Narses, arriving to the capital, Ravenna, without…

Xiao Dong, great-nephew of the rebellious general Hou Jing, succeeds Jianwen Di as emperor of the Liang Dynasty.

Xiao Dong has no real power and Hou Jing controls the imperial government at the capital Jiankang.

Jordanes, a Roman bureaucrat who had spent his career in Moesia, publishes The Origin and Deeds of the Goths in approximately 551, written in Constantinople.

It is significant as the only remaining contemporaneous resource to deliver the full story of the origin and history of the Goths.

Another aspect of this work is its information about the early history and the customs of Slavs.

The Sclaveni invaders winter for the first time in Roman territory in 550-551, despite the efforts of the army to dislodge them.

The new imperial commander Bessas quells a pro-Persian revolt of the Abasgi tribe, takes Petra and defeats Mermeroes at Archaeopolis in 551.

However, …

…the latter manages to capture the town Kutaisi and the Uchimerion fortress blocking the important roads to the mountains.

The Sabir live predominantly in the region of Azerbaijan and Dagestan bounded on the east by the Caspian Sea, on the west by the Caucasus Mountains.

Priscus mentions that the Sabir attacked the Saragur, Urog and Unogur tribes in 461, forcing them North to the Volga once more, as a result of having themselves been attacked by the "Avars".

In 515, having recovered from the Avar attacks of the 460s, they "advertised their power in a huge raid south of the Caucasus, in which they attacked Iranian and Byzantine lands with scrupulous impartiality".

However, in the face of the increasing Avar threat, the Sabirs, previously allied with Sassanid Persia, switch their allegiance to Constantinople in 551 and invade the Caucasus.

The imperial army and their Sabir allies (some six thousand men) under Bessas recapture the strategic imperial fortress of Petra, located on the coast of the Black Sea.

Bessas orders the city walls razed to the ground, but a new army under Mihr-Mihroe is able to establish Persian control over the eastern part of Lazica.

The imperial forces in Lazica withdraw west to the mouth of the Phasis, while the Lazi, including Gubazes and his family, seek refuge in the mountains.

An earthquake and tsunami destroys Beirut (the former Berytus) in 551.

Its epicenter has an estimated magnitude of about 7.2 or 7.6 and according to reports of Antoninus of Piacenza, Christian pilgrim, some thirty thousand people are killed.

The city, a great seat of learning, is soon rebuilt.

Justinian, his cousin Germanus having died in 550, appoints Narses as the new supreme commander and returns to Italy.

In Salona on the Adriatic coast, he assembles an imperial expeditionary force totaling twenty thousand or possibly thirty thousand men and a contingent of foreign allies, notably Lombards, Heruls and Bulgars.

The imperial fleet (fifty warships) destroys the Gothic naval force under Indulf near Sena Gallica (Senigallia), some seventeen miles (twenty-seven kilometers) north of Ancona, in autumn 551.

The battle marks the end of the Gothic supremacy in the Mediterranean Sea.

Narses arrives in Venetia and discovers that a powerful Gothic-Frank army (fifty thousand men), under joint command of the kings Totila and Theudebald, blocks the principal route to the Po Valley.

Not wishing to engage such an formidable force and confident that the Franks would avoid a direct confrontation, Narses skirts the lagoons along the Adriatic shore by using vessels to leapfrog his army from point to point along the coast.

In this way, …