Person

Justinian I

Justinian I

Eastern Roman emperor from 527 to 565 AD who codified Roman law, reconquered North Africa, Italy, and southern Spain from Germanic kingdoms, and rebuilt Hagia Sophia — a reign historian Anthony Kaldellis treats as too evenly balanced between success and failure to place on either his best- or worst-emperor lists.

Born to a poor agricultural family in the western Balkans, Justinian rose through the same channels of social mobility that let provincials reach the empire’s highest offices after the Edict of Caracalla. His uncle Justin I, a career soldier, became emperor and positioned Justinian as his successor; nothing certain is known of Justinian’s own activities before he appears in the historical record around age 38. He married Theodora, a former performer, in defiance of a law barring senators from marrying women of her former profession — a law his uncle repealed specifically so the marriage could go ahead. Kaldellis reads Justinian’s pattern of appointments, including Theodora’s own considerable influence during his reign, as evidence he favoured talent over social pedigree, assembling what contemporaries saw as an unusually disreputable circle of advisers who nonetheless delivered results.

His committee of jurists, led by Tribonian, produced the Corpus Juris Civilis, condensing the whole of prior Roman law into a single work that remains the primary surviving source for Roman law today — what is studied as ‘Roman law’ in modern law schools is, in large part, Tribonian’s committee’s work, not a text that survives directly from ancient Rome. Justinian also launched wars of reconquest, recovering North Africa, Italy, and part of Spain from Vandal, Ostrogothic, and Visigothic rule, framing the campaigns as divinely sanctioned restoration of the Western provinces.

Kaldellis judges the conquests only partly successful: Italy in particular may never have paid for the decades of war fought over it, and stripping the eastern frontier of troops to fund the Western campaigns left Antioch exposed to a Persian sack — in Kaldellis’s words, ‘I don’t think you get a pass for conquering North Africa by surrendering Syria.’ The same reign includes the violent suppression of the Nika riots in Constantinople in 532 AD, in which Justinian’s own forces killed more than 30,000 people and burned much of the city, followed by his reconstruction of Hagia Sophia. Justinian also reigned through the onset of the sixth-century bubonic plague named after him; Kaldellis argues against maximalist estimates of its mortality (up to 50% of the population), on the grounds that contemporary narratives show no interruption to his wars or to tax collection during the outbreak.

In the wiki

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