The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

His two great masters of war, foreigners in origin like himself, were Belisarius the Thracian and Narses the Armenian. Africa was wrested from the Vandals; Italy from the successors of Theodoric; and much of Spain from the Western Goths. Under Justinian the Byzantine or Eastern Empire resumed much of the majesty and power of ancient Rome. But the crowning glory of his career was the Code. One of the greatest historians says of his reign: "Its most instructive lesson has been drawn from the influence which its legislation has exercised on foreign nations. The unerring instinct of mankind has fixed on this period as one of the greatest eras in man's annals."

The Code was a digest of the whole mass of Roman law literature, compiled and annotated at the command of Justinian, under the supervision of the great lawyer Tribonian, who, with his helpers, reduced the chaotic mass to a logical system containing the essence of Roman law. The first part of the Codex Constitutionem, prepared in less than a year, was published in April, 529. The second part, the Digest or Pandects, appeared in December, 533. To insure conformity, both were revised and issued in November, 534, the Institutiones, an elementary text-book, founded on the Institutiones of Gaius, who lived A.D. 110-180, being added, and the whole, as a complete body of law, given to the law schools at Constantinople, Rome, Alexandria, Berytus, and Cæsarea, for use in their graduate course. Later the Novellæ Constitutione, or Novels, most of them in Greek, comprising statutes of Justinian arranged chronologically, completed the Code.

Forgotten or ignored during the lawless days of the Dark Ages, an entire copy of this famous code was discovered when Amalphi was taken by the Pisans in 1137. Its publication immediately attracted the attention of the learned world. Gratian, a monk of Bologna, compiled a digest of the canon law on the model of that work, and soon afterward, incorporating with his writings the collections of prior authors, gave his "decretum" to the public in 1151. From that time the two codes, the civil and canon laws, were deemed the principal repositories of legal knowledge, and the study of each was considered necessary to throw light on the other.

Justinian's example in the codification of laws was followed by almost every European nation after the eighteenth century; the Code Napoleon (1803-04), regulating all that pertains "to the civil rights of citizens and of property," being the most brilliant parallel to the Justinian Code. The reader familiar with the life of Napoleon will recall that all of his historians quote his frequent allusion to the Code Napoleon as the one great work which would be a living monument of his career, when the glory of all his other achievements would be dimmed by time or forgotten.

Gibbon's examination of the Justinian Code is justly regarded as one of the most important features of the historian's great work, and in several of the leading universities of Europe has long been used as a text-work on civil law.

When Justinian ascended the throne, the reformation of the Roman jurisprudence was an arduous but indispensable task. In the space of ten centuries, the infinite variety of laws and legal opinions had filled many thousand volumes, which no fortune could purchase and no capacity could digest. Books could not easily be found; and the judges, poor in the midst of riches, were reduced to the exercise of their illiterate discretion. The subjects of the Greek provinces were ignorant of the language that disposed of their lives and properties; and the barbarous dialect of the Latins was imperfectly studied in the academies of Berytus and Constantinople. As an Illyrian soldier, that idiom was familiar to the infancy of Justinian; his youth had been instructed by the lessons of jurisprudence, and his imperial choice selected the most learned civilians of the East, to labor with their sovereign in the work of reformation. The theory of professors was assisted by the practice of advocates and the experience of magistrates, and the whole undertaking was animated by the spirit of Tribonian.

This extraordinary man, the object of so much praise and censure, was a native of Side in Pamphylia; and his genius, like that of Bacon, embraced as his own all the business and knowledge of the age. Tribonian composed, both in prose and verse, on a strange diversity of curious and abstruse subjects; a double panegyric of Justinian and the life of the philosopher Theodotus; the nature of happiness and the duties of government; Homer's catalogue and the four-and-twenty sorts of metre; the astronomical canon of Ptolemy; the changes of the months; the houses of the planets; and the harmonic system of the world. To the literature of Greece he added the use of the Latin tongue; the Roman civilians were deposited in his library and in his mind; and he most assiduously cultivated those arts which opened the road of wealth and preferment. From the bar of the prætorian prefects he raised himself to the honors of quæstor, of consul, and of master of the offices: the council of Justinian listened to his eloquence and wisdom, and envy was mitigated by the gentleness and affability of his manners.