After 476 there was a “new order” in the East as well, but at first it was less obvious.
For one thing, there was still an emperor with considerable authority. The towns
continued to thrive, and the best of the small-town educated elite went off to
Constantinople, where they found good jobs as administrators, civil servants, and
financial advisors. While barbarian kings in the West were giving in to the rich and
eliminating general taxes altogether, the eastern emperors were collecting state
revenues more efficiently than ever. Emperor Justinian (r.527–565) had the money to
wage major wars—in a failed attempt to revive the Roman Empire of the first
centuries—even as he rebuilt Hagia Sophia (“Holy Wisdom”), the great church of
Constantinople, when it burned down. Ten thousand workers covered its domed
ceiling with gold and used 40,000 pounds of silver for its decoration. When a terrible
plague hit the whole Mediterranean region and beyond in the 540s, Justinian (after
whom the plague is now named) paid to dispose of the rotting corpses piled up along
the shore of Constantinople. He hired workers to build stretchers, carry out the
bodies, and deposit the remains in burial pits. (Pope Gregory the Great had a more
spiritual response to a later wave of the same plague: he called for “tears of
penitence” rather than grave diggers.^17 )
Nevertheless, the eastern Roman Empire was not the old Roman Empire writ
small. It was becoming a “Middle Eastern state,” akin to Persia. Borrowing the
ceremony and pomp of the Persian “king of kings” for himself, Justinian was pleased
to be represented in the mosaics of San Vitale at Ravenna (Plate 1.12) in a crown and
jewels, his head surrounded by a gleaming halo, his ministers—both secular and
ecclesiastic—flanking him on both sides. When the Visigoths sacked Rome, the
eastern Emperor Theodosius II (r.408–450) did not send an army; he built walls
around Constantinople instead. When the roads fell into disrepair, Justinian let many
of them decay. When the Slavs pressed on the Roman frontier in the Balkans,
Justinian let them enter. The “plague of Justinian,” which continued to attack
sporadically until the mid-eighth century, led to manpower and revenue shortages.
