Gratuitous Byzantine Posting

The Ravenna Mosaic. Belisarius is standing to the left of the Emperor Justinian.

I see where today is the anniversary of the Battle of Ticameron near Carthage in 533 AD, in which the great Byzantine general Belisarius effectively ended the Vandal kingdom in North Africa and returned the African provinces to Constantinople's control. Later, Belisarius would reconquer Italy from the Goths, the triumph of which is celebrated by the above mosaic. Indeed, some people argue that Justinian was the last "Roman" Emperor instead of Romulus Augustulus, who was deposed by the Goths in 476 AD. (Unfortunately, Byzantine mismanagement kept the reconquest from lasting very long.)

An entertaining and informative book about the period is this one:

Count Belisarius by Robert Graves. Although a fictionalized biography of Belisarius, it nonetheless provides a faithful account of his great military achievements and of the political and religious in-fighting around the court of Justinian which climaxed with Justinian's alleged blinding and beggaring of Belisarius, captured by Jacques-Louis David in one of his more famous paintings:

(FWIW, I believe scholars now believe this episode to be apocryphal.)