Justinian's Wars · War Crimes & Atrocities
The reconquest fell most heavily on the civilians of Italy. The war was decided by sieges, and sieges meant starvation; cities were stormed and sacked, populations were expelled, and the countryside was stripped bare by armies that lived off the land. Compounded by the catastrophic Plague of Justinian, the eighteen-year Gothic War killed civilians on a scale that dwarfed the battlefield toll and helped bring the ancient life of Italy to an end.
1,500+
deaths
Victims: The inhabitants of Naples(No precise count survives; Procopius describes a general massacre in the storming of the city that Belisarius struggled to halt.)
Victims: The population of the city of Rome(The direct death toll is unrecorded; the catastrophe was the starvation of the siege and the forced emptying of the city, after which Rome stood almost deserted for a time.)
300,000+
deaths
Victims: The rural and urban population of Italy(Estimates of the civilian death toll from the war's famines and disease across Italy run into the hundreds of thousands; Procopius describes whole regions starving.)