general and was then furious when Belisarius dared to
entertain an offer from the Goths to take the imperial
title in the west. When the settlement of 540 with the
Goths broke down and a counter-offensive by Totila be-
gan undoing Belisarius’s work, Justinian sent Belisarius
back to Italy, though grudgingly and without adequate
support or resources. Only when Belisarius asked to be
recalled and the outlook in Italy seemed hopeless did
Justinian commission Narses to organize a new army
and complete the conquest of Italy.
When Justinian’s commitment to the reconquest was
most intense and the reconquest itself was in full tide
and was proving more prolonged than he had intended,
the rapacious Persian king reopened war with the empire
on a wide range of fronts. This drained the emperor’s
manpower and resources, which were further reduced
by a plague that ravaged the Mediterranean world in
542–543. Justinian, increasingly pressed, was forced to
impose oppressive taxes and to skimp on expenditures
wherever he could. His economies and his withdrawals
of troops particularly weakened the Balkan regions,
which were exposed to raids by various peoples, notably
the Huns, who menaced Constantinople several times.
This weakening allowed even more disastrous penetra-
tions of the Balkans by Avars and Slavs in the decades
following Justinian’s death.
Throughout his reign, Justinian strove to achieve
religious unity in the face of intractable dissent and
regional resistance. His continually shirting responses
included persecution, conciliation, schemes for com-
promise, and the bullying of Pope Vigilius to win the
accord of Rome. Justinian’s increasing obsession with
religious coercion poisoned his last years, during which
the ruinous effects of his overstrained fi nances darkened
his reputation and made his death in November 565 a
relief to his subjects.
Among Justinian’s achievements, for good or ill,
must be reckoned his lasting impact on Italy. Although
his wars of reconquest left the peninsula devastated
and exhausted, he nevertheless set the pattern for its
restored government through his Pragmatic Sanction of
554; and the extraordinarily comprehensive powers that
he granted to Belisarius and Narses laid the foundation
for the governmental agency of the exarchate, through
which the Byzantine empire was to rule its Italian
holdings in the face of invasions by the Lombards. The
exarchs’ capital, Ravenna, provided a model for imperial
style and imagery for centuries and had an important
infl uence on Charlemagne. This model was conveyed
most notably through the wondrous mosaic decorations
carried out under Justinian, which include the famous
portraits of him and Theodora in San Vitale. As the spon-
sor of the great Corpus juris civilis—whose rediscovery
in Italy in the eleventh century was infl uential in reviving
Roman law and legal studies in later medieval Italy and
the west in general—Justinian himself became a symbol
of the traditions of Roman sovereignty. Dante was to
celebrate Justinian as a paradigm of imperial majesty
in Canto 6 of Paradiso.
See also TheodoraFurther Reading
Barker, John W. Justinian and the Later Roman Empire. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1966. (General account setting
the reign in the context of the fourth-seventh centuries.)
Browning, Robert. Justinian and Theodora, rev. ed. London:
Thames and Hudson, 1987. (Vivid and insightful.)
Bury, J. B. A History of the Later Roman Empire from the Death
of Theodosius I to the Death of Justinian I (a.d. 395–565),
Vol. 2. London: Macmillan, 1923. (Reprint, New York: Dover,- Fullest modern scholarly study in English.)
Downey, Glanville W. Constantinople in the Age of Justinian.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960. (Lively evoca-
tion of the era.)
Holmes, W. G. The Age of Justinian and Theodora: A History of
the Sixth Century, 2 vols. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1905– - (2nd ed., 1912. Extended and detailed but somewhat
uninspired and dated.)
Procopius of Caesarea. History of the Wars, Secret History, and
Buildings. Loeb Classical Library Series, 7 vols. London
and Cambridge, Mass.: Heinemann and Harvard University
Press, 1914–1940. (With reprints. Full English translation of
the complete works of the most important contemporaneous
historian of Justinian.)
Ure, Percy N. Justinian and His Age. Harmondsworth and
Baltimore, Md.: Penguin, 1951. (Stimulating and perceptive
study.)
John W. Barker
JUSTINIAN I