By June of 548, Justinian's public and private worlds were unravelling. Gone were the halcyon days of 534 and 540, when Belisarius had hauled the Vandal king Gelimer and the Gothic king Vitigis back to Constantinople as captives, along with the treasures of their kingdoms. The emperor's attempts to recover the lost territories of the Western Empire had instead devolved into a quagmire of seemingly endless military campaigns on multiple fronts. In North Africa, two serious mutinies in 536 and 546 had left the Roman army divided, which contributed to a series of insurrections by the Berbers. The situation in Italy was even worse. In Belisarius’ absence, squabbling amongst the Roman high command and maltreatment of the locals had led to a recognition by many Italian natives that the East Romans were not the saviour they claimed to be. The Italo-Romans’ angst contributed to the rise of a new and powerful Gothic king, Totila, who had not only halted the Roman advance, but had increasingly taken the fight to them. Even the return of Belisarius to Italy, in 544, after a four-year absence, did little to stem the tide of the Gothic onslaught. More troubling, in 540, the Persians had violated the ‘Endless Peace’, storming into a Roman Syria denuded of troops. Procopius relates how city after city fell to the rampaging armies of the Persian shah Chosroes, lamenting that any Romans who were not slaughtered were hauled back to Persia in chains. In the aftermath of these disasters, Roman resistance stiffened somewhat. A Persian invasion of Mesopotamia in 542 led to a failed attempt by the Persians to take the city of Sergiopolis.