Meanwhile all Italy was once more aflame with war. After Ravenna surrendered, and Witiges was led captive to Byzantium, all the Gothic fortresses surrendered save two, Verona and Pavia, the only towns of northern Italy in which the Teutonic element seems to have outnumbered the Roman. [Sidenote: Hildibad, king of the Goths, 540-41.] The remnant of the Ostrogoths in Pavia, though they did not number 2000 men, took the bold step of proclaiming a new king, a warrior named Hildibad, who was the nephew of Theudis, king of Spain, and who promised his uncle’s help to his followers. Hildibad’s resistance might have been crushed if he had been promptly attacked, but the Roman commanders were occupied in taking over the towns that made no resistance, and in quelling some disorders among their own men. After Belisarius left, there were five generals in the peninsula of whom none was trusted with supreme authority over the rest. Each left to another the task of treading out the last sparks of Gothic resistance, and gradually Hildibad grew stronger as the scattered remnants of the army of Witiges made their way to his camp. When he recovered most of Venetia, the Romans thought him worthy of notice, but he won a battle near Treviso over the army that came against him. The Italians were now far from showing the devotion to the imperial cause that they had once displayed. The Logothetes from Constantinople were harassing them with new imposts, and most especially with the preposterous attempt to gather the arrears of taxation for the years during which the war had raged, a time at which the emperor had, as a matter of fact, no firm hold on the country. In 541 Hildibad was murdered by a private enemy ere yet he had succeeded in freeing all the land north of the Po. But this hero of the darkest hour, who had saved the Goths from extinction when salvation seemed impossible, found a still worthier successor. After a few months, during which a certain Rugian, named Eraric, ruled at Pavia, Hildibad’s nephew, Baduila, was raised on the shield and saluted as king. Baduila[12] was, after Theodoric, the greatest of all the Goths of East or West: he showed a moral elevation, a single-hearted purity of purpose, a chivalrous courtesy, a justice and piety worthy of the best of the knights of the Middle Ages. As a warrior his feats were astonishing: he out-generalled even the great Belisarius himself. The only stain on his character, during eleven years of rule, are one or two unjustifiable executions of prisoners of war who had roused his wrath, and caused the old Gothic fury to blaze forth. Footnote 12: This, as his coins show, was his real name, but the Constantinopolitan historians call him Totila.