“By Roman or indeed any standards, Justinian was an autocratic bastard of the worst kind…He was certainly, however, the last ruler of Constantinople to use the resources of his Eastern heartlands to attempt to recreate a Roman Empire in the western Mediterranean and beyond.”

We’re still on a history kick, I’m afraid; we’ll be back to book reviews soon, honest!

Almost immediately after Theoderic died in the West, Justinian would take over as emperor of Eastern Rome. Historians are divided as to his abilities and motivations: some see him as a visionary who would attempt to rebuild the empire and Roman law, but it’s hard to know how true that is. Regardless, immediately after succession he faced the challenge any new leader faces: how to build legitimacy and popular support.

To do so, he embarked on two projects, picking a fight with the neighbouring Persians and attempting to codify the last 1400 years of Roman law. We’ll discuss the law later, but in brief the Persians defeated him, leading to huge riots in Constantinople, which he would put down by killing approximately 5% of the total population.

This, perhaps understandably, did not endear him to his subjects, so he looked for another way to build popular support: he would turn to Western Europe, conquering first North Africa, then Sicily and Italy. As he did so, however, the Persians invaded and utterly destroyed the second largest city in the Eastern Roman empire, Antioch. It would take him 27 years to stop the Persians and pacify Italy.

Within two generations, however, most of what he conquered would be lost, and most of the Eastern Roman Empire as well; historians are divided as to whether he is to blame for overextending, or if the new Islamic state that would take so much of its territory was inevitable.

It is for his reform of law, however, that Justinian is perhaps best known. Assembling all legal documents from the last 1400 years of Roman rulings, he would build a single legal system, suppressing entire law schools when they disagreed with him. That system would shape most of Western Europe’s legal system, and courses in it were mandatory at Oxford, for example, until the 1990s.

In any case, reuniting the West having failed from both West and East, attempts at reunification would falter for several centuries, until we get to perhaps the best known of our three wannabe unifiers: Charlemagne.