The 6th century: from East Rome to Byzantium

The Age of Justinian the Great

The 6th century opened, in effect, with the death of Anastasius and the accession of the Balkan soldier who replaced him, Justin I (ruled 518 - 527). During most of Justin's reign, actual power lay in the hands of his nephew and successor, Justinian I. The following account of these more than 40 years of Justinian's effective rule is based upon the works of Justinian's contemporary, the historian Procopius. The latter wrote a laudatory account of the Emperor's military achievements in his Πόλεμων (Wars) and coupled it in his Ανέκτοτα (Secret History) with a venomous threefold attack upon the Emperor's personal life, the character of the empress Theodora, and the conduct of the empire's internal administration. Justinian's reign may be divided into three periods: (1) an initial age of conquest and cultural achievement extending until the decade of the 540s; (2) 10 years of crisis and near disaster during the 540s; and (3) the last decade of the reign, in which mood, temper, and social realities more nearly resembled those to be found under Justinian's successors than those prevailing throughout the first years of his own reign.

After 550, it is possible to begin to speak of a medieval Byzantine, rather than an ancient East Roman, empire. Of the four traumas that eventually transformed the one into the other - namely, pestilence, warfare, social upheaval, and the Arab Muslim assault of the 630s - the first two were features of Justinian's reign.

The years of achievement to 540

Justinian is but one example of the civilizing magic that Constantinople often worked upon the heirs of those who ventured within its walls. Justin, the uncle, was a rude and illiterate soldier; Justinian, the nephew, was a cultivated gentleman, adept at theology, a mighty builder of churches, and a sponsor of the codification of Roman law. All these accomplishments are, in the deepest sense of the word, civilian, and it is easy to forget that Justinian's empire was almost constantly at war during his reign. The history of East Rome during that period illustrates, in classical fashion, how the impact of war can transform ideas and institutions alike.

The reign opened with external warfare and internal strife. From Lazica to the Arabian Desert, the Persian frontier blazed with action in a series of campaigns in which many of the generals later destined for fame in the West first demonstrated their capacities. The strength of the East Roman armies is revealed in the fact that, while containing Persian might, Justinian could nonetheless dispatch troops to attack the Huns in the Crimea and to maintain the Danubian frontier against a host of enemies. In 532 Justinian decided to abandon military operations in favour of diplomacy. He negotiated, at the cost of considerable tribute, an "Endless Peace" with the Persian king, Khosrow, which freed the Roman's hands for operations in another quarter of the globe. Thus Justinian succeeded in attaining the first of the objectives needed for reconquest in the West: peace in the East.

Even before his accession, Justinian had aided in the attainment of the second. Shortly after his proclamation as emperor, Justin had summoned a council of bishops at Constantinople. The council reversed the policies of Anastasius, accepted the orthodox formula of Chalcedon, and called for negotiations with the pope. Justinian had personally participated in the ensuing discussions, which restored communion between Rome and all the Eastern churches save Egypt. No longer could a barbarian king hope to maintain the loyalties of his Catholic subjects by persuading them that a Monophysite emperor ruled in the East.

In the same year of 532, Justinian survived a revolt in Constantinople, stemming from the Nika riot, which initially threatened his life no less than his throne but, in the event, only strengthened his position. To understand the course of events, it is essential to remember that Constantinople, like other great East Roman cities, had often to depend upon its urban militia, or demes, to defend its walls. Coinciding with divisions within the demes were factions organized to support rival charioteers competing in the horse races: the Blues and the Greens. It was originally thought that these two factions were divided by differing political and religious views and that these views were aired to the Emperor during the races. More recent scholarship has shown that the factions were seldom motivated by anything higher than partisan fanaticism for their respective charioteers. The Nika riot - "Nika!" ("Conquer!" or "Win!") being the slogan shouted during the races - of 532, however, was one of the rare occasions when the factions voiced political opposition to the imperial government. Angered at the severity with which the urban prefect had suppressed a riot, the Blues and Greens first united and freed their leaders from prison; they insisted then that Justinian dismiss from the office two of his most unpopular officials: John of Cappadocia and Tribonian. Even though the Emperor yielded to their demands, the crowd was not appeased, converted its riot into a revolt, and proclaimed a nephew of Anastasius as emperor. Justinian was saved only because the empress, Theodora, refused to yield. Justinian's able general, Belisarius, sequestered the rebels in the Hippodrome and slaughtered them to the number of 30,000. The leaders were executed, and their estates passed, at least temporarily, into the Emperor's hands.

After 532 Justinian ruled more firmly than ever before. With the subsequent proclamation of the "Endless Peace," he could hope to use his earlier won reputation as a champion of Chalcedonian orthodoxy and appeal to those Western Romans who preferred the rule of a Catholic Roman emperor to that of an Arian German kinglet. In these early years of the 530s, Justinian could indeed pose as the pattern of a Roman and Christian emperor. Latin was his language, and his knowledge of Roman history and antiquities was profound.

In 529 his officials had completed a major collection of the emperors' laws and decrees promulgated since the reign of Hadrian. Called the Codex Constitutionum and partly founded upon the 5th-century Theodosian Code, it comprised the first of four works compiled between 529 and 565 called the Corpus Juris Civilis (Body of Civil Law), commonly known as the Code of Justinian. This first collection of imperial edicts, however, pales before the Digesta completed under Tribonian's direction in 533. In the latter work, order and system were found in (or forced upon) the contradictory rulings of the great Roman jurists; to facilitate instruction in the schools of law, a textbook, the Institutiones (533), was designed to accompany the Digesta. The fourth book, the Novellae Constitutiones Post Codicem (commonly called the Novels), consists of collections of Justinian's edicts promulgated between 534 and 565.

Meanwhile, architects and builders worked apace to complete the new Church of the Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, designed to replace an older church destroyed in the course of the Nika revolt. In five years they had constructed the edifice, and it stands today as one of the major monuments of architectural history.

In 533 the moment had clearly come to reassert Christian Roman authority in the West, and Vandal North Africa seemed the most promising theatre of operations. Although a major expedition mounted under Leo I had failed to win back the province, political conditions in the Vandal monarchy had altered to the Eastern emperor's favour. When King Hilderich was deposed and replaced, Justinian could rightfully protest this action taken against a monarch who had ceased persecution of North African Catholics and had allied himself with Constantinople. The Eastern merchants favoured military action in the West, but Justinian's generals were reluctant; possibly for that reason, only a small force was dispatched under Belisarius. Success came with surprising ease after two engagements, and in 534 Justinian set about organizing this new addition to the provinces of the Roman Empire.

These were, in fact, years of major provincial reorganization, and not in North Africa alone. A series of edicts dated in 535 and 536, clearly conceived as part of a master plan by the prefect John of Cappadocia, altered administrative, judicial, and military structures in Thrace and Asia Minor. In general, John sought to provide a simplified and economical administrative structure in which overlapping jurisdictions were abolished, civil and military functions were sometimes combined in violation of Constantinian principles, and a reduced number of officials were provided with greater salaries to secure better personnel and to end the lure of bribery.

In the prefaces to his edicts, Justinian boasted of his reconstituted authority in North Africa, hinted at greater conquests to come, and - in return for the benefits his decrees were to provide - urged his subjects to pay their taxes promptly so that there might be "one harmony between ruler and ruled." Quite clearly the Emperor was organizing the state for the most strenuous military effort, and, later (possibly in 539), reforms were extended to Egypt, whence the export of grain was absolutely essential for the support of expeditionary armies and Constantinople.

Developments during 534 and 535 in Ostrogothic Italy made it the most likely victim after the fall of Vandal North Africa. When Theodoric died in 526, he was succeeded by a minor grandson for whom Theodoric's daughter, Amalasuntha, acted as regent. Upon the boy's death, Amalasuntha attempted to seize power in her own right and connived at the assassination of three of her chief enemies. Her diplomatic relations with the Eastern emperor had always been marked by cordiality and even dependency; thus, when Amalasuntha, in turn, met her death in a blood feud mounted by the slain men's families, Justinian seized the opportunity to protest the murder.

In 535, as in 533, a small, tentative expedition sent to the West - in this instance, to Sicily - met with easy success. At first the Goths negotiated; then they stiffened their resistance, deposed their king, Theodahad, in favour of a stronger man, Witigis, and attempted to block Belisarius' armies as they entered the Italian peninsula. There the progress of East Roman arms proved slower, and victory did not come until 540 when Belisarius captured Ravenna, the last major stronghold in the north, and, with it, King Witigis, a number of Gothic nobles, and the royal treasure.

All were dispatched to Constantinople, where Justinian was presumably thankful for the termination of hostilities in the West. Throughout the 530s, Justinian's generals almost constantly had to fight to preserve imperial authority in the new province of North Africa and in the Balkans as well. In 539 a Gothic embassy reached Persia, and the information it provided caused the king, Khosrow, to grow restive under the constraints of the "Endless Peace." During the next year (the same year [540] that a Bulgar force raided Macedonia and reached the long walls of Constantinople), Khosrow's armies reached even Antioch in the pursuit of booty and blackmail. They returned unhurt, and 541 witnessed the Persian capture of a fortress in Lazica. In Italy, meanwhile, the Goths chose a new king, Totila, under whose able leadership the military situation in that land was soon to be transformed.

The crisis of midcentury

At last the menace of simultaneous war on two fronts threatened Justinian's plans. During the 550s, his armies were to prove equal to the challenge, but a major disaster prevented them from so doing between 541 and about 548. The disaster was the bubonic plague of 541 - 543, the first of those shocks, or traumas, mentioned earlier, that would eventually transform East Rome into the medieval Byzantine Empire. The plague was first noted in Egypt, and from there it passed through Syria and Asia Minor to Constantinople. By 543 it had reached Italy and Africa, and it may also have attacked the Persian armies on campaign in that year. In East Asia the disease has persisted into the 20th century, providing medical science with an opportunity to view its causes and course. Transmitted to humans by fleas from infected rodents, the plague attacks the glands and early manifests itself by swellings (buboes) in armpit and groin, whence the name bubonic. To judge from Procopius' description of its symptoms at Constantinople in 542, the disease then appeared in its more virulent pneumonic form, wherein the bacilli settle in the lungs of the victims. The appearance of the pneumonic form was particularly ominous because it may be transmitted directly from person to person, spreading the infection all the more readily and producing exceptionally high mortality rates. Comparative studies, based upon statistics derived from incidence of the same disease in late-medieval Europe, suggest that between one-third and one-half the population of Constantinople may well have died, while the lesser cities of the empire and the countryside by no means remained immune.

The short-term impact of the plague may be seen in several forms of human activity during the 540s. Justinian's legislation of those years is understandably preoccupied with wills and intestate succession. Labour was scarce, and workers demanded wages so high that Justinian sought to control them by edict, as the monarchs of France and England were to do during the plague of the 14th century. In military affairs, above all, the record of those years is one of defeat, stagnation, and missed opportunities. Rather than effective Roman opposition, it was Khosrow's own weariness of an unprofitable war that led him to sign a treaty of peace in 545, accepting tribute from Justinian and preserving Persian conquests in Lazica. Huns, Sclaveni, Antae, and Bulgars ravaged Thrace and Illyricum, meeting only slight opposition from Roman armies. In Africa a garrison diminished by plague nervously faced the threat of Moorish invasion. In Italy, Totila took the offensive, capturing southern Italy and Naples and even forcing his way into Rome (546) despite Belisarius' efforts to relieve the siege. Desperately, Justinian's great general called for reinforcements from the East; if ever they came, they were slow in arriving and proved numerically less than adequate to the task confronting them.

The last years of Justinian I

After about 548, Roman fortunes improved, and, by the mid-550s, Justinian had won victories in most theatres of operation, with the notable and ominous exception of the Balkans. A tour of the frontiers might begin with the East. In 551 the fortress of Petra was recovered from the Persians, but fighting continued in Lazica until a 50 years' peace, signed in 561, defined relations between the two great empires. On balance, the advantage lay with Justinian. Although Justinian agreed to continue payment of tribute in the amount of 30,000 solidi a year, Khosrow, in return, abandoned his claims to Lazica and undertook not to persecute his Christian subjects.

The treaty also regulated trade between Rome and Persia, since rivalry between the two great powers had always had its economic aspects, focused primarily upon the silk trade. Raw silk reached Constantinople through Persian intermediaries, either by a land route leading from China through Persia or by the agency of Persian merchants in the Indian Ocean. The need to break this Persian monopoly had led Justinian to search for new routes and new peoples to serve as intermediaries: in the south, the Ethiopian merchants of the kingdom of Aksum; in the north, the peoples around the Crimea and in the Caucasian kingdom of Lazica, as well as the Turks of the steppes beyond the Black Sea. Other valuable commodities were exchanged in the Black Sea region, including textiles, jewelry, and wine from East Rome for the furs, leather, and slaves offered by the barbarians; yet, silk remained the commodity of prime interest. It was fortunate, then, that before 561, East Roman agents had smuggled silkworms from China into Constantinople, establishing a silk industry that would liberate the empire from dependence on Persia and become one of medieval Byzantium's most important economic operations.

In the West, Justinian's successes were even more spectacular. By 550 the Moorish threat had ended in North Africa. In 552 the armies of Justinian had intervened in a quarrel among the Visigothic rulers of Spain, and the East Roman troops overstayed the invitation extended them, seizing the opportunity to occupy on a more permanent basis certain towns in the southeastern corner of the Iberian Peninsula. Most important of all, Italy was recovered. Early in the 550s, Justinian assembled a vast army composed not only of Romans but also of barbarians, including Lombards, Heruli, and Gepids, as well as Persian deserters. Command of this host eventually was given to an unlikely but, as events were to prove, able commander: the eunuch and chamberlain Narses. In two decisive battles (Busta Gallorum and Mons Lactarius), the East Roman general defeated first Totila and then his successor, Teias. The Goths agreed to leave Italy. Despite the continued resistance of certain Gothic garrisons, coupled with the intervention of Franks and Alamanni, after 554 the land was essentially a province of the East Roman Empire.

In view of the wide mixture of peoples that descended upon it, the Balkans present a far more complex situation, and the Romans used a wider variety of tactics to contain the barbarians. After the Kutrigur Bulgar attack of 540, Justinian worked to extend a system of fortifications that ran in three zones through the Balkans and as far south as the Pass of Thermopylae. Fortresses, strongholds, and watchtowers were not, however, enough. The Slavs plundered Thrace in 545 and returned in 548 to menace Dyrrhachium; in 550 the Sclaveni, a Slavic people, reached a point about 40 miles (65 kilometres) from Constantinople. The major invasion came in 559, when the Kutrigur Bulgars, accompanied by Sclaveni, crossed the Danube and divided their force into three columns. One column reached Thermopylae; the second gained a foothold on the Gallipoli Peninsula near Constantinople; and the third advanced as far as the suburbs of Constantinople itself, which the aged Belisarius had to defend with an unlikely force of civilians, demesmen, and a few veterans. Worried by Roman naval action on the Danube, which seemed to menace the escape route home, the Kutrigurs broke off the attack, returned north, and found themselves under attack from the Utigurs, a people whose support Justinian's agents had earlier connived at and won by suitable bribes. The two peoples weakened each other in warfare, of which the episode of 559 was not the first instance, and this was precisely the result at which Byzantine diplomacy was aimed.

As long as the financial resources remained adequate, diplomacy proved the most satisfactory weapon in an age when military manpower was a scarce and precious commodity. Justinian's subordinates were to perfect it in their relationships with Balkan and south Russian peoples. For, if the Central Asian lands constituted a great reservoir of people, whence a new menace constantly emerged, the very proliferation of enemies meant that one might be used against another through skillful combination of bribery, treaty, and perfidy. East Roman relations in the late 6th century with the Avars, a Mongol people seeking refuge from the Turks, provide an excellent example of this "defensive imperialism." The Avar ambassadors reached Constantinople in 557, and, although they did not receive the lands they demanded, they were loaded with precious gifts and allied by treaty with the empire. The Avars moved westward from south Russia, subjugating Utigurs, Kutrigurs, and Slavic peoples to the profit of the empire. At the end of Justinian's reign, they stood on the Danube, a nomadic people hungry for lands and additional subsidies and by no means unskilled themselves in a sort of perfidious diplomacy that would help them pursue their objectives.

No summary of the quiet, but ominous, last years of Justinian's reign would be complete without some notice of the continuing attacks of bubonic plague and the impact they were to continue to produce until the 8th century. As have other societies subjected to devastation from warfare or disease, East Roman society might have compensated for its losses of the 540s had the survivors married early and produced more children in the succeeding generations. Two developments prevented recovery. Monasticism, with its demands for celibacy, grew apace in the 6th century, and the plague returned sporadically to attack those infants who might have replaced fallen members of the older generations.

The resulting shortage of manpower affected several aspects of a state and society that perceptibly were losing their Roman character and assuming their Byzantine. The construction of new churches, so noteworthy a feature of the earlier years, ceased as men did little more than rebuild or add to existing structures. An increasing need for taxes, together with a decreasing number of taxpayers, evoked stringent laws that forced members of a village tax group to assume collective responsibility for vacant or unproductive lands. This, contemporary sources avow, was a burden difficult to assume, in view of the shortage of agricultural workers after the plague. Finally, the armies that won the victories described above in east and west were largely victorious only because Justinian manned them as never before with barbarians: Goths, Armenians, Heruli, Gepids, Saracens, and Persians - to name only the most prominent. It was far from easy to maintain discipline among so motley an army; yet, once the unruly barbarian accepted the quieter life of the garrison soldier, he tended to lose his fighting capacity and prove, once the test came, of little value against the still warlike barbarian facing him beyond the frontier. The army, in short, was a creation of war and kept its quality only by participating in battlefield action, but further expansive warfare could hardly be undertaken by a society chronically short of men and money.

In summary, the East Roman (or better, the Byzantine) state of the late 6th century seemed to confront many of the same threats that had destroyed the Western Empire in the 5th century. Barbarians pressed upon it from beyond the Balkan frontier, and peoples of barbarian origin manned the armies defending it. Wealth accumulated during the 5th century had been expended; and, to satisfy the basic economic and military needs of state and society, there were too few native Romans. If the Byzantine Empire avoided the fate of West Rome, it did so only because it was to combine valour and good luck with certain advantages of institutions, emotions, and attitudes that the older empire had failed to enjoy. One advantage already described, diplomatic skill, blends institutional and attitudinal change, for diplomacy would never have succeeded had not the Byzantine statesmen been far more curious and knowing than Justinian's 5th-century predecessor about the habits, customs, and movements of the barbarian peoples. The Byzantine's attitude had changed in yet another way. He was willing to accept the barbarian within his society provided that the latter, in his turn, accept orthodox Christianity and the emperor's authority. Christianity was often, to be sure, a veneer that cracked in moments of crisis, permitting a very old paganism to emerge, while loyalty to the emperor could be forsworn and often was. Despite these shortcomings, the Christian faith and the ecclesiastical institutions defined in the 6th century proved better instruments by far to unite men and stimulate their morale than the pagan literary culture of the Greco-Roman world.