5

Justinian and Reconquest

The reign of Justinian (527–65) deserves treatment in its own right, as one of the most important and also the best-documented periods in late antiquity. It is also a key period for any consideration of the Mediterranean world and of the later Roman empire. Justinian’s codification of the law, achieved within a few years of his accession (Institutes, 533; Digest, 533; Codex Justinianus, 534) gave him a place in Catholic European history as a great Christian legislator, and his reign also saw a dramatic intervention in the west – an attempt by the east, at first spectacularly successful, to recover the lost territories of the western empire. This was the so-called ‘reconquest’, which began with the dispatch of a triumphantly successful expedition against Vandal Africa in 533 under the general Belisarius, and continued for over twenty years of military action and many vicissitudes until the settlement known as the ‘Pragmatic Sanction’ of 554 signalled the hoped-for return of Ostrogothic Italy to Roman rule. But unlike the North African campaign, the war in Italy proved to be costly and difficult, while the security of the Balkans had to be addressed at the same time; moreover, the recovery of North Africa from the Vandals brought with it a need for military, administrative and building investment. While Justinian’s armies were engaged in the west, war was waged simultaneously in the east against the Sasanians. Again, this was at first successful, but then, under the new king Chosroes I, it became far more difficult, and the peace treaty signed in 561 was very costly to Constantinople.

Justinian is also renowned for the building of the present church of St Sophia in Istanbul, and for scores of other churches and fortifications around the empire (even if, as seems to be the case, some attributed to him in contemporary panegyric had been achieved or were already under way under his predecessor Anastasius). His wife Theodora was one of the most famous and notorious of Byzantine empresses; together they had built the church of Sts Sergius and Bacchus in Constantinople and they directed policy together. They are both depicted in the mosaics of San Vitale in Ravenna (547, the year before Theodora’s death) and their names appear on the apse of the church of the monastery on Mt Sinai (later named after St Catherine), built by Justinian and originally dedicated to the Transfiguration. Justinian survived a very serious insurrection (the ‘Nika’ revolt, 532) and a dangerous visitation of plague (541–2). His reign saw a last flowering of Greek and Latin literary composition, within an administrative system that was still that of the late Roman empire. He followed the example of his predecessors in continuing to struggle to achieve church unity, actively intervening in theological debate and summoning the Fifth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in 553. However, he was not successful in his attempts to unify the church, and his reign saw the formation of a separatist church in the east, while as we saw the council was also a failure in the west. Justinian’s later years saw a succession of plots, disillusion and dangerous attacks from new enemies, Huns, Slavs and Avars. Edward Gibbon was not sure whether to count Justinian as the last great Roman emperor or the first of the ‘Greeks’ (by which he meant the Byzantines), and like Constantine Justinian has provoked very different assessments in modern historiography.¹

The Early Years: Justinian’s Codification of the Law

Within only a few months after becoming emperor, Justinian announced to the senate his plan of initiating the vast enterprise of collecting, editing and codifying the whole of previous Roman civil law, a task which was completed within five years, and which resulted in the three works already mentioned, all in Latin: the Codex Justinianus, the Digest and the Institutes, which together made up the Corpus iuris civilis.² For this purpose he set up a commission led by the praetorian prefect John the Cappadocian to collect and edit all imperial constitutions from the reign of Diocletian onwards and including the Codex Theodosianus, as well as all subsequent new laws (Novellae). The new Codex was promulgated with amazing speed in April 529, and reissued in revised form in 534 by a new commission led by the quaestor Tribonian, who was also in charge of producing the Digest, a vast compendium of non-imperial civil law.³ The Institutes, promulgated late in 533, were aimed at law students in Constantinople, Rome and Berytus (Beirut), and also regulated the five years required for legal study. The whole was nothing less than a complete statement of all Roman law, edited and brought up to date for the sixth century – nothing that was not included in these compilations could be cited or had the force of law. Some contemporary sources give an idea of how these books were actually used by students and lawyers in Justinian’s reign, and of the difference their publication had made when compared to the confused body of material that had previously existed.⁴ After their publication, Justinian continued to legislate, issuing new laws, known as Novellae; these were binding on the whole empire, and if addressed to Illyria or Africa they were issued in Latin, whereas those meant for the eastern provinces were in Greek. These were not collected, and soon led to the sort of contradictions and confusion that had existed before the publication of the Corpus.

Justinian’s Corpus was not a Christian compilation as such, but the emperor appealed in it to God and the Trinity, and the legislation was proclaimed in the name of Christ as well as that of Justinian. Some of Justinian’s own legislation did, however, deal with church matters, or show Christian influence, especially in matters of marriage and family. Novel 131 (545) also gave to ecclesiastical canons the force of civil law, which Justinian expected bishops to promulgate, ordering also that copies of the Gospels should be placed in secular courtrooms. He was also concerned that the new compilations should be widely known in the provinces, through the offices of the respective praetorian prefects.

Taken together, Justinian’s codification of the law and his legislative activity were an extraordinary achievement. It was not surprising that he claimed divine aid, or that he used the rhetorical prefaces introducing the new law books and the later Novellae to present the work within the framework of Roman tradition or to justify what he was doing.⁵ It went together with the emperor’s energetic reforms in other spheres – for example, in the administration – and Justinian’s law codes remained, albeit with modifications, the basis of both Byzantine law and much European civil law, so much so that the discovery of Procopius’s scandalous and hitherto unknown Secret History (see below) in the early seventeenth century seemed to shake Justinian’s reputation so severely that it was assumed to be a forgery.

Procopius of Caesarea and Justinian’s Wars

Most of Justinian’s reign is fully and dramatically reported by a major writer, Procopius of Caesarea, who has provided not only a nearly complete military narrative in his eight-book History of the Wars, but also a sensational deconstruction of the same events in his Secret History. The same author’s panegyrical Buildings, in six books, listing and praising the building activity of Justinian, brings a further level of complexity to those attempting to understand Procopius as an author and evaluate his evidence as a historian.⁶ In Procopius’ works we have a body of historical writing in Greek as important and interesting in itself as that of any historian in antiquity and a wealth of detailed information on military matters, topography, finance, buildings, and much else. Procopius was a participant in and eyewitness of some of the campaigns which he describes, and although that certainly does not guarantee his accuracy as a reporter, it does give his writing an immediacy and an authority which strike anyone who reads it. Procopius began as the aide of the general Belisarius, and his accounts of the early campaigns against the Persians in the east reveal an enthusiasm which was to sour later when things went less well. His descriptions of Belisarius’ invasion and reconquest of Vandal Africa, and of his early successes in Italy, are based on his own experience on those campaigns, including missions undertaken together with Belisarius’ wife Antonina. However, after 540 Procopius seems to have stayed in Constantinople, and he became increasingly disappointed with Belisarius and with Justinian. The Secret History fills in the narrative of the early part of the Wars by giving the ‘secret’ and more personal side of what happened in those years, including notoriously salacious and scathing accounts of the two women, Theodora and Antonina. The literary techniques of Procopius’ writings, including the Buildings, have still to be fully unpacked, and not surprisingly his versions have dominated much of the historiography.⁷ Procopius was a major writer, if not one of the first rank; it has recently been argued that he was at heart a pagan or a Neoplatonist,⁸ and there were indeed currents of Neoplatonism in sixth-century Constantinople, as can be seen in the work of John the Lydian and the author of the anonymous treatise on political knowledge (Chapter 6).⁹ However, it is not an easy matter to deduce Procopius’ own religious position from passages in his writings and there are many indications that he largely accepted the Christian assumptions of his day.

Map 5.1 The ‘reconquest’ of Justinian

Justinian’s wars pose many questions, not least whether the emperor himself had any clear intention of ‘reconquering the west’ when he launched the expedition against the Vandals in 533; it is more likely that the spectacular success over the Vandals, after which Belisarius celebrated a magnificent triumph in Constantinople, suggested the possibility of a similar success against the Ostrogoths in Italy. The outcome was in some ways ironic: it led in North Africa after 534 to the establishment of a Greek administration, imposed from Constantinople in the name of Roman restoration, and set up in a province which was traditionally a bastion of Latin-speaking Christianity. Nevertheless, although the Arabs established themselves in North Africa in the mid-seventh century, Carthage itself did not fall until the late 690s.¹⁰ In Italy an equally poignant effect of the long years of war against the Goths by Byzantine armies was the effective destruction of the Roman senate and the departure of many of the remaining Roman aristocratic families to the east, where some of them formed a Latin-speaking colony in Constantinople. Byzantine rule was established in Italy, but a new challenge came almost immediately from the Lombards, and Justinian’s conquests came too late for the eastern empire to do more than maintain a partial presence in southern Gaul and Spain; although there was still a Byzantine presence in Italy until the eleventh century, most of the west was already out of the reach of Constantinople.¹¹ The lack of fortifications in Spain, in sharp contrast to those in Byzantine North Africa, might be attributed to the financial and military difficulties which Justinian had encountered by the 550s. Finally, it might be argued that the cost and the effort of this huge and prolonged military initiative, coinciding as it did with a major plague, continuing and expensive wars against Sasanian Persia and new threats in the Balkans (Chapter 7), actually weakened the eastern government and made it less able to deal with the military challenges of the late sixth and early seventh centuries.

Justinian’s wars are as susceptible to contradictory judgements as the rest of his policies. The emperor himself enunciated high-sounding claims that he was restoring the Roman past while issuing such severe laws against pagans and all other dissidents that they have led one writer to compare him with Stalin.¹² It was Justinian whose laws forbidding pagans to teach had the effect of closing the thousand-year-old Academy at Athens, founded by Plato in the fourth century BC, and who from time to time rounded up suspected pagans among the elite. In contradiction, the same emperor is also often depicted as a patron of letters and has been seen as one who inspired a classicizing artistic renaissance.¹³ These judgements need to be treated with caution. Yet the reign did see a notable amount of literary activity in classical genres and much spectacular imperial art, even if little has survived. Descriptions of the lost decoration of the ceiling in the Chalke entrance to the imperial palace by Procopius, and of Justinian’s funeral vestment and the gold plate used in the palace in a Latin panegyric on the succession of Justin II by the North African writer Corippus, give an idea of this imperial iconography.¹⁴ The last ‘Roman’-style triumph was celebrated in Constantinople in 534 after Belisarius’ victory of the Vandals, when the general led the captive Vandal royal family into the Hippodrome to prostrate themselves before the emperor; Procopius likens the spectacle to the famous earlier triumphs of Titus and Trajan.¹⁵ But Justinian was also an avid theologian who enjoyed debating, even with clerics exiled by his own policies, and who wrote his own highly technical theological treatises.¹⁶ Perhaps because of these contradictions, and like most other strong rulers in history, he aroused violent reactions among contemporaries. For the Chalcedonian church historian Evagrius, writing in Constantinople in the 590s and drawing on Procopius, Justinian ‘fell among thistles and thorns’ when at the end of his life he adopted a Julianist doctrinal position.¹⁷ In his Secret History Procopius condemned him for greed, for ‘bloodlust’, and for overreaching himself, and the fiscal demands of his policies placed a heavy burden on the empire, especially on the wealthy classes. His reign marked the final reassertion of Roman military and imperial traditions aimed at the unification of east and west before the end of classical antiquity, and his legal codification the means whereby Roman law was transmitted and adopted in the European tradition. Yet the idea of reuniting the Mediterranean world under the rule of Constantinople could not succeed in the long term. Many motives were at work in the programme of western reconquest, taken as a whole, but those most commonly expressed and emphasized by contemporaries were the twin aims of imperial restoration and the championing of Christian orthodoxy in the territories now ruled by barbarians. These objectives run through the politics of Justinian’s reign as a whole. In the same way the emperor seemed to be at one and the same time a conservative and an innovator – something which contemporaries found hard to understand or, often, to tolerate.¹⁸

There had been unsuccessful attempts by the eastern empire to dislodge the Vandals in the fifth century (Chapter 1). Their rule seemed well established and was extolled in the Latin poems by local poets collected in what is known as the Latin Anthology, and indeed North Africa remained the home of a vigorous literary culture in Latin.¹⁹ However, the sometimes harsh pressure exerted by the Arian Vandals on the Catholic church and its leaders, combined with the natural desire of the emperor to succeed where others had failed, made them a tempting target. Justinian’s expedition against them in 533 was despatched with a great sense of style. On board the ships was a force of 10,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry, with the general Belisarius and his wife Antonina and the historian Procopius, Belisarius’ right-hand man; they were seen off from Constantinople by the emperor and empress and the patriarch, who said prayers for the expedition’s success. Remembering the ignominious failure of the expedition sent by the Emperor Leo (Chapter 1), nobody had been in favour of the emperor’s idea, says Procopius, and the only one who dared to speak against it to the emperor was his minister John the Cappadocian, whose long speech the historian records. However, a mysterious ‘bishop from the east’ conveniently reported a dream in which God had promised his help, and thus confirmed the emperor’s enthusiasm to proceed.²⁰ Within months, Belisarius was back in Constantinople celebrating a triumph, and Justinian was thinking of Italy, where Belisarius was soon dispatched via Sicily, reaching Italy in the summer of 536. The emperor had a pretext for war in the murder of his protégée Amalasuntha, the daughter of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric and mother of the dead Athalaric, who had misguidedly offered the throne to Theodatus.²¹ Justinian also had good political reasons at home for mounting such an attempt, even against the prudent opinions of his advisers, for he had only recently weathered with extreme difficulty the great riot in Constantinople known as the ‘Nika revolt’ (from the cries of ‘nika’ (‘victory’) by the rioters). During the uprising, the emperor had allegedly only been prevented from fleeing altogether by the resolve of the Empress Theodora, who rallied the imperial party by declaring in ringing tones that she would never flee – ‘empire is a fine shroud’.²² The circus factions (‘Blues’ and ‘Greens’) were prominent in the rioting, and in Procopius’ account of it, and participants in urban violence were all too likely to take up particular grievances; the factions reappear as players in the fall of the Emperor Maurice and the unrest in eastern cities which led to the overthrow of Phocas in the early seventh century (Chapter 9, and for urban violence, see Chapter 7). The hippodrome in Constantinople was the epicentre of the ‘Nika’ revolt, and it was here where imperial troops went in, led by Belisarius, and killed many of the crowd. The rioters voiced their demands in the form of shouting and acclamations addressed to the imperial box, and the flavour of this chanting is vividly conveyed in the seventh-century Chronicon Paschale.²³

The immediate danger to the regime was averted, though only at the price of much destruction and great loss of life. Serious damage had been done to the official areas in the centre of Constantinople, including the church of St Sophia, and this was now rebuilt on a grand scale; the church as we see it today was rededicated in 535. Procopius claims that it was also felt that since the situation on the eastern front against Persia was satisfactory after the treaty of 533, a successful expedition might restore the emperor’s reputation. This impression is reinforced by Procopius’ emphasis on the opposition to Justinian’s scheme, which he shared, and the role played in his narrative at this point by prophetic dreams – he even claims to have had a dream himself of Belisarius’ future success. Belisarius’ fleet landed at Ras Kapoudia on the east coast of Tunisia, and learned that Gelimer, who had deposed the relatively pro-Roman Hilderic in 530, was absent from Carthage. By September Belisarius had defeated the Vandal army outside Carthage and in a sensational move, entered the city, where, according to Procopius, who was there, he feasted in the palace and seated himself on Gelimer’s throne.²⁴ A further victory in December resulted in Gelimer’s surrender; in traditional Roman style, Justinian had already taken the victory titles of Vandalicus and Africanus.²⁵ This extraordinarily easy success, combined with the murder of Amalasuntha, made similar action against the Goths in Italy seem equally feasible. The reforming laws of this period have an optimistic and energetic tone which fits Justinian’s confident expectations of imperial success.²⁶ He was not to know that the Italian campaigns would drag on for nearly twenty years, or that the price of the final settlement in AD 554 would be a devastated Italy.

The Eastern Provinces and Peace with Persia

Whatever the original intention may have been, ideas and policies changed with changing circumstances, and the hopeful beginning soon met with problems. In the east the Sasanians still presented a major military problem, and this lasted throughout the period of the western campaigns and beyond, passing in turn to Justinian’s successors (Chapter 9). The story of Justinian’s wars with Persia dramatically illustrates the actual lack of the necessary resources to pursue major campaigns in the eastern frontier area, or even to resist Persian raids, while simultaneously campaigning elsewhere, as well as the enormous cost to the eastern empire of securing temporary peace.

The two powers had remained in competition over the border territory and its population since the Sasanians first came to power in the third century.²⁷ Now, a series of not-so-glorious campaigns on the Mesopotamian frontier in the first years of Justinian’s reign, as a result of which the future historian Procopius first became the intimate of Belisarius, came to a temporary end in 531 with the death of the Persian king Cavadh and the accession of Chosroes I. This is the point at which, if we believe Agathias, seven philosophers from the Academy at Athens, who had left after Justinian’s law of 529, made their way to Ctesiphon in the hope that Chosroes would prove a Platonic philosopher-king. They found that ‘those in authority were overbearing and vainglorious’ and that the young king’s much-vaunted acquaintance with philosophy was ‘utterly superficial’, and soon left Persia.²⁸ Procopius’ version of these early campaigns in the east is biased towards Belisarius, as can be seen from the parallel account in the Chronicle of John Malalas.²⁹ A major treaty between the two powers was concluded in 533; the terms included a payment by Byzantium of 11,000 lb of gold, but apart from forcing a certain degree of retreat on both sides, left things essentially unchanged. It was not likely that a strong ruler such as Chosroes I, who was fully a match for Justinian, would rest content with this. Moreover, his timing was fatal for the Byzantines; after making hostile noises for some time, he invaded Roman territory again in 540, the very year when Belisarius was recalled from Italy. The second Persian war, in the 540s, was a very different affair from the first. The lack of an adequate Roman defence system is painfully obvious in the ease with which the Persian armies could approach towns such as Edessa and Apamea in Mesopotamia and Syria, and extort large payments of silver. The local bishops were the unfortunate middle-men in these transactions; the Persians took and burnt Beroea (Aleppo) while its bishop, Megas, was away appealing to the Roman command at Antioch for assistance, only to find that Justinian had given orders for no payments to be made for the safety of eastern cities, and that Ephraem, patriarch of Antioch, was under suspicion of being willing to hand over his city to the Persians. Returning to Beroea, the hapless Megas expostulated with Chosroes, but let out that he had received no funds for the safety of Antioch, whereupon the Persian king at once made for Antioch.³⁰ Those citizens who could, immediately left, and Chosroes besieged and sacked Antioch, second city of the eastern empire, a catastrophe which provoked Procopius to exclaim:

I shudder when I describe so great a disaster, and pass it on to be Remembered by future generations, and I do not know what God’s will could be in raising up the affairs of a man or a place, and then casting them down and wiping them out for no apparent reason.

(Wars II.10.4)

We have a telling glimpse of the real situation at Antioch before the Persian siege when we see the patriarch, local bishops and Byzantine envoys from Constantinople all in urgent conference about what best to do. Since the Persians demanded payments in silver, the local population did its best to rid itself of as much silver as possible before they arrived. When the Persians did start the siege, the population was unwise enough to indulge in taunting the enemy from the walls, only to be subjected to a massacre when the Persians entered the city.³¹ After this example, Chosroes was naturally able to ask an even higher price in silver for the safety of other cities such as Apamea, Chalcis and Edessa.

The early 540s also saw one of the greatest plagues in history. The disease, usually thought to be a form of bubonic plague, struck Constantinople and the eastern provinces in AD 542, having first struck in Egypt the year before, and is vividly described by Procopius, who was an eyewitness;³² the emperor himself fell ill but recovered. Even allowing for exaggeration in the literary sources (the plague is also described by the Syriac church historian John of Ephesus), the level of casualties was clearly extremely high, perhaps approaching that of the Black Death. The church historian Evagrius, who was a child at the time, movingly describes its effects at Antioch, which fell heavily on his own family. The plague, he says, fell upon the east two years after the sack of Antioch, thus in 542, and was in some respects, though not all, similar to the Athenian plague of 430 BC described by Thucydides:

I too, the writer of this history … was afflicted in the early stages of the plague with the so-called buboes, while I was still just a schoolboy. In the various attacks of the plague many of my children died, as well as my wife and other members of my family, servants and country people, for the attacks returned up to my own day, as it were in cyclic progression. I lost my daughter, as well as the earlier ones, and her child, two years before the time of writing, when I was in my fifth-eighth year, the plague having returned four times to Antioch and this being the fourth attack in the cycle.

(Evagrius, HE IV.29)

The sixth-century plague poses considerable problems for historians, in that despite the detailed accounts in literary sources, it is very hard to demonstrate directly from archaeological evidence (see Chapter 7). However, it cannot but have had a serious effect; the death toll had an immediate effect on imperial tax revenues and military manpower clearly apparent in subsequent legislation to recover taxes from the estates of those who had died intestate,³³ and in the great difficulties now experienced in sustaining the war on two fronts simultaneously.³⁴ The plague spread widely and struck in successive waves in both parts of the empire. However, historians differ greatly as to its probable effects or mortality rate, and the identification with bubonic plague, largely a retrojection from the Black Death, has been challenged; faced with the problems surrounding its interpretation, Peregrine Horden aptly describes the problem as ‘a [historiographical] black hole at the centre of the Age of Justinian’.³⁵

Despite the plague, a large Byzantine army gathered to defend Armenia in 543, but thanks to confusion and mismanagement on the Byzantine side a small force of Persians was able to kill the general Narses and inflict a heavy defeat at the fortress of Anglon near Dvin.³⁶ Eventually a five-year treaty was concluded in 545 at a cost to the empire of 2,000 lbs of gold. Even during this period, operations continued between the Arab allies of Byzantium and Persia, the Ghassanids and the Lakhmids, and a substantial Byzantine force, having previously laid siege to Petra in Lazica, which was held by the Persians, was able to destroy the Persian forces in Lazica twice in the course of the year 549. A further five-year treaty was concluded in 551 in Constantinople, the empire paying on this occasion 2,600 lbs of gold; but hostilities dragged on in Lazica, where a complex local situation exacerbated the difficulties caused by the rival powers. By 561, however, both sides had reasons for concluding a more solid peace, and the end of that year saw a fifty-years’ peace agreed at Dara between Justinian’s Master of Offices, Peter the Patrician, and the Persian ambassador Yesdegusnaph, with the Persians renouncing their claims to Lazica, but exacting from the empire the large annual sum of 30,000 gold nomismata, of which ten years’ instalments would be paid in advance in two instalments. Existing frontiers were confirmed and trade across the borders was limited to those cities where there were customs facilities. A long and detailed account of the negotiations, which provides interesting information about contemporary diplomacy, and a complete text of the treaty itself, is given by the historian Menander Protector, who also records the letters sent by both rulers to ratify what had been agreed by their envoys. The letter of ratification from the Roman Emperor, bearing the usual superscription, is well known to us. The letter from the Persian king was written in Persian, and Menander provides a Greek translation:

‘The divine, good, father of peace, ancient Khosro, king of kings, fortunate, pious and beneficent, to whom the gods have given great fortune and a great kingdom, giant of giants, formed in the image of the gods, to Justinian Caesar, our brother.’ Such was the superscription, while the meaning of the text was as follows (I use a word-for-word translation, a procedure I felt absolutely necessary lest, if I changed the phraseology, I be suspected of distorting something of the truth).

(fr. 6.1 Blockley, Menander the Guardsman, lines 175–87)

Among the clauses agreed was one relating to the movements of the Arab groups allied to each side, who were now a more and more important factor in the politics and settlement patterns in the east (Chapter 8), and another that guaranteed the status of the many Christians in Persia.³⁷

The War in Italy

The continuous drain of resources, manpower and indeed gold on such a large scale to the east helps to put the ‘reconquest’ of the west into a more realistic perspective. One of the striking features about the conduct of the campaigns is the small number of troops dispatched from Constantinople, which in turn evoked constant complaints from the generals that they were being starved of resources. Belisarius, for instance, found himself defending Rome with 5,000 men against a Gothic force of possibly 20,000. It is true that the Byzantine cavalry, as mounted archers, were more mobile and thus had an advantage over the Goths, who were armed with spears and swords; but their small numbers constituted a major problem, especially in the early 540s after Belisarius’ recall to Constantinople, and Totila’s accession as king of the Goths in 541. Sieges played a major role in Ostrogothic success in these years, and the Gothic superiority in numbers gave them the capacity to starve out the inhabitants of the towns, the resulting loss of Byzantine control leading to Belisarius’ second Italian expedition in 544.³⁸ Even then he was consistently left without enough troops to give battle effectively, as Procopius bitterly reports:

When he arrived in Italy, there was not a single day when things went right for him, because the hand of God was unmistakably against him … in spite of five years’ effort he never once succeeded in disembarking on any part of the coast, unless there was a fortress handy: the whole of that time he sailed about, trying one landing-place after another.

(Secret History 4.42; 5.1)

There were other factors that delayed a final victory, including, it would seem, the emperor’s own suspicions of his generals, especially Belisarius. Though in fact he remained entirely loyal to Justinian, Belisarius was often recalled, and, if we believe the disappointed Procopius, even after the inopportune death in 550 of Germanus, the newly appointed general for the Italian campaign, he was kept in Constantinople doing nothing.³⁹ After his return in 549, and the fall and occupation of Rome for the second time by Totila, it had taken the latter’s attack on Sicily and lobbying by prominent Italians now living in Constantinople to persuade Justinian to pursue the war with real force.⁴⁰ That the eunuch Narses was able to win the final battles, beginning with a naval battle in 551, owed much to his having insisted on being given enough resources to raise sufficient troops and pay the soldiers’ arrears. In the encounter at Busta Gallorum (552), the Byzantines for once outnumbered the Goths, whose weakness in archery again told against them. The Gothic king Totila was fatally wounded in this battle, before which he performed a dramatic war-dance,

wearing armour plentifully covered with gold, and the decoration on his cheek-plates as well as on his helmet and spear was of purple – indeed a wonderful display of regal splendour.

(Proc., Wars VIII.31.18)

A few months later his successor Teias was also defeated in battle at Mons Lactarius. But even before this, Procopius’ account had become more and more disillusioned about Justinian and imperial policy generally, and he left the closing stages of the war to be told by his successor Agathias in the early 570s.⁴¹

In taking on the task of reconquering Italy, Justinian clearly underestimated the power of the Ostrogoths to mount a long-term and serious resistance, as well as the consequent costs to the empire of keeping up the military effort year after year. He may have thought in terms of an offensive as short term as Belisarius’ spectacular campaign against the Vandals. No one could have foreseen the plague of 541 or its drastic impact on the capital, and the relative quiet of the situation on the eastern frontier at the start of the Italian campaign was to prove illusory. Once conquered, North Africa, and eventually Italy, each required a new administrative organization – also costly. There was investment in religious structures, as with the large pilgrimage complex at Bir Ftouha in Carthage, dated to the 540s,⁴² and in the case of Africa, this also meant a massive investment of men and resources for the province’s defence, which added to the difficulty of carrying on the wars elsewhere. But in addition to all these factors, Justinian himself turned out to be an uncertain commander, suspicious of his subordinates and jealous of allowing them even the forces they needed for the task in hand.

Moreover, the military problems went hand in hand with those of maintaining religious unity. The closing stages of the Gothic war in the 540s and early 550s coincided with a tense period in ecclesiastical politics which led up to the Fifth Ecumenical Council held in Constantinople in 553–54, by which Justinian hoped to find a formula acceptable both to the anti-Chalcedonians in the east and to the church of Rome. Passions ran very high on all sides. The Latin-speaking North African bishops, who were strongly on the side of Rome and against the emperor, went to Constantinople en masse, while Pope Vigilius, still in the capital, spent months under virtual house arrest, and for a long time refused to attend the council altogether, only recanting in its final stages.⁴³ The crisis followed Justinian’s own religious initiative in 543, known as the affair of the Three Chapters, because of his decree ordering the condemnation of the works of three earlier dyophysite theologians (Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrrhus and Ibas of Edessa), and was raging throughout the later 540s, just when the war in the east and in Italy was going badly.⁴⁴ The emperor was again attempting to find a formula acceptable to the easterners,⁴⁵ but his decree roused strong opposition from the North Africans (see below) and in Italy. Pope Vigilius was summoned to Constantinople, but made slow progress and arrived only in the winter of 546–47; under pressure, he condemned the Three Chapters in 548 but then withdrew his condemnation and agreed to a new council in Constantinople. These upheavals coincided with the general political difficulties which Justinian was experiencing, and which are graphically recorded in book VII of Procopius’s Wars. Finally the attitudes of the Roman population in Italy to Justinian’s military intervention were by no means straightforward. Members of the senatorial class found their lands devastated by the war and their personal safety threatened, especially by the repeated sieges of Rome. After 540 a number of them, including Cassiodorus, found their way to Constantinople, where their presence constituted an important lobby and added to the number of Latin-speakers in the capital. The eastern government represented the Italian war as a war of liberation, but it was not obvious that it was regarded in the same way by the Romans in Italy themselves. When the war finally ended, the formerly prosperous Italy was left in a dire condition.⁴⁶

Given all these problems and adverse factors, it is less surprising that the military campaigns ran into difficulties than that they could actually be sustained for so long; this can only be explained in terms of the generally prosperous and healthy condition of the eastern empire when Justinian came to the throne in the early sixth century. On the other hand, as we shall see, indicators of urban change begin to become apparent from the end of Justinian’s reign (Chapters 7 and 8); if his ambitious programme of military reconquest and imperial reconstruction was not actually a contributory factor in that process, it certainly added to these difficulties.

The Cost of Reconquest: North Africa

The speedy capture of North Africa from the Vandals provides a striking example of the continuing cost of conquest after the initial fighting was over. Already in April 534, before Belisarius’ return, Justinian had confidently legislated for the future civil and military government of the newly reconquered territory.⁴⁷ Africa was placed under a praetorian prefect with seven provinces and soon had its own magister militum. The law looked back to the days of Roman rule in Africa, and showed no realization of the current importance of the local tribal groups, who were relegated to the role of enemies.⁴⁸ In Constantinople much was made of the victory. In a grandiose imitation of earlier Roman triumphs, Gelimer, the last Vandal king, was taken to Constantinople to walk in chains in Belisarius’ procession, while Belisarius himself walked to the Hippodrome and prostrated himself before Justinian, who sat in the imperial box wearing the special triumphal garment known as the loros, to underline the lesson that victory belonged to the emperor, albeit a civilian one. But the next two decades were to prove much more difficult than had been anticipated. A new and more recalcitrant military threat immediately presented itself from the Berber tribes (Mauri), unforeseen by the easterners and conspicuously lacking in Procopius’ narrative of the early stages of the reconquest, as well as from a mutiny in the Byzantine army; and while the eunuch general Solomon, and then John Troglita, fought successful, if hard, campaigns, the problem of dealing with hostile Berbers did not go away.⁴⁹ John of Biclar, a well-informed chronicler who lived in Constantinople, records what was evidently a dangerous situation in the 560s and early 570s, and there was more fighting in the 580s and 590s.⁵⁰ The condition of Africa is painted in gloomy terms in the 560s by the African poet Corippus who had come to Constantinople and composed a Latin panegyric on the accession of Justinian’s successor, Justin II (565–78); on the whole, however, the province seems to have attained a reasonable degree of peace and prosperity by the later sixth century, and the expedition which was to overthrow Phocas in 609–10 and put Heraclius on the throne in Constantinople was dispatched from Carthage.

Africa was rich and fertile; the reconquest made its grain available for Constantinople, and its oil production reached a height in the seventh century, when according to later Arabic sources it was immensely rich. Justinian’s regulatory law laid down provisions for a civil administration of 750 persons (staffed from the east), whose salaries amounted to over 17,500 solidi per year. In addition there was the cost of the military hierarchy, perhaps 500 strong, and the army itself.⁵¹ Added to this regular expenditure was the special cost of defensive and other building works; these were necessary after a century of Vandal rule and in order to secure the reconquest. The imposition of immediate taxation was obviously a priority, as Procopius also recognized.⁵² Thus having got rid of the Vandals, with whom many will have made a reasonable accommodation, the ‘Roman’ inhabitants, still Latin-speaking and with their religious loyalties centred on Rome, found themselves faced not only with heavy taxes and military rule, but with a situation in which the army billeted in their towns was by no means always able to defend them against an increasing threat of Berber raids. If Procopius’ picture of Africa in the Wars is somewhat mixed, that in the Secret History is one of unrelieved gloom:

Libya, for instance, in spite of its enormous size, has been laid so utterly waste that however far one went it would be a remarkable achievement to find a single person there.

(Secret History 18)

In addition to their military and economic impositions, the newcomers used Greek instead of Latin, as the many surviving official seals make clear. By the mid-seventh century a formal debate in Carthage between the Monothelite patriarch Pyrrhus of Constantinople and Maximus Confessor was held in Greek (Chapter 9). Justinian had embarked on the war against the Vandals under the banner of restoring orthodoxy, yet very soon after the conquest the emperor in Constantinople began imposing a religious policy which the African church, traditionally linked with the church of Rome, found totally unacceptable. Among the leading African bishops who protested personally and in writing against Justinian’s condemnation of the Three Chapters were Facundus of Hermiane and Primasius of Hadrumetum. After holding their own council at Carthage in 550, they were summoned to Constantinople, where they carried on their opposition and became the targets of imperial sanctions. Reparatus of Carthage was eventually deposed along with many others, and the chronicler Victor of Tunnuna, himself imprisoned for opposition to Justinianic policy, later recorded the imprisonment and poor treatment of African bishops in Constantinople. Thus the price of reconquest was high on all sides, and both the conquering power and the local populations got more than they had bargained for.⁵³ Africa was atypical, however, in that in the late sixth century, despite all this, and despite the hard fighting which ensued between the Byzantine army and the Berbers, it eventually did well, thanks to local factors – its own bountiful natural resources, the speed of the original conquest, which spared it from the lengthy war and frequent sieges which so devastated Italy, and perhaps also the situation under Vandal rule, which seems to have been better than was once thought and to have profited in turn from the prosperous condition of the late Roman province of North Africa. The real puzzle of Byzantine Africa lies in the lack of literary or documentary source material for the more peaceful second half of the sixth century, and certainly in the seventh, which makes a closer assessment of the economic and social effect of Byzantine reconquest extremely difficult. Yet the newly conquered province was not subject to the kind of invasion and consequent fragmentation experienced by Italy, or for example Greece, where Justinian’s defence system failed to halt the Slav incursions of the late sixth century. Eastern cults arrived and many new Christian sanctuaries were built and others modified.⁵⁴ In the seventh century, Africa had remained safe from Persian conquest, and Maximus Confessor and other monks made their base near Carthage. Efforts were also made to convert Berber tribes, even in the sub-Sahara.⁵⁵ Arab armies arrived in Africa in the mid-seventh century and a new Islamic settlement was founded as Kairouan, but North Africa remained in the main a Byzantine province for much longer than Egypt.⁵⁶ Coin hoards indicate that the government in Constantinople was still able to invest in North Africa in the second half of the seventh century, and the eventual fall of Carthage to the Arabs came only in the 690s.

Fortifications and Other Buildings

Even if some of the countless fortifications claimed for Justinian belong more probably to the reign of Anastasius, Justinian was a great builder. To judge from Procopius’ account, much of the emperor’s extensive building programme in the provinces was dedicated to defence. However, its overall scope and impact are hard to assess for a variety of reasons. The first has to do with the fact that our main literary source is Procopius’ Buildings, written explicitly to praise Justinian, which makes extravagant claims for the emperor’s achievements.⁵⁷ Since the work is also incomplete as a record (it omits Italy entirely and only gives lists of fortifications for the Balkans in book IV), and since individual statements often cannot be checked, this is a difficult text on which to base a fair assessment, especially as in those places where checking is possible from archaeological or other evidence Procopius is quite often found wanting (Chapter 7).⁵⁸ In addition, especially in the case of the forts and fortified sites in the northern provinces, many sites remain unexcavated, or, if they have been excavated, there is nothing in the material remains (for example, inscriptions or coins) by which they can be securely dated. It may well be that substantial parts of the programme which Procopius ascribes to Justinian were actually begun by Anastasius, and indeed it is entirely in the nature of panegyric to seem to claim the credit for building anew when in fact the work in question is a work of restoration. But even if Justinian was the restorer rather than the initiator, the sheer amount of building suggested by Procopius was enormous, implying capital investment in military installations on a massive scale.

How strategic or effective it was in terms of defence is another matter. Extensive fortifications were built in North Africa, but many served the purpose of housing troops for supply purposes rather than actual defence, and they were quite often modest in size. The building works in North Africa are described in some detail by Procopius in book VI of the Buildings and have been thoroughly studied.⁵⁹ However Procopius’s narrative puts them in a wider context of building, and also emphasizes the importance of church building for Justinian’s policy. His account of the building work in Carthage⁶⁰ is useful but incomplete, and one must remember that he himself left Africa at the same time as Belisarius, and so far as we know never returned. His sources for many of the building works he describes are indeed still unclear. When writing of Palestine in book V, he is, not surprisingly, a good guide, as a native of Caesarea, and his accuracy was spectacularly confirmed by the discovery of the Nea church in Jerusalem, dedicated to the Virgin.⁶¹ As for the position of the walled monastery which still stands at the foot of Mt Sinai, where Moses saw God, it was built over the traditional site of the burning bush and in a location already inhabited by monks and hermits. Its location clearly shows a diplomatic and religious function, though Procopius claims that it was built to keep Saracen invaders from entering the province of Palestine.⁶² This it could hardly do, positioned as it is in a cleft between two mountainous peaks; on the other hand, the Justinianic walls which surrounded the monastery remain one of its most striking features.⁶³ Justinian’s motives in his buildings were religious as well as military; the site of the burning bush was enclosed within its walls, and the apse of the monastic church, built by a local architect from Aila and with an inscription on its roof beams which commemorates the death of Theodora in 548, is decorated with an impressive mosaic on the theme of the Transfiguration.⁶⁴ But defence was certainly vitally important in Justinian’s overall programme and in some areas his building work took the form of long walls, as at Thermopylae and the Isthmus of Greece.⁶⁵ Elsewhere it was a question of fortified refuges or, less often, actual fortresses.

Figure 5.2 The walls of the monastery of St Catherine at the foot of Mt Sinai, built by Justinian and described by Procopius. The fine mosaic in the apse of its church depicts the Transfiguration; the dedication to St Catherine dates from considerably later.

Ambitious as it was, the scheme was unable to keep out the Huns from threatening Greece and even Constantinople in 558–9, when the aged Belisarius was recalled to confront them. Yet even allowing for exaggeration, Justinian’s building programme represents an extraordinary outlay of resources, even during the years of maximum military effort. Procopius makes it clear time and time again that in the building programme, defensive and religious aims went hand in hand. There were also works of social welfare such as hospitals and hospices, and churches were built as often as forts, especially in newly reconquered territory, where they could serve as demonstrations of Roman power. Together with Justinian’s military policy went a determined missionary activity. This can be seen in several areas; for instance, in Nubia and in the case of King Tzath of Lazica, whose conversion was the price of clientship; as Garth Fowden has shown, the eastern Mediterranean became a network of Christian client states.⁶⁶ Justinian was even willing to entrust the conversion of pagans in Asia Minor to a Syriac-speaking non-Chalcedonian, John of Ephesus. Even in the case of the provinces which were subject to military offensives, the wars were given the appearance of crusades undertaken to restore orthodoxy, although the reality of the situation often looked different when the local Roman population was faced with the choice between the local Arian rulers to whom they had become accustomed and the harsh actuality of the Byzantine intervention.

The Impact of War

For the eastern empire the drain in gold, men and other resources as a result of Justinian’s wars was immense, especially when combined with the similar demands made on imperial funds by the war against Persia and the expensive treaties it entailed. There was a cost in public opinion too: the early euphoria could hardly be maintained, and as things became difficult, whatever the reason, the emperor lost popularity. Two works in particular reflect the doubts and criticisms:⁶⁷ Procopius’ Secret History, with its violent tirades against Justinian and Theodora (who died in 548) and its catalogue of complaints and accusations against the abuses which Procopius claims had taken place; and John the Lydian’s De Magistratibus, where an attempt is made to save the emperor’s reputation by blaming everything on his ministers, especially the praetorian prefect, John the Cappadocian:

Our emperor, gentlest of men, knew nothing of these affairs because everyone, though abused by the Cappadocian’s unrestricted exercise of power, spoke in defence of that wicked man. … Only the emperor’s wife and helpmeet, who was most vigilant in her sympathy towards those suffering injustice, found it intolerable to ignore the destruction of the state. … Naturally, then, the emperor, being a good man though slow to requite evil, was in the grip of a baffling situation.

(De Mag. III.69, from Maas, John Lydus, 95)

Blame was also attached to Justinian’s ministers by Procopius, but his account of the eventual fall of John the Cappadocian spares neither Justinian nor Theodora, who emerges as both vindictive and manipulative.⁶⁸ The social structures of sixth-century cities were also conducive to disturbances.⁶⁹ Justinian was indeed hesitant, especially in his handling of his ministers and generals, but it is only with hindsight that we see so clearly that the changes already taking place in the Mediterranean world would combine with the sheer size of the endeavour to prevent his military successes from lasting. Peace with Persia in 561 was bought at a high price, and new invaders in the shape of Lombards, Huns, Avars and Slavs soon reached Italy (568) and the Balkans. Justinian’s new flagship city of Justiniana Prima (usually identified withČaričin Grad, south of Niš) was merely one out of many sites in the Balkans that soon sank into obscurity (Chapter 7). Much of Italy was soon lost to the kingdom of the Lombards, and Byzantine control reduced to the exarchate of Ravenna and the duchy of Rome, which facilitated the development of a territorially based papacy.⁷⁰ On the other hand, the coastal territories gained by the expedition sent to Spain in 552 under the aged patrician Liberius, to help the pretender Athanagild, were in the main kept by Byzantium until 624 and their defence put under a magister militum appointed by Constantinople.⁷¹

Leaving aside North Africa, the overall result of the ‘reconquest’ of the western provinces was that the eastern empire regained and retained a small portion of Italy and a much smaller portion of Spain during the ensuing period when the early medieval western kingdoms were taking shape. In itself this was a significant achievement. But in Italy the effects of the Gothic wars were destructive in the extreme. A law known as the ‘Pragmatic Sanction’ imposed a settlement on the model of that given to North Africa twenty years before. Pope Pelagius I (556–61), already alienated by Justinian’s religious policies, complained in his letters that agriculture was devastated; in addition, the senatorial aristocracy had had its fortunes undermined if not destroyed, and many members had left for the east, while the senate itself collapsed as an institution and many towns, including Rome, suffered greatly during the hostilities.⁷² Even if Italy’s capacity for recovery is often underestimated, Ravenna especially showing evidence of growth and vitality,⁷³ profound underlying changes in urban structure, municipal organization and settlement patterns were already under way. The future Pope Gregory I spent some years in Constantinople in the 580s, where he established excellent relations with the family of the Emperor Maurice and the Italian senatorial exiles in the eastern capital, which, as his letters show, survived into his tenure of the papacy. But, as T.S. Brown points out, this group suffered severely from the attack made on the supporters of Maurice by Phocas (602– 10), and with it, valuable connections between Constantinople and Italy were broken. Another factor which had made for difficulty in relations with Constantinople was the opposition of the Roman church to the Three Chapters decree and the Fifth Ecumenical Council of 553–4.⁷⁴ This was to continue. In the seventh century, too, despite the appointment of easterners to the papacy, Rome was the centre of opposition to the imperial policy of Monotheletism, and attracted African as well as eastern participants to the Lateran Synod held there which condemned the policy in 649 (Chapter 9). The African church, equally opposed to Constantinople, looked to Rome throughout this period as its natural ally. The church in Italy also gained economically and in other ways from the political changes in the later sixth century, in effect stepping into the shoes of the old senatorial aristocracy and acquiring both wealth and political influence. In this way, Justinian’s own ecclesiastical policies, though aimed at the near-impossible task of achieving unity between the eastern and western churches, in practice proved a major difficulty in Byzantine relations with Rome and contributed to the growth in power of the Roman church and eventually the papacy.

In considering the effects of the reconquest policy on the provinces and on the empire generally, three factors need to be remembered: first, the immediate effects of war and of the subsequent administrative, economic and military settlements; second, Justinian’s own energetic interventions in religious policy, which so far as the western provinces were concerned cut across the process of reunification; and third, the backdrop of urban and rural change which can be perceived in all areas throughout the period (Chapter 7). As for the eastern provinces, here too, Justinian failed to conciliate eastern religious feeling – indeed, it was his unsuccessful attempts to do so which led to the alienation in the western church and part of the east after the Fifth Council. In the 540s, even as non-Chalcedonian exiles were housed in the palace at Constantinople, Jacob Bar’adai was made bishop of Edessa and began ordaining Miaphysite clergy in the east, a fateful step which thus created a dual hierarchy in the east, especially Syria and Mesopotamia, and allowed the development of the Syrian orthodox or Jacobite church, so named after Jacob himself (Chapter 8).

Justinian as Emperor

Justinian’s reign was extraordinary. Not only did it last for thirty-eight years (527–65), but it was also commonly agreed that he had been the effective ruler during the reign of his uncle Justin I (518– 27).⁷⁵ Justinian’s own reign opened with a grand imperial gesture, the idea of codifying the whole of previous Roman law; amazingly, the work was completed in record time; the situation on the eastern frontier looked hopeful and the trauma of the Nika revolt seemed to have been overcome by the building of St Sophia and Belisarius’ astonishingly successful expedition against the Vandals. Italy followed as the next imperialist objective, and a high point was reached with Belisarius’ entry into Rome in AD 540. Whatever the mortality rate of the plague of 541–2, which even struck the emperor, the epidemic came as a severe blow. The population of Constantinople certainly suffered a sudden drop, and the losses among the rural population in the eastern provinces must have been serious, with adverse short-term consequences for the imperial tax revenues. Procopius says of the effects that when pestilence swept through the whole known world and notably the Roman empire, wiping out most of the agricultural community and of necessity leaving a trail of desolation in its wake, Justinian showed no mercy towards the ruined free-holders. Even then, according to Procopius, he did not refrain from demanding the annual payment of tax, not only the amount at which he assessed each individual, but also the amount for which his deceased neighbours were liable.⁷⁶

The ensuing phases of both the Italian and the Persian campaigns were difficult, and command problems were added to those of supply and manpower. However, it is necessary to correct for the fact that Procopius, with his traditional mentality, tends to ascribe all difficulties to personal or class motives. Such criticisms show themselves most sharply in the Secret History, but they also permeate the Wars.⁷⁷ The fall of John the Cappadocian came in 541, but Procopius also accuses Peter Barsymes, who became praetorian prefect early in 543 and thus had major financial responsibility for provincial taxation and army supply and maintenance. At a deeper level lies the question of Justinian’s own responsibility for the policies adopted during his reign. In this case while Procopius and other contemporary sources certainly personalize the reign in a dramatic way, it does seem that one can recognize in the real Justinian the untiring and sleepless emperor portrayed in the Secret History.

Figure 5.3 The fortress at Zenobia (Halabiye) on the Euphrates

As the reign drew on, with the death of the Empress Theodora in 548, the spectacular imperial initiatives of the early years gave way to other concerns, such as religious unity and the building of a longer-lasting peace with Persia. The 540s were dominated in Constantinople by the emperor’s religious policies, but, as we have seen, the Fifth Council, which met in Constantinople and spent much time and effort in trying to get the support of the unfortunate Vigilius, was received negatively in both east and west. Justinian’s later years were gloomy by comparison with the early part of the reign, with new barbarian threats and the emperor himself turning more and more to theological speculation. In his last years he made yet another unsuccessful attempt at conciliation by adopting the Julianist formula according to which Christ’s body (being divine) was incorruptible, an old subject of controversy relating to the deeper question of the relation of God to matter in the Incarnation which was to go on to be a central issue throughout the seventh century (Chapter 9). Justinian’s edict on the subject (564) resulted in the deposition of the patriarch of Antioch, who stood up to the emperor, and the exile of Eutychius, the patriarch of Constantinople, whose appointment the emperor had himself contrived in order to have an amenable patriarch in place at the Fifth Ecumenical Council. Eutychius was replaced by the ultra-orthodox John Scholasticus, a great supporter of Justinian’s orthodox nephew and successor, Justin II, but Justinian’s action and Eutychius’ deposition left many loose ends, and the latter was briefly reinstated after the death of John Scholasticus in 575.⁷⁸

Events and policies during the reign, and their effects, were thus deeply contradictory, as were the verdicts of contemporaries; we have unusually abundant literary sources, which portray Justinian both as a great and strong emperor and as a dangerous reformer. As we have seen, Procopius does both, and so, in milder tones, does John the Lydian, who had been an official in the praetorian prefecture and knew what he was talking about. The deacon Agapetus’ eulogizing Advice to the Emperor, Paul the Silentiary’s equally fulsome Description of Hagia Sophia and the anonymous and ambivalent Dialogue on Political Science represent the range of contemporary responses.⁷⁹ Justinian has featured in modern works as a Christian humanist, as the giver of Roman law to Christian Europe, as an intolerant and authoritarian persecutor of pagans and heretics and (anachronistically) as a prototype of totalitarian rule. All these judgements suffer from the tendency to confuse the man himself with the events of his reign, which is reinforced by the temptation to read off the personalities of Justinian and Theodora from two very striking surviving works: the Secret History of Procopius and the well-known mosaics of Justinian and Theodora in the church of San Vitale at Ravenna – especially as the rather podgy appearance of Justinian and the distant look of Theodora in the mosaics both seem to fit Procopius’ descriptions of the emperor and empress:

[Justinian] showed himself approachable and affable to those with whom he came into contact; not a single person found himself denied access to the Emperor, and even those who broke the rules by the way they stood or spoke in his presence never incurred his wrath … with a friendly expression on his face and without raising an eyebrow, in a gentle voice he would order tens of thousands of quite innocent persons to be put to death, cities to be razed to the ground, and all their possessions to be confiscated for the Treasury.

(Secret History 13.1–2)

To her bodily needs she [Theodora] devoted quite unnecessary attention, though never enough to satisfy herself. She was in a great hurry to get into her bath, and very unwilling to get out again. When she had finished her ablutions she would go down to breakfast, and after a light breakfast she would take a rest. But at lunch and supper she indulged her taste for every kind of food and drink. Again and again she would sleep for hours on end, by day until nightfall and by night till sunrise.

(ibid., 15.6–8)

We also have seem to have utterances from Justinian himself, who was a great legislator and author of theological treatises. But even if the contribution of Justinian himself can be assumed, works like these are inevitably written in a rhetorical mode that masks the personality of the author. It is similarly difficult to assess the emperor’s contribution as patron of the culture of his age, especially in relation to visual art, for despite the mass of public works to which Procopius’ Buildings testifies very little imperial art has actually survived. What little there is, such as the Barberini ivory (Figure 5.1), which is probably, though not certainly, Justinianic, shows what we would naturally have expected – a mixture of classicizing and traditional motifs; the same goes for the ivory diptych showing the Archangel Michael in the British Museum, one of the masterpieces of the period. But these are not known to have been imperially sponsored; nor are the famous mosaics of Justinian and Theodora at Ravenna, or indeed, even though the monastery itself was a Justinianic foundation, the great Sinai icons of Christ, the Virgin with angels and St Peter which are usually – though not by all – held to be Justinianic. The church of St Sophia in Constantinople (Figure 1.2), described in detail by Procopius in book I of the Buildings and by Paul the Silentiary in his hexameter poem on the rededication of the dome in January AD 563 after it had been damaged by earthquake, is a masterpiece, but it is not classical at all.⁸⁰

Figure 5.1 The Barberini ivory. An emperor (probably Justinian) is shown in traditionally classicizing style and in triumphant pose with conquered peoples below, but with a bust of Christ above. Paris: Musée du Louvre

Similar problems arise with the literary texts. In one sense, the reign is rich in classicizing literature, from Procopius’ own works to the clever classical epigrams by Paul the Silentiary (a palace official) and several other office-holders such as Macedonius the consul and Julian the prefect, which were collected by Agathias and eventually passed into the Greek Anthology.⁸¹ Both the technical expertise and the reading public were evidently still present. Literary production in the sixth century depended not only on the level of education and the circulation of books but also on patronage, and Procopius claims that the Buildings was an imperial commission, while Paul the Silentiary’s poem on the restored St Sophia, written in formal hexameters, is a formal panegyric composed for an imperial occasion.⁸² On the other hand, imperial themes were also addressed in the elaborate rhythmical kontakia (liturgical hymns) by the deacon Romanos, performed as part of the liturgy in a church of the Theotokos in Constantinople to which he was attached, and influenced by Syriac poetry and homiletic, and Justinian’s reign saw the composition of the first important Byzantine chronicle, that of John Malalas.⁸³ All these writers used Greek, but Latin literature was also still being composed in Constantinople, including the Chronicle of Marcellinus, an early Illyrian protégé of Justinian, a short treatise by Junillus the quaestor and Jordanes’ Gothic and Roman histories (Chapter 2). The number of educated Latin-speakers was augmented by the arrival of the exiles from Gothic Italy after 540, who included Cassiodorus, whose work on the Psalms was written in Constantinople. The monastery Cassiodorus founded at Squillace on his return to Italy became one of the most important medieval centres for copying manuscripts, while Cassiodorus’s own Institutes was one of the most influential texts in the transmission of classical learning to the Middle Ages.⁸⁴

Justinian was a strong emperor who initiated a series of extraordinarily ambitious policies, and carried most of them through in the face of great obstacles. But it is doubtful whether even without these obstacles the eastern empire would have been sufficiently strong in economic and administrative terms to sustain the extra burdens it was taking on.⁸⁵ And at the same time processes of social change were taking place throughout the Mediterranean world of which contemporaries were barely aware, yet which were conditioning the outcome of the very policies which they adopted.