Lars Brownworth - Lost to the West - The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

The money for all these projects inevitably came from taxes, and Justinian was fortunate to have on hand a ruthless individual named John the Cappadocian who seemed capable of squeezing money out of a stone. Uneducated and devoid of any charm, John streamlined the tax system, closed loopholes, and attacked corruption with a dog-like tenacity. His favorite targets were the rich, who had long escaped their due with privileges and exemptions, and he was perfectly willing to torture those he thought were trying to dodge their responsibilities. The provoked nobility raised an outcry, but the emperor was distinctly unsympathetic.

An upstart himself, Justinian had no patience for the patricians who looked down their long noses at him, and he had no intention of sparing their delicate sensibilities. As far as he was concerned, the aristocracy had been a plague on imperial history, forever battling the power of the emperor and clogging up the bureaucracy with their constant attempts to maintain the status quo. This was a time to try new ideas, not to be weighed down with the outmoded thinking of worn-out tradition. The way into his favor was to have impressive merits, not names, and he was determined to surround himself with pragmatic figures who would sweep aside the clutter of the stuffy imperial court. John the Cappadocian was admirably reforming the bureaucracy, and if the nobility were squirming in the process, so much the better.

The emperor was, in any case, already onto his next project. He had met an extraordinary lawyer named Tribonian who seemed to be a walking encyclopedia of Roman law. This was all the more impressive because Roman law was a confusing mess of nearly a thousand years of often-contradictory precedent, special exemptions, and conflicting interpretations, none of which were written down in any one place. In a typically ambitious move, Justinian decided to bring much-needed order to the situation by removing all the inconsistencies and repetitions, making the first comprehensive legal code in imperial history. The brilliant Tribonian was clearly the man for the job, and he attacked it with relish and an astonishing speed. In a mere fourteen months, he published the new Codex —the supreme authority for every court in the land, and the basis of most European legal systems today *Law schools sprang up from Alexandria to Beirut, and the University of Constantinople soon produced legal scholars who exported the code throughout the Mediterranean world.

These glittering achievements, however, came with a cost. Tribonian and John were among the most hated men in the empire, and the fact that Tribonian was famously corrupt—and a pagan into the bargain—didn’t help matters. Had the emperor been listening, he would have heard an ominous rumbling of dissent. The bruised egos of the powerful aristocracy demanded retribution, and the common man suffering under the cruel hands of the imperial tax collectors began to wonder if life wouldn’t be a whole lot easier with another man on the throne.

Justinian was far too busy with foreign affairs to notice storm clouds on the domestic horizon. In 528, war had finally broken out with Persia, and he had been busy reorganizing the eastern army. The aging Persian king sent a huge army to flatten the Romans, but Belisarius defeated it with his characteristic flair, and he even managed to conquer part of Persian Armenia. It was the first clear victory on the Persian frontier in living memory, and it sounded the clarion call of imperial revival.

It also resulted in the fall of the Vandal king of Africa. He’d been maintaining an increasingly difficult balancing act for years, and this latest triumph of Byzantine arms had made his position nearly untenable. On the one hand, he had to placate Justinian to keep the imperial armies away, but too much of an effort to keep the Byzantines happy would inevitably invite charges of betrayal by his own subjects. Most Vandals feared for their independence and wanted a tough stance from their leader, but the king chose this moment to unveil a new series of coins with the emperor’s portrait on them. The ill-timed attempt to ingratiate himself with the eastern court cost him his crown. Aided by the outraged Vandal nobility, the king’s cousin Gelimer easily overthrew him and seized the throne of Carthage.

From the start, Gelimer made it clear that he didn’t intend to be intimidated by any bullying from Constantinople. When Justinian sent a letter protesting his usurpation, Gelimer told him to mind his own business, subtly reminding him that the last Byzantine military expedition against his kingdom had ended in a complete fiasco. If these blustering Byzantines wanted their land back, Gelimer announced, let them come and get it. They would find Vandal swords ready for them.

Justinian was slightly disappointed by the change in Vandal kings, since he was quite sure the right diplomatic pressure would have delivered North Africa back into the Roman fold without the loss of a single soldier, but Gelimer’s warlike stance would do almost as well. The contemptuous letter provided an insult to be avenged, a useful bit of propaganda for the emperor and the perfect pretext to invade. The Vandal occupiers had plundered Roman land and thumbed their noses at Constantinople for long enough. Now they would find out what it meant to taunt the Roman wolf.

There was only one man who could be entrusted with the African campaign, but Belisarius was busy fighting on the Persian frontier. In 531, he managed to fight a much larger Persian army to a standstill, and, with his customary good luck, this proved to be the decisive conflict of the war. A few days later, the demoralized Persian king unexpectedly died, leaving a young but shrewd son named Chosroes to take his place. The new king desperately needed peace to consolidate his power, and hastily agreed to an “Everlasting Peace,” leaving Justinian’s favorite general free. *Nothing, it seemed, could now stop the reconquest of North Africa.

But Belisarius had barely arrived in Constantinople when a very different sort of war erupted. While Justinian was dreaming of glory in Africa, tensions in the capital had built to a fever pitch. Upset by the rising taxes and increasing corruption, the population had reached its boiling point when the emperor severely restricted the privileges of the Blues and the Greens in order to cope with a rise in factional violence. Not only had Justinian allowed his surrogates to fleece the citizens with cruel taxes, but now he was interfering in their sports as well. Games celebrating the ides of January were held to defuse the situation, but when the spectators caught sight of Justinian taking his usual seat, things began to get ugly. The anonymity of the crowd gave someone the courage to taunt the emperor, shouting out that he wished Justinian’s father had never been born, and the stadium shook with the roar of approval. When Justinian furiously asked if they had gone mad to address him so, the mob exploded in a rage, bursting out of the Hippodrome intent on destruction.

Justinian beat a hasty retreat to the Great Palace, and, after a few hours of rioting, his imperial police managed to get control of the situation. Seven of the ringleaders were arrested and sentenced to death, but the large crowd that soon gathered seemed to unnerve the executioners, and they managed to botch the final two hangings. The first attempt was embarrassing enough, as the rope broke and both men were found to be still breathing, but when the hangmen tried again, the entire scaffold collapsed. Naturally, such excitement drew a larger crowd, and in the uproar that followed, several monks from the nearby monastery of Saint Conon managed to spirit the condemned men to safety.

The commander of the imperial guard was hesitant to pursue them, fearful that forcing his way into a sacred building would touch off a riot, so he elected to starve them out instead. If this plan was meant to ease tension, however, it backfired badly as a large mob quickly surrounded the soldiers and loudly demanded that the two men—one Blue and one Green—be pardoned immediately. The sight of heavily armed soldiers besieging a monastery seemed the very embodiment of tyranny to the populace, a bitter betrayal of everything they had been promised. Justinian’s coronation had hinted of imperial largesse, of bread and circuses and enlightened rule by a supporter of the Blues who was one of them and understood their passions. Now, however, they found their emperor as austere as any of his predecessors, and his heavy-handed threatening of unarmed monks revealed him as the worst sort of tyrant.