Justinian I
Justinian reconquered half the western Mediterranean, codified Roman law, built Hagia Sophia, and left the empire exhausted. He was the nephew of an illiterate peasant who had risen through the guards to become emperor, and he was brought to Constantinople and educated for exactly this. He married Theodora, a former actress and, by the account of the historian who worked for him, a good deal more, and she was his most consequential adviser. The Nika riots of 532 nearly finished him in the fifth year of the reign: the circus factions united, burned half the city and proclaimed a rival, and Justinian had a ship ready when Theodora is reported to have told him that purple makes a fine shroud. Belisarius killed some 30,000 people in the hippodrome, and the rebuilt Hagia Sophia rose on the ruins in five years with a dome nobody had attempted before. The legal work is the most durable achievement. The commission under Tribonian reduced a thousand years of accumulated statute and juristic opinion to the Code, the Digest and the Institutes, which is the foundation of the civil law of most of Europe and Latin America. Belisarius took Africa from the Vandals in a year and Italy from the Ostrogoths in a war that ran, on and off, for twenty and destroyed the country it recovered. The plague of 541 killed perhaps a third of the empire's population. He died in 565 with the treasury empty. The reconquest is the part historians argue about. Italy, Africa and southern Spain were taken and could not be held, the wars and the plague drained the resources that defended the Danube and the east, and his successors inherited an empire overextended in every direction.
- Lived: 482 CE – 565 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: leader, politician
