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Last time, we saw the emperor Justin rise from a peasant pig farmer with a little help from his nephew, Justinian.
Today, we'll see what happens when power changes hands
and Justininian becomes sole ruler of Rome.
Turns out, a lot happens.
Upon coming into his own, Justinian bursts into a flurry of action, nearly unparalleled in history.
He reformed almost every aspect of the empire,
trying to fix a thousand years of bureaucracy and neglect.
But he didn't do it alone.
He elevated a cast of some of the most talented, most diligent men in the history of the empire
to attack all the things he saw wrong with the imperium.
Unfortunately, these brilliant hardworking servants of the empire were also some of the most corrupt, quirky, and colorful characters the empire would ever see.
So today, we're just going to work through Justinian's reforms
by introducing you to these characters and what they did.
First off, Justinian was a big spender.
He wanted to build up the military, increase infrastructure, create monumental public works,
and throw lavish games.
But to do all this, he needed coin.
And one of the problems the Roman Empire struggled with from its inception
one of the problems that helped bring down the west and had almost brought down the east
was tax collection.
The rich would avoid their taxes
and the poor couldn't pay.
And this just would not fly for Justinian.
So he brought in John the Cappadocian.
I mean, he even sounds like a mobster, doesn't he?
This guy, John the Cappadocian, totally overhauled the tax system in the empire.
He moved tax collection out of the hands of local officials
He crushed corruption within the ranks of the tax collectors
and one of his less popular reforms, at least with some segments of society,
was torturing rich people until they paid their taxes.
Of course, he was also a debauched glutton who skimmed from the taxes to feed his own perversions.
Reports abound of his greed
his sexual appetites,
and his boorish slave-like treatment of his staff.
Now, of course, many of these are exaggerations.
After all, nobody likes the tax man.
And being a more efficient tax collector probably isn't gonna win you a glorious place in contemporary history.
But, there are enough of these reports that I think we can assume this guy was likely running a very whistle-clean tax administration
while shaking people down and engaging in some Baron Harkonnen-like good times himself.
With the money he needed taken well care of,
Justinian also attacked the second problem of the empire: the legal code.
For a thousand years, laws had been added, changed, and overturned without anyone really collating them,
rationalizing them, or really putting them together in any way that wasn't contradictory.
At this point a lot of them just plain didn't make sense.
This meant that the law courts had become clogged,
corruption was rampant
and justice through the legal system was simply not available for most people.
Justinian planned to end this, and so he brought in Tribonian.
Tribonian was one of the most brilliant legal minds of all time.
In 14 months, he untangled a millenium of roman law
and had a new law code ready to publish.
Then, he compressed fifteen hundred existing books of legal decisions
down to a mere 50-book set
making the law comprehensible and approachable.
With Justinian's help, he then had these books ruled to supersede all previous legal decisions
so that all lawyers and judges were working from the same law.
He rounded out these mind-boggling feats by writing an accessible textbook for all future lawyers to learn from
and together, these books formed the Corpus Juris Civilis
the work that today's civil law is founded on.
Of course, Tribonian was also an unabashed pagan, throwing sacrilegious parties and feasts
even as Justinian was ostensibly cracking down on paganism.
He was also utterly corrupt, or as one author once put it,
every day he repealed or enacted some law at the insistance of people who purchased this from him.
Otherwise, of course, he was known for being good-natured, diplomatic, and only a little bit of a fop.
With the Herculean task of reforming the entire canon of Roman law safely in the hands of perhaps the only man in history who might actually be up to the challenge
Justinian could finally turn his eye on military affairs.
Justinian dreamed of reconquering the west,
of reuniting and recreating an empire that had only fallen some fifty years before.
He dreamed of restoring Rome.
But at the time the Romans were being kicked around by the Sassanid Persians all across the southern half of the empire.
Before Justinian could turn his eye west, he had to stop the Persians from taking over what empire there was left.
And for this, he had one of the best generals history has ever produced:
a man easiliy the rival of Napoleon or Alexander,
though his name's not so well known.
A man named Belisarius.
From an early age, Justinian recognized this man's brilliance
and by the time Belisarius was 25
he was Magister Militum, or theater commander of the east.
But to talk about Belisarius, we have to talk about the battle of Dara.
At this point, Roman armies had suffered defeat after defeat at the hands of the Persians.
The situation looked hopeless.
Belisarius had been ordered to gather together whatever troops he can and hold the town of Dara
a small fortress town that guarded the entrance to Anatolia.
If the Sassanid army got past there, they'd be in the heart of the empire.
Envoys were sent from the imperial court to sue for peace, but the Persian king would have none of it.
His army moved toward Dara.
Reports start coming in of the strength of the Persian army.
30, 40, no
50 000 men.
Fifty thousand.
Belisarius looked to his troops standing on the walls of his desert border fort.
25 000 men.
Huh.
Belisarius wanted to hole up, to fight from behind these walls.
It was the only way they'd have a chance against an army twice their size
But he knew that if he did that, the Persians would just go around him.
Behind him was nothing but farmers in their fields
and priests in their churches
No, he had to stop them here.
So he prepared to fight.
A messenger galloped up from the Persians
and handed him a note.
It was from the enemy commander.
It said, prepare me a bath, for tomorrow I shall bathe in this fortress.
Belisarius ordered his men to dig.
The next day, the armies lined up for battle.
The massive Persian army with their infantry in the center and the famed Immortals on the wings.
The Byzantine army lined up across from it, with their infantry anchoring the center behind a great trench they had dug on Belisarius's command
with heavy cavalry on the wings,
lighter cavalry in reserve,
and a small force of Huns hidden behind a hill.
The Persian cavalry charged.
The wings were a whirling melee of horses and men.
But the center, the infantry holding the Byzantine center,
just stood there behind their trench.
The Persian commander faltered.
Even with his numbers, he didn't want to charge his infantry over that trench.
His cavalry were doing well, he would let them win the day.
Once they'd routed the Roman cavalry,
they could circle behind the infantry and negate Belisarius's improvised defense.
And like that, the Persians pinned their own infantry, giving up their massive advantage in numbers.
Then, just as the cavalry melee was swinging toward the Persians,
the Huns sprang from their hiding place.
All of a sudden, the Persians' right flank was in disarray. They were falling back.
But no matter, there was still time to rally them.
The left flank was still doing well. They pushed the Romans beyond the trench line.
They were pursuing the Roman cavalry almost to the walls of Dara itself.
But the rest of the Persian army was still where it had begun.
There was a huge gap between the Immortals, who had chased the Byzantine cataphract, and the infantry that had never moved.
The Persian cavalry had chased the Byzantines so far
that they were now behind enemy lines.
And their infantry was way too far away to support them.
The Roman cavalry reserve charged.
The main Byzantine cavalry rallied.
The Immortals were surrounded, cut off.
Discipline fell apart. Each man tried to hew his way out, but one by one they fell.
And now the Byzantines, having the only cavalry left on the field, knew it was their turn to ride the Persians down.
No Sassanid commander would be bathing in Dara that day.
This victory paved the way for peace in the east.
The empire would still have to pay dearly for it, 11 000 pounds of gold,
but now the southeastern border could be secured, and Justinian could turn to the west.
Now, following our pattern, this is where you might expect me to tell you of Belisarius's flaws,
but by all accounts he was a stand-up guy.
So instead, I'm gonna tell you about a historian who was Belisarius's legal advisor
and came on all of his campaigns:
a fellow named Procopius.
Procopius is our principle source for Justinian's reign.
By being with Belisarius, he had a front row seat to almost every major event.
His work is thorough and comprehensive.
It's a historian's dream.
Thanks to him, the reign of Justinian is perhaps one of the best-documented periods in Byzantine history.
But, and here's where it gets wild,
in the 1600s, in an archive in the Vatican library,
there was found a book.
A hidden secret book, called the Secret History. Also by Procopius.
And while Procopius's official histories paint the reign of Justinian as glorious with a handful of failings mixed in
his secret history talks of Justinian as a monster.
And I don't mean like a figurative monster,
I mean a demonic creature that could pop off its head and wander the palace headless late at night.
It depicts Theodora as debauched and depraved,
and spares no one in Justinian's inner circle
Now, today, most historians see Procopius's principle histories as highly valuable
and regard the secret history as little more than slander from some noble who was angered by the way Justinian eroded the power of the nobility.
But where else will you find a secret history, hidden away for centuries,
penned by the same guy who served as the glowing chronicler of the reign,
filled with demons and monsters and the most slanderous critique?
Nothing in the reign of Justinian and Theodora was done small.
Sorry we didn't quite get to talking about the Demes like I promised last time,
but there's just so much going on within the first few years of Justinian's reign.
Don't you worry though, next time,
haha, next time,
prepare to witness the Demes' full fury in the Nika revolt
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