Basic Books (2023) h/b 544pp £30 (ISBN 9781529365382)
Rome had few really long-lived emperors. Many died early, often at the hands of their successors or would-be successors. But three who did stamp their own longer mark on time were Augustus (40 years), Theodosius II (42), and Justinian, the subject of this wonderful new biography by Peter Sarris.
Justinian’s thirty-eight years in the imperial purple are now mainly remembered for his codification of Roman law—work that lasted right up until Napoleonic times. But, as S. illustrates so vividly, Justinian was much more than that. He was a military emperor, determined to reconquer and strengthen the empire in both west and east. He was an administrator with a Stakhanovite appetite for work and detail. He built out Constantinople as the empire’s great capital with Hagia Sophia at its centre. And he constructed a Christian state, intolerant of other faiths, but one that reflected his own deeply thought religious doctrine.
In between he had to deal with huge external shocks: the arrival of bubonic plague; serious climate change that drove tribes across the steppes; repeated insurrection in Gaul, Spain, Italy and North Africa; and the perennial pressure from Persia on Rome’s eastern frontier.
Justinian first reached the capital with his uncle Justin who worked his way up from a semi-barbarian upbringing in what is now Bulgaria to a position in the emperor’s palace guard. When Justin succeeded Anastasius, Justinian became his heir apparent. Married by then to Theodora and promoted general commanding the capital’s troops, he took over smoothly in 527 AD in his mid-40s. From the start he was energetic at home, cracking down on heretics and criminality, and skilful abroad, using religious diplomacy to shore up Christian allies along the Persian border, in the Balkans and across the Caucasus.
His uncle had himself been an active legislator, but Justinian quickly outdid him. He passed 400 new laws in his first nine years against Justin’s thirty, covering marriage, inheritance, property, and commercial contracts. Most, however, were religious, dealing with heresy, clerical behaviour, paganism. Alongside this tidal wave of new laws came long-overdue codification, pulling together hundreds of previous rulings and case law from the provinces into three vast sets of volumes—the Codex, Digest and Institutes.
An attempted coup in 532 followed a week of rioting and burning in the capital in protest against high taxes and poor markets. Justinian held on, bowing to some reforms, but then resumed his legislative programme. He used the widespread destruction to commence a massive programme of public works, centred on the new church of Hagia Sophia. Probably then the biggest building in the world, sheathed in white marble for maximum visual and acoustic impact, it represented the middle space between heaven and earth.
Abroad the Roman imperium was fraying again at the edges. Justinian’s top general, Belisarius, was sent to restore King Hilderic in north Africa: he recaptured Carthage and fortified cities all along the coast, reviving the flow of money and resources to Rome. There was similar trouble in Sicily and Italy where King Witigis was holding out: in turn Belisarius recaptured Syracuse, Naples, Rome and Ravenna itself.
At home Justinian tightened his grip, improving tax administration and court procedures in the provinces. This was a new type of emperor: obsessed with detail, determined to tackle local elites abusing their power or tax breaks. His was a court-focused, palace-based political culture but one in which the emperor was ready to intervene in local disputes. He pressed ahead with full-blown Christianisation, creating in essence an orthodox republic by persecuting and repressing paganism and homosexuality. Within the church Justinian pursued a middle of the road path between the pro- and anti-Chalcedonian elements, pressing the ‘Theopaschist compromise’ on Pope Vigilius in the west as well as across the east.
By 540 Justinian could reflect on a more settled empire: the imperial administration reformed, Africa and Italy reclaimed. But he was then hit by a series of inter-linked disasters: Khusro, the Persian shah, sacked Antioch; there were poor harvests, probably the result of the changing climate; and serious outbreaks of bubonic plague in most of the empire’s big cities. Attacks by Gothic and Frankish armies in the west saw barbarian chieftains back in the frontier provinces, often bold enough to issue their own coinage and collect their own taxes. There were simply too few troops to deal with so many warlords.
More isolated than ever, Justinian became increasingly unpopular, surviving another assassination attempt but accused of megalomania and over-zealous reform. In 548 Theodora, effectively his co-ruler for a quarter of a century, died. Justinian became confined to his capital but his appetite for reform was undimmed. Before his death in 565 he was still pronouncing on religion, building more defences, and pursuing diplomatic initiatives in the east.
At the end of his long reign the authority of the empire had been restored at least around the immediate Mediterranean, and its interests advanced in the Caucasus. The administrative structures had been overhauled, and its corpus of law had been completely codified. Much of the capital Constantinople had been rebuilt, and the emperor himself had given official consistency to the Christian orthodoxy. Justinian’s legacy becomes all the clearer when his reign is contrasted with the following half-century. Italy, Spain, the Balkans, and later Persia all slipped away; tax revenues shrunk and the military with them.
Justinian was not unique: his predecessors wrestled with similar challenges at home, especially as rival Christian doctrines clashed, and with incursions on Rome’s eastern and western frontiers. But his remarkable partnership with Theodora, his unfaltering, almost obsessive attention to administration, his reforming zeal in legislation and his careful, neo-Chalcedonian accommodation of Christianity with the imperial state were great achievements alongside the rebuilding of his capital.
That legal framework and those religious reforms influenced Europe for centuries. Montesquieu and Gibbon were not fans, perhaps too heavily influenced by the historian Procopius, and the Enlightenment’s rejection of organised religion. But, as Sarris concludes, Justinian’s ultimate legacy was ‘a model of statecraft to which future Byzantine emperors, along with medieval kings, Muslim caliphs and Ottoman sultans would come to aspire’.
This is a substantial biography, readable, well-balanced and thorough. I doubt it will be bettered for a long time.
Sir Michael Fallon
Founder of the Parliamentary Classics Group.