Our time with Justinian is nearly at an end. His conquest of Rome lost his people
decimated by Plague. The last man to dream of a reunited Rome has seen that dream slip through his fingers
But Justinian was never idle, even as he crossed a 65th year
And he was never one to give up on that dream and though it would never seem as
Natural or as inevitable as it must have in the five thirties to the mind of Justinian the thing that had once seemed his
Glorious Destiny was still in the 550's his responsibility
And so where luck, brilliance, and splendor once served, labor,
persistence, and time would now be his tools. With monumental effort an empire near ruin was brought back to a
functioning and even somewhat prosperous state with renewed national fortunes came that lifeblood of armies: money
With the cash in hand to once again pay soldiers and equip troops
Justinian prepared to deal with the threats that had assailed the empire from all sides and
so we come to one of the most inscrutable parts of the reign of
Justinian, the last company. The final group of men that he would choose to execute his will and restore the empire
For he chose a group of men who seemed like impossible candidates
They were ancient men the last of a generation he picked the sectarian Bessas to retake Lazica, though
He had largely been at fault for re-losing rome
he chose Scholasticus a court eunuch without any experience in the field to command forays against the Slavs to the North and to
retake Italy. He picked the aging eunuch Narses, the same Narses who had bribed the demes for Justinian during Nika and
Yes
The very same guy who may have doomed the first Italian campaign by disputing
Belisarius's commands. It was a strange bunch to put in charge of an army and yet in Lazica
They won they took Petra and at last made a peace with Persia that
Recognized Lazica as part of the Roman sphere. And in the balkans they won. It may have taken some diplomatic wizardry from Justinian
But they won. And in Italy in Italy Narses's did what
Belisarius could never do he finally kicked the Ostrogoths out of Italy entirely
Sure he had 20,000 men at his disposal and a full purse to work with but with these resources
He was at last able to pin the Ostrogoths down in open battle and truly
conclusively beat them in the field in Italy they finally won. Heck while Narses was out in Italy, Justinian even received a letter from Hispania
Requesting his help and sent 2,000 men under the command of the octogenarian
bureaucrat Liberius who promptly took over half the country and set up the province of Spania if nothing else
Justinian's one great talent was somehow even when all odds seemed against it knowing exactly
The right person to pick for a job, and that talent hadn't failed him even when so much else had.
But nothing is ever quite done. A wave of natural
disasters hit the Empire, and then the plague returned.
While it didn't quite bring the empire to its knees the way the first wave did it did create an opening for the Bulgars
to sweep out of the North and raid the Empire again.
A contingent of them even came within a hundred kilometers of Constantinople, with no other armies nearby
Justinian called on Belisarius one last time. The general who had long since put down his arms gathered together a force of retired soldiers,
guardsmen, and volunteers from the demes for one last service to the Empire and here
He did what
Belisarius does
He set far more campfires than he had men and as the battle began he had his main force
make as much noise as
possible while he secreted away a part of his army for an ambush, and when the Bulgar forces attacked, they thought themselves outnumbered and surrounded
As the ambush force poured fire from one side, and they heard the great din from the other and so they fled
But that would be the last service for Belisarius, and one by one, the chapter closed on all of our players
Tribonian had died in 542,
Theodora in 548, John the Cappadocian fades out of the historical records sometime in the 550's in
554 mortality makes even our historian Procopius put down his pen and
Belisarius he himself passed in 565
Almost all of the minor players, those who have just had a bit part on Justinian's stage
They, too, are dead. Justinian is alone
The only one to outlive them all would be Narses, who would make it to the Grand old age of 95
But he was out there in Italy
reorganizing the province. A generation of greatness had passed. Justinian would spend his last years trying to consolidate what he'd achieved, and
continuing his ill-fated attempts to reconcile the Christian church, but the days of glory and of boundless empire were at an end.
In 565 after one of the longest reigns of any emperor in Roman history and just a few months after
Belisarius, he too died. It's almost impossible not to wonder what his last thoughts were
Did he see the success of his conquests or their cost? Did he die a man,
disappointed at failure to achieve his dream to see a reunited Rome and a reunited Church?
Or did he look out at the Hagia Sophia one last time and think about how much he'd grown the empire?
How he'd rationalized the laws, brought Rome back into the fold, and seen the empire through the plague without being torn apart by civil war?
We'll never know. To this day, Justinian remains one of the great "what-ifs" of history. What if the plague hadn't struck?
What if the Ostrogoths had capitulated one of those dozen times they were just about to?
What if the Persians had been led by somebody less competent or just been a little slower to attack?
What if Justinian's successors were as energetic and as capable as he had been? If any one of those things had turned out differently,
perhaps we would consider him the greatest Roman Emperor of all time. Perhaps the West would speak Greek and Latin and still see
Constantinople as its capital. But none of those what-ifs took place and within a hundred years, almost everything he had gained would be lost.
Only the Hagia Sophia and his law code would truly endear, and for his conquests, for his vision of a western Empire,
what did he sacrifice?
Perhaps everything. He emptied the Byzantine treasury, taxed heavily
Created thousands of miles of new borders to guard for an empire reduced by plague and a soldiery reduced by his own wars
Italy would turn out to cost the Empire more than it ever brought in, and North Africa would suffer a series of rebellions and
convulsions due to his inability to pay the troops there. Would the Byzantines be so unprepared for the Muslim conquest 70 years later if
Justinian hadn't squandered the Empire's resources on the ephemeral West? Would the Empire have been bled dry by
continuous Persian wars and further conflicts with barbarian tribes to the north if Justinian had just instead focused all that energy on
settling these problems rather than his romantic dream of restoring Rome
but for all this one can't help but
respect the dream and the monumental efforts of the men of his age to make it come true
and in hearing about his work one can't help but get a little lost in that dream and
Imagine what the empire would have been if he'd achieved the success he came so close to. And so we leave
Justinian and all those who stood by his side as a question, and a cautionary tale. An enigma, and a promise.
A parable to inspire us to dream and a warning against being blinded by our own vision.
An though the reign of Justinian is at an end
We continue to feel the echoes of these men and women centuries later, their triumphs and their failures.
Thanks for watching! We'll see you next time.
[Mystical, eerie liturgical chanting] aah-aahhh, eeeee, woooh.... aahh-aaahhh eeeee......