Part 7

The gloom of Justinian’s later years was even more marked after the death of his wife; Theodora died in A.D. 548, six years after the great plague, and it may be that her loss was no less a cause of the diminished energy of his later years than was his enfeebled health. Her bold and adventurous spirit must have buoyed him up in many of the more difficult enterprises of the first half of his reign. After her death, Justinian seems to have trusted no one: his destined successor, Justinus, son of his sister, was kept in the background, and no great minister seems to have possessed his confidence. Even Belisarius, the first and most loyal soldier of the empire, does not appear to have been trusted: in the second Gothic war the Emperor stinted him of troops and hampered him with colleagues. At last he was recalled [A.D. 549] and sent into private life, from which he was only recalled on the occurrence of a sudden military crisis in A.D. 558.

This crisis was a striking example of the mismanagement of Justinian’s later years. A nomad horde from the South Russian steppes, the Cotrigur Huns, had crossed the frozen Danube at mid-winter, when hostilities were least expected, and thrown themselves on the Thracian provinces. The empire had 150,000 men under arms at the moment, but they were all dispersed abroad, many in Italy, others in Africa, others in Spain, others in Colchis, some in the Thebaid, and a few on the Mesopotamian frontier. There was such a dearth of men to defend the home provinces that the barbarians rode unhindered over the whole country side from the Danube to the Propontis plundering and burning. One body, only 7,000 strong, came up to within a few miles of the city gates, and inspired such fear that the Constantinopolitans began to send their money and church-plate over to Asia. Justinian then summoned Belisarius from his retirement, and placed him in command of what troops there were available—a single regiment of 300 veterans from Italy, and the “Scholarian guards,” a body of local troops 3,500 strong, raised in the city and entrusted with the charge of its gates, which inspired little confidence as its members were allowed to practice their trades and avocations and only called out in rotation for occasional service. With this undisciplined force, which had never seen war, at his back, Belisarius contrived to beat off the Huns. He led them to pursue him back to a carefully prepared position, where the only point that could be attacked was covered with woods and hedges on either side. The untrustworthy “Scholarians” were placed on the flanks, where they could not be seriously molested, while the 300 Italian veterans covered the one vulnerable point. The Huns attacked, were shot down from the woods and beaten off in front, and fled leaving 400 men on the field, while the Romans only lost a few wounded and not a single soldier slain. Thus the last military exploit of Belisarius preserved the suburbs of the imperial city itself from molestation; after defending Old Rome in his prime, he saved New Rome in his old age.

Even this last service did not prevent Justinian from viewing his great servant with suspicion. Four years later an obscure conspiracy against his life was discovered, and one of the conspirators named Belisarius as being privy to the plot. The old emperor affected to believe the accusation, sequestrated the general’s property, and kept him under surveillance for eight months. Belisarius was then acquitted and restored to favour: he lived two years longer, and died in March, 565.(14) The ungrateful master whom he had served so well followed him to the grave nine months later.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

Of Justinian as conqueror and governor we have said much. But there remain two more aspects of his life which deserve notice—his work as a builder and his codification of the laws. From the days of Diocletian the style of architecture which we call Byzantine, for want of a better name, had been slowly developing from the old classic forms, and many of the emperors of the fourth and fifth centuries had been given to building. But no previous monarch had combined in such a degree as did Justinian the will and the power to launch out into architectural experiments. He had at his disposal the hoarded treasures of Anastasius, and his tastes were as magnificent as those of the great builders of the early empire, Augustus and Nero and Hadrian. All over the empire the monuments of his wealth and taste were seen in dozens of churches, halls of justice, monasteries, forts, hospitals, and colonnades. The historian Procopius was able to compose a considerable volume entirely on the subject of Justinian’s buildings, and numbers of them survive, some perfect and more in ruins, to witness to the accuracy of the work. Even in the more secluded or outlying portions of the empire, any fine building that is found is, in two cases out of three, one of the works of Justinian. Not merely great centres like Constantinople or Jerusalem, but out-of-the-way tracts in Cappadocia and Isauria, are full of his buildings. Even in the newly-conquered Ravenna his great churches of San Vitale, containing the celebrated mosaic portraits of himself and his wife, and of St. Apollinare in the suburb of Classis, outshine the older works of the fifth-century emperors and of the Goth Theodoric.

Columns In St. Sophia.

Galleries Of St. Sophia.

Justinian’s churches, indeed, are the best known of his buildings. In Oriental church-architecture his reign forms a landmark: up to his time Christian architects had still been using two patterns copied straight from Old Roman models. The first was the round domed church, whose origin can be traced back to such Roman originals as the celebrated Temple of Vesta—of such the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Rome may serve as a type. The second was the rectangular church with apses, which was nothing more than an adaptation for ecclesiastical purposes of the Old Roman law-courts, and which had borrowed from them its name of _Basilica_. St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, at Rome is a fair specimen. Justinian brought into use for the first time on a large scale the combination of a cruciform ground-plan and a very large dome. The famous Church of St. Sophia may serve as the type of this style. The great cathedral of Constantinople had already been burnt down twice, as we have had occasion to relate: the first time on the eve of the banishment of John Chrysostom, the second in the great “Nika” riot of 532. Within forty days of its destruction Justinian had commenced preparations for rebuilding it as a monument of his triumph in the civil strife. He chose as his architect Anthemius of Tralles, the greatest of Byzantine builders, and one of the few whose names have survived. The third church was different in plan from either of its predecessors, showing the new combination which we have already specified. It is a Greek cross, 241 feet long and 224 broad, having in its midst a vast dome, pierced by no less than forty windows, light and airy and soaring 180 feet above the floor. In the nave the aisles and side apses are parted from the main central spaces by magnificent colonnades of marble pillars, the majority of _verde antique_. These are not for the most part the work of Justinian’s day, but were plundered from the chief pagan temples of Asia, which served as an inexhaustible quarry for the Christian builder. The whole of the interior, both roof and dome, was covered with gilding or mosaics, which the Vandalism of the Turks has covered with a coat of whitewash, to hide the representations of human forms which are offensive to the Moslems’ creed. Procopius describes the church with enthusiasm, and his praises are well justified—

“It presents a most glorious spectacle, extraordinary to those who behold it, and altogether incredible to those who know it by report only. In height it rises to the very heavens, and overtops the neighbouring buildings like a ship anchored among them. It towers above the city which it adorns, and from it the whole of Constantinople can be beheld, as from a watch-tower. Its breadth and length are so judiciously chosen, that it appears both broad and long without disproportion. For it excels both in size and harmony, being more magnificent than ordinary buildings, and much more elegant than the few which approach it in size. Within it is singularly full of light and sunshine; you would declare that the place is not lighted from without, but that the rays are produced within itself, such an abundance of light is poured into it. The gilded ceiling adds glory to its interior, though the light reflected upon the gold from the marble surpasses it in beauty. Who can tell of the splendour of the columns and marbles with which the church is adorned? One would think that one had come upon a meadow full of flowers in bloom—one wonders at the purple tints of some, the green of others, the glowing red and glittering white, and those, too, which nature, like a painter, has marked with the strongest contrasts of colour. Moreover, it is impossible accurately to describe the treasures of gold and silver plate and gems which the Emperor has presented to the church: the Sanctuary alone contains forty thousand pounds weight of silver.”

Justinian was almost as great a builder of forts as of churches, but his military works have for the most part disappeared. It may give some idea of his energy in fortifying the frontiers when we state that the Illyrian provinces alone were protected by 294 forts, of which Procopius gives a list, disposed in four successive lines from the Danube back to the Thessalian hills. Some were single towers, but many were elaborate fortresses with outworks, and all had to be protected by garrisons.

Thus much of Justinian as builder: space fails to enumerate a tithe of his works. Of his great legal achievement we must speak at even shorter length. The Roman law, as he received it from his predecessors was an enormous mass of precedents and decisions, in which the original basis was overlaid with the various and sometimes contradictory rescripts of five centuries of emperors. Several of his predecessors, and most especially Theodosius II., had endeavoured to codify the chaotic mass and reduce it to order. But no one of them had produced a code which sufficed to bring the law of the day into full accord with the spirit of the times. It was no mean work to bring the ancient legislation of Rome, from the days of the Twelve Tables down to the days of Justinian, into strict and logical connection with the new Christian ideas which had worked their way into predominance since the days of Constantine. Much of the old law was hopelessly obsolete, owing to the change in moral ideas which Christianity had introduced, but it is still astonishing to see how much of the old forms of the times of the early empire survived into the sixth century. Justinian employed a commission, headed by the clever but unpopular lawyer Tribonian, to draw up his new code. The work was done for ever and a day, and his “Institutes” and “Pandects” were the last revision of the Old Roman laws, and the starting-point of all systematic legal study in Europe, when, six hundred years later, the need for something more than customary folk-right began to make itself felt, as mediæval civilization evolved itself out of the chaos of the dark ages. If the Roman Empire had flourished in the century after Justinian as in that which preceded him, other revisers of the laws might have produced compilations that would have made the “Institutes” seem out of date. But, as a matter of fact, decay and chaos followed after Justinian, and succeeding emperors had neither the need nor the inclination to do his work over again. Hence it came to pass that his name is for ever associated with the last great revision of Roman law, and that he himself went down to posterity as the greatest of legislators, destined to be enthroned by Dante in one of the starry thrones of his “Paradise,” and to be worshipped as the father of law by all the legists of the Renaissance.

IX. THE COMING OF THE SLAVS.

The thirty years which followed the death of Justinian are covered by three reigns, those of Justinus II. [565-578], Tiberius Constantinus [578-582], and Maurice [582-602]. These three emperors were men of much the same character as the predecessors of Justinian; each of them was an experienced official of mature age, who was selected by the reigning emperor as his most worthy successor. Justinus was the favourite nephew of Justinian, and had served him for many years as Curopalates, or Master of the Palace. Tiberius Constantinus was “Count of the Excubiti,” a high Court officer in the suite of Justinus: Maurice again served Tiberius as “Count of the Fœderati,” or chief of the Barbarian auxiliaries. They were all men of capacity, and strove to do their best for the empire: historians concur in praising the justice of Justinus, the liberality and humanity of Tiberius, the piety of Maurice. Yet under them the empire was steadily going down hill: the exhausting effects of the reign of Justinian were making themselves felt more and more, and at the end of the reign of Maurice a time of chaos and disaster was impending, which came to a head under his successor.

The internal causes of the disaster of this time were the weakening of the empire by the great plague of 544 and still more by the grinding exactions of Justinian’s financial system. Its external phenomena were invasions by new hordes from the north, combined with long and exhausting wars with Persia. The virtues of the emperors seem to have helped them little: Justin’s justice made him feared rather than loved; Tiberius’s liberality rendered him popular, but drained the treasury; Maurice, on the other hand, who was economical and endeavoured to fill the coffers which his predecessors had emptied, was therefore universally condemned as avaricious.

The troubles on the frontier which vexed the last thirty years of the sixth century were due to three separate sets of enemies—the Lombards in Italy, the Slavs and Avars in the Balkan Peninsula, and the Persians in the East.

The empire held undisputed possession of Italy for no more than fifteen years after the expulsion of the Ostrogoths in A.D. 553. Then a new enemy came in from the north, following the same path that had already served for the Visigoths of Alaric and the Ostrogoths of Theodoric. The new-comers were the race of the Lombards, who had hitherto dwelt in Hungary, on the Middle Danube, and had more frequently been found as friends than as foes of the Romans. But their warlike and ambitious King Alboin, having subdued all his nearer neighbours, began to covet the fertile plains of Italy, where he saw the emperors keeping a very inadequate garrison, now that the Ostrogoths were finally driven away. In A.D. 568 Alboin and his hordes crossed the Alps, bringing with them wife and child, and flocks and herds, while their old land on the Danube was abandoned to the Avars. The Lombards took possession of the flat country in the north of Italy, as far as the line of the Po, with very little difficulty. The region, we are told, was almost uninhabited owing to the combined effects of the great plague and the Ostrogothic war. In this once fertile and populous, but now deserted, lowland, the Lombards settled down in great numbers. There they have left their name as the permanent denomination of the plain of Lombardy. Only one city, the strong fortress of Pavia, held out against them for long; when it fell in 571, after a gallant defence of three years, Alboin made it his capital, instead of choosing one of the larger and more famous towns of Milan and Verona, the older centres of life in the land he had conquered. After subduing Lombardy the king pushed forward into Etruria, and overran the valley of the Arno. But in the midst of his wars he was cut off, if the legend tells us the truth, by the vengeance of his wife Queen Rosamund. She was the daughter of Cunimund, King of the Gepidæ, whom Alboin had slain in battle. The fallen monarch’s skull was, by the victor’s orders, mounted in gold and fashioned into a cup. Long years after, amid the revelry of a drinking bout, Alboin had the ghastly cup filled with wine, and bade his wife bear it around to his chosen warriors. The queen obeyed, but vowed to revenge herself by her husband’s death. By the sacrifice of her honour she bribed Alboin’s armour-bearer to slay his master in his bed, and then fled with him to Constantinople [A.D. 573].

But the death of Alboin did not put an end to the Lombard conquests in Italy. The kingdom, indeed, broke up for a time into several independent duchies, but the Lombard chiefs continued to win territory from the empire. Two of them founded the considerable duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, the one in Central, and the other in Southern Italy. These states survived as independent powers, but the rest of the Lombard territories were reunited by King Autharis, in 584, and he and his immediate successors completed the conquest of Northern Italy.

Thus, during the reigns of Justin, Tiberius II., and Maurice, the greater part of Justinian’s Italian conquests were lost, and formed once more into Teutonic states. The emperor retained only two large stretches of territory, the one in Central Italy, where he held a broad belt of land, extending right across the peninsula, from Ravenna and Ancona on the Adriatic, to Rome on the Tyrrhenian Sea; the other comprehending the extreme south of the land—the “toe” and “heel” of the Italian boot—and comprising the territory of Bruttium and the Calabrian(15) towns of Taranto, Brindisi, and Otranto. Sardinia and Sicily were also left untouched by the Lombards, who never succeeded in building a fleet. The Roman territory which stretched across Central Italy cut the Lombards in two, the king ruling the main body of them in Tuscany and the valley of the Po; while the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento maintained an isolated existence in the south.

Cross Of Justinus II. (_From the Vatican._) (_From "L’Art Byzantin," Par C. Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)

This partition of Italy between the Lombards and the empire is worth remembering, from the fact that never again, till our own day, was the whole peninsula gathered into a single state. Not till 1870, when the kingdom of United Italy was completed by the conquest of Rome, did a time come when all the lands between the Alps and the Straits of Messina were governed by one ruler. Justinian had no successor till Victor Emmanuel.

After the Lombard conquest the imperial dominions in Italy were administered by a governor, called the Exarch, who dwelt at Ravenna, the northernmost and strongest of the imperial fortresses. All the Italian provinces were nominally beneath his control, but, as a matter of fact, he was only treated with implicit obedience by those of his subordinates who dwelt in his own neighbourhood. He found it harder to enforce his orders at Naples and Reggio, or in the distant islands of Sicily and Sardinia. But it was the bishops of Rome who profited most by his absence: although a “duke,” a military officer of some importance, dwelt at Rome, he was from the first overshadowed by his spiritual neighbour. Even during the days of the Ostrogoths the Roman bishops had acquired considerable importance, as being the chief official representatives of the Italians in dealings with their Teutonic masters. But they spoke with much more freedom and weight when they had to do, not with a King of Italy dwelling quite near them, but with a mere governor fettered by orders from distant Constantinople. Gregory the Great [590-604] was the first of the popes who began to assume an independent attitude and to treat the Exarch at Ravenna with scant ceremony. He was an able and energetic man, who could not bear to see Rome suffering for want of a ruler on the spot, and readily took upon himself civil functions, in spite of the protests of his nominal superior the Exarch. In 592, for example, he made a private truce for Rome with the Lombard Duke of Spoleto, though the latter was at war with the empire. The Emperor Maurice stormed at him as foolish and disobedient, but did not venture to depose him, being too much troubled with Persian and Avaric wars to send troops against Rome. On another occasion Gregory nominated a governor for Naples, instead of leaving the appointment to the Exarch. In 599 he acted as mediator between the Lombard king and the government at Ravenna, as if he had been a neutral and independent sovereign. Although he showed no wish to sever his connection with the Roman Empire, Gregory behaved as if he considered the emperor his suzerain rather than his immediate ruler. He would never give in on disputed points, issued orders which contradicted imperial rescripts, and maintained a bitter quarrel with successive patriarchs of Constantinople, who possessed the favour of Maurice. When the patriarch John the Faster took the title of “œcumenical bishop,” Gregory wrote to Maurice to tell him that the presumption of John was a sure sign that the days of Antichrist were at hand, and to urge him to repress such pretensions by the force of the civil arm. This is one of the first signs of the approach of that mediæval view of the papacy which imagined that it was the pontiff’s duty to censure and advise kings and emperors on all possible topics and occasions. Gregory’s immediate successors were not men of mark, or a breach with the empire might have been precipitated. The final disavowal of the supremacy of the Constantinopolitan monarch was to be still delayed for nearly two hundred years.

The wars between the Exarchs of Ravenna and the Lombard kings were little influenced by interference from the East. The emperors during the last thirty years of the sixth century were far more engrossed with their Persian and Slavonic wars. Contests with the Great king of the East occupied no less than twenty years in the reigns of Justin II., Tiberius, and Maurice. War was declared in 572, and did not cease till 592. Like the struggle between Justinian and Chosroës I., thirty years before, it was wholly indecisive. There were more plundering raids than battles, and the frontier provinces of each empire were reduced to a dreadful state of desolation and depopulation: if the Persians pushed their ravages as far as the gates of Antioch, Roman generals penetrated deep into Media and Corduene, where the imperial banner had not been seen for two hundred years. The net result of the whole twenty years of strife was that each combatant had seriously weakened and distressed his rival, without obtaining any definite superiority over him. Forced to make peace by the pressure of a civil war, Chosroës II. gave back to Maurice the two frontier cities of Dara and Martyropolis, the sole trophies of twenty campaigns, and ceded him a slice of Armenian territory. But these trivial gains were far from compensating the empire for the fearful losses caused by dozens of Persian invasions.