Justinian I

• 1. The Emperor Who Never Slept

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  Justinian I was born in 482 in Tauresium, in Dardania, near the city of Naissus, into a peasant family of either Thraco-Roman or Illyro-Roman origin. He may have been the last Roman emperor to speak Latin as his native tongue. From those obscure rural beginnings, he rose to rule the Roman Empire from 527 to 565, and history remembers him as Justinian the Great. Contemporaries called him "the emperor who never sleeps," a nod to work habits that seemed almost inhuman. The chronicler John Malalas, who lived during his reign, described him as short, fair-skinned, curly-haired, and round-faced, with a receding hairline and greying hair. How does a bodyguard's nephew end up reshaping law for nations that will not exist for another thousand years? What did it cost an empire to chase the dream of putting itself back together? And why, centuries later, would Dante place his soul in heaven while another writer painted him as cruel and demonic? The answers sprawl across battlefields, courtrooms, and the dome of a church that still stands.

• 2. The Climb To The Throne

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  Justin, an officer commanding one of the imperial guard units called the Excubitors, changed his nephew's life by adopting him. The name Iustinianus marks that adoption. Justin brought the boy to Constantinople and paid for an education that left Justinian fluent in jurisprudence, theology, and Roman history. He served as a candidatus, one of 40 men chosen from the scholae palatinae to guard the emperor in person. When Emperor Anastasius died in 518, Justin was proclaimed emperor with significant help from his ambitious nephew. Justinian's rise accelerated from there. After the general Vitalian was assassinated in 520, an act some sources lay at Justinian's door, he was made consul and commander of the army of the east. In 525 he received the titles nobilissimus and caesar, marking him as heir-apparent. As Justin grew senile near the end of his reign, Justinian became the de facto ruler. He was crowned co-emperor on the 1st of April 527 and became sole ruler when Justin died on the 1st of August 527, a transfer of power he had spent years preparing.

• 3. Theodora And The Inner Circle

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  Around 525, Justinian married his mistress Theodora in Constantinople, a woman by profession an actress and some twenty years his junior. In earlier times he could never have married her because of her class. His uncle Justin had lifted the legal restrictions on marriages with former actresses, and the union, though a scandal, made Theodora enormously influential. Tribonian served as his legal adviser and would oversee the rewriting of Roman law. Peter the Patrician ran the palace bureaucracy as a diplomat for years, while the finance ministers John the Cappadocian and Peter Barsymes collected taxes more efficiently than anyone before them, funding the emperor's wars. The generals Belisarius and Narses carried out the reconquests of North Africa and Italy. Theodora died in 548, relatively young, possibly of cancer, and Justinian outlived her by nearly twenty years. Her loss left him surrounded by an inner circle he had drawn into the palace decades earlier, men he would still lean on in his final, isolated years.

• 4. Fire In The Hippodrome

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  In January 532, the chariot racing factions of Constantinople, normally bitter rivals, joined forces against Justinian in an uprising remembered as the Nika riots. The mob forced him to dismiss Tribonian and two other ministers, then tried to overthrow him entirely and replace him with the senator Hypatius, a nephew of the late emperor Anastasius. As the city burned, Justinian considered fleeing by sea. He stayed, apparently because his wife Theodora refused to leave. Over the next two days his generals Belisarius and Mundus crushed the revolt. Procopius records that 30,000 unarmed civilians were killed in the Hippodrome, and Anastasius' nephews were executed. The rioters had destroyed governmental buildings, state archives, hospices, hospitals, and charitable institutions. Every patient of the Hospice of Samson died, and the fires reached the Baths of Zeuxippus and its famous statues. From this devastation came opportunity. The ruined ground cleared the way for an ambitious building program, and chief among its works would rise a church with a domed roof unlike anything before it.

• 5. Rewriting Roman Law

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  Tribonian, appointed as quaestor early in the reign, was handed a task no one had attempted before: the complete revision of all Roman law. The first draft of the Codex Justinianeus, gathering imperial constitutions from the 2nd century onward, was issued on the 7th of April 529, with a final version in 534. It was joined by the Digesta, a compilation of older legal texts, in 533, and by the Institutiones, a teaching textbook. The Novellae collected new laws of the reign and, unlike the rest, appeared in Greek, the common language of the Eastern Empire. Together these form the Corpus juris civilis. The reforms reached into daily life. Justinian restricted divorce, passed laws protecting prostitutes from exploitation, ordered that widows have their dowries returned, and ruled that a husband could not take on major debt without his wife consenting twice. He improved the rights of slaves, letting them plead personally for their freedom and classifying a master who killed his slave as a murderer. He acknowledged that slavery was an unnatural state, though the law still treated a slave as property. This code ensured the survival of Roman law itself, passing into the Basilika of Basil I and Leo VI the Wise, and reaching Western Europe in the 12th century to become the foundation of much Continental law.

• 6. The Dream Of Recovery

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  From his uncle, Justinian inherited ongoing hostilities with the Sassanid Empire, and in 532 he bought peace with an "Eternal Peace" costing 11,000 pounds of gold to King Khosrau I. With his eastern frontier secured, he turned west toward the Germanic kingdoms holding former Roman lands. The first target was the Vandals in North Africa, where King Hilderic had been overthrown by his cousin Gelimer in 530. In 533 Belisarius sailed with a fleet of 92 dromons escorting 500 transports carrying about 15,000 men. They landed at Caput Vada in modern Tunisia and crushed the Vandals at Ad Decimum on the 14th of September 533 and at Tricamarum that December. Gelimer fled to Mount Pappua in Numidia, surrendered the next spring, and was paraded in a triumph at Constantinople. Italy followed. Belisarius invaded Sicily in 535, sacked Naples, and captured Rome on the 9th of December 536, eventually reclaiming the Ostrogothic capital of Ravenna in May 540. The wars dragged on for decades. A second phase against the Ostrogoths under Totila saw Rome change hands three more times before Narses led roughly 35,000 men to a decisive victory at Busta Gallorum in the Apennines, where Totila was slain. Spain came too, when Justinian sent 2,000 men in 552 under the octogenarian Liberius to found the province of Spania. The reconquests carried a brutal price tag. Africa cost the empire about 100,000 pounds of gold, Italy about 300,000, and Procopius estimated that 5,000,000 perished in the African war alone.

• 7. One Empire, One Faith

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  Justinian saw the orthodoxy of his empire threatened by miaphysitism, a doctrine with many adherents in Syria and Egypt that rejected the Council of Chalcedon of 451. He believed unity of the empire demanded unity of faith under the Chalcedonian Church, and he made the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan creed the sole symbol of the Church. He gave legal force to the canons of the four ecumenical councils. The bishops at the Council of Constantinople in 536 acknowledged that nothing could be done in the Church against the emperor's will. His wife Theodora was herself a Miaphysite and a source of pro-Miaphysite intrigue at court, which left Justinian caught between persecuting Miaphysite bishops and seeking compromises that satisfied no one. In 529 he closed the Neoplatonic Academy in Athens, while schools in Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria continued. He restricted the civil rights of Jews, threatened the religious privileges of the Samaritans who repeatedly revolted, and persecuted Manicheans with exile and death. He promoted the Archangel Michael as his imperial protector through oaths, liturgy, and church-building, reinforcing his own legitimacy. His settling of papal disputes ran the same way; he favored Vigilius and had the rival Silverius deported. Even at the Fifth Ecumenical Council, when Pope Vigilius was forcibly brought to Constantinople and besieged in a chapel before giving his assent, the compromise pleased neither east nor west.

• 8. Stone, Silk And The Final Years

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  On the 26th of December 537, at the completion of his greatest building, Justinian is said to have declared, "Solomon, I have outdone thee." The Hagia Sophia, rebuilt after the Nika riots under the architects Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles, cost 20,000 pounds of gold and rose on a completely new ground plan with a gilded dome filled with mosaics. The San Vitale in Ravenna, sponsored by Julius Argentarius, carries two famous mosaics of Justinian and Theodora. The imperial couple also built the Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, later called Little Hagia Sophia, between 532 and 536. Justinian secured Constantinople's water with underground cisterns, raised an arch dam to protect the border town of Dara, and built the large Sangarius Bridge in Bithynia. His economy stretched as far north as Cornwall, where tin was traded for Roman wheat, and in the early 550s two monks smuggled silkworm eggs from Central Asia, making silk a homegrown product. Then came the disasters. The extreme weather of 535-536 brought famine, with Procopius writing that the sun "gave forth its light without brightness." In 542 the Plague of Justinian struck, afflicting the emperor himself, who contracted and survived it. In his last years Justinian grew isolated and fixated on religion, yet less ruthless, refusing to execute suspected conspirators and pardoning even Belisarius. He died in his sleep on the night of the 14th of November 565, childless, and was laid in a golden tomb in the Church of the Holy Apostles. That tomb endured until 1204, when it was desecrated and robbed during the pillage of the city by the Latin States of the Fourth Crusade.