Justinian's Reconquest and the Corpus Juris Civilis
Justinian I ascended the Byzantine throne in 527, harboring an overriding ambition: the renovatio imperii, the renewal of the Roman Empire in its full Mediterranean extent. That he came closer to achieving this than any emperor since Theodosius, and that the attempt ultimately exhausted Byzantium at a critical moment, is the central paradox of his reign. The military campaigns were entrusted primarily to Belisarius, one of antiquity's most gifted commanders. In 533-534, Belisarius destroyed the Vandal kingdom in North Africa with astonishing speed, capturing King Gelimer with an army that had crossed the Mediterranean just months earlier. The reconquest of Italy from the Ostrogoths proved far harder: the Gothic War (535-554) devastated the Italian peninsula after nearly eighty years of relatively stable Ostrogothic rule under Theodoric. By the time Narses finally crushed the last Gothic resistance in 554, Italy's population had been reduced by perhaps a third through famine, plague, and warfare. The southern coastline of Spain was added in 552. The Plague of Justinian (541-549) compounded the military exhaustion catastrophically. Arriving first in Egypt and spreading via the grain trade to Constantinople and then the entire Mediterranean world, this first pandemic of bubonic plague may have killed 25-50 million people, perhaps a quarter of the Mediterranean population. It struck twice during Justinian's reign and recurred for two centuries. The enduring achievement was juridical. Between 529 and 534, the jurist Tribonian led a commission that compiled all Roman law into the Corpus Juris Civilis: the Codex (imperial constitutions), the Digest (juristic writings), the Institutes (a student textbook), and the Novellae (new laws). Rediscovered in eleventh-century Italy and taught at Bologna from the 1080s, this became the foundation of European civil law traditions from France to Germany to Spain, and through them of international law worldwide. Empress Theodora, daughter of a bear-keeper and formerly a mime actress, possessed political intelligence that arguably exceeded her husband's. During the Nika Revolt of 532, when Constantinople burned and Justinian prepared to flee, Theodora delivered the speech that saved his throne: purple makes the finest burial shroud. The Hagia Sophia, consecrated in 537, the largest enclosed space in the world for nearly a thousand years, was the physical embodiment of Justinianic ambition; at its dedication Justinian reportedly said: Solomon, I have surpassed thee.
- Year: 527 CE
- Category: Political
