Hello, and welcome to Western SIEV. In today's Bonus author interview, I
sit down with historian Peter Cyrus and we discuss his newest book on Justinian.
It really is an all encompassing historical biography. It touches on every aspect of
Justinian's life and his impact on the Byzantine Empire. There's whole sections on,
of course, military affairs Belisardius, Assassinid, Persian Empire, and the reconquest
of the West. There's also lengthy discussions of domestic policy, specifically Justinian's involvement
in theology, which is fascinating topic in and of itself. The historian discusses
the rise of Isophia and the Church and the miracle that that was, and
in terms of its construction. There's something in this book for everyone. I
know a lot of my listeners are avid Roman history bands, and so this
is going to be right up your alley. Now. The book is several
hundred pages long, so we do not have time to get to everything.
I tried to touch on what I felt were some of the most interesting highlights
and also some of the more interesting historical what ifs. But if you're interested
in more information, about justin Ian. Go ahead and clink the link in
the show notes to purchase the book. You will not be disappointed. And
so, without further ado, here's the interview. All right, welcome back.
So, as I mentioned a moment ago, I'm sitting down with historian
Peter Saris and we're talking about his most recent book, Justinian Emperor Soldier Saint.
And I think the title really kind of summarizes, to a large extent,
what is a fantastic book and the complex personality that is the Emperor Justinian.
When I was an undergrad, I took a course on Byzantine history and
we discussed Justinian, but it focused almost entirely on military exploits, particularly his
efforts to reconquer the West. And then when I was in law school,
took a history of law course and it focused on Justinian. But Justinian in
that case, the lawgiver, Justinian, the code maker. Justinian one of
the four runners of early modern jurisprudence, and so it's interesting to think about
him in a lot of different ways. But to start the conversation here,
I think we should frame ourselves and remind the listener is of what the Byzantine
Roman because they would have called themselves Roman world look like at the turn of
the sixth centuries or in sixth century CE, and that's the time that Justinian
comes to power. And so what would the you know, Eastern Mediterranean and
generally you know, European situation would have looked like at the turn of that
sixth century. Yeah, from the perspective of Constantinople, really at the start
of the sixth century, the East Roman Empire ruled from Constantinople was in what
I would think of as a sort of position of ambivalent strength. On the
one hand, it was still one of the two great superpowers of Western Eurasia,
alongside its great rival the Susanian Empire of Persia. From his season Contentinople,
the emperor had a sway extending over still Greece, past the Balkans,
Anatolia, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, particularly important given
its the sort of economic powerhouse of the Mediterranean. But beyond that, in
a sort of geopolitical sense, there are two great challenges which are really I
think playing upon people's minds in Constantinople at the start of the century and just
prior to Justinian come into power, the first is that over the course of
the fifth century, the Western Roman Empire had gradually disappeared, and we have
the emergence to a series of independent Romano Germanic successor kingdoms under primarily barbarian rulers.
Now, some of these rulers would still acknowledge some sort of loose overlordship
emanating from Constantinople, but others certainly wouldn't and openly reject Constantinopolitan political claims.
So you have an emperor in Constantinople who is claiming universal authority, but that
universal authority is manifestly contested by the facts on the ground, and core sectors
of the Mediterranean coastline are now under Barbarian domination and court out to the Empire
Italy, North Africa, Spain, Gaul in particular. So those are the
challenges from the west to the east. One factor that had enabled the Eastern
Roman Empire to surmount the crisis of the fifth century was that they had been
abled the authorities there had been able to negotiate a detente with the Susanian Empire
of Persia. Both the Persians and the East Romans are face a common foe
in the Huns and so they cooperate against the Huns with one another. At
the start of the sixth century, that peace with Persia suddenly breaks down when
the Persian Shah Caabad launches what the Romans perceived to be a completely unprovoked attack
on Roman territory in Syria. And getting the Persians out of Syria requires a
massive mobilization of manpower and resources. So you have this growing cent of insecurity
in Constantinople, resulting from an awareness that Roman power in the West is no
more, and now this intense sense of insecurity across the lands of the Near
East, which also plays into political conditions and content in Ople because many members
of the Senate there own estates in the East. So I think you have
this sort of this paradoxical position of what is still a great power. It's
economy is booming, its population is rising, cities are growing, commerce is
living, but in political terms, it feels increasingly constrained and challenged. Yeah,
and I think one of the things that is always interesting about this era
is that coming so close on the heels of the collapse of the West,
you know, there has to be a question in the minds of a lot
of people of is this a temporary situation, Is this a temporary reprieve for
some Western territories, or is the Western Roman Empire gone forever? And the
other thing worth pointing out here is, of course, just to remind the
people who are listening at home, that we are talking about a geopolitical situation
prior to the rise of Islam. So just bear that in mind as we're
going forward here, that that is going to be a major shakeup that does
come in the future, but post dates Justinian. Now, getting to Justinian
more specifically for a second, he isn't someone that you would expect to come
to power, certainly not in his early formative years, and the way that
he does come to power is kind of interesting and leads to some interesting historical
what ifs. So I was hoping you could kind of walk through a little
bit of Justinian's background, his family, and how does he wind up being
in this position of becoming arguably one of the most powerful men in the world.
Yeah, so I think we have to wind back a bit to the
middle of the fifth century. Justinian is born around the year four eight two,
but we need to go back a little bit before that. So Justinian
and his family really come from the regions the sort of south or southwest of
the city of Nish Romans of Ignaisus in what's now sort of southern Serbia,
and Justinian would later founder a city near the village where he claimed to have
been born, the remains of which you can still see now. In the
mid to late fifth century, this was really the Empire's sort of wild west,
as a zone which had been subjected to massive military insecurity in the middle
years the fifth century, subjected to Hunnic attacks and attacks by Goths. It
clearly did enormous damage to the local infrastructure at the time when around the middle
of the fifth century, this is probably a region where it's not clear who's
in control. The Romans are claiming it, other barbarian groups are claiming it.
It's probably a sort of no man's land where no one group is in
total control, but where poverty is endemic. Disruption has been massive. Now
just In Justinian's family are basically peasants. It would appear from the region around
to the south of nis Natius, his uncle, and really the rise of
the family begins with his uncle Justin, who later source tells us as a
young man as a swineherd. Now, as with a lot of impoverished but
ambitious young men, the young Justin wants out of the situation he finds himself,
and probably around the year four seventy, he and a couple of friends
of his decide to head to Constantinople. They go there on foot the hope
of bettering their fortunes by joining the Imperial Army. Once in Constantinople, Justin
is extraordinarily lucky in as he arrives at a moment when the authorities are overhauling
the arrangements for the Palace Guard. Justin, we're told, is of striking
appearance. He's tall, he's good looking, he's what you want standing outside
the palace advertising imperial power. So he gets recruited into the new guards units
in the Palace. So this suddenly project this swineherd from the Balkans into the
center of imperial power in the greatest city in the known world. Justin is
clearly a man of some talent. He rises up through the ranks and by
the time he's in his sixties he's head of the Palace Guard, and he's
quite an education of sorts. Through the army. He has a great career.
He marries a loving wife, but they don't have kids, and so
at some point it's probably, I would say, about four ninety Justin writes
to his sister back home, suggested she send her son to Constantinople to be
raised by Justin, and she does this. I think the boy is probably
about eight, and his name is Petrus. Once in constant and this will
be our Justinian, because once in Constantinople, Justin will give this boy an
education, he will adopt him, giving him the name Petrus Eustinianus, where
we get our Justinian from. And he then arranges for this boy to be
recruited into the palace guards himself. So we have, as it were,
a career that opens up to Justinian by virtue of Justin's childlessness. Phase one,
Phase two round the five eighteen. In the five eighteen, the Emperor
Anastasius is ailing and then dies, but he hasn't made arrangements for his succession,
and there's a struggle for power at the palace court, and finally no
one can agree on any between any of the obvious candidates, so they agree
on Justin to be made emperor as a sort of compromise candidate in the expectation
he's going to be around for much longer. He's in his late sixties now,
So Justin becomes emperor, and that extraordinary step then opens the way for
Justinian. Now Justin doesn't initially, as it were, a point Justinian's a
very high office, but he gives the young man a stage on which to
advance himself. And from that moment on, from the moment Justin is emperor,
we see Justinian starting to try to prepare the way for his own rise
to power, sidelining opponents, having at least one assassinated, it would appear
I'm reaching out for allies in the church, on the streets of Constantinople,
through the circusfactions like sports supporters clubs, reaching out for allies at court,
and progressively he manages to persuade his uncle to appoint him to high and higher
rank, until really, by the time Justin is drawing towards his death,
Justinian has managed to get himself set in place as the heir apparent. So
it's a series of strokes of good fortune for the family and Justinian matched with
and matched by very careful preparation and politicking on Justinian's part once his uncle or
father has become emperor. That's really interesting. One of the things that I
find fascinating about both Roman history and Byzantine history is by looking at the individual
emperors, and there seems to me, oftentimes, and I'm certainly not the
only person who's ever argued this, that there's a great distinction and quality of
emperors oftentimes between those who have to do something to obtain their position and those
who are the quote unquote born to the purple. And I wanted I love
that story, and it's important because I want to point out that even though
Justinian does succeed justin he doesn't have to sure, he doesn't have to conquer
the empire, doesn't have to win a civil war. But by no stretch
of the imagination, was he is no, By no stretch of the imagination,
is he committists. Okay, by no stretch of the imagination, is
he sort of just born to this and this is something he's going to get.
And that kind of brings me to my next question, which is an
impossible question to answer, and I concede that at the outset, but it's
a question that just comes up all the time, you know, whether whenever
we're talking about pre modern individuals, people want to know, well, what
were they like? You know, what was what was their personality like?
You know, how did how did they behave? And of course we don't
have any tweets from Justinian. We don't have any. I suppose they're not
tweets anymore. Sorry, we don't have any. We don't have any video
of him. But you know, we I think we could discern something of
his personality. So I was hoping you could tell us all, you know,
as much as you can. You know, what do we think Justinian
was like as a person and as an emperor? Yeah? Unfortunately, because
he leaves so much legal material behind in his own voice, and you know,
we have reason to believe that bits of it are genuinely penned by the
emperor, and we have theological tracts by him, and we have accounts of
him from written by people who are close close to the center of imperial power.
We can actually come away unusually with Justinian, with an emperor, become
away the sense of emperor whose personality really does come across from the sources quite
consistently. In particular, he's clearly a workaholic. He tells us that he
works deep into the ninth night, and critics confirmed this. He has a
constant urge to micro manage. When we look at legislation that's emerging from his
court, it goes into the finest of detail on the levels of remuneration and
command structures, on the very distant fringes of empires. He's sometimes been compared
with Stalin compared to Stalin, and that of comparison is largely to do with
this, this obsession with micro management. He has a fiery temper, and
we see him losing his rag on a number of occasions, even with quite
high ranking holy men and priests. He has a very prickly sense of his
own dignity, which is partly informed by the fact that, as you alluded
to, Okay, he is the son of someone who's become emperor, but
the family's background is quite obscure. They're from quite an insignificant background. Surrounding
him at court are lots of members are very prestigious Roman senatorial families, and
his center of his own dignity and his sensitivity to being slighted is I think
sharpened by that He's constantly in a hurry. Whether he's writing to the Pope
about theology, or to his architects about constructions, or to his legal team
about legal reform, he's constantly saying, hurry up, hurry up, hurry
up. And then in terms of his own mindset, one thing that is
a uniting thread from priority when he becomes emperor all the way to his dying
days is he is fascinated by theology and obsessed with Christian doctrine in a way
that's really very unusual. And I say we can trace this e long before
his emperor. So when he is really just a guards officer at court,
the nephew or adopted son of an emperor, but still not yet holding very
high position, we see him writing to the Pope in Rome, trying to
engage him in detailed doctrinal discussion. Now, this would have come across very
strangely in Rome, and it's very unusual. I think that really gives us
an in trusting insight into him. He has a romantic streak in that,
rather like his uncle, he marries a wife. It would appear the empathy
Adora. Really it's only explicable in terms of a love match. I mean,
she is a very lowly background herself, and he could have required a
much posture wife in court circles who would have been much more politically useful had
he wanted to. And there are flashes of a sense of humor. I
think I found one joke in the entirety of his legislation, and it's a
very loyally joke. But you know, we don't have and I'm not aware
of many other jokes. And Byzantine emperors as a ruler, he has enormous
difficulty letting go or delegating responsibility, and perhaps tied into that, he has
a tendency to exhaust those he works with, driven on by a very strong
sense of moral purpose, which ties in to the theological interests as well.
Yeah, when I picture the Emperor Justin he and I oftentimes picture someone.
I mean, there's there's the famous mosaic from Ravenna, which is probably the
image that just about everybody has when they think about Justinian. But I imagine
someone meetings all day and then wanderings the halls of the palace, unable to
sleep at night, consumed by thoughts of things going on in distant reaches of
the empire, and it's it is remarkable the level of micromanaging that he attempts.
And I say attempts because you know we are you know, this is
the classical age. You know, a message travels as fast as a horse
can ride or as fast as a ship can sail, so circumstances oftentimes may
have changed dramatically by the time the message goes from wherever to Constantinople and then
from Constantinople back. So to think that you're going to be able to send
relevant orders is kind of an interesting theory for him to think. But I
want to then ask a little bit about you. You talked about this about
the rise of Sosanid Persia. Well not the rise, but you know,
the breakdown of peaceful relations between you know, the Roman Empire slash Byzantine Empire
and the Sosanids in the start of the sixth century. And Rome always has
done typically well when it has peaceful relations with whatever permutation of the Persian Empire,
it happens to be dealing with, whether it's the part the instance,
sonets, so on and so forth, and tends to struggle more when it
has to engage in military affairs. And I think to an extent this because
you know, they're the only two quasi modern states. They're the only two
states capable of marshaling the resources to engage in lengthy wars of conquest. Yeah.
I mean you've got, you know, different tribal entities. You've got
the Avars, You've got the Huns, who might from time to time strike,
but you're not necessarily concerned that they're going to take large swaths of territory
and hold it. That's not the case with Persia. You might legitimately lose
Antioch and not be able to get it back. So that's a big,
big, big problem. What does Justinian do as a way to try to
confront this rising threat that's I suppose reignited in the East. Yeah. I
think this is one of those areas where because the breakdown in relation to Persia
predates Justinian's rise to power, one arguably has the highest degree of continuity between
his reign and those of his immediate predecessors, not just his uncle Justin,
but also Anastasius before him, under whom the war with Persia has re rupted.
So broadly speaking, one distinguishes between the direct frontier zone between the East
Roman Empire and Persia that's essentially the frontier between modern Syria and Irac at all
intents and purposes, and then the zone into the butted to north and South
Arabia and the Caucasus. In that direct frontier zone, Justinian follows in the
footsteps of his predecessors in a massive program of investment in the defensive infrastructure of
those eastern frontiers, of the Eastern Frontier, trying to achieve a measure of
sort of defense in depth, trying to limit the damage that any marauding Persian
foe can inflict if they break through into Roman territory that's very much continuity along
the desert frontier. The problem the Romans have is that their desert frontier is
very extensive and largely undefended, and so very prone to the Persians striking across
the desert zone. So there Justinian affects the creation of a pro Roman Arab
tribal confederacy known as the Jaffnids, who he will build up as agents of
imperial influence in the region to try to block any ability on the past of
the Persians to strike from that direction with their Arab allies, the Nazareth.
This struggle for power between these two powers in Arabia will start to have increasingly
pronounced consequences in the Arabian world itself, leading to much greater state formation and
military development there, which is important for the background to Islam. Then heading
north in the Caucasus, this is where in many ways, the strategic interests
of the two empires most clash. Here we see Justinian crucially creating a new
command structure, creating a new field army under a new general to take command
of warfare in the Caucasus. We see him trying to use Christianity to extend
imperial influence in the region, and also as Christianity is used to meet as
a means of sort of cultural imperialism in the Caucasian zone and as people are
drawn towards Concertinople that way, seeks to impose much more direct rule on those
Caucasian territories where the Romans manage to get a toe hold. He tries to
more fully integrate Armenian territories, he tries to impose direct rule and other frontier
ones. So we have this combination of military tactics, diplomatic tactics, fortifications,
but also in terms of diplomacy, especially later in his reign, he
will really play upon a key feature of the Susanian Empire. The Sasanians perceive
themselves to be massively vulnerable to attack from the world of the Eurasian step the
stretches out east towards China. At Hanik attacks in preceding centuries had done massive
harm to the Sasanians. So every time the Persians appeared to be under pressure
from a nomadic foe, just in An intervenes to try to extract greater concessions
from the Persians. And we see him deploying that strategy, I said,
particularly at the end of his reign, but it is a theme throughout when
he engages with the great superpower rival East. Yeah, it's interesting. You
know a lot of times, you know, I'll listen to people who are
very critical of the Byzantine Empire, and I'm just going to use that term
for just to draw a distinction between that and the unified Roman Empire for the
purposes of right now. Who are very critical of the Byzantine Empire for being
oh they're too diplomatic as opposed to you know, you're the power of the
of the Roman legions, you know, marching across the world, which I
think that ignores a couple of things. First of all, war is uncertain,
you know, there's there's no indication that if you go to battle that
you're going to win, especially with an evenly matched opponent. And second of
all, let's just face it, wars are kind of expensive, and diplomacy
is a lot cheaper, and it's a lot cheaper to get someone else to
fight your war for you if you can't. Certainly, as you point out,
Justinian's intervention with the tribal peoples of the Arabian Peninsula is going to to
some extent facilitate the Arab explosion of military expansion that's going to come later on.
He didn't know that at the time. And I'm not going to sit
here and Monday morning quarterback him from thousands of years ago. I don't think
that's worth you just raised about the Justinian is perfectly willing when he deems it
appropriate to buy peace with Persia through massive diplomatic subsidies. And there is an
interesting correlation I've spotted before in the sixth century whereby because Justinian is, in
terms of his career structure, a military man is in the palace guards.
That's the sort of the mindset is inculcated with. In general terms, it
tends to be in the sixth and seventh centuries, Roman emperors or byz Antine
emperors of military background who are most willing to pay for peace. Is the
civilian emperors who's as it were, political base, are most anxious about their
tax money being given away to barbarians who are most inclined to be aggressive on
that front and to prefer war over diplomatic subsidies. And that's a very interesting
correlation, and Justinian very much fits into that model. As you said,
the military have a great appreciation of the dangers of war once it kicks off.
Yeah, I mean, it's true. It's it's also true. I
mean, if you even want to look at more modern history of most of
most American presidents who have engaged in most of the major conflicts are not the
military presidents. They're they're not there. They tend to be the civilian president.
So it is interesting that and I think that that's that is a theme
that kind of runs throughout much of history, is that people who have engaged
in combat are much less willing to roll the dice on other people's lives than
those who have not, which I suppose makes sense from just a practical standpoint.
But and and not to jump around a bit, but I want to
make sure that we do cover all aspects of Justinian. So I want to
ask about the law code for a moment, because his roles as a law
maker are really unprecedented in a lot of ways and incredibly dramatic. And I
wonder if maybe, if you want to look at, you know, long
term contributions to society, if maybe this isn't the most important contribution that Justinian
bequeaths to sort of the Western world. Is this incredible law revision that he
undertakes. So I wondered if you could talk about that, about what is
he seeking to accomplish by this, and just how big of a project are
we talking about here. There are two aspects to Justinian as a law giver
which we have to think about, both of which are very important, and
they're interconnected. First of all, Justinian as codifile. Now when it comes
to power, the problem is there's just so much legal material in circulation that
it's very hard to work out what the law on any given situation is.
And this is sort of recipe for chaos. I mean, the reason for
this is that Roman law is inherited by Justinian, has different sources of law
and different sources of legal authority. So you have laws issued by emperors.
You also have in circulation extensive legal writings by legal scholars from earlier centuries which
can be cited in court and an interpretation. Now, an effort had been
made earlier in the fifth century to impose some order on laws issued buy emperors,
and you have the collation of the so called Theodosian Code in the early
fifth century. But since then many more laws have been issued by the subsequent
emperors, so again that problem has returned. There's just a lot of legal
enactments. Sometimes they're contradictory. How do you decide between which laws? An
attempt had also been made to try to give priority to some legal scholars and
their writings over others. But even in terms of those given precedents, you're
still talking about, you know, sort of around three million lines of Latin
text or two thousand volumes. So this is a huge, massive material for
people to try to marshal when deciding the law. Now, Justinian decides very
early on in his reign to impose order on this situation and to edit and
boil down the legal texts so as to express a single unified opinion and will
presented as that of Justinian. And it's a sign of how successful he and
his commissioners are that it's almost impossible for us to really work out in any
detail now what Roman law was like before they got to work, because they're
so good, as it were, air gushing out what they don't approve of.
So we have, first of all, the order five two eight,
a year after it comes to power to issue his own codex replacing the Theodosian
Code in reforming all the inherited legislation issued by emperors to express a single unified
will and model, as it were, removing contradictions and not have you.
That initially completed by five two nine, although there's signs that his law commissions
have done it in too much of a hurry, because he's been urging them
onto aggressively, and they end up having to produce a second version in five
to three four. But then more extraordinarily, he does try something which no
one had ever tried before, which was to impose order on this swirling mass
of jurisdic opinions written by the legal scholars, the so called jurist consults,
and in an extraordinary program between five thirty and five to three three, his
law commissioners go through these inherited legal texts and reduce them by ninety five percent
to create this extraordinarily condensed version of Roman legal thinking which can be used more
readily alongside the laws of the Codex. Now it's still a massive work when
it emerges. I mean, Justinian's Digest is still one and a half times
to size the Bible. But it's an extraordinary achievement. And Justinian tells us
when he started giving instructions that it be put into effect, the compilation to
Digest. Many said it was impossible, others say it would take ten years.
His law commissioners get it done into three. At the same time,
they also produce a new legal textbook, the Institute, which is like a
map of the law, showing how these different bits of the law and Roman
law as a system cohere and operate. So that's the codification, and that
is the form then in which Roman law will be received by subsequent European societies.
And really it's the common law of Europe until Napoleon iss used his own
code in the nineteenth century. But at the same time he's also issuing an
enormous amount of legislation himself. And once again here we see his real interest
in the law long before he comes across his chief legal officer, Trebonian,
who relies upon for the codification to a great extent. And we see this
from the fact, for example, that you know Justin the first his uncle
wasn't a lazy administrator or a lazy emperor. But we have this period of
five months during which Justinian is co emperor alongside Justin, because Justin is now
ailing, and it is a remarkable fact that a third of all the laws
we have from Justin's reign are issued during those five months when Justinian has managed
to get himself alongside in power in his eight and a half year reign.
For his eight and a half year reign, we have about thirty laws that
survived from Justin as emperor. For the first eight years of Justinian's reign we
have over four hundred. I mean, the pace of legislation just skyrockets,
and we see him intervening on almost every aspect of life as lived in Roman
society at this time. He's codifying the Roman law of marriage, he's christianizing
it. Every aspect really is addressed, and he starts to push Roman legal
thinking in fundamentally new directions which are also going to lay the foundations for really
Byzantine law, which has very different conceptions of things like the family, for
example, as compared to classical Roman law. And this is something emerging from
Justinian's court during this extraordinary period of legal activism. Yeah. Interesting is as
you're talking, you know, I don't want to like, no, I
don't want to call other like previous Roman emperors or Byzantine emperors lazy, but
certainly by comparison to Justinian, most people look like, what are you doing
taking Saturdays and Sundays off? You know, he's he works NonStop and this
is the sort of project that only somebody who has this level of sort of
dedication to the state and to state craft is going to be able to undertake.
And it's just if you take nothing else away from this conversation today,
just remember that when you think about European common law to an extend American common
laws, of course we adopt English common law as well. You know,
it forms the basis it comes from Justinian. Justinian, like you say,
we don't really have a sense of what Roman law was prior to this point
because of the massive reorganization and restructuring, to an extent streamlining of everything that
we have. I mean, that's a huge takeaway. Another one that I
want to ask about is Isosophia, which, of course the massive church constructed
net today. Of course it's all I think it's actually a museum, or
maybe it's a mosque. I get, oh, it's a mosque again.
Okay, thank you. I know that it had gone both ways. So
but I think it's you know, to to understand what someone would have experienced
in the sixth century visiting this site, I think is just almost mind blowing.
You write the book it's nothing less than miraculous the construction of this building.
And I wanted you to break that down for a second because I think
after reading that your chapter or section of the book on the Isosophia, I
came away with that exact same word miraculous. This is nothing less than a
miracle, and I think people in that time period would have seen it that
way too. So what is it that makes the construction of Isophia so miraculous,
well, I think for those worshiping within it. And this is something
very hard to really appreciate when you go and visit the modern the building its
current state, not the modern building in its current state due to the number
of windows. What have you been blocked out? Is that Agasophia, as
reconstructed by Justinian after the nikobriots, is an extraordinary combination of acoustic engineering and
lighting engineering, and as it were, it's attempts to create a total sensor
you experience for the worshiper. And we've become more and more aware of this
thanks to fantastic work being done by acoustic engineers and also by musicologists such as
the group who in the US and of Capella Romana have done amazing work reconstructing
the liturgy of the Great Church at its heights. And when you draw these
things together, you get a real sense of the very careful, the extraordinary
evocation of the numinous which the authorities are aiming at and which they achieve,
because even Justinian's critics like Procopious emphasize this. Then beyond that, in terms
of how people would have understood it as a sort of miraculous structure. I
think you know you've touched upon the two crucial ones. It is the extraordinary
speed with which it is constructed to start off with, I mean it's destroyed
during the n The old Hagiasophia is destroyed during the nikerriot of January five to
three two. The new Hagiosophia is formally inaugurated barely five years later, December
five three seven. Now you compare that to the length of time it would
take to build medieval cathedrals in the West, and you get a cent of
how staggering that is. It's a gargantuan mobilization of manpower and resources. Later,
Byzantine observers would assume that there was the work of a miracle, the
Justinian be given the design by an angel. They claim that ten thousand workmen
were required and that it cost the equivalent equivalent of a year's tax revenues from
Egypt. Now those aren't necessarily real figures, but they're giving you a sense
of how Byzantines understood the scale of the project. The speed is something really
worth emphasizing, though, because in order to construct it, Justinian has to
ransack the cities of the Near East to get the building materials, which is
why actually it's a bit hotchpodg inside. You know some you know, not
all the columns are the same length, and some have had to be sort
of doubled up and what have you. It's you can see one again,
the Justinian's always in a hurry, and you see that actually in the internal
construction of Hagia Sophia. But its scale is also exceptional. I mean,
the internal height of it, beneath the central dome is equivalent to a fifteen
story building. It would be the largest domed construction anywhere in the world until
the sixteenth century. And it is domed. I mean, no Roman emperor
had ever attempted to build a domed structure on this scale. And this really
clearly pushes his engineers to the absolute limits of their knowledge and their technical capacity.
And once again, I think, both in his architecture and to some
extent in his lawmaking and in some of his military endeavors, I mean,
he really pushes those under him to the maximum, sometimes up to and just
beyond what they're really capable of. Yeah, and at the speed, by
the way, for those who want me to put this into context, for
you for a second, and some of this is a little hyperboleep, but
you know, Notre Dame took about two hundred years. You know, if
you want to go from beginning to end by comparison to five for this,
I mean, if you want to talk about miracle, yeah, I mean
it would seem like it would be conceivable for someone in the military, perhaps
a noble to be away from the city for five years and come back and
it's done. And that I mean that in terms of pre modern building capacity,
that's unheard of. That's just simply unheard of for a project of this
scale and shape. And again, I think gives us an indication of Justinian's
personality and his drive to see this project finished. Not twenty years from now,
right now. I want it done today, and that's when we're gonna
get it done. All right, Let's talk about the West, because you
know, most people are when they think Justinian, are gonna think Belisadius and
his efforts to reconquer the lost Roman territories in the West. And it starts
with North Africa and is kind of shockingly I suppose, or maybe it's maybe
surprisingly easily successful. But you know, to start, you know what gets
Justinian involved in North Africa, because it would seem like he has plenty on
his plate with the Sosani Empire. Yeah, in North Africa, just by
way of a bit of background, had fallen to this group of Vandals in
the fifth century Carthage, fall to them in four three nine, and they
establish a very prosperous and very it will appear stable kingdom initially. Now,
the Romans had last attempted to intervene there in four six' eight, when
an imperial fleet had been destroyed by the fireships of the Vandal king. Geiseric
Byzantine armada is wiped out, and now after the Byzantine policy is one of
positive engagement really in so far as they can. But as I think a
sense in which the authorities in Constantinople are always minded to intervene in Africa if
they get the chance. One reason is because it's so prosperous. So the
landscape of North Africa is good for tax revenues if you can get it back.
Second, the Vandals have a major fleet, and that can pose a
threat to East Roman continuing control of the sea lanes of the Central and the
Eastern Mediterranean should that be a problem. And lastly, the Vandals are followers
of a fourth century churchman called Arius, who was regarded as a heretic in
Constantinople. And there are constant reports of the members of the Imperial the so
called Catholic or Orthodox Church, being persecuted at the hands of the Aryan Vandal
authorities. So you have all these reasons for Byzantin to be minded perhaps to
intervene should the opportunity arise. Now Justinian has courted previously the heir to the
Vandal throne, a certain Kilderic could come to power in five to two three,
and under whom the treatment of the Catholic clergy seems to improve, and
we start seeing a diplomatic tilt back towards Constantinople. But Kilderic is not a
very militarily effective king, and in these early medieval societies in the West,
military effectiveness is the key requirement for good kingship. And eventually, by virtue
of his military failings in five point thirty he has brought down by his cousin
Gelimer, and we start seeing signs of tension and of this kingdom starting to
fragment. The governor of Sardinia casts off Vandal overlordship there's revolved by the Romans
in Tripoli. So this gives Justinian an opportunity and a pretext to intervene,
but interestingly he doesn't do so then in five point thirty. Instead, the
intervention only comes after, first of all, a peace has been negotiated with
Persia in five to three to two, and also in the aftermath of the
Niker riots, when Justin has almost been deposed from the throne in an outbreak
of rioting which members of the Senate appear to have tried to take advantage of
to depose the Emperor, his legal activism actually being a source of enormous anxiety
to them. So I think on one level, the intervention there is driven
by both an opportunity provided by political instability in the Vandal kingdom combined with now
a need to try to rebuild the police call credibility of the regime at home
by making an opportunistic formay to the West. So I think that explains the
timing of it. An opportunistic is kind of the right word here in Justinian,
and we'll talk about this at the end. You can be criticized in
these efforts to reconquer parts of the West, and that well does he deplete
resources needed to actually counteract Persia in their assassenods in the east in order to
try to reconquer parts of the empire that cannot really be reincorporated. But to
an extent, if you are looking at where can we be militarily successful for
the least cost, certainly the Vandal Kingdom of North Africa looks much more like
an easy target compared to the Sosanids to the east by a million stretches of
the imagination, and they proved to be. The other thing that is always
worth remembering is that we have to disabuse ourselves of what comes to mind when
we picture North Africa right now, because what we picture North Africa right now
would have not been what North Africa was like during this time period. It
was much more agriculturally productive, much more fertile. It would have been a
useful portion of the empire to add it back and bring it back into the
Roman sphere of influence. Belis Adius is dispatched under as you indicate, and
is successful in winning a pitched battle against the Vandal Kingdom and essentially toppling it
over. But I always wonder about this because I think sometimes maps can be
misleading, especially at certain points. You put this big color on the map
and you say this is Rome, and this is not Rome, and so
Rome has control over this. But the question that I want to ask use
even after North Africa is i'll say, reincorporated into the Byzantine sphere of influence,
brought back into the Roman fold. To what extent is that true?
Because I think you did a nice job in the book of sort of outlining
you know, how firm is Roman control once it's re established in this area
compared to you know, some areas that are much much closer to Constantinople.
The emphasis from the start, and I think this probably gives one the sense
of the core strategic objectives appears to have been very much on controlling the cities
of the coastal zone along the Mediterranean coastline and their immediate hinterlands, which were
agriculturally extremely productive, and also on controlling the key islands of the western and
central Mediterranean which the Vandals had also controlled, such as Sardinia and the bally
Arics. They're really not that interested in the areas beyond that. These sort
of the hinterlands of the old Vandal Kingdom where the Vandals had confronted various bear
bear war lords. So as a result, during the course of both the
wars and then the Roman reoccupation, really was seeing ongoing bear bear encroachment coming
in from the tribal zone of Mauritania and Numidia beyond. But that the main
focus is on the most taxable territory, the coastal territory and the islands are
a crucial for pinning down once more control of the Mediterranean. It's also worth
emphasizing that as you say that really it's the defeat of the Vandal kingdom,
it really centers on the defeat in battle then ultimately the capture of the Vandal
king. In the early medieval West you see the emergence of these sort of
king focused societies where if you can capture the king in a political sense,
you have the kingdom as we see most obviously, the best example would be
what happens to England in ten sixty six with the Omans. Same thing really
with with Howld. So he's taking advantage of the sort of new dynamics of
power that have emerged in the West in order to achieve this result, and
then you know, it goes further, and you know, Justinian has this
I'll say, you know, ace up his sleeve. He's got this general
by the name of Belisarius, who is unbelievably effective in the field, like
just just incredible, and in short order is able to then move from eventually
North Africa to Sicily, to southern Italy, to Rome and to Ravenna.
And that's just a remarkable sort of a series of military achievements in such a
short period of time. And I'm just kind of curious if you could speak
to that for a second, because I've always wondered about this military campaign.
You know, to what extent was this part of an overarching strategy, or
to what extent was this just simply byzantine opportunism, To what extent was this
just I can't believe we keep winning, but we keep winning easily. So
let's just keep rolling the dice. You know, where where do we end
up on that spectrum? Here? Yes, I think it's I don't think
that Justinian comes to power, as it were, with a plan to reconquer
the Western Roman Empire. There's one moment in one law at the height of
ambition in five fee five, where he raises that prospect. But I think
he's probably getting a bit over excited there. I think what we see is
much more piecemeal, much more opportunistic. But his policies in the West are
always united by common analysis of power, which is understanding that these kingdoms in
the West are always vulnerable when there is a succession dispute, or a dispute
over the military effectiveness of the ruler. It's this king focused nature again.
Now, the same circums, very similar circumstances that had arisen in Africa that
open the way the Byzantine intervention there then arise in Italy. The old king,
Theodoric, who is a fantastic ruler, had died in five two six.
There hadn't been an adult male heir to succeed him capable of stepping into
Theodoric's war boots. Instead, you have a boy king Athalaric, who reigns
under the care of his mother, a Mala Suntha, a marvelous woman,
but she can't lead the army. And he then dies in five three four,
just before he's old enough to start to be a militarily effective king.
And we then have this struggle for power at the court in Italy ruled from
the Venna between Amalasuntha and her cousin Theoda Had. Amalasuntha is assassinated and this
now once again opens the way for Justinian's armies, led by Belisarius, who
he's talent spotted when Belisarius was a fighting soldier, to intervene. So the
circumstance in terms of the analysis of power are very similar. Belisarius leads his
armies into Sicily. It's effectively an unopposed campaign. There's not much by way
of Gothic garrison troops in Sicily. The Gothic army is concentrated to the north,
where you would normally expect Italy to be attacked from. What then happens
as Belisius crosses onto the mainland is that the Gothic high commands sort of goes
into meltdown. The king theodor Had, who again has no military credentials,
is assassinated. They have a new king, Vitigis Ritiguis, who is more
militarily effective, but he has to face the problem that Belisius is advancing into
Italy from the south. More Roman forces are also advancing on northern Italy,
and the Romans have also mobilized their allies, the Franks, who are also
now bearing down on northern Italy. So Vitigis has to choose between trying to
hold out in Rome, on which Belisara's advancing, or pulling his men back
to consolidate his control of the Ostro god big heartland, which is to be
found in the land to the north of the River po around Wavenna, which
is the political capital and the area from which the gods have always expected any
attack to come from the world of the North. So really Belisaras is able
to enter Rome essentially unopposed because Vitigis has taken the strategic decision to pull back
to Levenna. Once again, the authority is playing on the vulnerability of Italy
to attack from the north. He's then able. There's a lot of toing
and throwing. We went at times going to hear, but then we end
up in a situation where by about five three nine to five forty Vitigis and
his regime is hold up in northern Italy, hold up in Ravenna. But
Justinian is now minded to try to draw the Italian campaign to a close the
Persians and mobilizing on the eastern frontier. He really wants Belisarius his services back
there again, and Vitigis offers to essentially partition Italy with Justinian, with the
Goths maintaining a rump state to the north of the Poe, keeping Ravenna acknowledging
Justinian's overlordship, but Justinian having the rest, so Justinian can have Italy south
of Italy can have Rome, he has Sicily, and Justinian seems minded,
his ambassadors seem minded to accept this. The problem is that the ambassador's sense
to do this deal. The problem they're faced with is that the Goths expect
Belisarius to sign the peace treaty as well, and Belisarius prevaricates. He thinks
Justinian can get more out of this situation. This is recorded by his secretary,
the historian Procopius, who is with him during these campaigns and who's writing
his account of it. So and an extraordinary episode then appears to ensue,
whereby Belisarius doesn't sign the peace treaty, and the Gothic nobility and ultimately King
Vitigus himself approach him and say, look, if you cast off Justinian and
make yourself Western Roman emperor. We'll support you Justinian. So I'm Bensias gives
them the impression he's going to go along with this. As a result,
the doors of Anna the Gate Avenna are open to him and his armies and
they are able to occupy the city. And before the Goths know what is
happening, their king's been arrested, is on the ship to Constantinople, and
they've had themselves over to Justinian. It's an extraordinary episode in military history.
Yeah, it's it is. It is interesting because it is a series of
events and what Justinian is really good at doing here and what this example shows,
and also what you brought up previously of taking advantage of whenever the Persians
are attacked by one of those step peoples, is he's excellent at recognizing when
there is the opportunity, when there's the opportunity to intervene, and he doesn't
pass those opportunities by. When there is the opportunity, he takes it,
and he takes it consistently, and that is sort of the hallmark of a
good emperor. But it's it's interesting, yeah, And he does the same
in the five fifties in Spain as well. Again we get a succession dispute
in the Visigothic kingdom in Spain, and now and behold, his army is
suddenly turned up on the Spanish coastline, exactly the same circumstances, exactly an
analysis of power of work his purposes. Yeah, but then, of course,
you know, something happens in five point forty one that's going to sort
of change Justinian's fortunes, and that is that from one of the plague folk
guy that are natural in the world, bubonic plague irrupts and the plague of
Justinian begins, and the plague of Justinian is obviously going to have has a
dramatic effect the latter half of his reign. And so I was hoping,
you know, before we get to our last question, I was hoping you
could talk a little bit about the plague and how it if impacted his overall
fortunes. And I often wonder, I think there's a historic what if here
of what happens if the plague doesn't occur. You know what happens, and
I know it's an impossible question. Is he able to accomplish more? I
think obviously the question. The answer to that is probably yes, if the
plague doesn't happen, or you know, would the last years have played out
in the same sort of fashion. The arrival of bubonic plague, in the
words of my old professor in Oxford sil Mango, was perhaps the most important
event of the sixth century in the absence of modern medicine. Bubonic plague is
one of the most devastating diseases known to mankind. And as you say in
five four one, we have the first securely datable outbreak of this disease in
the history of the Roman Mediterranean. Possibly visited North Africa a few centuries earlier,
but this is the first truly trans regional pandemic of it. It reaches
cons Dowtinople in five four to two, where we're told justin In himself contracts
a disease, but miraculous he survives it soon is in Armenia, Italy.
It even reaches where I am now, so half an hour from the cottage
I'm sitting in as an Anglo Saxon burial site at a place called Edig's Hill,
where a few years ago we found evidence for a mass mortality episode to
do with the Justinianic plague there from again the mid sixth century, so it's
even reaching rural parts of the Anglo Saxon world. Now I think that this
will have this will cause mounting difficulties for Justinian over the years ahead. Initially
we see him and his courtiers introducing a series of crisis driven measures aiming to
sort of shore up the fiscal and legal foundations of the Roman state as mass
mortality episodes lead to problems collecting text revenues, problems raising troops for the army,
legal confusion as to who owns what has so many heirs are dying in
quick succession. And those crisis driven measures I think are quite good at initially
containing the first ramification to the plague during the first five years down to about
five four seven. But then we start getting mounting evidence for just the cumulative
waves of this disease having an ever more severe impact. As it takes all
its toll on the rural population the urban population, you have fewer taxpayers.
Fewer taxpayers means fewer less revenue with which to pay the army. The hard
it is to pay the army, the hardred is to fight wars to both
east and west and the problem for Justinian is from the early five forties you
have now simultaneous warfare in the West and against the Persians, and an increasingly
problematic situation in Africa as well due to bare bear pressure and military mutilely as
military pays and the forthcoming. So I think in many ways I said,
it's going to increasingly constrain the Emperor's opportunities in terms of military strategy, internal
domestic reform. But I think above all, I don't for me, but
what I see the justin aetic plague doing primarily is exacerbating internal weaknesses and tensions
that had long bedeviled the Empire long before the advent of the plague. During
his extraordinary legislation of five thirties, Justinian is complaining about the difficulty in raising
enough tax revenues. He overhauls the structures of the Roman state to try to
pump as much fiscality out of the Empire as possible. So tax raising is
already a problem. He's already complaining that the costs of warfare make it necessary
to really improve the tax collecting mechanisms of empire. The plague now raises those
fiscal problems to a new order of reality. And I think that's true of
some of the political problems as well well. And listeners are of course very
aware that you know, we just recently went through a pandemic of our own,
and those of existential crises tend to simply reveal existing cracks and exacerbate them.
And I think I agree with you that to a large extent, that's
what this did. Of course, it creates new problems of its own,
but any existing problem, it is just going to dump fertilizer on top of
I want to ask, because we're coming up on time, but I want
to ask the last question you pause it in the book. I mean,
I might not get the quotation exactly correct, but did Justinian ruin the empire
that he set out to restore? And that I think is a fascinating question
that reasonable people can discuss and maybe even come to different conclusions on. But
I want to ask, in your opinion, did he no? I think
in short, it's true that in the second half of his reign in particular,
and in the centuries of the decades ahead under his successors, the Empire
would find mount face mounting social the mounting difficulties in the second half of the
sixth century, we have ongoing problems with raising taxes. We have growing fiscal
instability that feed into growing political instability. Is later emperors have to try to
cut back on expenditures, they try to restrain military pay and this will lead
to military mutinies and civil war, which will then open the way of first
Persian and then ultimately Arab conquests. So the Empire is clearly getting increasingly fragile
and unstable after Justinian's reign. But I don't think we can causially connects that
instability to his policy agenda. Really, I think the growing travails of the
empire and the second half of the sixth century and in the early seventh are
really due to a phenomena which are primarily outside of Justinian's control in any meaningful
sense. The five point thirty is the period of major climate change then problematizes
agriculture in a way that has economic consequences moving forward. We have the devastating
outbreak the bubonic plague, which repeats itself and it's not a one hit wonder
as it were. This is, you know, we have major outbreaks going
through throughout the sixth and into the seventh centuries, it only peters out.
In the eighth century, we have a renewed era of instability on Eurasian step
that leads to the restward migration of a group known as the Avars. As
a results of their migration, new Barbarian fed will emerge. The Lombards will
migrate into Italy, undoing Justinian's reconquest there. Slavs will start infiltrating the Roman
position in the Balkans, hollowing out Roman power there. And as I say,
in the aftermath of the Roman Persian Wars, when two each of these
empires are exhausted, the Arabs will arrive. But these are this unraveling of
the empire that takes place in the early seventh century in particular, I think
really is the result of cumulative problems resultant from these great external forces climate change,
plague, migrations. The Justinian sitting in Constantinople, for all his claims
to universal authority and autocratic omnipotence, could never really contain or contrast it.
Yeah, I agree, you know, I don't think that. I think
it's unfair for us to assume that Justinian has more capabilities than the leader of
a modern nation state. A modern nation state struggles with pandemics, they struggle
with climate change, they struggle with huge external forces to expect Justinian, as
you say, and I think it's point correct to point it out again sitting
in Constantinople. I mean, he may in the middle of the plague dispatch
a letter to someone that by the time the letter has arrived is dead,
and there isn't anything that he can do about that. You know, he
is still dealing with the technological limitations of his age and trying to get things
successful. You need to be highly skilled and you have to get a little
lucky it. Justinian had good luck to a large extent at the beginning of
his reign through the middle in the second half not as much, and none
of that is necessarily his fault. But anyway, well, we didn't get
to talk about a lot of the book, but that's because it's an excellent
book. It's very detailed. I really recommend it. I hope that people
pick it up. We didn't talk at all about theology, and there's a
huge portion of the book that's about that, and I know that my listeners
are going to be really interested in that. So the book is available right
now if you're listening to this, and if you'd like to pick it up,
you can click the link in the show notes and we'll go from there.
But thank you so much for coming on. This was a wonderful conversation.
Think it's suit you. S