CHAPTER XLI: Conquests Of Justinian, Charact Of Balisarius .-- Part I.
Conquests Of Justinian In The West .-- Character And First Campaigns Of Belisarius--He Invades And Subdues The Vandal Kingdom Of Africa--His Triumph .-- The Gothic War .-- He Recovers Sicily, Naples, And Rome .-- Siege Of Rome By The Goths .-- Their Retreat And Losses .-- Surrender Of Ravenna .-- Glory Of Belisarius .-- His Domestic Shame And Misfortunes.
When Justinian ascended the throne, about fifty years after the fall of the Western empire, the kingdoms of the Goths and Vandals had obtained a solid, and, as it might seem, a legal establishment both in Europe and Africa.

The titles, which Roman victory had inscribed, were erased with equal justice by the sword of the Barbarians; and their successful rapine derived a more venerable sanction from time, from treaties, and from the oaths of fidelity, already repeated by a second or third generation of obedient subjects.

Experience and Christianity had refuted the superstitious hope, that Rome was founded by the gods to reign forever over the nations of the earth.

But the proud claim of perpetual and indefeasible dominion, which her soldiers could no longer maintain, was firmly asserted by her statesmen and lawyers, whose opinions have been sometimes revived and propagated in the modern schools of jurisprudence.

After Rome herself had been stripped of the Imperial purple, the princes of Constantinople assumed the sole and sacred sceptre of the monarchy; demanded, as their rightful inheritance, the provinces which had been subdued by the consuls, or possessed by the Caesars; and feebly aspired to deliver their faithful subjects of the West from the usurpation of heretics and Barbarians.