JUSTINIAN AND RECONQUESTartistic 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 Jus-
tinian was also an avid theologian who enjoyed debating, even with clerics
exiled by his own policies, and who wrote his own highly technical theologi-
cal 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 fi scal demands of his policies placed a heavy
burden on the empire, especially on the wealthy classes. His reign marked the
fi nal reassertion of Roman military and imperial traditions aimed at the unifi -
cation of east and west before the end of classical antiquity, and his legal codi-
fi cation 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 fi fth 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 Con-
stantinople by the emperor and empress and the patriarch, who said prayers for