This was the last of Justinian’s great wars; but the end of his reign was far from being peaceful or prosperous. It was especially noteworthy for the repeated inroads of the Huns and Slavs into the Balkan peninsula. The greatest raid was in 558, when the Cotrigur Huns under their khan Zabergan eluded the garrisons on the Danube, crossed the Balkans, and rode at large over the whole of Thrace. |Belisarius defeats the Huns.| One body of 4000 horse pushed their incursions up to the very gates of Constantinople, and so alarmed Justinian that he bade the aged Belisarius to buckle on his arms once more, and save the capital. The military resources of the empire were so scattered that Belisarius could only count on 300 of his own veterans, on the ‘Scholarian Guards’[[13]] and a levy of half-armed Thracian rustics. By skilfully posting this small force, and inducing the Huns to attack his line exactly where it was strongest, he routed the barbarians, and returned in triumph from this his last campaign.
[13]. A body of local troops raised in the city, who formed part of the imperial guard.
After this final feat of the old general it is sad to learn that his master had not even yet learned to trust him. Four years later there was a futile conspiracy against Justinian, and Belisarius was accused of having known of it. He was disgraced, and put under ward for eight months, before the emperor convinced himself that the charge was false. Restored at last to favour, he lived two years more in possession of his riches and honours,[[14]] and died in March 565. His thankless master followed him to the grave before the end of the same year. On the 11th of December 565, Justinian, after living more than seventy years, and reigning for thirty-eight, descended to the tomb.
[14]. It is now fully recognised, as Finlay and Bury have proved, that there is no truth in the legend that Belisarius was blinded, and became a beggar crying to the people, Date obolum Belisario.
We have spoken of Justinian’s wars, of his buildings, of his financial policy, of his ecclesiastical controversies. But for none of these is he so well remembered as for his activity in yet another sphere. |Legal reforms of Justinian.| It is by his great work of codifying the Roman law, and leaving it in a complete and orderly form as a heritage to the jurists of the modern world that he earned his greatest title to immortality. This was an achievement of the first half of his reign, carried out with the aid of the best lawyers of Constantinople, headed by Tribonian, the able but greedy quaestor against whom the rioters in the ‘Nika’ sedition had raged so furiously.
Roman law had hitherto consisted of two elements—the constitutions and edicts of the emperors, and the decisions of the great lawyers of the past. Both these elements were somewhat chaotic. Five centuries of imperial edicts overruled and contradicted each other in the most hopeless confusion; Pagan and Christian ideas were intermixed in them, many had gone completely out of date, and new conditions of society had made others impossible to work. Nor were the responsa prudentum or decisions of the ancient jurisconsults any less chaotic; in modern England the difficulties of ‘case made law,’ as it has been happily called, are perplexing enough to enable us to understand the troubles of a Constantinopolitan judge, confronted with a dozen precedents of contradictory import.
Justinian removed all this confusion by producing three great works. His Code collected the imperial constitutions into a manageable shape, striking out all the obsolete edicts, and bringing the rest up to the requirements of a Christian state of the sixth century. His Digest or Pandects did the same for the decisions of the ancient lawyers, laying down the balance of authority, and specifying the precedents which were to be accepted. Lastly, the Institutes gave a general sketch of Roman law in the form of a commentary on its principles for the use of students. These volumes were destined to be the foundation of all systematic jurisprudence in modern Europe; their compilation was the last, and not the least, of the works of the ancient Roman spirit of law and order, incarnate in the last great emperor of Roman speech, for none of Justinian’s successors could say, as could he himself, that Latin was his native tongue. After-ages remembered him, above all things, as the compiler of the Code, and it was as its framer that he is set by Dante in one of the starry thrones of the Christian paradise.
In spite of all his great achievements it cannot be disputed that Justinian left the empire weaker than he found it. Its territorial expansion in Italy, Africa, and Spain did not compensate for the exhaustion of the Eastern provinces. By his ruthless taxation Justinian had drained off their vital energies, and left them poorer and weaker than they had ever been before. Even his armies felt the reaction; at the end of his reign we read that they were sinking both in numbers and efficiency; the new and extended frontiers were more than they could guard, and the old race of generals who had followed Belisarius was dead. Justinian himself is said to have neglected their pay and maintenance, while he set his aged brains to wrestle with the problem of the ‘Three Chapters’ or the heresy of Aphthartodocetism. Like Louis XIV. of France, whom he resembles in many other respects, Justinian closed a reign of unparalleled magnificence as a gloomy pietist, whose despotism drained and crushed a people who had grown to abhor his very name.