Emperor Justinian and His Reign

Justinian I is the most consequential ruler in the history of the Byzantine Empire. He reigned from 527 to 565, almost forty years, and in that time he nearly reconstituted the Roman Empire within the boundaries it had held under the Antonine emperors. His armies recovered North Africa, Italy, and parts of Spain for the empire. His jurists produced the Corpus Juris Civilis, the most influential legal code in Western history. His architects built the Hagia Sophia, for centuries the largest cathedral in Christendom. And his wife, Empress Theodora, was one of the most powerful and remarkable women of the early Middle Ages. Justinian’s reign, more than any other single reign, set the template for the medieval Byzantine state.

The argument below links to the related treatments of the Code of Justinian, Empress Theodora, and the building of Hagia Sophia, and to the broader history of the Byzantine government and Byzantine religion.

Origins and Accession

Justinian was born around 482 in Tauresium, a village in the Roman province of Dardania in the central Balkans, into a family of Latin-speaking Thracian or Illyrian peasants. His uncle, Justin, was a soldier who had risen through the ranks of the imperial guard at Constantinople, and the young Justinian followed him to the capital, received an education that included Latin, Greek, and Roman law, and accompanied his uncle to the throne in 518. Justinian was crowned co-emperor on 1 April 527 and inherited the throne alone on Justin’s death in August of the same year.

He inherited a state that was, by the standards of the early sixth century, in good shape. The eastern frontier was at peace with Persia, following the Eternal Peace of 532 (negotiated in part to free the treasury for Justinian’s western ambitions). The treasury, accumulated by Justin’s parsimony, was full. The civil service, trained in Roman law and Hellenistic rhetoric, was functional. The army, although it would need expansion, was loyal. And the new capital, Constantinople, was the most populous and prosperous city in the Mediterranean. Justinian thus began his reign with advantages that few late-Roman emperors had enjoyed.

The Nika Riots

In January 532, the early years of his reign nearly ended in catastrophe. The blues and the greens, the two great chariot-racing factions of the hippodrome, were the closest thing the capital had to political parties, and they had grievances: high taxes, onerous civic obligations, and the recent execution of members of both factions for murder. When Justinian refused to pardon the condemned men, the factions united in an unprecedented coalition and raised the cry of Nika — “Conquer!” The rioters stormed and burned the prefect’s office, set fire to the great church of Hagia Sophia, and proclaimed a new emperor, Hypatius, nephew of the late emperor Anastasius.

For five days the imperial government lost control of the capital. Justinian, by the account of his court historian Procopius, considered fleeing by ship. According to the famous (and possibly apocryphal) anecdote, Theodora rebuked him with the words “purple makes the best shroud,” and the emperor resolved to stay. Theodora’s resolve, and the loyalty of the general Belisarius and his Gothic mercenaries, allowed Justinian to launch a surprise counter-attack. Belisarius’s troops trapped the rioters in the hippodrome and slaughtered them; some 30,000 are said to have died. Hypatius was executed, and Justinian emerged from the crisis with absolute power. For more on this event, see the Nika riots.

The immediate political consequence of the riots was the destruction of much of central Constantinople, including the original Hagia Sophia. The greater consequence was Justinian’s decision to rebuild the cathedral on a vastly more ambitious scale. Within five years the new Hagia Sophia, designed by the mathematicians Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, was complete, and its construction inaugurated the great age of Byzantine architecture.

The Reconquests

The next two and a half decades of Justinian’s reign were dominated by the attempt to recover the western provinces of the Roman Empire. The opportunity arose when the Vandal king of North Africa, Hilderic, was overthrown by the usurper Gelimer in 530, giving Justinian a pretext for intervention. In 533 Belisarius, with a small expeditionary force of perhaps 15,000 men, landed in North Africa, defeated the Vandals in two battles, and entered Carthage. The reconquest of North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica added an enormous grain-producing territory to the empire and was, by general agreement, the most successful of Justinian’s western wars.

In 535 Justinian turned on the Ostrogoths of Italy. The pretext was the deposition of the pro-Roman queen Amalasuntha; the war lasted almost twenty years. Belisarius took Sicily and southern Italy in 535–540 and even entered the Gothic capital Ravenna in 540, but he was recalled, and the war had to be fought again under the eunuch general Narses, who finally defeated the Ostrogoths at the Battle of Taginae in 552 and then at the Battle of Volturnus in 554. The Gothic war devastated Italy: Rome changed hands several times, the population of the peninsula fell sharply, and the infrastructure of the Roman Mediterranean was disrupted in ways that would last for centuries. For the broader context, see the Germanic migrations.

A third war, against the Visigoths of Spain, was opened in 552 at the invitation of the Visigothic king Athanagild. The Byzantine expeditionary force seized the southeastern coast, but the new Visigothic king Leovigild soon recovered most of the lost territory. The Byzantine province of Spania, established in the south, survived only until the early seventh century, but it gave the empire a foothold on the Iberian peninsula for a generation. These western wars, expensive and ultimately fragile, defined the high-water mark of the early medieval Roman state.

The Code of Justinian

Justinian’s most lasting achievement was the codification of Roman law. He came to the throne already convinced that the existing mass of Roman legal opinion and imperial legislation was contradictory, archaic, and unsuited to the needs of a Christian Roman state. In 528 he appointed a commission of ten jurists under the quaestor Tribonian to compile a single code of imperial constitutions. The result, the Codex Justinianus, was published in 529. The same commission, considerably expanded, was then charged with collecting the relevant opinions of the great Roman jurists of the second and third centuries; the result, the Digesta or Pandectae, was published in 533. A textbook for first-year law students, the Institutiones, was published in the same year. The whole work, plus the Novellae (Justinian’s own new laws), is now known as the Corpus Juris Civilis. For a fuller treatment, see the Code of Justinian.

The Corpus was not a particularly influential document in the Greek-speaking east during Justinian’s own time, but in the eleventh century it was rediscovered in Italy, and a school of legal scholars at Bologna, known as the glossators, used it as the basis of a comprehensive European civil law. The political theology of the empire as God’s chosen earthly kingdom, the principles of imperial legislation as the source of law, and the assumption that Roman law was universal were all eventually transmitted to the Latin west by way of the Corpus. The Roman law tradition of continental Europe is, in a real sense, the posthumous achievement of the commission that worked under Tribonian.

Religious Policy

Justinian was, by the standards of his time, a deeply religious emperor who saw himself as both a ruler and a priest. He held the title of “priest of the Most High” in his own laws, and he intervened in theological controversies with the same energy he brought to the codification of law. He regarded theological correctness as essential to the empire’s well-being; the emperor’s role was to ensure the unity of the Church, and the Church’s role was to support the empire.

In 529 he closed the Neoplatonic Academy in Athens, an event sometimes presented as a defining moment in the end of ancient paganism. The closing affected only a small community of late antique philosophers, but the symbolic importance was great, and the closure reflected Justinian’s understanding that the Christian empire had no need for a pagan philosophical institution. He also wrote a treatise against the Monophysites, a Christological position that had become the majority position in the eastern provinces and especially in Egypt and Syria, and that rejected the Council of Chalcedon’s formula of two natures in one person. The Monophysite controversy, treated more fully in the Byzantine religion and the Orthodox Church, was a persistent irritant in Byzantine religious life, and Justinian’s attempts to resolve it by force of imperial authority failed.

In 553 he convened the Second Council of Constantinople, known as the Fifth Ecumenical Council, to settle the so-called Three Chapters controversy, a dispute about the writings of certain fifth-century theologians that had been condemned as Nestorian. The council, like those before it, was the joint work of emperor and bishops, and its decrees, ratified by Justinian, became part of the orthodox canon. The theology of the Council of Chalcedon and the Five Ecumenical Councils that defined the Christian faith is discussed in the Byzantine religion and the Orthodox Church.

The Plague of Justinian

In 541, when the Vandal war was over and the Gothic war was in its middle years, a plague appeared in the Egyptian port of Pelusium and spread rapidly through the Mediterranean. Modern scholars have identified it as a bubonic pandemic caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the first recorded outbreak of the disease. The plague reached Constantinople in 542 and may have killed ten thousand or more people in a single day at its height. It is said to have carried off Procopius’s law commissioner Tribonian, and it recurred repeatedly throughout the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, leaving the empire’s population and tax base permanently diminished.

Procopius, the great historian of Justinian’s reign, described the plague in graphic terms in his Wars. The pandemic had serious economic, military, and demographic consequences. The manpower to garrison the reconquered western provinces was already thin; the loss of additional population to disease made the new conquests even harder to hold. The plague was, in the long run, a major reason why Justinian’s reconquests were lost so quickly after his death.

The Empire’s Limits

Justinian’s reign was, by the standards of the early Middle Ages, extraordinarily ambitious. He aimed at nothing less than restoring the Roman Empire to the Mediterranean unity it had enjoyed in the second century. The cost, however, was enormous. The wars had been paid for by drawing down the treasury, by raising taxes, and by selling offices; the resulting pressure on the population contributed to the plague’s severity, and the cost of rebuilding cities, fortifications, and churches was borne by an exhausted citizenry. The reconquered western provinces, especially Italy, took decades to recover from the devastation of the Gothic war, and they were the first to be lost in the seventh century to the Lombards, the Avars, and the Slavs.

To the east, the wars of Justinian’s successors would prove the limits of empire even more starkly. By the time of his death in 565, the Sassanid Persians under Khosrow I were already probing the eastern frontier; the great crisis of the seventh century, with the Persian wars of Heraclius and the Arab conquests of the 630s and 640s, would strip the empire of all the territory Justinian had gained and more. Within a century of his death, the empire he had ruled was reduced to a Greek-speaking rump around the Aegean.

Legacy

Despite the limits of his achievements, Justinian’s reign is the most important in the history of the eastern Roman state. The legal code he produced, the cathedral he built, and the imperial theology he articulated were the inheritance that the medieval Byzantine state preserved and that the Macedonian emperors of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries would consciously restore. His reign also marks the high-water mark of late antique Roman culture, the moment when the resources of the ancient Mediterranean were marshalled for the most ambitious project of Christian imperial restoration. For the broader context, see the survey article on the Byzantine Empire.