The first ‘great’ achievement of Justinian was his codification of Roman law. Over the preceding 500 years Roman law had become an unwieldy accumulation of imperial decrees interspersed with the opinions of jurists. The result was a mass of contradictions and uncertainties. For Justinian a unified system of law, based on Roman tradition, was essential to the security of the state and the consolidation of his own authority. In 528 he set codification in hand. It was masterminded by a senior administrator, Tribonian, a man of great erudition and intellectual energy. The work was completed in three parts. The Code brought together all imperial decrees in a single volume. Henceforth, only those cited in the Code could be used in the courts. A first version of the Code was ready as early as 529 but what now survives is a second version promulgated in 534. The Digest is a compilation and rationalization of the opinions of jurists. Three million words of opinion were reduced and consolidated into a million.
The Digest was a symbol of Justinian’s determination to bring an administrative unity to his empire based on Roman, not Greek, principles. It also had an ideological purpose, to present the emperor as the ultimate source of all law and so, as critics within the civil service were complaining at the time, potentially a tyrant. In order that there should be no confusion Justinian forbade any further commentaries on these opinions. They had to be used as they were without further interpretation (though translations into Greek were allowed). In order that lawyers would be able to use the Code and Digest, a separate volume, the Institutes, was drawn up to serve as a textbook for students. The Digest and Institutes were promulgated in 533. They were all in Latin while a collection of the subsequent imperial legislation was in Greek, a sign of the transition to a Greek-speaking empire (see further below, pp. 666-7) as well as a recognition that law was not static but continually evolving as new challenges arose.
Surprisingly this eminent proclamation of imperial authority survives only in one single sixth-century copy. This re-emerged in Italy in 1070 where its importance was soon recognized by the burgeoning city-states. (The copy is now in the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence.) The Digest proved particularly influential in the Italian city-states for its recognition of property rights and the equality of persons before the law and later became part of the legal tradition of countries as varied as South Africa, France, and Germany.
World History
