The Lasting Legacy of Emperor Justinian’s Efforts to ‘Make Rome Great Again’

Social fragmentation, political polarization, factionalism, diminished state capacity, military overstretch, pandemic… Am I describing our own time or the sixth century? In the sixth century, the Roman state was more than 1,000 years old and was in terrible shape. The old city of Rome was a backwater. The court of the emperors had been moved to Constantinople, now called Istanbul. Most of the western provinces had been lost to Germanic invaders for several generations. In the east, the Iranian empire pressed hard on an uncertain border running south from the Caucasus down into Arabia, and warfare was frequent. The fate of Armenia, the most important kingdom between Iran and Rome, hung in the balance. Taxes were onerous, trade precarious, and the old Roman legal system was a farrago of conflicting laws going back hundreds of years....