No sooner had Vitalian and his troops withdrawn than Anastasius reneged, sending out a general named Cyril to oppose him. This was a mistake. If we believe our sources, Vitalian bribed his way into the opposing general’s camp and killed him with his own hands, seizing control of his forces. Anastasius’s nephew Hypatius led another force that Vitalian defeated in its turn. Vitalian’s men captured Hypatius, and when ambassadors went out to ransom him with 1,100 pounds of gold, they too were captured and the gold along with them. Many in Thrace and beyond cheered these victories and could see that a new emperor was in the making, no trivial thing when the reigning emperor was in his eighties.
Vitalian marched on Constantinople
Now triply empowered, Vitalian marched on Constantinople again, and this time was more classically successful. He liberated his captives in return for ransom and for the title of master of soldiers for Thrace. There was religious rapprochement as well, as Vitalian and Anastasius both wrote letters to Pope Hormisdas in Italy encouraging him to call a council of reconciliation in church matters, but nothing came of it. When that disappointment sank in, Vitalian marched on Constantinople—third time unlucky—and saw his fleet destroyed and his army defeated and so fled back to Thrace. The betting that had gone in his favor paused. Some sources had it that the future emperor Justin was involved, paying the philosopher Proclus of Athens 400 pounds of gold for a sulfur compound that could be thrown a distance and catch fire, devastating the wooden ships.30 Though several sources tell the story, and no one quite believes it, it marks the importance of Vitalian’s defeat. Had Vitalian prevailed on that approach, his imperial dreams might have been fulfilled holidays bulgaria.
A man much like Theoderic
What would have happened then? A man much like Theoderic would have been in power in Constantinople, able to ensure ecclesiastical peace at least with the west, and military harmony as well. The history of the sixth century might then have been one of restored Roman imperial domains, stretching from Italy to Constantinople, unified in purpose and able to offer support from each capital when fighting was necessary on the northern frontier against Franks or the eastern frontier against Persians. The religious unity would very likely have brought together all forces west of the Bosporus, and their eventual ability to prevail over eastern belief would have been strong. If division had finally come, the boundary would have run through Asia Minor, not the Balkans. Most important, that unification of Constantinople and Italy would presumably have made the Balkans a heartland, not a borderland.
For just a moment, Vitalian brought into play the possibility of a different geopolitical future. His failure casts a long shadow over the coming years.
Now tamed, Vitalian still potentially remained a power. From 515 to 518 he was still in the field, though with no official position. From the last days of Anastasius, Justinian, as the power behind Justin’s throne, seems to have thought it better to keep Vitalian inside the tent than outside, and so honored him at Constantinople, making him “master of soldiers in the imperial presence” and supporting his Chalcedonianism by sending him to represent the true faith in councils at Tyre, on the Palestinian coast; and at Apamea, inland in Syria, in 518 and 519 The end of Theoderic.
He gave his approval and thus lent credence to Constantinople’s reunification with Rome that Justin and Hormisdas brokered in 519, and he supported the Scythian monks in their struggle for Chalcedonian orthodoxy. In 520, he was honored with the consulship, but in the year that was named after him, he was murdered in the imperial palace along with two of his aides. Justinian was, at last, without a serious rival, and feared or despised by those who assumed, rightly or wrongly, that he had done in the better man himself.
Distant spectator of Vitalian’s career
Theoderic was a distant spectator of Vitalian’s career, forced to depend on scattered and belated reports of his progress and ambitions. As that hope faded and then ended with Vitalian’s death, Theoderic soon found himself with suspicions and rivalry of his own closer to home.
Boethius, the philosopher, was proud of his family, ostentatious in his learning, and ambitious in every way. Entering his forties in the 420s, about to see his sons’ grand joint consulship, he had made his name through his education, as we have seen. That learning makes him hard to observe clearly, because he fits so neatly into the roles of both public intellectual and man of letters that our historians of philosophy and literature take him over and take him for granted. But he came to a bad end, and an important story that doesn’t belong exclusively to philosophy or literature sits in plain sight, yet despite its obviousness remains easy to overlook.
