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.
Almost 1,500 years ago, in April of the year 527, a peasant from what is now Macedonia became emperor of the Romans. His original name was Petrus Sabbatius, but as emperor he was known as Justinian. “Make Rome Great Again” should have been his motto.
He had an extremely ambitious plan of reform and renewal. It was his great dream to re-establish Roman rule in the West and to reunite the fractured Mediterranean world. But, critically, his reforms began with the legal system. These were entrusted a committee of lawyers from Beirut and Constantinople, and they were led by the law professor Tribonian. All the ambiguities and conflicting laws and legal opinions going back to the ancient Roman Republic were clarified, and whatever was superfluous was purged. Justinian took a keen interest in the work, and forced it onward at breakneck speed.
The results were the so-called Justinianic Code (all laws issued to date), the Digest (a legal encyclopedia), and the Institutes (an introductory textbook for students). Collectively, they are all known as the Body of Civil Law. There was also a later update of new legislation in the form of Justinian’s “novels” or New Constitutions.
Justinian’s uncompromising fixation on legal reform was extremely successful. It was so successful, in fact, that it is very difficult for historians to determine what Roman law was actually like before the reforms. The best proof of success, though, is that the Roman state lasted for almost another 1,000 years. What we call the Byzantine empire was really just the long-lived Eastern Roman Empire, and it lasted down to 1453. But Justinian’s work outlived even that, and his law code became the basis of modern European civil law. The influence of that legal system even reached the New World in the form of the civil codes of Quebec and Louisiana.
No other part of Justinian’s ambitions succeeded, though. Many saw him only as a peasant upstart, and doubted his legitimacy. They hated many of his policies, and revolted. Justinian responded by having 30,000 protesters massacred. His wars in the West were in large measure domestic distractions and quests for legitimacy. But the effort to reconquer Italy was a major financial drain, and it ended up destroying and depopulating much of the countryside. Germanic resistance mutated into an insurgency, and the upheavals that followed made Italy inhospitable to scholarship and learning, and snuffed out the old Roman Senate. What some people still call the Western “Dark Ages” could largely be blamed on Justinian.
Seemingly endless conflict with Iran produced no important gains also. And Justinian’s religious policies did more to divide than to unite the Christian world. To add insult to injury, the plague that broke out in the 540s killed off up to a third of the Roman population. Cities were devastated, and the survivors were left weakened and demoralized.
If anyone now expects a Justinianic figure to set things right, the history of the sixth century should be cause for concern. Despite all his efforts, Justinian left the Roman state impoverished and bogged down in warfare nearly everywhere. The example of Justinian, who sought to remake the world by conquest and regime-change, should have been a warning to neoconservatives in the 2000s. And his policy of total religious conformity is a warning to all ideological purists.
But his legal reform was a triumph. And that is the example that we should emulate. Western legal systems and the governments that repose upon them should be shored up and strengthened, not gutted and mindlessly deregulated. Training up a new generation of competent legal scholars, bureaucrats, and politicians would have done more for us than quixotic military adventures over the past 20 years. And if the legal reform proves anything, it is that it may never be too late to turn things around. Let us hope we can take this to heart soon.
