Dissensions in Italy excited the ambition of Justinian.  Belisarius was sent with another army to Sicily in 535, and after subduing that island and suppressing a revolt in Africa, he invaded Italy in 536.  Policy dictated the retreat of the Goths, and Belisarius entered Rome (December 536).  In March, Vitiges, the Gothic ruler, returned with a force of one hundred and fifty thousand men.  The valour of the Roman general supported a siege of forty-one days and the intrigues of the Pope Silverius, who was exiled by his orders; and, finally, with the assistance of a seasonable reinforcement, Belisarius compelled the barbarians to retire in March of the following year.  The conquests of Ravenna and the suppression of the invasion of the Franks completed the subjugation of the Gothic kingdom by December 539.

The success of Belisarius and the intrigues of his secret enemies had excited the jealousy of Justinian.  He was recalled, and the eunuch Narses was sent to Italy, as a powerful rival, to oppose the interests of the conqueror of Rome and Africa.  The infidelity of Antonina, which excited her husband’s just indignation, was excused by the Empress Theodora, and her powerful support was given to the wife of the last of the Roman heroes, who, after serving again against the Persians, returned to the capital, to be received not with honour and triumph, but with disgrace and contempt and a fine of $600,000.

The incursions of the Lombards, the Slavonians, and the Avars and the Turks, and the successful raids of the King of Persia were among the number of the important events of the reign of Justinian.  To maintain his position in Africa and Italy taxed his resources to their utmost limit.  The victories of Justinian were pernicious to mankind; the desolation of Africa was such that in many parts a stranger might wander whole days without meeting the face of either a friend or an enemy.

The revolts of the Goths, under their king, Totila (541), once more demanded the presence of Belisarius, and, a hero on the banks of the Euphrates, a slave in the palace of Constantinople, he accepted with reluctance the painful task of supporting his own reputation and retrieving the faults of his successors.  He was too late to save Rome from the Goths, by whom it was taken in December 546; but he recovered it in the following February.  After his recall by his envious sovereign in September 548, Rome was once more taken by the Goths.  The successful repulse of the Franks and Alemanni finally restored the kingdom to the rule of the emperor.  Belisarius died on March 13, 565.

The emperor survived his death only eight months, and passed away, in the eighty-third year of his life and the thirty-eighth of his reign, on November 14, 565.  The most lasting memorial of his reign is to be found neither in his victories nor his monuments, but in the immortal works of the Code, the Pandects, and the Institutes, in which the civil jurisprudence of the Romans was digested, and by means of which the public reason of the Romans has been silently or studiously transfused into the domestic institutions of the whole of Europe.