Justinian

AFTERWORD

Occupying much of what has been called ‘the last Roman century’, Justinian’s reign, in terms of the chief aims he set himself (restoration of the West Roman Empire in parallel with the establishment of religious unity), has to be adjudged a failure, though a failure of heroic dimensions. For within a few generations of his death, the mighty realm which he had inherited and, with the conquest of Africa, Italy and southern Spain, greatly expanded, had, under the onslaught of Lombards, Avars, and militant Islam, shrunk to an Anatolian rump with a scattered archipelago of minor outposts in the West. And his mission to create religious unity by attempting to resolve the differences between the Monophysite East and the Chalcedonian West (through the Edict condemning the Three Chapters, and the later one regarding Aphthartodocetism), merely resulted in driving the two sides even further apart. Anyway, the epic struggle between the two opposing creeds (which had given rise to so much angst and persecution during the fifth and sixth centuries), suddenly became — with the Arab conquest of Roman Africa, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria — an obsolete irrelevance, as did, due also to Islamic occupation (of the Great King’s realm this time), the eternal tug-of-war between Rome and Persia.

Yet despite so much of his life’s work running into the sands, Justinian has left us an enduring legacy in one important field — that of law. His and Tribonian’s great Institutes provided the foundation for the legal systems of many countries (e.g. Scotland and Holland) at the present day. In addition, we owe to Justinian the existence of a number of magnificent churches, above all Hagia Sophia — the apogee of Roman architectural and engineering genius. If this sublime building were Justinian’s sole memento, the world would still owe him an immeasurable debt.

In a telling metaphor in his perceptive and thought-provoking The World of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown imagines a traveller by train realizing ‘at the end of a long slow journey that the landscape outside has altered — so in the crucial generations between the reign of Justinian and that of Heraclius, we can sense the definitive emergence of a medieval world’. The world into which Justinian was born was still a fully Roman one. By the year of his death, 565, the signs that Antiquity was ending (e.g. a preoccupation with religious issues at the expense of rational philosophy, of which the closing of the Schools of Athens is a marker) were beginning to appear. It is perhaps not without significance that, almost coincidentally with Justinian’s passing, was born (c. 570) the man whose legacy would bring about the passing also of Justinian’s world — Mahomet.