, ended the Gothic
war.[138]

The reconquest of North Africa from the Vandals cost Justinian a few months
of uninterrupted victory. The reconquest of Italy from the Goths cost
twenty years of suffering to both sides, leaving, indeed, Justinian master
but of a ruined Italy, master also of Rome, but after five successive
captures; its senate reduced to a shadow, its patricians all but destroyed,
its population shrunk, it is supposed, when Narses took possession of it in
552, to between thirty and forty thousand impoverished inhabitants. But the
greatest change remains to be recorded. The Pope had indeed been delivered
from Arian sovereigns, who held the country under military occupation, but
exercised their civil rule with leniency and consideration, bearing, no
doubt, in mind that they were, at least in theory, vice-gerents of an
over-lord who ruled at Constantinople what was still the greatest empire of
the world. What Pope Gelasius truly called "hostile domination" had been
tempered during three-and-thirty years by the personal qualities of one who
was at once powerful in arms and wise in statesmanship. Rome, in the time
of Theodorick and Athalarick, had been maintained, its senate respected,
the Pope treated with deference. A stranger entering Rome in 535, at the
beginning of the Gothic war, would still have seen the greatest and
grandest city of the world, standing in general with its buildings
unimpaired. In 552, the Pope, instead of a distant over-lord, to whom he
could appeal as Roman prince, had received an immediate master, who ruled
Rome by a governor with a permanent garrison, and who understood his rule
at Rome to be the same as his rule at Byzantium. The same as to its
absolute power; but with this difference, that while Byzantium was the seat
of his imperial dignity, in which every interest touched his personal
credit, and its bishop was to be supported as the chief officer of his
court and the chief councillor of his administration, the Rome he took from
the Goths was simply a provincial town of a recovered province, once indeed
illustrious, but now ruined and very troublesome. A provincial town because
the seat of Byzantine power in Italy was henceforth not at Rome but at
Ravenna, while the sovereign of Italy no longer held his court within
Italy, at Ravenna or at Verona, as Theodorick and Athalarick, but at
Constantinople. Mature reflection upon the civil condition made for the
Pope by the result of the G