Justin I
Justin I was an illiterate peasant from the Balkans who became Byzantine emperor at about sixty-eight and left the throne to his nephew Justinian. Born around 450 in a village near Naissus in what is now Serbia, he was a Latin-speaking swineherd or farmer who walked to Constantinople with two companions and enlisted in the palace guard, carrying, according to Procopius, nothing but a cloak and some biscuits. He rose through the excubitores over decades and was their commander when the emperor Anastasius died childless in July 518. The account of his election is that the chamberlain gave him a large sum of money to distribute among the guards on behalf of another candidate, and that he spent it securing his own acclamation. He could not write, and used a stencil to trace the first four letters of his name on documents. The reign was governed in substance by his nephew Petrus Sabbatius, whom he had brought to the capital, educated and adopted, and who took the name Justinian. Its central act was religious. Anastasius had favoured the Monophysites; Justin reversed it, restored communion with Rome in 519 after the thirty-five-year Acacian Schism, and persecuted the Monophysite bishops of Syria and Egypt. That realignment made Justinian's reconquest of the west politically possible and hardened the eastern provinces' alienation permanently. He legalised Justinian's marriage to Theodora by repealing the law forbidding senators to marry actresses. He died in 527, and Justinian ruled for thirty-eight years. His rise from a Balkan village to the purple is the clearest case in Roman history of a career open to anyone who survived long enough.
- Lived: 450 CE – 527 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, military_leader
