Anastasios was succeeded in 518 by Justin, who had in turn been commander of the excuhitores. His reign saw a stabilization along the eastern front and the consolidation of the political stability won during the reign of his predecessor; when he died in 527 he was succeeded without opposition by his nephew, Justinian. The reign of Justinian was to prove a watershed in the evolution‘of East Rome—Byzantium— and can be said in many ways properly to mark the beginnings of a medieval east Roman world (Bury 1889: vol. 1,227-482; vol. 2,1-64; Jones 1964:221-302; Stein 1959; Lee 2000:42-62; Cameron 2000).
Theological issues were always a dominant feature of internal politics. Although the Nestorians had seceded after the council of 431, formally establishing a separate Church at their own council at Seleucia-Ctesiphon in Persia in 486, Christological debates continued to present serious political problems for the government. There now evolved a much more significant split within Christianity in the form of the Monophysite movement, which—although only referred to under this name from the seventh century—represented a reaction to some Nestorian views, and centred around the ways in which the divine and the human were combined in the person of Christ. Two ‘schools’ of Monophysitism evolved, the more extreme version, elaborated by a certain Eutyches, arguing that the divine was prior to and dominated the human element (hence the description ‘Monophysite’: mono—‘single’ zndphysis— ‘nature’). A council held at Ephesos in 449 (the ‘Robber Council’), which was marred by violence and intimidation on the part of the monks who supported Eutyches, found in favour of the Monophysite position. But at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 a larger meeting rejected it and redefined the traditional creed of Nicaea to make the Christological position clear. The political results of this division were that in Egypt and Syria in particular Monophysitism became established in the rural populations, and led to occasional, but harsh, persecutions. At court, imperial policy varied from reign to reign leaving some confusion within the Church as a whole, and involving persecutions by both sides: Zeno (474-91) issued a decree
Of unity, the Henotikon, which attempted to paper over the divisions; Anastasios supported a Monophysite position; Justin I was Chalcedonian; and Justinian, partly influenced by the empress Theodora (d. 548) swung between the two. Theodora lent her support to the Syrian Monophysites by funding the movement led by the bishop Jacob Baradaeus (whose name was afterwards taken to refer to the Syrian Jacobite Church); a similar shadow Church evolved in Egypt, and the Armenian Church also adopted the Monophysite view. In each case, the form of traditional belief may have been one of the most important factors, but it has also been suggested that alienation from the Constantinople regime, especially following the occasional persecutions which took place, also played a role (Brown 1971; Cameron 1993:57-80; Chadwick 1998; Brown 1998a, 1998b; Allen 2000).
The emperors at Constantinople continued to view the lost western territories as part of their realm. Some successor kings were treated as their legitimate representatives—they governed on behalf of the emperors until imperial authority was restored. This is most obviously the case with the Ostrogoths. Under their leader Theoderic, they were dispatched by Zeno against the usurper Odoacer, who had deposed the last Roman emperor in the West, Romulus Augustulus, and claimed to represent the empire in his stead. Theoderic’s success enabled him to establish a powerful state in Italy. The leader of the Salian Franks in northern Gaul, Clovis, adopted Orthodox Christianity in the last years of the fifth century in order to gain papal and imperial recognition, claimed to represent Roman rule, and exploited the fact of his Orthodoxy to justify warfare against his Arian neighbours, the Visigoths in southern Gaul in particular.
The view that the West was merely temporarily outside direct imperial authority enabled Justinian to embark upon a series of remarkable reconquests, aimed at restoring Rome’s power as it had been at its height. But although Justinian came very close to achieving a major part of his original aims, the plan was overambitious, as the problems which later arose as a result of his policies illustrated.
When Theoderic the Ostrogoth died in 526 conflict erupted over the succession, throwing the kingdom into confusion. In Africa, the political conflict and civil strife which broke out upon the death of the Vandal king gave Justinian his chance. In 533, in a lightning campaign, the general Belisarios was able to land with a small force, defeat two Vandal armies and take the capital, Carthage, before finally eradicating Vandal opposition. Encouraged by this success, Sicily and then southern Italy were occupied in 535 on the pretext of intervening in the affairs of the Ostrogoths to stabilize the situation. The Goths felt they could offer no serious resistance, their capital at Ravenna was handed over, their king Witigis was taken prisoner and sent to Constantinople, and the war appeared to be won. At this moment Justinian, who appears to have harboured suspicions about Belisarios’ political ambitions, recalled him, partly because a fresh invasion of the new and dynamic Persian king Chosroes I (Khusru) threatened to cause major problems in the East. In 540 Chosroes captured Antioch, one of the richest and most important cities in Syria, and since the Ostrogoths had shortly beforehand sent an embassy to the Persian capital, it is entirely possible that the Persians were working hand-in-glove with the Goths to exploit the Roman preoccupation in the West and to distract them while the Goths attempted to re-establish their position. For during Belisarios’ absence they were able to do exactly that, under a new war leader, the king Totila. Within a short while, they had recovered Rome, Ravenna, and most of the peninsula. It took the Romans another ten years of punishing small-scale warfare throughout Italy finally to destroy Ostrogothic opposition, by which time the land was exhausted and barely able to support the burden of the newly re-established imperial bureaucracy.
Justinian had further expansionist plans, but in the end only the south-eastern regions of Spain were actually recovered from the kings of the Visigoths, also Arians. As part of the realization of his plan to restore Roman greatness, he ordered a codification of Roman law, which produced the Digests and the Codex Justinianus and provided the basis for later Byzantine legal developments and codification. He persecuted the last vestiges of paganism in his efforts to play both Roman and Christian ruler, defender of Orthodoxy and of the Church, and he also introduced a large number of administrative reforms and changes in an effort to streamline and bring up to date the running of the empire. But his grandiose view of the empire and his own imperial position brought him into conflict with the papacy during the so-called Three Chapters controversy, for example (Jones 1964; Stein 1959; Cameron 2000: 63-84).
In 543 the emperor issued an edict against three sets of writings (the Three Chapters) of the fourth and fifth centuries by Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and Ibas of Edessa, who had been accused by the Monophysites of being pro-Nestorian. The intention was to conciliate the Monophysites, and required the agreement and support of the Roman Pope Vigilius. The pope did indeed, eventually, accept the edict in spite of very substantial opposition in the West, and in 553 an ecumenical council at Constantinople condemned the Three Chapters. The pope was placed under arrest by imperial guards and forced to agree. But the attempt at compromise failed to persuade the Monophysites to accept the neo-Chalcedonian position. Justinian was by no means always popular within the empire, either. In 532 he nearly lost his throne in the great Nika riots, and there were several plots against him during the course of his reign which were uncovered before they came to anything (Cameron 2000: 79-81).
World History
