Quick facts
- Location
- Italy, Sicily, Dalmatia
- Byzantine commanders
- Belisarius, then Narses
- Gothic king defeated
- Totila (d. 552)
- Duration
- 535-554 CE
What happened
Byzantine emperor Justinian I, having just retaken North Africa, sent the general Belisarius to invade Italy in 535 to remove the Ostrogothic kingdom that had ruled since Theodoric. Sicily fell quickly, and by 540 Belisarius had captured Ravenna and most of Italy. The Goths regrouped under a new king, Totila, retook much of the peninsula through the 540s, and the war dragged on until 553, when the general Narses finally defeated Totila. Rome itself changed hands three times during the fighting. Two decades of war left Italy's cities, farmland, and population devastated, a cost historians weigh against the reconquest's brief restoration of imperial rule.
Why it matters
The reconquest reunited Italy with Constantinople for a generation, but the war's destruction left the peninsula too weak to resist the Lombard invasion that followed within fifteen years, and it deepened the political and cultural split between a Greek-speaking East and a Latin West that the earlier Ostrogothic kingdom had tried to bridge.
How we know
Procopius of Caesarea, Belisarius's own legal secretary, wrote a detailed campaign history, De Bellis, within a few years of the events, alongside his more critical Secret History; this timeline covers the fuller Byzantine story, including the earlier Justinianic period and the later Fourth Crusade sack of Constantinople, on its own dedicated timeline.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Justinian I · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- World History Encyclopedia. Justinian I · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- The Byzantine Empire → · The Gothic War is one campaign in a much longer Byzantine story, from Constantine's new capital to 1453.