Justinian shaped the legacy of Roman antiquity that continues to have an impact on our world. The chronological system whereby this year is the two thousandth and twenty-fourth year after the birth of Christ was developed by Dionysius Exiguus, an intellectual living in Rome at the time. His work spoke to the regularization of traditions that was encouraged by Justinian. In Dionysius’s case this involved establishing the date of Easter and collecting the documents of major Church councils. As Dionysius was working in Rome, Tribonian, a jurist from Cyme in Turkey, was overseeing the codification of Roman statutes to form the Codex named for his employer, Justinian, as well as the opinions of Roman jurists, which he organized into the Pandectae, or Digesta, and finally the record of Justinian’s own massive legislative career, the Novellae. Tribonian’s achievement laid the foundation for the European tradition of Civil Law. The work of regularization was accompanied by a program of imperial restoration as Justinian’s armies smashed Germanic successor states to the Roman empire’s western imperial regime, now awarded a terminal date of 476 CE.
Few emperors can claim an impact comparable to Justinian’s. But what of one final legacy? The destruction of the Roman Empire. Justinian’s ill-advised military adventures so weakened the empire that it could no longer dominate its neighbors in the Balkans or the Near East. Rather than an innovator, he should be understood as dim-witted tyrant, dominated for much of his life by the whore who seduced and married him.
Who was Justinian? Was he a good or bad thing? These questions are central to Peter Sarris’s excellent book. Sarris, who, amongst many other projects, has previously edited an English edition of Justinian’sNovellae, makes use of the legislative record to enable us to hear the voice of Justinian. He was devout and hardworking, staying up all night to ensure the welfare of his subjects. The picture we get of the tireless ruler with an intense concern for detail is thoroughly convincing and a critical corrective to the vision of Justinian which emerges from the most important literary sources for the reign, composed by Procopius, who turned Justinian’s self-presentation on its head in his Secret History, “in which both the emperor and his consort Theodora are seriously represented as two demons, who had assumed an human form for the destruction of mankind” (Gibbon, Decline and Fall Ch. 40). An essential problem for Procopius was not what Justinian was, but rather who he, and those closest to him, were. All were outsiders to the professional/aristocratic class at Constantinople.
Sarris offers a vision of Justinian’s homeland, the city of Justiniana Prima, slightly south of modern Nis in Serbia, reasonably suggesting that the city’s strongly religious character, as well as the impressive engineering that resulted in the city’s advanced water system, reflects the way Justinian wished to be seen. He was a thoroughly modern gentleman, intrigued by engineering and his own faith. His greatest building project in Constantinople, the church of Hagia Sophia, would also be testament to these qualities. What Justinian was burying through these projects was his peasant birth.
Born Petrus Sabbatius, the future emperor arrived in the capital at the invitation of his childless uncle, Justin, who had walked to Constantinople from his hometown to join the army. Over the decades Justin rose through the ranks to become commander of the imperial guard. As a person of low social status, he had married, on his way up, a woman who had allegedly been a prostitute in earlier life. She took a dim view of Justinian’s decision to make a similar match when he fell deeply in love with a young woman, Theodora, a former actress and mother of a child born of an affair prior to her meeting with Justinian. Theodora’s arrival on the scene reinforced the tendency of both Justin and later Justinian to staff senior positions with relative outsiders and family members (240). Sittas, one of the leading generals of the time, was married to Theodora’s sister, also a former actress. Sittas’s colleague, Belisarius, was of peasant background and likewise married to an actress. Tribonian was also an outsider as was John the Cappadocian, the chief minister of state for more than a decade until Theodora ousted him. A third general, Narses, was a eunuch. The nephew who would succeed Justinian married the daughter of Theodora’s sister. According to Justinian’s vision, hard work, devotion to God, and knowledge mattered more than birth. Members of the traditional nobility were told that they needed to pay court to the new leadership group, swearing loyalty to both Justinian and Theodora. At the same time, quite probably under Theodora’s influence, Justinian passed legislation to correct long-standing abuses of the downtrodden.
Justin’s accession stemmed from a crisis in the palace after the death of Anastasius (r. 491-518), who would most likely have preferred the throne go to one of his nephews. Justin was not going to leave things to the vagaries of fortune from which he had benefitted. Justinian was essentially Justin’s co-ruler for several years and was proclaimed co-Augustus on April 1, 527. He was then “a middle-aged man in a hurry” (116) and his legislative record was remarkable: fully a third of all the laws issued in his reign were issued in the five months he shared the throne with Justin. After surveying the achievements of those early months, Sarris offers excellent discussions of Justinian’s work as a legislator and his intense involvement in theological controversies throughout his reign. Justinian instigated persecutions of Jews, Samaritans, non-conforming Christians, and pagans as well as those he regarded as morally deviant, though in the case of anti-Chalcedonian Christians, who had a sympathizer in Theodora, the policy of persecution was mitigated. It was only after her death in 548 that Justinian’s hostility towards the anti-Chalcedonian movement became more coherent.
The issue of religious conformity is of little interest to Procopius, and one of the challenges any historian dealing with the period must face is how to manage the divergent records of the reign emerging from Procopius and sources such as the documentary record or official histories preserved through the chronicles of John Malalas and others. Sarris manages this task with admirable clarity, offering, on the one hand, a convincing picture of Procopius as a creature of Constantinople’s literary salons, writing in a classicizing style for an audience that was likely as out of sympathy with Justinian’s regime as he would come to be by the time he completed his history--a perspective he shares with Agathias, his successor as narrator for the later part of the reign. On the other hand, Procopius’s first-hand experience of the campaigns in the Middle East, North Africa, and Italy make his history the crucial guide for these events.
Justinian’s inability to bring the campaigns in the Middle East and Italy to a successful conclusion lies at the heart of the negative view of the reign in modern scholarship (430). What enables Sarris to bring a fresh perspective to the problem is his command of the evidence for the natural phenomena that wrecked the empire’s resources. First there was a series of volcanic eruptions in 536 and 540, which blocked out the light of the sun, causing severe drops in temperature, a sudden climate change that resulted in widespread famine. The change in climate may have facilitated the spread of bubonic plague from its home in east Africa to humans around the Mediterranean, whose resistance to the disease had been weakened by malnutrition (317-24). The ecological catastrophe of the 540s had nothing to do with Justinian’s policies, but it demolished the domestic resources needed to continue the western campaigns and for the defense of the Balkan frontier. Sarris points out that the empire’s settled population, like that of the Sasanian empire, was more susceptible to the disease than the scattered populations of western and central Europe. The decline in Sasanian resources may explain the indecisive campaigns of Justinian’s later years, which were focused around the Black Sea, well away from Syria, the scene of conflict in the early years.
When he succeeded his uncle in 565, Justin II complained he inherited a state in which the treasury was burdened with innumerable debts and that many things had been neglected by his aging uncle. The conquest of Italy was unravelling in the face of the Lombard invasion, while the Balkan frontier fell victim to new arrivals, the Avars. To read Justinian’s immediate legacy as his whole legacy would, Sarris suggests, be shortsighted. It was his commitment to the values of the Roman state, to the rule of law and religious orthodoxy that shaped the image of Rome for later generations. These aspects of Justinian’s reign are the basis of his legacy today.
Sarris’s thoughtful engagement with the full range of evidence surviving from the time of Justinian, his clear prose, mastery of relevant scholarship, and obvious passion for the subject make his book an obvious starting point for readers who wish to engage not just with the reign of Justinian, but with the world of later antiquity as a whole.