Kinlight · The Byzantine Emperors

Justinian I

482 – 565 · Generation IX · Emperor (r. 527–565) · Justinian

Portrait of Justinian I

Justinian I ruled the Eastern Roman Empire from 527 to 565, and his reign gave it the Hagia Sophia, a codified body of Roman law and, for a time, the western Mediterranean. He was born about 482 as Petrus Sabbatius, the son of Sabbatius and Vigilantia, in a Latin-speaking peasant family. Procopius places his birth at Tauresium in Dardania, usually identified with a site near Skopje. His mother’s brother Justin had gone to Constantinople as a soldier and risen to command the palace guard. Justin brought the boy to the capital, adopted him, whence the name Justinianus, and gave him a thorough education in law, theology and Roman history.

When the emperor Anastasius died in 518, Justin took the throne and his nephew became his closest adviser. Justinian was consul in 521, was named Caesar in 525 and was crowned co-emperor on 1 April 527. Four months later Justin died and he ruled alone. Around 525 he had married Theodora, a former actress some twenty years his junior. The law forbade such a match for a man of his rank until Justin changed it. She proved as able and energetic as her husband and had great influence on his government. They had no children.

His first great project was the law. Early in the reign he set the jurist Tribonian to sift centuries of imperial legislation. The first Codex appeared in April 529 and its final version in 534. It was joined in 533 by the Digest, a vast anthology of the classical jurists, and by the Institutes, a textbook for students. Together with his own later laws, the Novels, issued mostly in Greek, these make up the Corpus Juris Civilis. Rediscovered in western Europe in the twelfth century, it became the foundation of civil law across much of the Continent.

In January 532 he nearly lost everything. The Blue and Green circus factions of Constantinople, normally rivals, joined in a revolt remembered by its watchword, Nika. They burned much of the city centre and proclaimed a rival emperor, Hypatius, a nephew of Anastasius. Justinian was ready to flee by sea. According to Procopius it was Theodora who refused to go and stiffened his resolve. His generals Belisarius and Mundus then trapped the crowd in the Hippodrome, where Procopius says 30,000 people were killed. On the ruins Justinian rebuilt. The old church of Hagia Sophia had burned, and its replacement, designed by Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus with an immense dome, was dedicated in December 537.

Having bought an “Eternal Peace” from Persia in 532, he turned west to recover provinces lost in the previous century. Belisarius destroyed the Vandal kingdom in North Africa in 533–534 and led its king Gelimer through Constantinople in triumph. In 535 he landed in Sicily, took Rome in December 536 and entered the Ostrogothic capital Ravenna in 540. The Gothic war then revived under King Totila and dragged on until Narses defeated and killed him in 552, leaving Italy impoverished. An expedition also seized a strip of southern Spain. Meanwhile Khosrow I of Persia broke the peace in 540 and sacked Antioch, and the eastern war continued on and off until a fifty-year peace was agreed near the end of the reign.

In 542 bubonic plague reached Constantinople and swept on through the empire. Justinian himself caught it and recovered, but the loss of people and revenue strained everything he attempted afterwards. His finance ministers, John the Cappadocian and Peter Barsymes, collected taxes more efficiently than anyone before them to pay for the wars. In the early 550s monks smuggled silkworm eggs from Central Asia, which gave the empire its own silk industry.

He saw himself as the guardian of orthodoxy as well as of the state. He legislated against pagans, heretics, Samaritans and Jews, and in 529 the Neoplatonic school of Athens closed. He tried repeatedly, and without success, to reconcile the churches of Egypt and Syria, which rejected the Council of Chalcedon and had Theodora’s sympathy, with Rome and Constantinople. His condemnation of the “Three Chapters”, confirmed at the Fifth Ecumenical Council, pleased neither side. Theodora died in 548 and he outlived her by seventeen years. His working habits had earned him the name of the emperor who never sleeps. He died on 14 November 565 and was buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles. His nephew Justin II, son of his sister Vigilantia, succeeded him. He may have been the last Roman emperor whose mother tongue was Latin.

Images

One of 9 people of Justinian (518–602) in this archive. Justinian and Theodora’s house, which rebuilt the law and reached back into the west.

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Life

  • 482 — Born
  • 525 — Married Theodora
  • 565 — Died

Sources

  1. Justinian I · Wikipedia
  2. Justinian (527–565 A.D.) · De Imperatoribus Romanis (James Allan Evans, University of British Columbia)
  3. Justinian I · World History Encyclopedia

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