The result was the Civil Code, 'still taught as the founding document of legal theory to thousands of aspiring lawyers,' Rosen writes. He also initiated – under the supervision of another extremely talented servant of the crown, the jurist Tribonian – the overhaul of the Roman legal code, then an incoherent mass of statutes and judicial rulings from time out of mind. Justinian was directly responsible for the construction of one of the greatest buildings on the planet, the Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. But it was Justinian's instinct for great military men – notably Belisarius, one of the best generals in history, and the only slightly less gifted Narses, a eunuch – that distinguished the emperor's rule.Īnd what did this great statesman accomplish? He preserved the eastern empire against encroachment from the Persian Empire (ruled at the time by an equally brilliant monarch named Chosroe), while regaining North Africa, Italy and parts of Spain from the grip of such barbarian invaders as the Vandals and the Ostrogoths.

His chief minister, John the Cappadocian, was a brilliant financier who also performed the useful office of any subordinate, namely taking the heat for unpopular government decisions. 'The man's work habits had convinced his enemies that he was not a man at all, but a demon requiring no rest.'Įven more useful was his 'unerring eye' for talent. 'Ruling the world's richest and greatest empire was a job without end, and so it had become his custom to work straight through the night, forgoing food and sleep,' Rosen comments. Justinian himself possessed rare qualities. 'Their partnership was total, their love for one another complete,' Rosen writes their union remains 'the most successful marriage in the history of statecraft.' He was not an orator or charismatic leader, Rosen writes, but was 'one of the greatest statesman who ever lived, combining a grand vision for the empire he ruled with the ability of seeing a dozen moves ahead of his opponents.'īased in the city of Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), he was assisted by his wife Theodora, a former prostitute (and, if the tales of her enemies are to be credited, a live-sex-show performer) who possessed keen political instincts. 527 to 565, a century after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. The central figure of Rosen's book, Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe, is the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, who ruled from A.D.

A very bright idea is represented in a new popular history written by William Rosen, a former publishing executive but non-historian and first-time author from Princeton, N.

Justinian's Flea by William Rosen