An Age of Invasions

Justinian's extravagance has been blamed for bankrupting his empire and rendering subsequent set-backs inevitable. In fact the empire remained rich and powerful and, with the exception of Italy, decline seems to have been the result of plague and long-term economic factors rather than war and over-taxation. The Byzantines could still raise revenue efficiently, but the essentially civilian character of the empire made it difficult to raise troops of the quality and quantity required to contain new more numerous and tenacious invaders.

The first of these were the Slavs. The pressure became stronger and more violent with the advent of a nomadic people, the Avars, who organized the Slavs into a loose but effective empire based on tribute and pillage, and launched devastating attacks on the Byzantine Empire from 570 onwards. After the Emperor Maurice was killed in a mutiny on the Danube frontier his ineffectual successor Phocas was unable to prevent the Avars and their Slav allies from occupying most of the Balkans and Greece apart from a few coastal enclaves. An Avar force besieged Constantinople in 626, and Thessalonica, the greatest city in the empire's European provinces, attributed its salvation from repeated attacks only to the intervention of its patron, St Demetrius.

Avar pressure on Pannonia also forced the Lombards, who had hitherto been in the background, to launch the most lasting and destructive of the Germanic invasions in the Mediterranean area. In the sixth century the Lombards had refined their political and military organization through contact with the Romans as mercenaries and some had been converted to Arianism. Under the able leadership of King Alboin the Lombards entered Italy in 568 and within a year had occupied most of the peninsula north of the Po. The Lombard advance benefited from local resentment of imperial taxes and religious policies and the existence of a Germanic fifth column among underpaid mercenaries and the remnants of the defeated Goths. After reorganizing the administration under a military supremo or exarch the Byzantines were able to mount a counter-offensive

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