A Peasant's Nephew on the Throne
Justinian was born about 482 in the Latin-speaking Balkans, to a peasant family, and owed his rise to his uncle Justin, an illiterate soldier who climbed to command the palace guard and then, improbably, to the throne in 518. Justinian was brought to Constantinople, educated, and made his uncle's effective partner in government before succeeding him in 527. He married Theodora, a former actress from the circus world, a match so far beneath imperial custom that the law had to be changed to permit it.
Their partnership held. In January 532 the two circus factions united in the Nika riots, burned much of the capital and acclaimed a rival emperor. With ships waiting, Justinian prepared to flee. Procopius reports that Theodora argued against it, saying that the imperial purple made a fine burial shroud, and that the emperor stayed. Belisarius and Mundus then trapped the crowd in the hippodrome, and tens of thousands were killed. The regime was secure, and the burnt centre of the city was cleared for rebuilding.
Law, Dome, and Reconquest
His most durable act began within months of his accession. A commission under the jurist Tribonian gathered a thousand years of Roman law, imperial edicts, and juristic writing, stripped out contradictions and obsolete provisions, and produced the Codex, the Digest of jurists' opinions, the Institutes for students, and the Novels of new legislation. The corpus preserved Roman law when the western state that made it had gone, and its rediscovery in eleventh-century Bologna became the foundation of legal education and civil law systems from France to Japan.
He also built. Hagia Sophia, raised in under six years by Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, put a dome of unprecedented span on pendentives over a rectangular hall, and its first dome partly collapsed after an earthquake in 558 and had to be rebuilt steeper. Meanwhile his generals Belisarius and Narses took North Africa from the Vandals and fought a twenty-year war to retake Italy from the Ostrogoths, a campaign that devastated the peninsula and left Rome repeatedly sacked and depopulated.
Plague, Persecution and the Reckoning
In 541 plague reached the empire, and Constantinople the following year. Justinian caught it and survived. The population did not: the epidemic returned in waves for two centuries, gutting tax revenue and manpower at precisely the moment the reconquest needed both. He remained at war with Persia, bought peace with tribute, and taxed hard enough that Procopius, who had written official histories praising him, also composed a Secret History accusing him and Theodora of rapacity, murder and demonic malice. Historians read that text carefully, but not innocently.
He legislated on belief as well as property, closing the Neoplatonic school at Athens, restricting pagans, Jews and Samaritans, suppressing a Samaritan revolt with great bloodshed, and intervening personally in doctrinal disputes without resolving the divisions over the nature of Christ that were driving Egypt and Syria away from Constantinople. He died in 565 with the treasury drained. Within a lifetime most of Italy was lost to the Lombards, and the Arab conquests took Egypt and Syria. The law outlasted everything else he made.
