Between 535 and 554 the East Roman emperor Justinian sought to reconquer Italy from the Ostrogothic kingdom, producing a war that ran for two decades over the whole peninsula. Cities changed hands repeatedly: Milan was destroyed in 539 with its male population reportedly killed and its women handed to Burgundian allies; Rome was besieged and taken four times, and in 546 Totila expelled its inhabitants entirely, leaving the city briefly empty. The fighting coincided with the plague pandemic of 541-543 and with famines described by Procopius in Picenum and Aemilia, so mortality cannot be attributed to the war alone. The conquest was completed in 554 but collapsed almost immediately when the Lombards invaded in 568. The episode fills a long silence in the atlas between the Hunnic invasions and the Umayyad conquest of Iberia, and is the clearest case of state-directed urban emptying in early medieval western Europe.
East Roman armies under Belisarius and Narses and Ostrogothic forces under Witigis and Totila fought a twenty-year war across Italy, repeatedly besieging, sacking and emptying its cities
There is no sixth-century count. Atlas-scale reconstructions, chiefly McEvedy and Jones, put Italy at roughly 4 million around 500 CE, down from perhaps 7 million at the height of the Roman empire; other estimates for the early sixth century range from about 3.5 to 7 million. The war overlapped with the Justinianic plague from 541, whose mortality is itself heavily disputed, so the population during the conflict was falling for reasons the war alone does not explain.
No credible total. Procopius's claim of fifteen million dead in Italy is rhetorical and is rejected by modern historians; there are no censuses, tax registers or burial series for the period that would support a reconstruction. Deaths arose from sieges, massacres of captured city populations, famine and the concurrent plague in proportions that cannot be separated.
Procopius, an eyewitness to the campaign, describes the sieges and famine of Picenum and Aemilia, the sack of Milan in 539 and the emptying of Rome in 546.
Italy, Bulgaria