Gothic War

The Gothic War was fought from 535 to 554 CE between the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire under Emperor Justinian I and the Ostrogothic Kingdom that had ruled Italy since Theodoric the Great's conquest in the late fifth century, as part of Justinian's broader campaign to reconquer the western territories lost to Germanic kingdoms. Byzantine general Belisarius opened the war by capturing Sicily and Naples in 535 and 536 and took Rome itself in 536, but the conflict dragged on for nearly two decades through sieges, betrayals and reversals, with the Ostrogothic king Totila reclaiming much of Italy in the 540s before being decisively defeated and killed at the Battle of Taginae in 552 by the Byzantine general Narses. The prolonged war devastated the Italian peninsula, destroying much of its urban infrastructure and population and leaving it economically and militarily exhausted, conditions that historians widely credit with enabling the Lombard invasion of Italy that began only a few years after the war's end in 568.