Justinian I was Byzantine emperor, noted for his administrative reorganization of the imperial government and for his sponsorship of a codification of laws known as the Codex Justinianus (534).
Background
He was was by birth a barbarian, native of a place called Tauresium in the district of Dardania, a region of Illyricum, and was born, most probably, on the 11 th of May 483.
His family has been variously conjectured, on the strength of the proper names which its members are stated to have borne, to have been Teutonic or Slavonic. The latter seems the more probable view. His own name was originally Uprauda. Justinianus was a Roman name which he took from his uncle Justin I, who adopted him, and to whom his advancement in life was due.
Career
When Justin ascended the throne in 518, Justinian became at once a person of the first consequence, guiding, especially in church matters, the policy of his aged, childless and ignorant uncle, receiving high rank and office at his hands, and soon coming to be regarded as his destined successor. On Justin's death in 527, having been a few months earlier associated with him as coemperor, Justinian succeeded without opposition to the throne.
Justinian's reign was filled with great events, both at home and abroad, both in peace and in war. They may be classed under four heads; (1) his legal reforms; (2) his administration of the empire; (3) his ecclesiastical policy; and (4) his wars and foreign policy generally.
It is as a legislator and codifier of the law that Justinian's name is most familiar to the modern world.
In 528 he set up a commission to produce a new code of imperial enactments or constitutions, the Codex Constitutionum. This was published in 529, and in 530 a second commission sat to codify the Roman jurists; the work of this commission, known as the Digest (Digesta), appeared in 533.
At the same time, a handbook for the use of law students, the Institutes (Institutiones), was prepared and published in 533. A second edition of the Codex Justinianus containing Justinian’s own laws up to the date of issue was published in 534. His subsequent legislative work to 565 is known as the Novels (Novellae Constitutiones Post Codicem). Much of this legal activity was inspired and supervised by Tribonian, the emperor’s most important judicial minister.
In his financial administration of the empire, Iustinian is represented to us as being at once rapacious and extravagant. His unwearied activity and inordinate vanity led him to undertake a great many costly public works, many of them, such as the erection of palaces and churches, unremunerative. The money needed for these, for his wars, and for buying off the barbarians who threatened the frontiers, had to be obtained by increasing the burdens of the people. They suffered, not only from the regular taxes, which were seldom remitted even after bad seasons, but also from monopolies; and Procopius goes so far as to allege that the emperor made a practice of further recruiting his treasury by confiscating on slight or fictitious pretexts the property of persons who had displeased Theodora or himself. Fiscal severities were no doubt one cause of the insurrections which now and then broke out, and in the gravest of which, (532) thirty thousand persons are said to have perished in the capital. It is not always easy to discover, putting together the trustworthy evidence of Justinian's own laws and the angry complaints of Procopius, what was the nature and justification of the changes made in the civil administration. But the general conclusion seems to be that these changes were always in the direction of further centralization, increasing the power of the chief ministers and their offices, bringing all more directly under the control of the Crown, and in some cases limiting the powers and appropriating the funds of local municipalities. Financial necessities compelled retrenchment, so that a certain number of offices were suppressed altogether, much to the disgust of the office-holding class, which was numerous and wealthy, and had almost come to look on the civil service as its hereditary possession. The most remarkable instance of this policy was the discontinuance of the consulship. This great office had remained a dignity centuries after it had ceased to be a power; but it was a very costly dignity, the holder being expected to spend large sums in public displays. As these sums were provided by the state, Justinian saved something considerable by stopping the payment. He named no consul after Basilius, who was the name-giving consul of 541.
In a bureaucratic despotism the greatest merit of a sovereign is to choose capable and honest ministers. Justinian's selections were usually capable, but not so often honest; probably it was hard to find thoroughly upright officials; possibly they would not have been most serviceable in carrying out the imperial will, and especially in replenishing the imperial treasury. Even the great Tribonian labours under the reproach of corruption, while the fact that justiriian maintained John of Cappadocia in power long after his greed, his unscrupulousness, and the excesses of his private life had excited the anger of the whole empire, reflects little credit on his own principles of government and sense of duty to his subjects. The department of administration in which he seems to have felt most personal interest was that of public works. He spent immense sums on buildings of all sorts, on quays and harbours, on fortifications, repairing the walls of cities and erecting castles in Thrace to check the inroads of the barbarians, on aqueducts, on monasteries, above all, upon churches. Of these works only two remain perfect, St Sophia in Constantinople, now a mosque, and one of the architectural wonders of the world, and the church of SS Sergius and Bacchus, now commonly called Little St Sophia, which stands about half a mile from the great church, and is in its way a very delicate and beautiful piece of work. The church of S. Vitale at Ravenna, though built in Justinian's reign, and containing mosaic pictures of him and Theodora, does not appear to have owed anything to his mind or purse.
Justinian's ecclesiastical policy was so complex and varying. His main doctrinal problem was the conflict between the orthodox view accepted at the Council of Chalcedon (451), that the divine and human natures coexist in Christ, and the Monophysite teaching that emphasized his divine nature. Monophysitism was strongly held in Syria and Egypt and was closely allied to growing national feelings and resentment of Byzantine rule. Justinian, whose wife, Theodora, was a strong champion of the Monophysites, did not wish to lose the eastern provinces, but he knew, on the other hand, that any concessions to them would almost certainly alienate Rome and the West. Justinian tried to compel the orthodox Western bishops to arrive at a compromise with the Monophysites, and he even went so far as to hold Pope Vigilius against his will in Constantinople and to condemn some writings by important church figures in Antioch in an effort to achieve his aim. The second Council of Constantinople (553) finally reaffirmed the Chalcedonian position and condemned the Antioch suspect writings. Justinian achieved nothing by the episode, however; he did not conciliate the Monophysites, he enraged Antioch by the attack on its teachers, and he aroused Rome particularly by his handling of Pope Vigilius and his attempt to determine doctrinal matters. The decrees of the council were not accepted by Vigilius’ successors, and a schism thus occurred between Rome and Constantinople that lasted until 610.
Justinian was engaged in three great foreign wars, two of them of his own seeking, the third a legacy which nearly every emperor had come into for three centuries, the secular strife of Rome and Persia. When Justinian came to the throne, his troops were fighting on the Euphrates River against the armies of the Persian king Kavadh (Qobād) I. After campaigns in which the Byzantine generals, among whom Belisarius was the most distinguished, obtained considerable successes, a truce was made on the death of Kavadh in September 531. His successor, Khosrow I, finally came to terms, and the Treaty of Eternal Peace was ratified in 532. The treaty was on the whole favourable to the Byzantines, who lost no territory and whose suzerainty over the key district of Lazica (Colchis, in Asia Minor) was recognized by Persia. Justinian, however, had to pay the Persians a subsidy of 11, 000 pounds of gold, and in return Khosrow gave up any claim to a subvention for the defense of the Caucasus.
War broke out again in 540, when Justinian was fully occupied in Italy. Justinian had somewhat neglected the army in the East, and in 540 Khosrow moved into Mesopotamia, northern Syria, and Byzantine Armenia and systematically looted the key cities. In 541 he invaded Lazica in the north. Belisarius, now reappointed commander in chief in the East, launched counteroffensives in 541 and 542 before his recall to Italy. The war dragged on under other generals and was to some extent hindered by bubonic plague. A five-years’ truce was made in 545 and renewed in 551 but still did not extend to Lazica, which the Persians obstinately refused to restore, and a fierce struggle continued intermittently in this mountainous region. When the truce was again renewed in 557, however, Lazica was included. Finally, a 50 years’ truce was negotiated, probably at the end of 561; Byzantium agreed to pay an annual tribute of 30, 000 solidi (gold coins), and the Persians renounced all claim to the small Christian kingdom of Lazica, an important bulwark against northern invaders. Justinian had thus maintained his eastern provinces virtually intact in spite of the vigorous offensives of the Persian king, so his policy on this front can hardly be described as a failure.
In the West, Justinian considered it his duty to regain provinces lost to the empire “through indolence, ” and he could not ignore the trials of Catholics living under the rule of Arians (Christian heretics) in Italy and in North Africa. In the Vandal kingdom of North Africa, Catholics had been subject to frequent persecution. There was also a disputed succession to the throne after the aged Vandal king Hilderich, who had been in alliance with Constantinople and had ceased persecution of the Catholics, was deposed in favour of Gelimer in 530. At the same time, the Vandals were threatened by the Moorish tribes of Mauretania and southern Numidia. In the face of considerable opposition from his generals and ministers, Justinian launched his attack on North Africa to aid Hilderich in June 533. The fleet of about 500 vessels set out with 92 warships. An unopposed landing was made in August, and by the following March (534) Belisarius had mastered the kingdom and received the submission of the Vandal ruler Gelimer. Northern Africa was reorganized as part of the empire and now included Sardinia, Corsica, the Balearic Islands, and Septem (Ceuta).
In Italy, the mother province of the Roman Empire in which the older capital city (Rome) was situated, Justinian found a situation similar to that in North Africa and particularly favourable to his ambitions. Under his immediate predecessors, Italy had been ruled by a barbarian, the Ostrogoth Theodoric, who, though virtually independent, was the nominal representative of the Byzantine emperor. He was an Arian and, though at first a tolerant and wise ruler, toward the end of his reign had begun to persecute the Catholics. He had no male heir, and on his death there was not only antagonism between Arian Goths and Catholic Italians but also a rift within the ranks of the Ostrogoths, some of whom were violently anti-Byzantine.
Thinking that this was now his opportunity to support his fellow Catholics and to reassert direct control over the province, Justinian dispatched an army and sent Belisarius with a fleet to attack Sicily, while an embassy set off to gain the support of the powerful Franks now settled in Gaul. After the defeat of the Ostrogothic king Witigis and the capture of Ravenna in 540, imperial administration was reestablished in Italy under the praetorian prefect Athanasius. Rigorous financial exactions and the rapacity of the soldiers made the new regime unpopular. Many of the Ostrogoths had never submitted, and after the two short and unfortunate reigns of Hildebad and Eraric, they proclaimed Totila (Baduila) as their king in the autumn of 541. Totila proved an able leader and in 542 took the offensive in southern Italy and in 543 captured Naples. In 544 Belisarius was sent against him with inadequate forces. City after city was captured by the Ostrogoths until only Ravenna, Otranto, and Ancona remained in Byzantine hands. Belisarius could make no headway without adequate reinforcements, and in 549 he was recalled to Constantinople.
Meanwhile, Totila took over the administration of the country, though at the expense of alienating the great landowners. He hoped to come to terms with Justinian, but in 552 a powerful army was sent against him under the eunuch commander Narses. Totila was defeated by superior numbers and strategy and was mortally wounded at the battle of Busta Gallorum. Narses entered Rome and soon afterward defeated Ostrogothic resistance at Mount Lactarius, south of Vesuvius. Pockets of resistance, reinforced by Franks and Alemanni who had invaded Italy in 553, lingered on until 562, when the Byzantines were in control of the whole of the country. Justinian hoped to restore the social and economic well-being of Italy by a series of measures, the Pragmatic Sanction of 554. The country was so ravaged by war that any return to normal life proved impossible during Justinian’s lifetime, and only three years after his death part of the country was lost to the Lombard invaders.
On the northern frontier in the Balkans the Roman provinces faced continual attacks from barbarian raiders. Thrace, Dacia, and Dalmatia were harried by Bulgars and Slavs (known as Sclaveni). In 550–551 the invaders even wintered in Byzantine territory, despite the efforts of the army to dislodge them. In 559 the Bulgars and Slavs were joined by the Kotrigur Huns, who got as far south as Thermopylae and eastward through Thrace to the long wall protecting Constantinople. The veteran Belisarius saved the situation by mustering the civilian population. In 561 the Avars joined the raiders but were bought off with a subsidy. These attacks from beyond the Danube did immense damage, and, although fortifications and defense works were built and strengthened in the Balkans and in Greece, the newcomers were neither effectively repulsed nor assimilated by the Byzantines. The Slavs, and later the Bulgars, eventually succeeded in settling within the Roman provinces. Failure to keep them out is one of the criticisms sometimes made against Justinian.
