~44 min read • Updated Mar 28, 2026
The Emperor
Arcadius died in 408, and his seven-year-old son Theodosius II became emperor of the East. Pulcheria, Theodosius’s sister, who was two years older than he, undertook his education with such excessive tenderness that he never acquired the qualities of a ruler. He delegated his duties to his chief of the guard and to the Senate, and himself occupied his time copying and illuminating manuscripts, apparently never reading the law code that bears his name. In 414, at the age of sixteen, Pulcheria assumed the regency and ruled the empire for thirty-three years. She and her two sisters had sworn to remain virgins, and apparently kept their vow. The three sisters dressed with monastic simplicity, fasted, sang hymns, prayed, built hospitals, churches, and monasteries, and filled them with gifts. The imperial palace was transformed into a convent where only women and a few priests were allowed to enter. Amid all this piety, Pulcheria, her brother’s wife Eudocia, and their ministers governed the empire with such competence that during the forty-two years of Theodosius’s nominal reign the Eastern Empire enjoyed exceptional peace, while the Western Empire moved toward chaos and decay. One event of the time that has not been forgotten is the publication of the Theodosian Code (438). In 429 a commission of jurists was appointed to compile all the laws enacted since the beginning of Constantine’s reign. This new code was accepted in both East and West and remained the law of the empire until the compilation of a larger collection under Justinian.
Between the reign of Theodosius II and Justinian I, the Eastern Empire had several rulers who were active in their time but are now remembered only by name: Leo I (457–474) sent the largest fleet in Roman history against Gaiseric (467); the fleet was defeated and destroyed. His son-in-law Zeno the Isaurian (474–491), wishing to silence the Monophysites, created a bitter schism between Greek and Latin Christianity by issuing his imperial decision in a letter called the Henotikon, “the instrument of union,” declaring that Christ had one nature. Anastasius (491–518) was a capable, courageous, and benevolent man; he filled the treasury through wise and economical administration, reduced taxes, abolished the combat of men with wild beasts in public spectacles, made Constantinople almost impregnable by building the “Long Walls” sixty kilometers long from the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea, spent the state budget on many other public works, and left 320,000 pounds of gold (about $134,400,000) in the treasury, which made Justinian’s conquests possible. The people hated his economies and his Monophysite leanings; a mob besieged his palace and killed three of his officials; he faced the crowd with the dignity of his eighty years and said that if the people could agree on his successor he was ready to resign. This condition was impossible to fulfill, and the mob begged him to continue his reign. When he died, the imperial crown was usurped by Justin, an illiterate senator (518–527). Justin was so fond of his ease at the age of seventy that he entrusted the administration of the empire to his able nephew and regent Justinian.
Procopius, the historian and enemy of Justinian, seems to have been annoyed by his humble origin, for the future emperor was born into a poor Illyrian peasant family — perhaps Slavic — living near ancient Serdica (modern Sofia). His uncle Justin brought him to Constantinople and provided him with a good education. Justinian distinguished himself as an army officer and for nine years served as such an able assistant and administrator to Justin that when his uncle died (527) this nephew succeeded him on the imperial throne.
At this time he was a man of forty-five, of medium height, ruddy complexion, and curly hair; he shaved his beard; he was courteous and smiling, and his smile was a veil behind which he hid his purposes. Like the solitary ascetics he was abstemious in eating and drinking, ate very little and mostly vegetable food; he often fasted, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. Even during fast days, as at other times, he rose early and “from dawn till noon, and then till late at night,” attended to the affairs of the empire. Often when his officials thought he was asleep he was occupied with study; he had a great desire to be, while emperor, also a musician and architect, a poet and jurist, a theologian and philosopher; yet he believed in many superstitions of his time. His mind was always active and equally ready to consider great and small matters. He was not physically strong or courageous; during the disturbances at the beginning of his reign he wanted to abdicate, and he never personally entered the field in the many wars of his time. Perhaps this was one of his amiable weaknesses: he was easily influenced by his friends, and therefore often wavered between different political policies; he frequently subordinated his own judgment to that of his wife. Procopius, who devoted one volume of his work to describing Justinian’s faults, portrays him as “insincere, crafty, hypocritical, two-faced, cunning, capable of concealing his anger, a consummate actor in feigning a belief, and even capable of shedding tears when necessary”; but all this may be the description of the abilities of a diplomat. Procopius continues: “He was a fickle friend and an implacable enemy, and a strong advocate of murder and plunder.” Obviously he sometimes was; but he was also ready to show mercy and gentleness. One of his generals, Probus, was accused of insulting him and was tried for treason; when the court report was presented to Justinian he tore it up and sent this message to Probus: “I forgive the offense you have committed against me; pray that God may also forgive you.” He tolerated honest criticism. “This tyrant” — poor man, he had no luck with historians! — “was the most accessible man in the world. For men of the lower and obscure classes were completely free to come into his presence and even to converse with him.”
At the same time he increased the splendor and ceremonial of his court even beyond what had existed in the time of Diocletian and Constantine. Like Napoleon, as the successor of a usurper, he sadly lacked the advantages of legitimacy; he had no prestige of birth or personality; consequently, to compensate for these deficiencies, whenever he appeared in public or before ambassadors he arranged for himself a magnificent ceremonial and retinue. He tried to foster the Eastern idea that kingship is a divine trust, referred to himself and his belongings with the title “sacred,” and required those who came into his presence to kneel and kiss the hem of his purple robe or the tip of his boot. He was anointed and crowned by the patriarch of Constantinople and wore a pearl-encrusted crown. No government has ever tried so hard as the Byzantine to win and maintain public respect through magnificent ceremonial. This policy was really effective; there were many revolutions in Byzantine history, but most of them took the form of palace coups; for the court was overawed by its own majesty.
The most important revolt during Justinian’s reign occurred early in it (532) and nearly cost him his life. The Greens and Blues — factions into which the people of Constantinople were divided according to the color of the costumes of their favorite charioteers — had carried their quarrels to the point of open riot; the streets of the capital had become unsafe, and the wealthy were forced to dress like the poor to be safe from knife-wielding thugs at night. Finally the government attacked both factions and arrested several of their leaders. After this attack the two factions united against the government. Probably some senators also joined the rebels, and popular discontent turned the riot into a revolution. The people stormed the prisons and freed the prisoners; guards and government officials were killed; fires began that burned the church of Santa Sophia and part of the emperor’s palace. The crowd shouted “Nika!” (Victory), and this word gave its name to the revolution. The rebels, intoxicated with success, demanded the dismissal of two unpopular and perhaps oppressive members of Justinian’s council, and he agreed. Now bolder, the rebels incited one of the nobles, Hypatius, to accept the crown; he, despite his wife’s entreaties, accepted and went among the excited people to occupy the imperial seat in the hippodrome. At that time Justinian had hidden himself in his palace and was thinking of flight; Empress Theodora restrained him and urged him to resist with all his strength. Belisarius, the commander of the army, was ordered to suppress the rebels. He gathered some Gothic soldiers, led them to the hippodrome, and killed thirty thousand of the people present there, arrested Hypatius, and ordered his men to kill him in prison. Justinian restored his dismissed officials to their posts, pardoned the conspiring senators, and returned the confiscated property of Hypatius to his children. For the next thirty years Justinian was safe from danger, but apparently no one except one person loved him.
Theodora
In one of his books, Buildings, Procopius gives a description of the statue of Justinian’s wife: “It is a beautiful statue, but it does not yet approach the beauty of the empress herself; for to describe her beauty in words or to represent it in a statue is beyond the power of any human being.” This greatest Byzantine historian, in all his writings except one, speaks of Theodora only with praise. But in a book he did not publish during his lifetime and which therefore was called the Anecdota (Secret History), he tells such a scandalous story of the empress’s life before her marriage that its truth has been debated for thirteen centuries. This “Secret History” is a pamphlet of open malice written solely with the aim of blackening the posthumous reputation of Justinian, Theodora, and Belisarius. Since Procopius is our chief witness for that period, and in his other works he appears accurate and fair, it is impossible to dismiss the Anecdota as an entirely false and fabricated work; it can only be regarded as the angry revenge of a disappointed courtier. John of Ephesus, who knew the empress well and never otherwise censured her, simply calls her “Theodora the harlot.” Apart from this, there is no other evidence in the works of contemporary historians to confirm the accusations made by Procopius. Many theologians of that time condemned her heresies, but none of them mentions her moral corruption — which, if true, would have been an incredible act of generosity on the part of these theologians. From what has been said, we may infer that Theodora did not begin her married life as befits a lady, but ended it as befits an empress.
Procopius assures us that she was the daughter of a bear-keeper, grew up among circus performers, became an actress and prostitute, excited the people of Constantinople with her lascivious manners, had several successful abortions, but also gave birth to one illegitimate child; she became the mistress of a Syrian named Hecabolus, her lover abandoned her, and she disappeared for a time in Alexandria. Then she reappeared in Constantinople as a poor but chaste woman who earned her living by spinning wool. Justinian fell in love with her, made her his mistress, then his wife, and finally his empress. We cannot now say how much of this preface is true; but if such a past did not disturb an emperor’s mind, it should not greatly trouble ours either. Shortly after his marriage Justinian was crowned in the church of Santa Sophia; and Theodora was crowned beside him; and Procopius says “not even a priest was offended by this.”
What is certain is that Theodora — whatever she had been before — became, after her marriage to the emperor, a chaste lady whose chastity no one doubted. She was greedy for money and power, sometimes gave way to a domineering temper, and occasionally schemed to achieve purposes contrary to Justinian’s intentions. She slept a great deal, indulged in food and wine, loved luxury, jewels, and splendor, and spent many months of the year in her palaces on the seashore; yet Justinian remained constant in his love for her and philosophically endured her interference in his plans. Out of conjugal love he had theoretically granted her power equal to his own, and now he could not complain that she made use of it. Theodora practically intervened in politics and ecclesiastical affairs, appointed and deposed popes and patriarchs, and removed her enemies. Sometimes she annulled her husband’s decrees, often for the benefit of the country; her intelligence was almost equal to her power. Procopius accuses her of cruelty toward opponents and says she imprisoned them in underground dungeons and even attributes several murders to her; men who greatly offended her disappeared without a trace — as is also customary in the political morality of our time. But she also had mercy. She hid the patriarch Anthimus, who had been exiled by the emperor for heresy, for two years in her own residence. Perhaps she was too lenient toward the adultery of Belisarius’s wife, but to maintain balance she built a beautiful “convent of repentance” for repentant prostitutes. Some of these prostitutes regretted their repentance and, growing weary of the hardships of monastic life, threw themselves out of windows. Like a grandmother she showed interest in the marriages of her friends, chose good wives for them, and sometimes made marriage a condition of advancement at her court. As was to be expected, in her old age she became a strict guardian of public morality.
Eventually she became interested in theology and discussed the nature of Jesus with her husband. Justinian tried to unite the Eastern and Western churches; in his opinion religious unity was necessary for the unity of the empire. But Theodora understood nothing of the two natures of Jesus, although she had no objection to the three persons of God; she adopted Monophysitism and believed that in this matter the East should not submit to the West. She thought that the wealth and power of the empire lay in the rich provinces of Asia, Syria, and Egypt, not in the Western provinces that had been ruined by barbarism and war. She moderated Justinian’s zeal for orthodoxy, protected heretics, fought the papacy, secretly encouraged the establishment of an independent Monophysite church in the East, and persistently opposed the emperor and the pope in these matters.
Belisarius
Justinian’s strong desire for unity is understandable; it is the eternal obsession of philosophers and statesmen, and unification has sometimes cost even more than war. The recovery of Africa from the Vandals, Italy from the Ostrogoths, Spain from the Visigoths, Gaul from the Franks, and Britain from the Saxons; driving barbarism back into its abysses and restoring Roman civilization to its former extent and prosperity; and the re-publication of Roman law throughout the white world from the Euphrates to Hadrian’s Wall was by no means a base ambition, although in the end it exhausted both the conquerors and the conquered equally. To achieve these high goals, Justinian, on the basis of papal relations, ended the schism between the Eastern and Western churches, and dreamed of gathering the Arians, Monophysites, and other heretics into one great spiritual fold. No European mind since Constantine had thought on such a vast scale.
The existence of capable generals made Justinian’s task easier and the limitation of his resources harder. His subjects were unwilling to participate in his wars and lacked the power to pay their costs. He soon spent the 320,000 pounds of gold that his predecessors had left in the treasury; after that he was forced to impose taxes that displeased the citizens and to practice economies that embarrassed his generals. Universal military service had fallen into disuse a century earlier; now the imperial army was composed almost entirely of barbarian mercenaries from a hundred tribes and regions. These mercenary soldiers lived by plunder and were always thinking of acquiring wealth and violating honor; sometimes in the midst of battle they rebelled or, by delaying to plunder, squandered a victory already won. The only factors of unity and motivation for service in this army were regular pay and capable commanders.
Belisarius, like Justinian, came from an Illyrian peasant stock; and his life recalls the lives of the Balkan emperors — Aurelian, Probus, Diocletian — who had saved the empire in the third century. Since Caesar’s time no general had achieved so many victories with such limited financial and human resources; and few commanders could equal him in strategic and tactical skill or in popularity with his soldiers and mercy toward his enemies. Perhaps it is worth noting that the greatest generals — Alexander the Great, Caesar, Belisarius, Saladin, and Napoleon — found mercy a powerful military weapon. In Belisarius, as in those other great generals, there was a sensitivity and tenderness that immediately after the end of every bloody battle took him out of his soldier’s skin and turned him into a lover. Just as the emperor loved Theodora, Belisarius adored Antonina, endured her infidelities with furious anger, and for various reasons took her with him in his campaigns.
Belisarius won his first honors in the war against the Persians. After 150 years of peace between the two empires, the old quarrel over control of the trade routes of Central Asia and India had resumed. Amid brilliant victories, Belisarius was suddenly recalled to Constantinople; Justinian made peace with Khosrow Anushirvan by paying 11,000 pounds of gold (532) and then sent Belisarius to Africa to recover the Roman provinces. Justinian had concluded that he would never be able to make lasting conquests in the East: the people there were hostile to him and the defense of the frontiers was very difficult. But in the West there were nations that had been accustomed to Roman rule for hundreds of years, hated their Arian barbarian rulers, and would certainly cooperate in war and pay taxes in peacetime. Moreover, the arrival of additional grain from Africa could silence the grumblers in the capital.
Gaiseric had died after a reign of thirty-nine years (477). Under the rule of his successors, Vandal Africa had resumed many Roman customs and manners. Latin was the official language and poets wrote verses in praise of forgotten kings. The Roman theater in Carthage had resumed work and Greek plays were performed again. Ancient works of art were respected and new magnificent buildings were erected. Procopius describes the rulers of that land as civilized good men who occasionally showed signs of barbarism, but most of them had abandoned the art of war and were peacefully walking the path of decline under the golden rays of the sun.
In June 533, five hundred transport ships and ninety-two warships, gathered in the Bosporus, after receiving the emperor’s orders and the patriarch’s blessings, set sail for Carthage. Procopius was among Belisarius’s companions and wrote an exciting account of the “Vandal War.” Belisarius landed in Africa with only five thousand horsemen, quickly passed the defensive obstacles of Carthage, which had been hastily established, and within a few months shattered the power of the Vandals. Justinian hastily recalled him to Constantinople to defeat the Moors who had poured down from the hills and attacked the Roman garrison; Belisarius quickly returned and arrived just in time to suppress a revolt that had broken out among the troops and lead them to victory. Carthaginian Africa remained in Byzantine possession from that time until the arrival of the Arabs.
Justinian’s cunning diplomacy during Belisarius’s attack on Africa had arranged an alliance with the Ostrogoths; now he enticed the Franks into an alliance with him and ordered Belisarius to conquer Ostrogothic Italy. Belisarius made Tunis his base and from there took Sicily without much difficulty. In 536 he crossed the sea and attacked Italy, capturing Naples — by having some of his soldiers secretly penetrate the city through an aqueduct. The Ostrogothic forces were untrained and scattered, the people of Rome welcomed Belisarius as their savior, the clergy welcomed him because of his belief in the Trinity, and he entered Rome unopposed. Theodahad ordered Amalasuntha to be killed; the Ostrogoths deposed Theodahad and chose Vitiges in his place. Vitiges gathered an army of 150,000 men and besieged Belisarius in Rome. The Romans, who had been forced to economize on food and water and abandon daily bathing, began to complain against Belisarius, who had no more than five thousand armed men. Belisarius defended the city with skill and the special courage that was his, and Vitiges returned to Ravenna after a year of effort. Belisarius persistently demanded reinforcements from Justinian for three years; they were sent, but under the command of generals who were hostile to Belisarius. The Ostrogoths besieged in Ravenna and starving agreed to surrender on condition that Belisarius become their king. Belisarius apparently agreed to the proposal, took the city, and presented it to Justinian (540).
The emperor, while thanking Belisarius, became suspicious of him. Belisarius had provided himself with a good reward from the spoils of war, had won the excessive personal loyalty of his soldiers, and had even been offered the kingship; was it not possible that he dreamed of taking the crown from the nephew of a usurper? Justinian recalled him and with displeasure observed the splendor of his retinue. Procopius says: “The people of Byzantium were delighted every day to see Belisarius when he came out of his house. … For there were always very many Vandals, Goths, and Moors marching before and after him, and his retinue resembled the processions of festival days. Moreover he had a handsome appearance and was tall and well-built. But his behavior was so humble and his manners so amiable that he seemed like a very poor and obscure man.”
The commanders appointed in his place in Italy neglected the discipline of their troops, quarreled with one another, and earned the contempt of the Ostrogoths. A hardworking, upright, and vigorous man from the Goths was chosen king of the defeated people. Totila gathered devoted soldiers from the homeless barbarians wandering in Italy, captured Naples (543), took Tibur, and besieged Rome. He astonished everyone with his mercy and faith; he treated prisoners so well that they came over to his banner; he so honorably fulfilled the promises he had made in exchange for the surrender of the people of Naples that everyone wondered with amazement who was the barbarian and who the civilized Greek. Some senators’ wives fell into his hands; he treated them with respect and chivalry and freed them all. He condemned one of his soldiers to death for raping a Roman maiden. The barbarians in the emperor’s service did not behave so well; since their pay from Justinian was nearing bankruptcy, they plundered the country so excessively that people remembered with regret the order and justice of Theodoric’s time.
Belisarius was ordered to hasten to the rescue of Italy. Upon reaching Italy he rode alone through the ranks of Totila’s army and entered the besieged Rome. He had arrived very late; the Greek garrison had lost its morale; his officers were cowardly and incompetent; traitors opened the city gates and Totila’s army, numbering ten thousand, entered the capital (546). Belisarius, while retreating, sent a message to Totila asking him not to destroy that historic city; Totila allowed his unpaid and hungry soldiers to plunder, but spared the people from harm and protected the women from the soldiers’ lust. But he made a mistake by leaving Rome to besiege Ravenna; in his absence Belisarius retook the city, and when Totila returned, his second siege of the city against that clever Greek was unsuccessful. Justinian, thinking the West was conquered, declared war on Persia and recalled Belisarius to the East. Totila again took Rome (549) and then conquered Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, and almost the entire Italian peninsula. Finally Justinian gave a large sum of money to his eunuch general Narses and ordered him to raise an army and drive the Goths from Italy. Narses carried out his mission with skill and speed; Totila was defeated and killed while fleeing; the remaining Goths were allowed to leave Italy peacefully, and the “Gothic War” ended after eighteen years (553).
These years brought the ruin of Italy to its peak. During these years Rome was captured five times and besieged and starved three times; its population, which had once reached a million, was reduced to forty thousand, half of whom were paupers living on papal charity. Milan was destroyed and all its people killed. Hundreds of cities and villages were plunged into misery by the tyrannical demands of rulers and the plundering of armies. Areas that had previously been cultivated were abandoned, and food supplies dwindled; it is said that in those eighteen years alone five thousand people died of hunger in Picenum. The aristocracy perished, for many nobles were killed in battle or during the sack of cities, or fled, and the number remaining was so small that it was not enough to continue the life of the Roman Senate; after 579 no more mention is made of that assembly.
The aqueducts that Theodoric had repaired were ruined and abandoned, and as a result Campania again became a vast malarial swamp that remained until our time. The magnificent baths, which depended on these aqueducts, fell into decay and remained unused. Hundreds of statues that had survived the sack of Alaric and Gaiseric were broken during the sieges or melted down to provide bullets and war materials. Now only the ruins that remained bore witness to Rome’s ancient greatness as the capital of half the world. The Eastern emperor could now rule such an Italy for a short time; but this was an expensive and hollow victory. Rome could not fully recover from the effects of this conquest until the Renaissance.
The Justinian Code
History has rightly forgotten Justinian’s wars and remembers him only for his laws. A century had passed since the publication of the Theodosian Code; many of its provisions had become obsolete under changing conditions, and many new laws had been enacted that confused the existing compilations; and the numerous contradictions in the laws hindered the performance of the duties of executors and courts. The influence of Christianity had led legislation and the interpretation of laws toward greater mildness. The civil laws of Rome often conflicted with the laws of the nations that formed the units of the empire, and many past regulations did not agree with the Hellenistic traditions of the Eastern Empire. The vast body of Roman law, instead of being a wise code, had become a mass of empirical and pompous laws.
Justinian, with his unifying zeal, was disgusted by this confusion, just as the disintegration of the empire distressed him. In 528 he appointed ten jurists to classify, purify, and reform the laws. The most active and influential member of this commission was the quaestor Tribonian, who, despite his bribery and suspected atheism, remained the inspiring force, adviser, and chief executor of Justinian’s legislative plans until his death. The first part of the work was carried out with unseemly haste and published in 529 under the title Codex Constitutionum or “Code.” This collection was declared the law of the empire and all previous laws, except those re-enacted in this code, became invalid. Its preface contained this interesting statement:
To the young men who are eager to study law: The majesty of the empire must be equipped with laws, and its glory must rely on arms, so that good government may be possible in peace and war; and the ruler may appear as victorious against enemies as he is a precise guardian of justice.
The legislative commission then proceeded to its second task, namely to collect those Responsa or “opinions of the jurists” of great Rome that were still considered to have legal force. The result of this work was published in 533 under the title Digesta or Pandectae (Digest of Laws); the opinions included in this collection and the interpretations made of them were thereafter binding on all judges; and all other opinions lost their validity entirely. The older collections of Responsa were no longer copied and were often lost. What remains of them shows that the compilers of Justinian’s laws deleted opinions favorable to freedom and cunningly and dishonestly distorted some of the rulings of ancient legislators to agree with absolute government.
While this great work was in progress, Tribonian and two assistants, finding the entire “Code” too heavy for students, published an official handbook of civil law called the Institutiones (533). This booklet was essentially nothing but the interpretations of Gaius with revisions and adaptations to the needs of the time. (Gaius in the second century had skillfully summarized the civil law of his time in a remarkably clear manner.) Meanwhile Justinian was publishing new laws. In 534 Tribonian and four assistants incorporated these laws into a revised edition of the “Code”; the previous edition became invalid and was left for the record of history. After Justinian’s death the other laws enacted in his time were published under the title Novellae Constitutiones (New Laws). The previous versions were in Latin, but the new version was published in Greek, thus marking the end of Latin as the language of law in the Byzantine Empire. All these collections together are called the Corpus Juris Civilis, and are loosely referred to as the “Justinian Code.”
This code, like the Theodosian Code, incorporated the beliefs of orthodox Christianity into the laws. At its beginning it supported the doctrine of the Trinity, and Nestorius, Eutyches, and Apollinaris were anathematized. This code recognized the primacy of the Church of Rome and commanded all Christian sects to submit to its authority. But in later chapters it declared the emperor’s supremacy over the Church: all ecclesiastical laws, like civil laws, must be issued by the monarchy. Continuing this code, regulations were laid down for patriarchs, bishops, heads of monasteries, and monks, and special punishments were prescribed for priests who gambled or went to theaters or racecourses. The punishment for Manichaeans or heretics who broke their repentance was death, and the punishment for Donatists, Monophysites, and other heretics was confiscation of property, deprivation of the right to buy and sell, deprivation of the right to inherit or bequeath property by will; they were excluded from holding public office, had no right to assemble or meet, and could not legally prosecute orthodox Christians for debt. Milder regulations allowed bishops to visit prisons and protect prisoners from abuse of the law by government officials.
This code introduced new distinctions in place of the previous class distinctions. Freed slaves no longer constituted a separate class and, immediately upon manumission, enjoyed all the privileges of free men and could even rise to the senate and the empire. Free men were divided into two classes: “honestiores” (respectable and base persons) and “humiliores” (common people). The hierarchy that had formed among the “honestiores” since the time of Diocletian was confirmed and stabilized by this code. This hierarchy consisted of: patricians, illustres, spectabiles, clarissimi, and gloriosi; in this there were many Eastern elements in the Roman law.
In the laws concerning slavery this code shows the influence of Stoic or Christian philosophy. The punishment for violating the honor of a slave girl was the same as for raping a free woman: death. A slave could marry a free woman with the consent of his master. Justinian, like the Church, encouraged the manumission of slaves; but his law allowed the sale into slavery of a newborn child whose parents were desperate from poverty. Some provisions of the code gave legal status to serfdom and prepared the ground for feudalism. A free man who had cultivated a piece of land for thirty years was obliged to live on that land forever with his descendants; the justification for this provision was to prevent arable land from lying fallow. A serf who fled or entered the clergy without his master’s consent could be reclaimed by his master like a fugitive slave.
The status of women was somewhat improved by this code. The lifelong guardianship of women that had existed in the fourth century had disappeared, and the old principle that property could pass to someone only through men had been abolished; the Church, which often benefited from women’s inheritances, had a large share in these reforms. Justinian tried to give the Church’s views on divorce legal force and prohibited divorce except when one of the parties wished to enter monastic life. But this prohibition conflicted greatly with existing customs and laws; and many people of various classes protested that this provision would increase cases of poisoning. The emperor, in later laws he enacted on this matter, generously provided various grounds for divorce; this law, with some interruptions, remained in force in the Byzantine Empire until 1453. The penalties established by Augustus for celibacy and childlessness were abolished in this code. Constantine had prescribed death for adultery, although he rarely carried out this punishment; Justinian retained the death penalty for male adulterers but reduced the punishment for female adulteresses to confinement in a convent. A husband had the right to kill his wife’s lover if, after sending three notarized warnings to his wife, he still found her with the suspected man in his house or in a tavern. Severe punishments were also prescribed for sexual relations with an unmarried or widowed woman, unless that woman was a concubine or prostitute. The punishment for rape was death and confiscation of property. Justinian prescribed not only death for homosexuality but often ordered the offenders to be tortured and mutilated before execution and paraded around the city. In this extreme legislation against sexual deviations, the influence of a Christianity that had become enraged at the sins of pagan civilization and resorted to a violent puritanical reaction was evident.
Justinian made a decisive change in the law of property. The ancient privilege of blood relatives to inherit the property of a person dying without a will was abolished; and it was provided that the property of such a person should go to his direct blood relatives — children, grandchildren, and so on. The code encouraged the donation of property or its bequest for charitable purposes. Church property — movable and immovable, manorial rights, and serfs and slaves — was declared inalienable; no individual or group of clergy or laity had the right to give, sell, or bequeath any of the Church’s belongings. These laws of Leo I and Anthemius, confirmed by the code, became the basis for the increase of the Church’s wealth; while worldly property was dispersed from generation to generation, the Church’s property accumulated over generations. The Church tried to prohibit usury but did not succeed. Debtors who were unable to pay their debts were arrested, but were released upon giving security or swearing that they would appear in court. The magnificence of this basilica can be guessed from the size of its library, which had 150,000 books or scrolls. Every trial had to be conducted in the presence of a judge appointed by the emperor; but, if the parties wished, the case could be referred to an ecclesiastical court. In every trial a copy of the “Holy Bible” was placed before the judge; defense lawyers were required to swear on it that they would make every effort to defend their clients honorably and would resign from the case if they found it dishonorable; the plaintiff and defendant also had to swear on the Holy Bible that they were in the right in their case. Although the punishments were harsh, they were not absolute and unmitigable; the judge could grant leniency in the case of women, minors, and the intoxicated. Imprisonment was used as detention for trial and less often as punishment. Justinian’s code was, in this respect, more backward than the laws of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius in that it included mutilation among the types of punishment. Tax collectors who falsified tax figures and those who copied works related to Monophysite doctrine could be condemned to have their hands cut off, on the theory that the limb of the offender should pay for his crime. Cutting the throat or nose is frequently prescribed in the code in question; Byzantine law later added blinding, especially to disqualify heirs or aspirants to the throne. The death penalty for free men was carried out by beheading, and in the case of certain slaves by crucifixion. Magicians and deserters from military service were burned alive. A condemned citizen could appeal to a higher court or to the Senate and finally to the emperor.
Justinian’s code can more easily be praised as a whole than in its parts. The fundamental distinction of this code from previous codes is its more serious support for orthodoxy, its deeper obscurantism, and the severity of its punishments. From the point of view of an educated Roman, life in the age of the Antonines was more civilized than in the period of Justinian. That emperor could not escape the issues of his time and environment; and in his ambition to unify everything, he necessarily incorporated into the law the superstitions and barbarism of his age along with justice and benevolence. Justinian’s code, like everything else in the Byzantine Empire, was conservative and served as a severe restraint for a civilization that seemed never to die. This code soon lost its validity, except in a domain that grew smaller every day. The nationalist Eastern heretics, whom this code cramped, opened their arms to the Muslims and found more possibility of growth and flourishing under the Qur’an than under the Justinian Code. Italy under Lombard rule, Gaul under Frankish rule, England under Anglo-Saxon rule, and Spain under Visigothic rule ignored Justinian’s laws. Nevertheless, this code gave order and security to various and scattered communities for several generations and, across borders and in the streets of several nations, provided more freedom and immunity than nations enjoy today. This code remained in force until the end of the law of the Byzantine Empire; and five centuries after its end it was revived in the West by the jurists of Bologna, accepted by emperors and popes, and entered as a binding rod of order into the structure of many new countries.
The Theological Emperor
The only task left for the emperor was to unify beliefs and turn the Church into a homogeneous instrument of rule. Probably Justinian’s piety was sincere and not merely political; he himself, as far as Theodora allowed, lived like a monk in his palace; he spent his time fasting and praying, delving into theological books, and discussing the subtleties of faith with masters, patriarchs, and popes. Procopius, with a kind of obvious sympathy, quotes a conspirator as saying: “Anyone who has even a little courage can hardly refrain from killing Justinian. A man who always sits without a guard until late at night and eagerly opens and examines scrolls of the Holy Bible with elderly priests should not inspire fear.” Almost the first use Justinian made of his power while holding the regency for Justin was to end the schism between the Eastern and Western churches that had been intensified by Emperor Zeno’s Henotikon. By accepting the pope’s doctrine, Justinian gained the support of the orthodox clergy against the Goths in Italy and against the Monophysites in the East.
This sect, which argued vehemently that Christ had only one nature, was almost as numerous in Egypt as the Catholic sect. In Alexandria its members had advanced so far that they themselves had divided into “orthodox” and “heterodox”; these two groups fought each other in the streets and their women also participated in their struggle by throwing projectiles from the rooftops. When the emperor’s armed forces installed a Catholic bishop in the see of Athanasius, the crowd of followers responded to his first sermon with stones, but all were killed on the spot by the emperor’s soldiers. While Catholicism dominated the see of Alexandria, heresy spread in the villages; the peasants ignored the patriarch’s orders and the emperor’s commands, and Egypt had slipped out of the empire’s hands a century before the arrival of the Arabs.
In this matter too, as in others, the steadfast Theodora prevailed over the wavering Justinian. Theodora plotted with a Roman deacon named Vigilius to raise him to the papacy on condition that after reaching this position he would grant privileges to the Monophysites. Pope Silverius was deposed by Belisarius from his seat in Rome (537) and exiled to the island of Palmaria, where he soon died from ill-treatment; and Vigilius became pope by the emperor’s command. The emperor finally accepted Theodora’s view that Monophysitism could not be suppressed and tried to calm its followers by considering their demands in a document of imperial theology known as the “Three Chapters.” He summoned Vigilius to Constantinople and forced him to sign that document. Vigilius reluctantly consented and immediately afterward was excommunicated by the African Catholic clergy (550); he withdrew his consent and was exiled by the emperor’s command to a rock in Proconnesus; he consented again and was allowed to return to Rome, but died on the way (555). Never had any emperor made such an open attempt to dominate the papacy. Justinian ordered a general council to be held in Constantinople (553); almost none of the Western bishops attended that council; the council accepted Justinian’s proposals, the Western Church rejected them, and the Eastern and Western churches resumed their schism for a century.
Finally, death prevailed over all disputes. Theodora’s death in 548 dealt the heaviest blow to the emperor and ruined his courage, clarity, and power. He was then sixty-five years old and had been weakened by excessive asceticism and repeated crises; he left the government to his subordinates, abandoned the defensive fortifications he had labored so hard to build, and devoted himself to theology. Dozens of calamities ruined the last seventeen years of his life. Earthquakes occurred with particular frequency in these seventeen years; several cities were almost completely wiped off the map by earthquakes, and rebuilding them emptied the treasury. In 542 the plague came, in 556 famine, and in 558 the plague again. In 559 the Kutrigur Huns crossed the Danube and plundered Moesia and Thrace, took thousands of captives, violated the honor of women, maidens, and nuns, threw newborn babies that captive women gave birth to during the march to the dogs, and advanced as far as the walls of Constantinople. The terrified emperor appealed to the general who had saved him from danger several times. Belisarius, old and weak, nevertheless put on armor, gathered three hundred of the old soldiers who had fought with him in Italy, recruited several hundred untrained men, and rushed to confront the seven thousand Huns. He arrayed his forces with the special skill and strategy that was his and hid two hundred of his best soldiers in the adjacent forest. When the Huns advanced, these soldiers attacked their flanks and Belisarius himself fought them at the head of his small army. The barbarians fled before even one Roman was seriously injured. The people of the city complained why Belisarius had not pursued the enemy and captured the Hunnic leader. The jealous emperor listened to envious slanders against his general, suspected him of conspiracy, and ordered him to dismiss his armed men. Belisarius died in 565, and Justinian seized half of his property.
The emperor survived his general by eight months. In the last years of his life his attachment to theology bore strange fruit: the defender of the faith had himself become a heretic. He declared that the body of Christ was incorruptible and that his human nature had never been subject to the needs and humiliations of mortal flesh. The clergy warned him that if he died in that error “he would be consigned to the fire of hell and burn there forever.” Without repenting, after eighty-three years of life and thirty-eight years of reign, he died (565).
Justinian’s death was another turning point in history that can be said to mark the end of antiquity. He was a thoroughly Roman emperor who viewed the entire Eastern and Western Empire equally, tried to keep the barbarians away from his land, and wanted to re-establish orderly government and uniform laws in that vast realm. He succeeded to a large extent in achieving this goal: during his reign Africa, Dalmatia, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and part of Spain were recovered; the Persians were driven from Syria, and the empire’s extent was doubled. His law, although savage in its treatment of heresy and sexual immorality, is one of the peaks in the history of law because of its unity, clarity, and breadth. His government was tainted with administrative corruption, heavy taxation, amnesty, and capricious punishment; but on the other hand it was distinguished by the efforts of a precise economic and administrative organization; and this organization created a foundation of order that, although alien to freedom, firmly and continuously maintained the foundations of civilization in a corner of Europe while other parts of Europe were sinking into the “Dark Ages.” Justinian left his name in the history of industry and art; the church of Santa Sophia is also one of his legacies. His reign must have seemed to his orthodox contemporaries like this: the empire had once again turned back the wave of destruction and for a while had been saved from death.
But unfortunately this salvation was very short. Justinian found the treasury full at the beginning of his reign but left it empty at his death; his unjust laws and thieving tax collectors turned nations to discontent as quickly as they were conquered by his armies; and those depleted, scattered, and unpaid armies could not defend for long the lands they had conquered at the cost of so much destruction. Africa was soon abandoned to the barbarians; Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Africa, and Spain fell into the hands of the Arabs; and Italy came under Lombard rule; within a century of Justinian’s death the Roman Empire lost more lands than it had gained during his time. A proud look at the past may make us think how much better it would have been if Justinian’s government had turned the emerging nations and religions into a federal union, had taken a friendly approach to the Ostrogoths who had ruled Italy relatively well, and had served as a mediator for the smooth preservation and transmission of ancient culture to the newly born countries.
We do not need to accept Procopius’s evaluation of Justinian, for Procopius himself has contradicted it. He was a great ruler whose every fault stemmed from the logic and sincerity of his faith: his religious persecutions came from his faith, his wars from his Roman spirit, and his confiscations from his wars. We are moved by his violence and admire the greatness of his goals. The last individuals of the Roman generation were in fact he and Belisarius, not Boniface and Aetius.
Written & researched by Dr. Shahin Siami