 As the story unravels each of these three men become king against their will, in their unsuccessful struggle to save the kingdom.Not so much the Emperor Justinian I and his scheming wife Theodora, but his marshals Belisarius and Narses shape the campaigns for the reconquest of the Italian Peninsula.Belisarius has already conquered and destroyed the Vandals and is determined to bestow the same fate upon the Ostrogoths but fails to do so.